Black Jesus. Every time I make eye contact with another male, either white or black, I end up nodding my head ‘yes’.  Not purposely, but due to my misunderstanding about when it’s appropriate to nod up or vice versa.  The logical approach would be to nod up to black males, like saying, “what’s up”, and down to white males, like saying, “how ya doing”.  But it gets confusing when you factor in age, degree of blackness or whiteness, and environment.  I don’t fully understand why it gets so complicated in that split second decision, but my best friend Kali told me that it’s because I’m mixed. We were in the ninth grade and sitting in Mr. Hampton’s Advanced Algebra class.  Mr. Hampton would let students who turned in all the homework for the week and made passing grades on the quizzes have fifteen minutes at the end of class on Fridays to talk amongst ourselves. Kali sat across the room since we were in alphabetical order, so she would come and sit on my desk.  She’d gone to lunch at Arby’s with me and my mother that day and hadn’t stopped laughing since.  An older black man was leaving as we started walking in and both he and she slightly laughed when they noticed how awkward my head nod was after he did the downward nod.  When she came to sit on my desk during class, I asked her why it was so difficult. She said, “Come on, B.T., you know just as well as everyone else why you‘re so mixed up.” “Enlighten me,” I said. “I mean, look at your name, Benjamin Terrell Mott.  A person with that name has got to have some issues.” I had never considered that before.  It was something that she hadn’t told me when we started playing together when we were young.  It seemed to be something she’d kept to herself until class that day.  I didn’t realize it until later the same day, but the white kids tended to call me Ben and the black ones called me Rel.  I guess it was just a subconscious choice about which side of me they wanted to associate with. Kali was kind of in the middle of the ethnic thing too.  Everyone knew about her grandfather, Red.  He was a basketball legend and he still holds a few Ardmore High records.  If they didn’t know about him, we all knew about her great grandfather.  He was a councilman for one of the tribes and was responsible for verifying heritage claims.  He was next in line to lead the council, but then it surfaced that an ancestor five generations before him was of African descent.  He was removed from the tribal council and disgraced for having a drop or more of Negro blood. Kali could have been one of those closet kids since both of her parents and her brother are basically white.  The ones where the ethnicity skips generations and then makes up for it down the line.  She has beautiful, deep bronze skin and straight, coal black hair. Me on the other hand, I’m light skinned with good hair and gray eyes.  There was never a question about it.  I remember when I was at Wal-Mart filling out an online application and it asked me to check the ethnic group that applied.  It wouldn’t let me do more than one, and the “other” option wasn’t long enough to type in: Black or African American and Caucasian and 1/32 Choctaw and 1/64 Blackfoot and somehow Irish.  I wanted to just check Black but usually I just put Black and Caucasian because everyone knew my mother.  In small towns, all the interracial couples are infamous.  My mom and dad moved here from Jasper, Texas when I was a few years old.  They’ve always said it was too hot down there to get comfortable, so they wanted to move north. My teammates on the track team made me take a pop quiz every so often to see how black I was.  I knew most of the stuff, but they always got me on the dancing.  I’m not a big dancer and they liked to laugh at me trying.  Darren, the last leg on all the relays, would always say, “Name a Dru Hill song, Rel.”  When I didn’t reply he would say, “well then, who sings that damn Achy Breaky Heart?”  After that, he would usually try to get me to do the Kid’N’Play or the Electric Slide. My teammates on the swim team just treated me like I was black.  They joked about needing to change the uniforms from Speedos so I wouldn’t take their girls and how I was the first black kid to join the swim