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Brownskinned Bama

© Valerie Borey

Perhaps one of the reasons I decided to study anthropology is the strange sense of culture and ethnicity that occupied my thoughts as a child. It was a sense of divided loyalties and confused traditions, an unusual fusion of cultures that made life seem so complicated and rich. Although I often publicly attribute my interest in anthropology to the traveling I did in my youth, I think the generative seed of this fascination actually came from my grandmother and the sheer enormity of her personality and experience.

My grandmother lived with us from when I was about five years old until her death in 1997. I called her "Bama," a compromise between the Norwegian "bestemor" and English "grandma." While my mother was at work, she fed me, played with me, taught me how to cook and sew, and told me stories about her life and natal family in Norway. She sunned herself outdoors as often as the weather permitted, and continuous years of doing so had dyed her skin a warm, nutty brown that barely even faded in the Minnesota winter.

It's funny how the stories we tell ourselves somehow get into our heads and are carried around for years. When I started going to school, I came to the understanding that people with brown skin were "ethnic," as opposed to those of us who were "regular" and white. Ethnic people had different histories and languages, different ways of seeing the world. White people were just average and measured the baseline of normal experience. Ethnic people were interesting, white people were, well, unexceptional.

Although I was white, I felt more than a little proud of my own ethnic background. My grandmother was, after all, ethnic; she had brown skin, spoke a different language than the rest, and she told me stories that had very little to do with the George Washington or Ichabod Crane vignettes that were featured in our history books. She had a very different perspective on life; one that I found markedly incongruent with those I encountered in the schoolyard.

My grandmother was also a playful kind of person; she'd invent afternoon games in the summer and would sometimes emerge from her closet in character. When I was very young, it wasn't at all unusual to see her peeling potatoes in both a housedress and a full-feather headdress. You see, we often took little road trips out to S. Dakota and were probably target audience #1 when it came to rock-shining kits, travel games, and yes, feather headdresses. The kind with the red- and yellow-dyed bristles.

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