Little II

“Cin-cha, Cin-cha…”

“Yes, Little II?”

“What is that?”

I look down at Little II’s small index finger and follow the direction it is pointing.

We are standing in front of a three-apartment building. I see some dry leaves, some loose electric wiring, one apartment has a BLM sign, and a host of other wacky displays in the window.

I shrink to a squat beside him. Our heads now nearly at the same level.

“What exactly are you looking at?” I ask.

“There, Cin-cha… what does it say there, that w’iting?”

Little II, is four years old, very laid back, very risk averse, as tall as five- to six-year-olds, can play with worms and likes to dig for them, might like jumping in puddles but please don’t ask him to climb the structures at the playground. His response will like be, “Maybe when I am five or six, I can try climbing those.”

He loves make-believe stories like: Mama Lion and Papa Lion waking up in the morning and then waking up Baby Lion and then eating imaginary breakfast and sipping some water, then running out to play in the jungle – together. Then Baby Lion comes back home…but wait…

“No, Cin-cha. Mama Lion is at home already. And Papa Lion is at work in the office. Do that…so, Mama is at home making dinner.”

It turns out that after breakfast, Baby Lion somehow did not go to the jungle with Mama and Papa Lion. Unbeknownst to me, I had missed a step. Mama and Papa Lion stayed home to work in the office and baby Lion found friends in the jungle that he could play with.

“Okay. So, Mama Lion is making some dinner…” I stop to clarify. “What food is Mama Lion making?”

“Maybe some pasta and some tomato…” his face breaking into a warm smile, “and a yummy tei-k” (cake) for dessert.

I continue. “Mama Lion is at home making dinner for the family, some yummy pasta and some tomato sauce and some broccoli, and…and…guess what…some yummy cake for dessert…”

The jungle and home to this Lion family is a medium height, turquois settee. The back end of the settee is the forest and the wall against which this settee leans is the mountain.

Little II holds baby Lion. I hold both Mama and Papa Lion and mimic their voices. Mama and Papa Lion both speak English. And Baby Lion does alright with the basic speech that Little II can manage. Most times, though, Little II will forget Baby Lion’s lines – but we can forgive Little II for that since there was no time to rehearse this make-believe play.

Little II is also at an age where he has a sense of the letters of the alphabet even though his writing yet to manifest it. It is an important age. If he writes letter B that looks like a line starting at the top of the page, running slightly down and midway turns to the right for two inches and stops, you have one thing to do: place your two hands on your cheeks, dramatically widen your eyes in awe, and applaud the unique B or what definitely does not look like a B but is definitely a B to this four-year-old.

Back in my squat position, I look up and see that it is the BLM sign that caught his attention.

“What does it say?” he asks.

“BLM is Black Lives Matter,” I say.

“Black Lives Matter? What does it mean?” Little II presses.

“It means that black people matter.”

Is this the kind of conversation I want to have with a four-year-old? I was feeling ill-equipped.

“But Cin-cha, there are no black people in the world,” he says, in that four-year-old’s matter-of-fact way.

“Little II, I am black,” I say, if even a little worried that he could not see my “blackness”. Wasn’t it obvious?

“You’re not black…”

“I’m not?”

“Cin-cha…you’re brown,” he says.

I had been preparing to give Little II a solid education about black lives, never mind that I still felt ill-equipped for the task. But this…this “you’re brown” was… what shall I call it…arresting?!

Of course, what he sees is my brown skin – not exactly the colour of a walnut but close enough.

“You’re right, Little II. My skin colour is brown.”

How do I explain the categorisation of mid to dark brown complexions to a four-year-old?

I went on to explain that there are people whose skins (could I use the word complexion with a four-year-old) are darker than mine and others lighter than mine. I used Africa as my reference point because that is what I know. Then I tried to explain that black as a term or colour is really used to refer collectively to people of varying degrees of brown.

With kids, the only grey areas are the ones you introduce.