#multiracial characters

In Kate Elliott’s Court of Fives, Jessamy must navigate between different cultures, classes, and languages, as she competes in an athletic tournament and struggles to save her family.

By Kate Elliott

Code-switching refers to the practice of switching back and forth between two or more languages, or between two dialects of the same language. When I was a child, we spoke both English and Danish in our house because my mother is Danish and my father Danish-American. Out shopping my mother would often switch into Danish if she wanted to say something she didn’t want the people around us to understand.

Code-switching also refers to switching between “identities,” in both cultural and interpersonal situations.

My family has lived in the state of Hawaii for thirteen years. Originally settled by Polynesian seafarers (and later illegally annexed by the USA), Hawaii became an increasingly mixed community in the 19th and 20th centuries. Because English was the second language of many of the immigrants but also the only one they all had in common, a creole English called “pidgin” developed that incorporated elements of Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Tagalog. (Here’s a 4 minute excerpt from a documentary on pidgin by my friend Marlene Booth and her co-director Kanalu Young: Hawaii Pidgin The Voice of Hawaii.)

While it is absolutely common today to hear people switching from Standard English to pidgin and back again, the use (or non-use) of pidgin also became a marker of status and assimilation as well as a means of discrimination. Decades ago, schools in Hawaii were segregated in part according to speech. My friend Gin recalls how her older sisters schooled her in Standard English when she was five so she could “test into” the “academic” elementary school instead of the school where the pidgin speakers were sent. This is a form of code switching as well.

In Court of Fives, code-switching is a constant part of the heroine’s life. I wanted to explore what it would be like for a girl who not only code switches between languages but also between cultural expectations and sub-cultures.

Jessamy’s parents come from different ethnicities, Saroese and Efean (also called Patrons and Commoners in the book). She knows both languages, is fluent in both, and can switch easily between the two in contrast to most of the population, who only speak either Saroese or Efean depending on their ethnicity.

But because Efea is a conquered country, and because the Saroese are the conquerers, she also must negotiate a far trickier form of code-switching: That between the class divide created by the privileged and powerful Patrons and the conquered and looked-down-upon Commoners.

Raised by a Patron father, Jessamy and her three sisters are expected to behave like Patron girls in their speech and their conduct in both private and public. The eldest and youngest sister look enough like their father that they can “pass” as Patron girls, but the situation for Jessamy and her twin Bettany is particularly complex because they are obviously mixed. To look at them is to see they have one Saroese and one Efean parent, a pairing not approved of and fairly uncommon in this society because it is literally illegal for a Patron to marry a Commoner. At the same time, even when Jes speaks Efean to Commoners, they can tell by her looks and speech and behavior clues that she “acts like a Patron,” and they see these ways of acting as pretentious and delusional (because what is the point of acting like a Patron when no Patron will actually accept you as one).

So, yes, I can and do describe Court of Fives as “Little Women meets American Ninja Warrior in a fantasy society inspired by ancient Egypt.” It is definitely a fantasy novel about sisterhood and family loyalty in the wake of treachery, a conquered country ruled within a rigid social hierarchy, a popular game called the Fives that’s more than it seems, and one girl’s challenge to run the Fives even though it is forbidden to her.

But embedded in that story is a girl caught between, who code switches as a constant and regular part of her life, and doesn’t quite have a place in either of her parent cultures. Jessamy has to find her own path, and it’s not going to be an easy road.

Kate Elliott has been writing stories since she was nine years old, which has led her to believe that writing, like breathing, keeps her alive. She is the author of over twenty science fiction and fantasy novels, including her YA debut Court of Fives, as well as Cold Magic, Spirit Gate, King’s Dragon, Jaran, and her short fiction collection, The Very Best of Kate Elliott. A new epic fantasy, Black Wolves, arrives in November. She lives in Hawaii. She lives in Hawaii with her spouse, paddles with outrigger canoe club Ka Māmalahoe, and nurses along an aging schnauzer. Her website is at www.kateelliott.com.

