There’s a picture of my dad holding me in the hospital on the day I was born, his jerry curl dangling in shiny coils above my face. If you look closely, which I’m sure I did, you’ll find a Mercedes Benz with diamond windows nestled in his chest hair. My dad’s beaming down at me through heavy square-framed Cazal’s. My mom isn’t pictured, but somewhere in the room, I’m sure she was smiling at us through her grey-blue eyes — the quintessential picture of a happy family. There’s a knowing look on my face, however, a recognition of a weighty circumstance. I imagine I looked back at my dad on that day of entry into America, took in the diamond Benz, the color of his skin, and thought, damn…couldn’t they have given me something easy? One of those lives where you can just coast? Maybe I was Black in a past life. Maybe I was white and had an understanding of the benefits. Either way, I had some grasp of the gravity of the situation, because I was born in the 80s, less than twenty years after the United States Supreme Court officially made it ok for a white person and a Black person to marry each other. I knew from the get it wasn’t gonna be easy, and it’s all over my face in that photo.

Several years later, not long after I’d gotten a handle on words and the concept of stringing said words together, I declared: “Mom’s pink, I’m pink, and Dad’s Black.” The answer was to adopt an entirely different shade, to proclaim I was not in fact Black, because as suspected, this Black thing was proving to be exactly what I’d feared. Kids are astute observers of human response, and it was crystal clear pink was preferable. I felt a difference when my dad was around — a crackling in the room, a shifty glance of an eye. When it was just my blonde German mom and me, it was easy, comfortable. We could walk into Denny’s, get service immediately, and even declare our Eggs Benedicts needed to be rushed. When my dad was with us, we were strange, foreign, inciting whispers and discomfort. We had to beg for service, twist, turn, and charm for our right to just be. We were unwelcome in a world living inside color lines.

My dad chose not to comment on my claim to pink. He let me have my delusional hope for a time. Later in life, he was sure to inform me how law and history deemed me Black AF with just one drop. A rudimentary understanding of color would make me grey, caught in the folds, an occupant of no man’s land. Nonetheless, for a brief moment, I went onward and outward with the comforting notion of pink and Black. In the end, my color status was settled on the playground.

On Mother’s Day 1988, my family decided to have a picnic in Bob Baskin Park, our local haunt. Bob Baskin had everything — tennis courts where my dad and my brother could sport their sweatbands and embarrassingly short shorts, barbecues, shaded lawn space, and my favorite part, a sandbox with a jungle gym. My aunt, uncle, and cousins were in town, my little sister was an infant, and I was four and a half years old. My parents had proven to be masters in the art of dithering and delay. If you wanted to go somewhere, you had to pay the price of waiting, a painfully challenging task for someone my age. With guests, it was shocking we even made it out the door. By the time we got to the park, I was hankering for the sandbox. When my mom finally gave the green light, I sprinted off with reckless abandon.

Spring in Las Vegas is already swelteringly hot by most people’s standards, and on that day, it was somewhere in the 90s, which made the sandbox almost unbearable, but tolerable for me. I loved that heat. I liked the ceremony of sprinting across the sand as it lightly scalded my skin in prickly licks, like a frying pan. I imagined sharks would emerge and bite my feet off if I didn’t run quickly enough. I stopped to briefly test the temperature of the red bars before sprinting up the ladder and tumbling around. This particular jungle gym was my spot, my jam if you will. I could entertain myself for hours on end. I practically owned it. At the very least, I was the boss. I twisted and swung freely and confidently, running up the ladder and flying down the slide, over and over again.

It’s important to note, that at this stage my status as pink was far less tenable. My skin had taken on a golden-brown tinge from the hot Vegas sun. My hair was not dissimilar from Medusa’s, coiling and moving on its own accord, making it difficult for me to see, let alone pass as pink. I hadn’t updated my status, however. I was still parading around like a pink person, which is exactly what I was doing when Black caught up with me.

I was climbing up the bars of one of the ladders when a little girl peered up from the sand at me. She caught my attention because she was extremely small to be alone in the jungle, and she was packing a lot of tude. Homegirl looked like she was barely two, but she was staring up at me disapprovingly, paying my authority around those parts absolutely no respect. She wasn’t even a regular for God’s sake. Nevertheless, I found myself envying the way her silky blonde ringlets stayed in their rightful place. As I pushed aside my hair in a flurry of self-loathing, she began to climb the bars. Now, I understood the need to get out of that sand. It was cool if she wanted to play on my bars, but she really didn’t look qualified. There was definitely an age minimum, and she didn’t look like she met the requirements. What if she got hurt? I couldn’t allow that on my watch.

Eventually, as feared, she let go of the bars and crashed back into the roasting sand. She hadn’t acquired the kind of calloused resistance my palms had, and her pink skin didn’t look like it could handle the heat the sand was packing. Naturally, as soon as she hit the ground, she let out a blood-curdling scream. As the boss of this gym, I should have been able to handle a problem like this, but I froze. I found out quickly I wasn’t really qualified to address safety issues. I was just about to make a run for my mom when her dad stormed toward us. At first, this was comforting. I wouldn’t have to go acquire an adult or fess up to the limitations of my authority. Help was on the way. I could stand down and go back to my business on the bars. My relief was fleeting though because as he got closer, I got wind of his anger. It curled and twisted around him like my Medusa-like hair. He took one look at his screaming toddler and one scathing look at me before punching me in the stomach.

