I was born in a divided city, a city of walls, Berlin. I was born on the side of color graffiti, where people partied all hours of the night, and intellectuals held court. My mother always said that I was a Berliner at heart, for I had my own sense of style and a sassy sense of humor. Germans believe that fresh air is essential, so even on bone-chilling dark and cold days my mother would walk the Berlin streets with me. Perhaps this is why the city feels like home to me no matter how much it has changed.

When my Norwegian-American grandmother visited and discovered that I couldn’t speak English, she made her disappointment known to my mother, with subtle word weaponry. It was my first taste that I was different and this was not desirable. Years later she would refer to my parents’ marriage as a “war marriage”, a tragic by-product of war, and I still ask myself: what war was going on in Berlin in 1968? It took me years to realize that the war in my grandmother’s heart would eventually kill her.

My first experience in America was for 6 months when I was but 3 1/2 years old. We lived in Texas, and I spoke German with a Texas twang that amused my mother and father. And then we moved to Tehran, Iran, the country of my deepest childhood memories, fragrant memories that took root in my senses. I was the family translator, the one whom they sent to the door because I spoke Farsi. I spent most of the time with my neighbors, who plied me with sweets and were perhaps the reason for the many cavities that took me to the dentist when we returned to the States for good. Parisa and Afsenay invited me for many sweet hours in their walled flower-filled garden. They taught me to drink water from my hands. They taught me that people could be good to each other, value each other, and even delight in their differences. The two years of my Iranian memories are summoned by smells of certain spices, buttered rice, camels, the hookah, dusty streets.

My mother used to say that I was a happy and outgoing child. I didn’t become shy until I came to the States. I was first called a Nazi when I came to America at the age of 6. The children also told me that I must have invented the country of Iran. When I was 11, the fantastical story that I had told at age 6 became an “evil story”. It was the year of the hostage crisis, and children told me that the people in Iran were horrible demons. My heart refused to accept this, remembering the kindnesses of our neighbors Gooli and Ali, who treated me as well as they treated their own daughters.

Years of American schooling told me that being different was to be avoided at all costs. But what does a young girl with a foreign mother who doesn’t know about fairytales such as the mythical dream of Prom do? These were the Kathy years, when I didn’t want anyone to know my full name which would later be popularized by a certain ice skater. And yet Kathy didn’t fit, not any more than the preppy sweaters and CK jeans, perms, and purple eye shadow did.

I found a home on the East Side of Milwaukee on the punk scene. I started wearing quite a lot of black and haven’t gotten out of the habit over 20 years later, except for venturing more into the greys. Perhaps the punk scene appealed to the Berliner in me, but I rather think it was the freedom to color outside of the lines. Later when I was a graduate student I fell hard for the Expressionists, who painted the sky green, and the Absurdists, who said we were all rhinoceroses, and Kafka the giant cockroach. I even had a Kafka figure tattooed on my shoulder as a symbol of me standing apart from the rest of the world in my difference.

I claimed my name again when I was in college and became baffled that being European was exotic and now attractive. Why had it been weird and unattractive for so many years? It bothered me deeply that my white European background was prized in the city I grew up in, Milwaukee. To this day when someone asks me where I am from, if I say Milwaukee, they look at me with doubt until I confess to having been born in Berlin. When I was a child, I was told that I pronounced words like “can’t” and “either” wrong. Something in me rebelled, and I pronounced words in my own way. All of my life I picked up languages and accents easily and I decided to claim words for my own.

At the tender and impressionable age of 20, so innocent I was a former Bible study leader who had been drunk exactly once, I received an unusual job opportunity. My friend’s mother was the school director of a juvenile prison school, and because I already had a bachelor’s degree, I qualified for a limited term employee contract and was hired as a temporary librarian for the summer. They had received the entire library of a Catholic school that had closed. I was given the key to an unused room and asked to sort books alone. One of the two exits led out to the gang cottage, where boys would often play basketball unsupervised.

All the cottages had a theme: there was the gang cottage (although most of the kids were in gangs), the sex offender cottage, the younger boys’ cottage, the children of alcoholism/addiction cottage, and the model students’ cottage. All of the cottages were arranged around a football field.

The library was in the main school building, and there were business classes held in the library. Up until that point I had worked alone, having been told not to talk to any of the students. The only other guideline I had been given was to try to avoid being in the hall when the bell rang, for that is when the hallway filled with delinquents traveling between classes, rather like a chaotic high school hallway, except these kids had criminal records. I lost my fear of those boys the day I was left alone with Mr. Morrison’s business class.

Mr. Morrison and I had earnest conversations about inter-racial marriage. He said he would disown his daughter if she came home with a black man. Although he made frequent racist comments that hurt my heart, I felt sad for him because he was one of the loneliest staff members at the school. He was also one of the laziest. Mr. Morrison’s students would sit at computers and do “tests” with no help or input from him. I didn’t realize one of his laziness tricks until one day when he said he needed to go to the office to make copies. As he closed the door behind him and walked away from my shocked face and dropped jaw, he said I could always hit the call button if I needed help. That was when I realized that I had no idea where the call button was and that there were at least 10 young African American men watching me and noticing my anxiety rise. The tallest sat in the back, and he stood up and started walking towards me, saying “It’s been too long….” The boy next to him said, “Aww, quit sweatin’ her, man…” before he turned to me and said, “Oh, look at her face!” For some strange reason still unbeknownst to me, we all started laughing. It was the most unusual of ice breakers, yet extremely powerful.

