Blended

“Daddy, are you and Mommy splitting up because you’re Black and she’s white?” 

The question is innocent and straightforward but reflects Izzy’s need to grow emotionally. As a biracial child, Izzy is just beginning to sort through the impact of her racial profile. Her assumption here is that race played some part in her parents’ divorce. It is a reaction that reflects her naivete and her innocence—her parents, like non-biracial couples, simply drifted apart. Izzy needs clear causality and tidy logic. Here, she wants explanation that is simple and clean.

“Birds make nests in trees, right? One nest. One tree. Who ever heard of a robin moving her eggs every week to a new tree? That’d be crazy.” 

Here Izzy struggles to understand her parents. In her innocence, Izzy uses the available metaphors of the natural world she loves in her efforts to understand the implications of her parents’ complicated custody arrangement. She does not see, of course, what the reader does: the irony of the outrageous comparison. Birds are not people. Nests are not homes. Children are not eggs. She is not prepared yet to engage the logic of her parents’ agreement—how it carefully balances the two parents to give Izzy access to both.

“This assignment totally sucks. The real me? I have no idea who that is. Especially since there’s pretty much two of me.” 

Izzy’s coming-of-age narrative centers on her ability ultimately to blend her identities. At this point, when she is asked to write an essay on the real Izzy, she anguishes over the impossibility of such blending. She sees herself as divided. She is Black one week, white the next. When the school is upended by the noose, she claims her Black identity; when she prepares for her piano recital, she sees herself as white. Only by blending does she discover who she is.

“But the world can’t see the inside of a person. What the world can see is the color.” 

Izzy’s father counsels his daughter to be prepared for the racism of contemporary America. Izzy cannot understand why someone would be judged solely on their skin color. This is a part of her education that begins when her class studies the long history of racism in America. In this, her father is a complicated study in the pressures placed on a successful Black man in a society that is still characterized by hate and bigotry. The father’s quiet but firm warning anticipates the shocking discovery of the noose and later the encounter with the Cincinnati police.

“It’s like half of Dad and half of Mom got put in a blender, and the churned-up result was me.” 

Izzy is contemplating her body in the mirror. She struggles to understand how mismatched she looks and how different parts of her seem to reflect one or the other of her parents. The blender metaphor here, however, reflects Izzy’s growing understanding that she is not two Izzys. She understands her complicated identity, although at this point blending, which she compares to unsightly mess in the blender, still strikes her as a negative.

“I know the kind of people who do horrible stuff like hang nooses. […] I spent a lot of time behind the sofa and bein’ scared.” 

John Mark’s tearful confession that he was raised within a blatantly racist household marks a turning point for Izzy. Everything about her mother’s boyfriend epitomizes the redneck stereotype. Here, Izzy is first challenged to understand that stereotypes do not define an individual person. John Mark rejects his upbringing, telling Izzy how the behavior of his own parents when they would drink and start ranting about Black and Jewish people scared him but did not scar him.

“Well, it’s easy to be mean. And hateful. […] But it’s harder to be nice. It’s sometimes really, really hard.” 

This is Izzy at her most naïve and her most profound. In proposing that the students decorate the school with hearts as a way to counter the noose, she seems to think like a child, remarkably uninformed about the complexities of racism. Yet as simplistic as her remarks to her class are, she is right. Bigotry is easy; racial harmony is difficult. The repetition of the word “really” at once sounds like a child and underscores how challenging it is to end hate.

“She offers him her own hand. They touch. Four fingers of her slim brown hand grab four fingers of his surprisingly large pale hand. For just a second their palms brush. Their thumbs latch.” 

In poems, her father’s flower garden, and the homes of Anastasia and Imani, Izzy appreciates the harmony of color. Here, Imani has just returned to school after the noose incident. She is welcomed back by students, both Black and white. Here, she takes the hand of one of Izzy’s white friends, and the two walk together, Izzy appreciating the harmony of the shades of brown colors of their intertwined hands.

“I’m Black, Mom. African American. That’s what I put on my official school tests when they ask. I’m Black and I’m proud of that.” 