As I flew through the air, tendrils of heat curling around me, speckles of black and white blossoming before my eyes, I marveled at the unexpectedness of it all. I really hadn’t anticipated a punch to the stomach. A blow to the gut does have a way of knocking sense into a person, however. It knocked me right off my pink pedestal, a land of care bears, little ponies, and rainbows, and into reality — a place where there was no escaping who and what I was. Deep down in my wounded gut, I knew my fate was intimately intertwined with the concept of pink and Black, with the fact I was different. Like a rabid beast ready to rip my snake-ridden head off, race had finally tracked me down. It had me cornered, and all I could do was surrender. There was no way to escape what I’d known all along.

Eventually, I slammed against a mound of hot sand. I lay there for a moment, stunned, struggling to breathe. Despite the singing heat, I was frozen with a hole in my stomach and an overwhelming sense of defeat. I looked up at the stark blue sky. In Vegas, the sky is annoyingly clear, blindingly so. I could have gone for some clouds that day. I felt like a trampled ant sizzling under a magnifying glass. I’d been spanked before, so I wasn’t a complete stranger to pain. I’d had some taste of justice in my four and a half years. I hadn’t gotten what I wanted a few months ago, so I trashed my room — thrashed little plastic chairs against the wall, took some crayons and markers to it. I guess I could acknowledge I deserved that spanking, but did I deserve this? Was it karmic payback for my attempt to turn my back on Black, a cautionary tale to those who try to mask their true identity? I suspected I didn’t deserve it, but there was nothing I could do about it. I wasn’t a boss. I wasn’t anybody really. Embarrassing, to be treated with such disrespect on my so-called turf. Maybe I’d just sink into the fiery pit and let the sand fill me up, let the injustice drown and suffocate me all at once.

Air slowly worked its way back into my lungs, and with breath came tears, those cursed, shameful things. I wanted to disappear, to erase myself, to be forgotten forever. The sharks were painfully absent, however, so I was forced to make my undignified way back to the picnic. Clump by clump, my hair got tangled in the tears pouring down my face, but I was too downtrodden to care. My mom saw me first. The smile fell from her face as she took in the sand-ravaged, tear-strewn sight of me. I didn’t want to tell her what happened, it was too degrading, too cruel a reminder of my position, but eventually, she wrested the truth from me.

“He did what!” She exclaimed, before sprinting to the sandbox. She confronted the pink man, demanding to know why he hit me, but he casually told her to f*ck off. This left her with no choice. I watched her silently as she ran across the grass to the tennis courts. There was no turning back now. She was going to get Freddie. She was going to get the big guns.

Some quick background on Freddie: Freddie grew up Black in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s. Pink was never a remote possibility for him. While I was pretending race didn’t exist, Freddie was dealing with harsh realities. For Freddie, this kind of thing was nothing new. In fact, it was far too familiar. The regularity had worn him down, obliterated his tolerance. He was on his last limb as far as tolerance went. So, when my mom ran over to the tennis courts in Bob Baskin Park, broke up his doubles match, and told him what a white man had done to his daughter, he didn’t need to think about what to do. He reacted out of instinct, out of sheer exasperation. Racism had weaseled its way back into his life yet again, and there was no way he was going to sit back and watch it have its way with his family.

Freddie marched purposefully across the lawn with my brother. Seventeen at the time, my brother wasn’t one to miss a fight. The pair seemed to drift supernaturally in their short shorts, sweatbands, and matching jerry curls, tennis racquets in hand. “Munchkin,” my dad asked calmly (I was small when I was born), “who hit you?” I turned around and pointed at the man who was still hanging around the jungle gym. That’s how nice it is to be pink. When you’re pink, you can move through the world without fear of consequence.

My dad and my brother strode towards my old refuge determinedly. The only reliable form of justice was about to get served. I didn’t see what happened, but there was a confrontation and the pink dad didn’t prevail. Freddie dealt him a blow that sent him crashing into the slide, slicing his ear open. After some swift racquet practice, my brother astutely made a run for it. And that took care of that until of course I heard the sirens.

Some might associate the sound of sirens with relief, a signal to sit back, relax and let law, order, and justice prevail, but in this place called America, the Black person is always at fault. The police cars peeled into the parking lot, and the cops marched across the lawn. I thought they would arrest the man who hit me, but instead, they went straight for my dad, tossing him around as they wrestled his arms behind his back and slapped handcuffs on his wrists with a flourish. Bystanders whipped him with the N-word and denounced his attack on a supposedly innocent man. I waited for them to do something, anything to the pink man, but they didn’t. Instead, they assured him the problem had been taken care of.

