This is me. Robin Nathania Mathes Peacher Landry. However, at the time that this picture was taken, my name was simply, Robin Nathania (pronounced by my family as “nuh-than-ee-yuh”, which I hated and decided to change to “na-tahn-ya” when I realized that it was my name, and I could say it any way that made me happy) Mathes. This photo was probably taken some time between January 9 and January 16, 1963. I use those weirdly specific dates because it appears to be my hospital photo, the hospital bracelet on my left wrist and the fact that I found the photo among my mother’s things after she died in a folder with my hospital birth certificate, complete with sketch of the hospital where I was born and my vital statistics on one side and my inky baby footprints on the other.
I was born on Tuesday, January 8, 1963, and in those days, moms and their babies were allowed to hang out in the hospital maternity ward for a week (or even more in the case of a C-section) instead of like today, where moms and babies are usually lucky if they get a full 24 hours before being issued the American healthcare system’s equivalent of last call (“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!)
So, I was the second daughter of Robert Nathaniel and Carcelia “Jay” Mathes. I have one sister, Caryn, who is 8 years older (I was born just 2 days before her 8th birthday) and another sister, Michele, who is 2 and ½ years younger. It was my great-grandmother, Lula Tinsley Stewart, born in 1889, who recounted the first completely ridiculous random question about me from a member of white society at large.
Probably near the time this photo was taken, Grandma Lula had some to visit and was holding me while my mother and grandmother (her granddaughter and daughter, respectively) were shopping. Even in the black and white photo, it’s pretty obvious that my skin tone is decidedly lighter than Grandma Lula’s, (a gift from my father’s Irish ancestors, according to Ancestry.com DNA testing). Also, I possessed exceptionally “chubby” cheeks, which, although almost universally considered cute on babies of all varieties, had the unfortunate effect of giving my eyes a somewhat “squinty” appearance and it was this that prompted a white woman to approach Grandma Lula and inquire, (supposing my great-grandmother to be the nanny, I guess), “Is that a little ‘Jap baby’ that your employers adopted?” Oh my…cringeworthy on so many levels.
This was about 18 years after the end of World War II, so, one would think that the term “Jap baby” should have fallen out of fashion by then. Additionally, by the summer of 1963, any war orphans from either Japan in World War II or Korea circa 1950, would have all been teenagers by that point so the premise behind the inquiry was clearly flawed from the start. Finally, to assume that a well-dressed elderly black woman simply had to be an employee of wealthy white people, could have been reason alone for Grandma Lula to, in modern parlance, “go off.” By all accounts, however, Grandma Lula simply smiled sweetly, and replied, “No, she’s not,” before walking away. I always like to imagine, however, that with her Kentucky upbringing, she also murmured, “And bless your little racist heart” under her breath as she did so.
quietlyradical 