In the immediate aftermath of the noose incident, Izzy’s initial reaction is to reject her white identity. Her angry confrontation with her white mother signals her simplistic reaction to the embarrassment she feels being even a part of a race, to her mind, so stupid and so vicious as to play such a prank on her friend. When she lashes out at her mother, it is clear Izzy has much still to learn about the complicated dynamics of her biracial identity. She cannot decide on one or the other.

“I’m a flower in the yard / About to bloom and grow.” 

Izzy loves the idea of flowers. She encourages the flowers in her father’s garden. She lingers over the tulips planted outside the mall. Izzy’s poem, written to answer a poem by Langston Hughes that lamented biracial identity as a cross to bear, uses the idea of flowers in the springtime to celebrate what is fast emerging as her perception of herself on the threshold of beginnings. She celebrates a sense that she is leaving behind the comfortable world of her childhood. Who knows, her poem asks, who or what she will be, an indication she is ready to grow, emotionally and psychologically.

“Mr. Kazilly talked a lot about metamorphosis—how insects change from wormy-looking things into sometimes really cool-looking bugs. After bugs go through metamorphosis, they are called imagoes. Cool name.” 

The dynamic of change is at the heart of Izzy’s story. At the age of 11, she is just beginning to become a woman. Once again, she goes to nature for her understanding of the changes she is going through. Not only does she see changes in her body, which often make her cringe, but she also notes her changing attitudes toward the boys in her class—how flustered and nervous she gets—and a new awareness of her hygiene and appearance. In addition to her growing awareness about the difficult realities of divorce and racism, she is a girl evolving into a young woman.

“When she lets go, her eyes are filled with tears. She then does the unimaginable—she walks over to Anastasia, arms outstretched. The two women embrace.” 

After a particularly upsetting exchange at the mall when one of her parents is running late, Izzy freaks out over her parents’ discord. She has a meltdown right in the mall parking lot. She demands loudly that her parents leave her out of their fights. The parents are momentarily stunned by the realization of how their bickering is impacting their daughter. In a moment that Izzy describes here as unimaginable, her mother and her father’s girlfriend embrace in a conciliatory gesture that foreshadows the two families coming together in the wake of Izzy’s shooting.

“Four hours of not belonging to anyone! It’s not Mom’s time or Dad’s time. It’s just a little me time. Is it terrible to admit I feel like dancing?” 

Defining who she is apart from the claustrophobic relationships she maintains with her divorced parents emerges as a critical element in Izzy’s emotional growth. Now she is being dropped off at the mall to spent four whole hours with just her friends. The moment she steps away from her parents’ world, she feels liberated. She handles the guilt and the feeling of euphoria in at last being herself. The irony is that while at the mall, being herself, Izzy has her encounter with store security.

“This is a store for those who…can afford it […] My job is to remove possible…threats.”

The awkward, subtly hostile encounter with the store security guard exposes Izzy to how white America perceives her. Despite her biracial identity, here Izzy is defined as a Black kid and, as such, as a security problem. Here, Izzy experiences for the first time the reality of racial profiling. The stammer of the guard, suggested by the series of dots, reveals how carefully he is trying to avoid saying the obvious: that these two 11-year-olds are perceived as a threat only because of the color of their skin.

“I get so excited I let go of the balloons—about a zillion red, yellow, blue, purple, and green rubber globes bobble all over the ceiling. Bobbling—exactly how I feel.”

Love, not hate, exhilarates Izzy. Izzy celebrates the love between John Mark and her mother. In his elaborately staged, wonderfully romantic proposal, John Mark reveals to Izzy something she had yet to see in the relationship between her parents: genuine, unaffected, unironic love. She is giddy. This moment is far from the contentious squabbling of her own parents. As such, this marks Izzy’s initial movement toward her celebration of her expanding family.

“I like when I need the black keys—the flats and sharps. They make the music jump out and grab whoever gets to listen.”

