When my mother was pregnant with my oldest brother, the apartment she shared with my father on 181st Street and Valentine Avenue was broken into. Someone who robbed the apartment next door had knocked down the thin wall in their closet to get into my parents’ apartment, knocking over my father’s stereo system and robbing my mother of all kinds of things she had owned for years. Real jade pieces that my uncle brought back for her from his tour in Vietnam, money, records. When I asked my father who lived next door, he said, “One of the last Mohicans, Angie. All the white people were running from the South Bronx and had been for years. But she was one of the last white people living in the Bronx at the time who was a tenant and not a landlord.” Despite most of their own possessions being stolen, the neighbor accused my father and mother of being behind the robbery of her apartment and the situation was beginning to get nasty. With my mother’s belly swelling every day, my father went out looking for an apartment with $600 in his pocket. He found what he was looking for in the Kingsbridge section in the Bronx. The apartment where I grew up. Where my mother still lives.

At the time, the landlords of the building were two white women who lived on the top floor in an apartment that were two apartments in one. They literally lived on top of their tenants who were becoming increasingly brown and this, apparently, was a problem. So, when they met my father, with his light skin, green eyes and straight thick black hair, who spoke of a lovely pregnant wife, they were, of course, delighted to offer an apartment to the happy couple.

The first week in their new building, my father and mother were in the elevator. One of the white lady landlords came on to the elevator and smiled wide at my father. She didn’t acknowledge my dark-skinned mother, did not look in her direction. White Lady Landlord smiled her white lady smile at my olive-skinned father who she assumed was Italian.

“Oh, hi! How’s the apartment? How’s your wife?”

“She’s standing right here.”

White Lady landlord’s eyes widened and her smile froze. She finally acknowledged my mother, belly full with my brother, brown skin glowing with Africa. Her lip curled with a sneer and she scoffed as the elevator door opened.

My mother smiled and spoke as White Lady landlord left the elevator.

“Nice to meet you!”

I asked my mother how she felt when White Lady Landlord looked at her like that. “She did what she did, Imani. I was still going to be there even if she didn’t want me there.” Mami was the prettiest woman I knew and I wanted to be her color, that warm rich brown that only deepened in the sun. She was unafraid of her Blackness, unafraid of her Boricua-ness. Since I was old enough to understand, she’d tell me that in her youth, she was, “Too Black for the Puerto Ricans and too Puerto Rican for the Blacks.” She tells me how difficult it was to fit in but stresses that she wouldn’t drop one for the other. “I’m Puerto Rican, Imani. Boricua. That’s who I am. But I’m Black. Can’t change that. I’m a Black woman but no one can take Puerto Rico away from me.”