After unpacking several boxes of religious books, it became all too clear to me that these books were of no interest to the juvenile prison population. Because I knew that I was naïve, I read the files of many of the boys and discovered that most of them were LD (learning disabled) or ED (emotionally disturbed) or both. The boys at this facility were between the ages of 12 and 17, but few seemed to be able to read above a third grade reading level, if at all. The prison population was about 75% African American, with 25% or so divided among the white and Hispanic kids, with the occasional Native American. I looked at the library collection with the realization that there was next to nothing of interest for most of the population.

This is when I first started asking myself – if you want children to stay out of trouble, what can we give them to occupy their minds? What can we offer so that they may develop a healthy sense of self-esteem? A reason not to commit crimes – a reason not to hurt others in ways that started with abuse done to them? Creativity, choices, pride, and physical activity…activities that can give a lasting and real high- how do we give children this gift?

While I have never been proud of being German, I have always felt that a sense of where you come from gives a person a better feeling about where he might be headed. When people complain about having to use terms such as “African-American”, I feel compelled to ask why they aren’t willing to make an effort that might feel like honor to someone whose culture is generally disrespected and disregarded. Isn’t that a risk worth taking? I’m not even sure how the resources came together, but somehow I got a donation of books that were about historical and contemporary figures from different cultures, as well as some token racially aware classics. These books aren’t what the boys would have chosen for themselves – they were far more interested in street heroes featured in Iceberg Slim books – but it was a start.

My contract was extended for a year because a real librarian could not be found. I was back at University, but I worked at the prison part-time, mostly on Saturdays. I would walk from cottage to cottage with a big bag of books, and the boys would come out in the common room to talk to me. There were times when I was surrounded, perhaps not the safest and wisest of situations, and yet I never felt fear. Later one of the boys would cut through my naïve veil and say that there were boys who only borrowed books from me in order to get inspiration for masturbation time. And yet there were others who responded with a deeper hunger to someone showing interest in them, like a 13 year old boy named Terry. He told me about life on his street and asked me why he should work a job at a fast food restaurant for pennies when selling drugs made much more money for him to help his family. My innate disapproval felt irrelevant when he looked at me in the eyes and asked me this question. Who was I to judge his life when there had been so few resources for him and his family to draw upon?

I loved Saturdays at the prison because it was church night. When my work was done, I headed to the chapel for evening service. The preacher was a big African-American man with an even bigger voice. He played electric guitar and a former inmate played drums, and they rocked the house. The love in that room was palpable, and while those boys might not have spent a lot of time living their faith, in that service they believed in themselves, in the preacher, in God. I found out that staff members who had to be there were constantly worried that this would be the best possible scenario for a riot. This was where various gang members, brothers and cousins, would communicate in code, for not all the affiliations were known. I should have been afraid, but I knew they respected that preacher and would not violate his house of God.

One day I was asked what my ethnicity is, so I started rattling off the various nationalities in my background: Norwegian, Czech, German, a bit of Finnish… And the boy shook his head and said “No, there must be some kind of black blood in you. We’ve noticed that you come to the church service, but you are the only staff that doesn’t have to be there. You don’t show fear, so you must be some kind of weird white person then.” I have always been fair or sunburnt, with very few shades in between, so I didn’t understand what he was saying – until the sheer compliment hit me. I told the preacher about it, and he was taken aback for all of a moment, and then he nodded, saying, “Well, to them you don’t act like a normal white person. Why is that, anyhow?”

Why? Indeed, for 20 years I had struggled with being a foreigner in a multitude of situations. I picked up languages and accents without thinking about it, so I had started talking my own kind of street. While I’m not a touchy feely person, if one of the boys stood close to me and waved his arms around while talking, it was a cultural difference in my mind and it didn’t bother me. I realized that my sense of difference allowed me to embrace what was different and often rejected in others. I knew that feeling all too well.

When my son was small, he would play on the playground with any children – it didn’t matter if they were girls or a different color. Often he would start walking with them to their cars as though he was part of the family. I watched my blonde and blue-eyed little boy following an African-American family around, and I would smile at the Mom and say, he thinks he is one of you. The look I received in return was always startled and then amused.

I wanted him to know that being different is okay. Thanks to my job at an arts outreach organization, I was able to bring him to multicultural musical programs, plays, art festivals, etc. A friend of mine is a Master Drummer from Senegal who invited my 2 year old son to dance on stage with his African troupe. For my son it was normal to be one of the few white kids in the group, as was going to the zoo to feed the animals with my brother the zookeeper.

I enrolled my son in an alternative school where I taught German. I let his hair grow long like his father’s had been when I met him, and I thought surely he will flourish in an environment with dreadlocked and tattooed teachers. For a time I thought I would fit in also, for at least I had the tattoos. One day the school mentor, from Holland, told me that I would always be different from the staff because of my European-ness. This made no sense to me because the school philosophy was one that started in Europe and offered arts and multicultural lessons as a matter of curriculum. And yet an alternative school is no guarantee. While there were many wonderful teachers and parents at this school, there were people – like those who can be found anywhere – who didn’t teach their children about it being okay to be different. My son was made fun of for his long hair by his Kindergarten peers, so he cut it off himself one day. In the school where being different was prized – he was too different.

It is up to us to teach our children that is okay for us to be different, for once we let go of the fear of inferiority and the accompanying need to put anyone down, we can reach the compassionate realization that our difference also makes us the same at heart.

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