Our bus driver, Coulibaly

While everyone commented on my skin color (toubabu!), it never really felt like my color was attached to an identity the way it can be in the U.S. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but it was a couple weeks into the program, fairly early on. I was on a sotrama, going to school perhaps, holding onto the battered handrail welded onto the top of the bus. Everyone else was holding on too, a row of hands grasping iron to my left and right. I was gazing around, my glance passing from hand to hand, and all of a sudden my eyes fell on my own hand, and I was surprised.  My skin wasn’t supposed to be that color, it was pale and....wrong.

I felt suddenly out of place, hyperaware of my difference, and then the feeling changed. I looked around the sotrama again, at the wide-hipped women cradling infants in their laps; the hipless men in their pants and loud boxy shirts, the tall Touareg squeezed into the corner, his legs emerging out of his neighbors knees. The prend-ticket, calling for passengers, hanging halfway out the door. I didn’t see black people. I saw the curves of faces, mouths, noses, the shapes of eyes and the lines of the neck, wiry male arm muscles and women’s massive triceps. I saw the folds of pagnes, dusty feet in flip flops and leather sandals, tshirts worn through at the shoulders, bright boubous laundered and starched after every wearing. I saw individuals, and saw behind their set faces a student, a merchant, a potato seller, a mechanic, a griot.

Cherif's father's youngest wife

Others on the trip echoed my feelings. Gretchen had a similar experience on the sotrama. "I looked around one day and all I saw were bones," she said. "I was seeing through the skin, somehow, to the form underneath, just muscles and bones, just a physical body." This was not a sudden revelation, but it was a conscious realization, a recognition of a thought process we had been using without really thinking about it. I didn’t grow up around a lot of black people, and I was a little worried about how I would react to being surrounded by them. I didn’t fear them, or think they were all the same, or have lots of prejudices about them, but the simple fact of being a minority by virtue of my skin color was, if not uncomfortable, a little unsettling.