Izzy explores her emerging awareness of the implications of her biracial identity by using the black and white keys of her piano. Here she stresses the flamboyant, edgy sounds of the black keys, a suggestion of her own growing appreciation of her Black identity through the vehicle of her class’s exploration of racism in America and their investigation into the legacy of Black poets. She has also been introduced to the Black music that Anastasia shares with her. She is still, however, evolving toward her concept of harmony between and among the black and white keys.

“The boring old men in the paintings that line the walls remain stiff and unsmiling—sorta how a part of me feels. Does that make me an awful human being? I think it does.” 

Izzy is still struggling to grasp the reality of her expanding family. She is uncertain over how to read Anastasia. Because she is still coming to terms with Anastasia, Izzy is uncertain over how to react to witnessing her father’s staid and perfectly tempered proposal in the fancy steakhouse. Unlike John Mark’s proposal, this proposal lacks the crazy energy and unaffected love of the Waffle House proposal. Part of Izzy’s education centers on her coming to terms with her expanding family and, in turn, appreciating the depth of love her father feels for his new fiancée, despite his straitlaced and buttoned-down proposal.

“There’s really no hiding place in sight, so I press against the wall of the building, in the middle of a bed of freshly planted tulips and daffodils. I pull my jacket close—the storm is like liquid fury. Exactly how I feel.” 

Izzy is furious at her parents. Izzy’s father has just called the cops on her mother because she is running late for the exchange at the mall. Izzy cannot take the emotional stress. She bolts from the ugly scene between her parents and runs out into the rain into the parking lot, where she ends up standing in the mall’s garden. Like the tulips and daffodils, Izzy is herself a budding flower, growing in awareness even if that awareness includes rage.

“I also realize that while I was playing, not even once did I think about weddings. Not once—in, like, an hour. Woop, woop.” 

As her parents continue to feud over their conflicting weddings, Izzy increasingly finds comfort and refuge in her piano. As she practices the piano, the music becomes her refuge, her place apart. Izzy must learn that the piano cannot protect her, and, in the end, she will make her peace with the dynamics of her new family. For now, music is her solace.

“So you’re saying that the pretty part of me came from my mom, and if I weren’t pretty, then that would have come from my dad?”

A white kid who has a crush on Izzy awkwardly tries to compliment Izzy after meeting her mother by saying that he had no idea Izzy was biracial and that biracial girls, with their exotic looks, are so pretty. Izzy, increasingly more sensitive over her identity, quickly challenges the boy’s unintentional racism: that she gets her looks from her white side. The white kid stumbles with an apology, but the point is clear. Izzy has begun to develop her sensitivity over her complicated identity.

“The sky is blue. I know my piece. I’m ready.”

Every childhood has a moment that marks its end. Although Izzy has no way of knowing it, this moment, when she and her soon-to-be stepbrother are about to leave early to stop and get ice cream on the way to the recital hall, will be her last moment of such complete and simple integrity. This is the moment that marks the end of her innocence and her faith in the simple and clean logic of a world she knows. The encounter with the Cincinnati cops will forever mark the end of Izzy’s assumptions about the world and her place within it.

“I feel like my ears are hearing another language or something. And some lady is still pointing her gun at me! I want to say he just bought me an ice cream—but they told me not to breathe and that means no talking.”

Izzy’s confused reaction to the sudden intrusion of the police and her terror over having a gun pointed at her for no evident reason or explanation marks the beginning of her adult awareness. It is as if the police are speaking a language she does not know, the language of racism and bigotry. A young girl who loves language and even invents words, Izzy is suddenly effectively silenced.

“Tragedy often brings togetherness.” 

The nurse, an occupation that represents healing and compassionate empathy, here whispers to Izzy an explanation for how and why Izzy’s families, both sides, come together in the hospital. It is unfortunate that healing this family requires Izzy to be shot, but the impact of the shooting registers in the family. In the face of the enormity of the implications of Darren and Izzy being subjected to the psychological terrorism of racial profiling, the squabbles over the two impending marriages seem petty and unimportant. Tragedy brings the families to peace.