Court of Fives is now available.

“Casting my films and comics diversely has always been hugely important to me. That's probably largely due to the fact that I'm a biracial Asian American. It's also just because I live in a diverse world and the stories I write tend to reflect that world. Diversity's just honest storytelling, part of what makes the worlds I'm creating ring true. 

By Nina LaCour

[Image: Author Nina LaCour (Photo Credit: Kristyn Stroble)]

When I was a kid making my way through the California public school system, I took great care in bubbling in the demographic information on our standardized test packets. For the race/ethnicity section, I filled in as many circles as applied. My mother’s best guess for her mother, who was orphaned as a child and died years before I was born, was British, so I filled in White for her. I filled in American Indian for my maternal grandfather, because my aunt, the genealogist of the family, had found her grandparents had roots in the Cherokee nation.

My father’s family was Creole, from Louisiana, a culture comprised of French, African and Native American. With White and American Indian already filled in, I added Black for them. I liked the look of those filled-in dots on the page, like little clues about where I came from.

***

My new novel, Everything Leads to You, is the story of an eighteen-year-old named Emi, an emerging production designer who gets swept up in a mystery that leads her to love.  Her father is white and a Pop Culture professor. Her mother is half-white and half-black, and a professor of Black Studies. Emi’s race is not an issue in the book; it’s one facet of who she is in the world, and having academics as parents is another. This also applies to Emi’s sexuality: it’s a lesbian love story, but the lesbianism is not an issue. It’s all about the love.

When I was working on the early drafts, I was thinking a lot about an NYT opinion article titled “As Black as You Wish to Be” and its relation to my own identity. In it, memoirist Thomas Chatterton Williams takes the historical concept that “one drop” of black blood makes a person black, and brings it into the present. Williams has a white mother and a black father. He is married to a white French woman. He states that when he has children, their black heritage may not be visible, and argues the following: “Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.”

Williams’ position struck me powerfully. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, four hundred miles away from my Creole family in Los Angeles and much farther than that from my mother’s family in Florida and North Carolina. In my daily life, I didn’t feel connected to any specific cultural or ethnic heritage. My dad made Creole food sometimes, gumbo and jambalaya, and sometimes we listened to the Neville Brothers. Otherwise, I only witnessed Creole culture when we traveled south for big family events, when my grandparents would reacquaint me with my elder relatives and I’d revel in their accents and expressions, their dark, soft faces and their reminiscences.

In some ways, I felt home among them.

But I also felt like an outsider.

In a recent conversation, my dad said that when he was younger he felt tied to his heritage, proud of it. He spoke of moving freely in and out of the houses of extended family and friends, of sprawling, weekly picnics in Griffith Park. He said he felt a part of something. When I think of the times I celebrated with all my great aunts and uncles and cousins, and the ladies of the family pulled out parasols and the men turned up the music, and the second line dance began—when I think of what it felt like to dance in that line surrounded by my family—I think I understand a little bit of what my dad must have felt.

***

When working on my novel, I found an unplanned theme emerging. I’d be in the middle of a scene and a character would say something to the effect of how important it is to know your own history.

When thinking of my own history, I think of how census records for my dad’s parents read “Race: Negro,” of how my grandfather fought in the all-black troops in WWII, and how they left New Orleans for Los Angeles after the war in order to escape segregation and thereby have better job opportunities, and how my dad’s birth certificate’s race field says “Colored.”

I think about how my grandfather raised my dad to believe that he was black, until the Watts riots erupted in 1965 when my dad was eleven, and racial tensions ran so high in their Compton neighborhood that the disparity between identity and appearance became impossible to ignore.

I think about the night that Barack Obama was elected President, and how my dad cried, and then composed himself enough to tell us this story:

In around 1959, a traveling carnival visited Los Angeles. At that time his extended family and their friends, Creole people who had moved over a span of a few years in a mini-emigration from New Orleans, lived in a cluster, sharing households and occupying multiple units of apartment buildings. My dad’s grandfather usually stayed within their community, but they left the neighborhood one night to go to the carnival.

