Loving Day by Mat Johnson

mother enjoying childlike naïveté.
    It’s hard to tell Roslyn’s age because she’s clearly fit and wrinkle-free, and conventionally attractive, but from the full white of her hair I know she’s almost a generation older than me. She shows me her world and I look around this place thinking, Is it free? If not, can I afford it? But all I ask her is, “What’s a ‘sunflower’?”
    “A ‘sunflower’? Where did you hear that? That’s a horrible word.”
    “It’s a beautiful flower. You can eat it too.”
    “Yellow on the outside, brown on the inside. A slang term for a biracial person who denies their mixed nature, only recognizing their black identity.” Roslyn turns her head to look over at me as we slowly walk down the wooded path, as if I’m the source of the etymology. “I don’t allow use of that word here. The Mélange Center is about inclusion of all perspectives of the black and white, mixed-race experience. Our goal is to overcome the conflict of binary. To find the sacred balance.”
    “The sacred balance,” I say back to her, to prove I’m listening.
    “The sacred balance. An equilibrium that allows you to live a life that expresses all of who you are and hide none of it,” she says, and she keeps talking. I look at her and offer an occasional “Yes” and smile, but mostly I watch my daughter across the lawn with that first biracial militant I encountered. She’s taller than Tal. Much thicker. How can any grown straight man become infatuated with teens when there are women walking this earth? With cellulite and stretch marks because they’re actually living?
    “Oh. Sunita.” The director follows my eyes. “Sun is a miracle, really, my little soul sister. But when you get called names your whole life, it’s easy to revert to doing the same.”
    Sun
. She’s at the younger end of my generation, with a name like that. Creative, but predating the celebrity insane-name movement, which means her parents were also hippies and most likely young and idealistic when she was born. The Brits, they can tell your social station from asking you the weather, but in African America first names offer not only class and region, but year.
    “That’s fine. I’m sure Sun’s just used to the word from being called it.”
    “Oh no, Sunita Habersham?” Roslyn asks, laughing. “Sun used to be the biggest Oreo on the compound.”
    There’s a lecture. A spiel. I’m certainly not the first to hear it and by the time I do it’s fairly glossy and filled with sentences like “We aim to help mixed children deal with the unique challenge of negotiating African and European hybridity.” It’s a beautiful sentence. I don’t know what it actually means, or how you would do it, or what the end product would be either. “Now we’re actively moving to the next stage. A cultural center, an artist retreat. And a school. For your daughter’s age, it would be a GED diploma, by exam, but we offer teachers from the most competitive colleges and universities to give recommendations. We’re building something that will last. A permanent oasis. When you consider that this whole enterprise started as an annual weekend event just three years ago, you get a sense of the trajectory.”
    “How’d you do it?”
    “Nobody went home. On the last day of the retreat, nobody went home. And then more came. And here you are.” Roslyn smiles again. The grin doesn’t reach her eyes and it reminds me of the mask-like grins of the principals I submitted to from elementary through high school. Instinctively, I want to know if I’m going to be suspended.
    We’re by the Victorian cottages now, with their gabled roofs. There’s more than a dozen in the row, with another row behind it. Beautiful little shotgun homes with intricate woodwork and little concrete block porches. But when you look under those porches, you can see the wheels. Roslyn notices me bend a little to look and says, “All of our teachers are well