This obviously didn’t sit well with my mom. Hilde has always been less confrontational than the rest of us (she grew up in Canada). Usually, she avoided conflict like the plague, but these circumstances had crossed some sort of imaginary line. She began to protest vehemently. When the police didn’t respond, she became hysterical, promptly resulting in her arrest. Terror gnawed through me, as they carried her kicking, screaming form away. My mom was pink, but she was guilty by association.

When my aunt started to pile onto the protests, one of the police officers approached her calmly. In a voice dripping with venom, he informed her, “If you don’t calm down, I’ll lock you up too, and I’ll take all of these kids to Child Protective Services.” In response, my aunt started to cry, which might have been the scariest moment of all. She slumped in surrender, unable to combat the well-established forces governing Bob Baskin Park and society at large.

In the end, the cops left the park without asking me a single question. I didn’t matter to the cops. I was just a shade of Black after all. All I could do was watch, voiceless and powerless, as the police took my parents away in their cars. All I could do was wonder if I’d ever see them again and if it was all my fault if I didn’t. In that moment of loss and fear, I was forced to accept the grim reality of my difference, the inferiority of my position, and the disadvantage of being Black.

Eventually, my aunt packed up the saddest picnic of all time, rolling up blankets, tossing out half-eaten food, and mopping up long-gone remnants of joy and celebration. She strapped each of us into the car with shaky hands, unsuccessfully masking her distress. As she turned the key in the ignition, she admitted she didn’t know how to get home. I knew the way. I knew a lot of things, even if I was grossly mistaken about race. As I directed her, regret sliced through me like a slide on a pink man’s ear. If I’d just kept the gut punch to myself, I’d still have parents.

I dragged myself into the house, head hung heavily, shoulders rounded in defeat. I went straight to my room, slammed my door, and cried through sickening sobs. What would I do without my parents? Who would look after my sister and me? I tried to picture jail, that’s where they were, my aunt had said. I imagined a place deep underground, with tunnels and bars, monsters and consequences. I could see the withered forms of my mom and dad crying out for their family as angry police batted them back into the dark cave of their cell. Could I visit a place like that? Were kids allowed?

Minutes passed, hours, a lifetime, the entire expanse of mankind before my aunt burst into my room. “Your Mom’s on her way home!” she exclaimed. My dad was still a cause for major concern, but my mom was coming home. I let the news trickle over me like hot chocolate on vanilla ice cream. She wasn’t lost, vanquished, or forgotten in some subterranean cell. She was coming home! I ran to the living room and peered out the window, squirming with anticipation. I needed to see her in order to truly believe it.

Instead, I saw my uncle pull into the driveway. He slinked through the door dispiritedly and plopped himself heavily into one of the kitchen chairs, reeking of cigarette smoke. He’d been at the casino all day, and casinos had a way of doing this to people, of squeezing the joy out of them and making them smell like the putrid bowels of humanity. “Where the hell is everyone?” He asked. “In jail!” My aunt proclaimed. Clearly, it wasn’t a winning day for anyone.

The waiting and wondering continued to eat away at me until eventually, my mom came home. I ran to her, the heavy chain-link weight of the day falling from me with each step. We shared an embrace, a sigh of relief, until my uncle asked, “what the hell happened?!”

And so the story began…somewhere in the middle of it, my brother came home, a toothy grin plastered across his face. He’d provided critical back-up when the pink man’s wife and friend ganged up on my dad. He served up an ace with style and finesse on the pink man’s face and somehow managed to entirely avoid reprimand. My dad was still in jail, but at least they’d beaten the crap out of the guy, everyone agreed. After a few phone calls, we were assured he would be released the next day.

Crying turned into laughter, laughter into camaraderie, camaraderie into comedy. A day for the books! A story to tell! The worst Mother’s Day there ever was! At some point, I think I even laughed. Eventually, someone started cooking, others started drinking and it was over. I didn’t fully understand it, but I knew it was best to move on from the painful humiliation. No one asked how I felt anyway. There’s really no time for feelings when your kid is getting assaulted and you’re the one going to jail for it. I wanted to pretend it never happened, to bury it in the sandbox and abandon all notions of pink, Black, and otherwise.

Thankfully, my dad did come home the next day, but he had to go to court. In court, it was revealed that the man who hit me had been convicted of multiple counts of domestic violence. Luckily the charges against my dad were dropped, but the pink man who hit me? He walked out of the courtroom scot-free. You see, justice is a privilege in our country, one dictated by the color of your skin. Justice is for pink people, and I was not pink. Pink and Black had duked it out in the sandbox, settled it fair and square. While pink may have been a part of me, at the end of the day, I was definitively Black in America.

I buried the gut-punch deep in the pit of my stomach and went onward, trying my best not to look back. I knew who I was, that was certainly something to have discovered in the sandbox. Unfortunately, that clarity has never been easy to hold onto. It has been stolen from me and trampled upon by ongoing interrogations and opinions about who and what I am. I have repeatedly found myself lost in the schism between Black and white, unable to find my way back to the comfort of knowing oneself. Despite the countless challenges and assaults I’ve faced on my identity, no one can take away that gut punch, even if at times I wanted them to. No one can take away the understanding I gained at four years old of what it means to be Black in this country.