How Tan is Too Tan?

When I become very tan, a lot of white people think I look Black. This is puzzling to me because when I see really tan white people, I don’t think they look Latino.

I’m back from a blissful week of tropical sun, which has apparently left me looking like a “relaxed,” “happy” cast member of UPN’s Girlfriends. Before my island getaway, I was the color of congealed oatmeal and suffering from vitamin-D deficiency induced depression. After an intensive sun-swimming-SPF 70 intervention, my complexion has deepened to a cinnamon or burnt sienna hue.

This is a Toni Morrison way of saying, I’m really tan. Though the way people react, you’d think I was Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder.

“You look so . . . ,” my acquaintance, wide-eyed, hesitates. “You just look so . . . ,” she gropes for the word, looking simultaneously confused and constipated. This is the same look The Wife gives me when I ask her, while she’s straining on the loo with the door open, if she can recall the last time she ate a vegetable.

“Well rested,” I offer my still stumped companion. “Calm,” I try again. “Sun-kiss—”

“You’re so bla—dark.” She’s broken out into a faint lip-sweat trying to find the most p.c. option in her mental rolodex of dark skin tone phraseology, which I imagine to look something like:

African
African American
Afro-American
Really fucking black
Really black
Black
The back of Forest Witaker’s neck
Black-ass Wesley Snipes
Colored
Dark
*!*!*!*!*ding!ding!ding*!*!*!*!*

“ . . . so dark,” she repeats.

It took me nearly decade to realize that when someone calls you “dark,” in that cathedral-hush tone, it’s not meant as a compliment. Twas the cruel, cruel summer before sixth grade when I made this shocking discovery. It was at the first Indian Indian wedding I’d ever attended that I clued into this sleight disguised with a smile.

An Indian Indian wedding is usually what happens when two Indians get married. The bride and the groom’s parents invite 500 of their closest, predominantly Indian friends and social rivals. Then everyone spends a couple of days dancing, imbibing and generally making merry, while subtly and not so subtly critiquing and gossiping about each other’s families.

My father, in his infinite wisdom, prepared his four sunburnt, half-breed children for this horse-show of sorts with the following directive: “Some people are going to comment on how horribly dark you’ve all become. Don’t be offended. Just say, ‘thank you.’ ”

Horribly dark? Horribly dark? Could there be such a thing?

What were all those weeks of swimming and soccer camp for if not, at the very least, to have an awesome tan to show off? Why had we just spent a week on the beach in Delaware, in the blistering heat, if not to even out and darken up the funky farmer’s tan? Weren’t my friends always saying how they wished they could be as dark as me?

They did indeed; however while they were busy sweating my color, I was supposed to be indoors, wearing a UV-protectant hazmat suit, sitting under a parasol, and pining for their pastiness. White people trying to be browner, brown people trying to be whiter. Go figure! Were I a character in a George Bernard Shaw play, I would have felt like a cuckold.

When inevitably some sari-ed auntie gasped, “Oh my god, what happened? They used to be so nice and fair. Ooofff,” my parents politely thanked the woman for the group insult and graciously moved on.

Being ten years old, I just stood there feeling hot and ashamed, and immediately sweated through my stiff, bedazzled saffron kurta.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have said, “Look you gossipy bitty, I may be dark, but you’re stuck in a loveless marriage and have a fupa. Now get out of my really dark face, you self-hating bigot!”

Lucky for everyone involved, it’d be another decade before I’d take my first African American Studies course and free my mind.

What remains uncomfortable about these sort of I-spy observations is that it’s clear, from the tone, that they’re still not really meant as a compliment. Otherwise the person would say, “You look SO DARK!”

A genuine compliment is always an exclamatory statement, given in italicized, caps-locked, size-18 font. Obviously.

“Her performance is AMAZING!”
“This meal is DELICIOUS!”
“You are THE BEST!”

However in my case, many people describe my tanned complexion as “dark” in the same tone used when they’re not sure if someone is fat, or pregnant. Or when they find that so-and-so on the 16th floor was fired. There’s a gossipy and conspiratorial feel to the statement. Except that they are gossiping about me, with me.

It’s almost as if they are not sure if I know just how dark I’ve become.

And if I do know, then they seem to feel I should offer some explanation beyond, “I was someplace sunny.”

Perhaps a madcap story where I ended up handcuffed in a lounge chair, roasting in the high-noon sun, but managed to escape by picking the lock with a cocktail umbrella? Or an after the fact Eureka! moment, “OH! That’s how sunshine and melanin work?! Weird.” At the very least, a classic low-brow comedy bottle mix-up wherein I grabbed the bottle of baby oil, instead of the SPF 90?

I try not to give my bumbling, quasi-p.c. conversation-mate too much to work with. Surely it’s not so sci-fi strange for a naturally tan person to chill in direct sunlight and become darker. I hope I haven’t missed some Model Minority Memo that banned female minorities, with the exception of Jennifer Lopez, from purposefully getting a tan.

Given a couple of days, I trust my acquaintance will adjust to this Soul Man version of Jana, and stop staring. Until that point I just say, “THANK YOU!”

Then I hold out my closed fist and wait for her to “dap me up.”

Her lip beads with perspiration again, and a little part of me regrets not coming back from vacation with Bo-Derek braids. Those would have been FUCKING SWEET!