I See Him — Ibrahim Barry
I was 8 years old when I learned I was black. Until that point, I was Guinean, a 3rd grader, an older brother, and a son. It was getting bullied at school that changed that. After getting laughed at for "disappearing" when the teacher turned off the light to watch a movie. After getting called "mo-nica" because those children were too afraid of the teacher to actually call me a slur. That was when I realized I was black. Sitting in the bathroom after school with ashy knees, after seeing the white lines that rose up across my skin in my finger's wake, I wondered for a moment … if I scratched myself up and down, would I finally be white enough to be left alone.
I was 12. On a walk home from school, rocks crunching beneath my Skechers, beside the boy I would have defended with my life, when he got a call from someone I'd heard of but never met. That stranger looked at me once. And smiled.
"Hello melon muncher."
My friend laughed.
And, lips spreading into a well-practiced grin, so did I.
At 14, I sat under my covers, reading Akwaeke Emezi's You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty at an hour far past my parents' approved bedtime. When I finished, I looked at the cover and realized that beautiful story had been about black love — but blackness was the last thing I'd seen. How could it possibly be beautiful? For so long, every character in every story, regardless of their hue, had been, in my mind, anything but black, and everything but me. Lifting the covers off my head, I sat by my desk and in opening my notebook for the first time in God knows how long, I wrote about home. Not the house in California but Guinea.
At 15, sitting in my AP African American Studies class, my eyes were glazing over, getting prepared to zone out for the next hour, as I so often do, but for whatever strange reason, that was the day my eyes focused on the board. The lesson that day was on double consciousness — the feeling of being in conflict with yourself. Of not being the same person that the world sees. I set my pencil down. I thought about a bathroom floor. That smile I brandished at my own humiliation. I thought about every character I'd quietly made anything but black. I thought about my home. The next day, I was the first to raise my hand.
I am 17 years old. Sitting on the floor of his room, my brother breaks down. Looking at me with his eyes moist with tears he's too proud to let fall, he tells me stories. Tales of wounds covered with smiles. Insults too subtle to call out. I listen to him talk about hating himself, hating how he looks, hating how no one seems to understand who he is. I tell him to love where he's from — one of many truths I wish had been whispered to me in that bathroom 9 years ago. Kneeling there, my arms wrap around this tiny mirror of me, and instead of letting him disappear in the dark, or fade into white, I see him.
Ibrahim Barry is a writer and future civil rights attorney who spends his days obsessing over college decisions, what his next matcha spot is going to be, and whether or not his brothers will get to bed on time. His favorite activities include reading, photography, and being insufferably particular about music.