Mrs. Baylor: A Guest Post from It All Comes Down to This Author Karen English

When I was nine years old we had a housekeeper—Mrs. Baylor. One day she pulled me aside and told me that if I ever went to Africa, the Africans would kill me. “They don’t like no light skinned Negroes in Africa,” she told me.

As a child, confronting prejudice of any kind was routine. But its source was from the dominant culture. Under the thumb of the dominant culture, I always felt a need and a responsibility to prove that though I was “Negro” I could act with decorum. Did that feel bad? Not especially. I just felt as if I always had a point to prove when I was in the company of white people. I felt as if I was a kind of ambassador for black people. My brother, I’m sure, felt this special responsibility as well. When we were going downtown where we would surely cross paths with white people, my mother would stop us at the door and say, “Remember to act your age and not your color.” We would straighten up and become somber. We had to show white people we could behave in polite society.

It was complicated—this race thing.

That’s what I wanted to depict in It All Comes Down to This. Mrs. Baylor’s pronouncement was actually the impetus for this book. I never forgot her words—nor her special disdain for us. She was black but she did not like working for a black family. She especially didn’t like working for a light-skinned black family. Looking back, I cannot blame her. Her lie—and the need to tell it—was the result of two centuries of chattel slavery and what that wrought for future generations, decades of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, and even the common knowledge that there were black colleges where applicants had to include a picture with their application so that the admissions office could determine if the applicant was light enough to pass the paper bag test.

I needed to write a book that would include her comment. But I wanted to give it a kind of justification that did not end with the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow. I knew I wanted to include Mrs. Baylor as a pivotal character who remained somewhat in the background. But I wanted to include her with compassion. I also needed to write a book that would reflect another kind of African American story.

As a writer, everything that occurs in our personal lives or in the wide world goes into a kind of vault to be saved for the possibility of being used later. Something like money in the bank. That comment was money in the bank to me. I pulled it out five or six years ago and began this novel. It went nowhere. I put my effort away.

A few years ago, I took that first effort out of the drawer and began again. This time the book practically wrote itself. In the end I had, what I felt, was a unique narrative revealing, as one reviewer put it, “… a slice of African-American life seldom explored in stories for young people.” I felt vindicated by that, “…seldom explored” phrase because I did think I had moved away from narratives that have been told many times.

I also thought I’d be giving the reading public a peek behind a different curtain, so to speak. As with all people, our experiences are broad and we have many, many stories to tell. It All Comes Down to This, portrays just one story in the black experience, where money and education are not necessarily a protection from racism.

Sophie’s middle class neighborhood doesn’t protect her. Her parents’ professions don’t protect her. When she and her only friend, Jennifer, see kids from the neighborhood going down to the Bakers to go swimming, they run home and get into their bathing suits to join the parade. But, Sophie is turned away. “We don’t allow colored in our house or in our pool,” she’s told. Jennifer’s allowed to stay (which she refuses to do). For Sophie, oddly, this rejection is not a shock. It doesn’t warrant anything beyond making note that the Baker house and pool are off limits. To her.

I watched my own sister sit on our front porch and play with our cat when her friends on our block ran down to the house of a family who did not allow colored people to cross their threshold.

My sister didn’t seem especially disturbed by this. It was just the way it was. Like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. For Sophie—it is simply the way of the world. Something that must be accommodated when necessary.

It’s her sister, Lily, who has the spunk. She learns of the incident and asks Sophie, “Did you tell Mom?” And when Sophie says she hasn’t Lily says, “Don’t. I’m going to take care of them little bitches.” My editor changed “them” to “those” not realizing Lily was code switching—as African Americans are often wont to do. I let it go, realizing most readers might not know about code switching.

Times have changed. Mrs. Baylor couldn’t get away with saying such a thing today. The world has grown smaller and for so many of us, the continent of Africa is no longer as distant and foreign as it once was. I’m grateful for that comment. It’s been in the “vault” for many years. And, now it’s part of a book that had to be written.

Oh. Sidebar: Isn’t it a bit ironic that my husband happens to be from West Africa. Senegal.

It All Comes Down to This hits B&N bookshelves on July 11.