They parked several blocks away, and my four or five-year-old dad walked between his father and grandfather, holding their hands.

His grandfather was looking all around, taking in the scenery and the other fair-goers, until my dad felt something strange. His grandfather was shaking and his palms were sweating. My dad signaled to his dad that something was wrong.

“What is it?” his dad asked his grandfather. “What’s wrong?”

“We can’t go in there,” his grandfather said. “It’s not for us.”

My dad knew his grandfather to be a strong, unwavering man. He had never seen him afraid, but now he was trembling.

They stopped walking. His dad looked his grandfather in the eye.

“Dad,” his father said. “This is California. We can go wherever we want to go.”

***

Here is a sentence from Williams’ essay that haunts me:

[A]s I envision rearing my own kids with my blond-haired, blue-eyed wife, I’m afraid that when my future children — who may very well look white — contemplate themselves in the mirror, this same society, for the first time in its history, will encourage them not to recognize their grandfather’s face.

***

Black, White, American Indian. I can still see how those floating dots looked on the test packet and feel the satisfaction I found in coloring each of them in.

Passing as white, for me, is simple, and for most of my life that’s how I thought of myself, but it isn't what I think anymore. I don’t consider myself black, either, but I agree with Williams, and with the characters in my book: it’s important to know your own history.

I am rarely asked to provide information on my cultural heritage anymore, but a year ago my wife and I had a baby, and a woman from the birth certificates office kept calling and dropping into my hospital room to see if we had chosen a name for our daughter. I had a complicated pregnancy and birth, and in the hazy days of recovery my wife and I took our time deciding. Finally, we had it, and after spelling it out for her, she asked what to put down on the long form under race.

"Oh," I said.

I looked at my wife. She shrugged.

I hadn't considered our daughter's race, but she is fair-skinned with deep blue eyes and light hair.

"White, I guess?” I said.

“Anything else?” the woman asked.

I shook my head. And then when she was half way to the door I changed my mind.

“Actually,” I said. “Is Creole an option?”

She said yes.

We put that down, too.

The narrator in my book is much like me. People don’t register a specific ethnicity when they see her, but there is a lot of invisible history there.

No matter how many stories I’d heard about my heritage, how many photographs I’d seen of the darkly complexioned family members who came before me, when I looked in the mirror I saw straight brown hair and hazel eyes and fairly light skin. It was an article I read in the newspaper that made me reconsider how I see myself.

In a time when interracial families are more and more prevalent, more mixed-race children will choose, whether consciously or not, to remember who came before them, or to forget.

I choose to remember.

* * *

Submitted by thoughtsinanutshell

I think MBBM is my favourite Children's Book I read this year. I loved it because it asked important questions about what it means to be someone coming from two different ethnic backgrounds (the main character is Indian-Jewish). It also tackled topics like race, diversity and religion in a very effective and subtle manner. Overall it was a fantastic story that made me laugh and tear up at the same time :). 

YA Books About Multiracial Characters 2.0 (See 1.0 here)

Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher (Greenwillow Books)

The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson (Margaret K. McElderry Books)

Project: Boy Next Door by L.K. Madigan (self-published)

Riot by Walter Dean Myers (Egmont)

Transcendence by C.J. Omololu (Walker & Co.)

Monsoon Summer by Mitali Perkins (Delacorte)

Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan (pictured: Simon & Schuster UK edition)

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (St. Martin’s Griffin)

Misfit by Jon Skovron (Amulet Books)

Hmm...we (Cindy and Malinda) discussed this and we aren't sure whether there are more multiracial characters in YA than people of color from a single racial/ethnic background. Cindy did mention that it felt like among multiracial characters, it was predominantly white + another race. Malinda wrote one short story, "Good Girl" in the anthology Diverse Energies, that includes a character who is Asian and black, but it's only a short story.

9 YA Books About Multiracial Characters — Expanded from a list created by Sarah Hannah Gómez at YALSA's The Hub