Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob (New World, Random House)

Barack Obama, America’s first biracial president, is nearing the end of his second term in office when Mira Jacob’s six-year-old son Z becomes aware of differences in skin color. Discovering that Michael Jackson, his idol, wasn’t born with fair skin, he wonders if his own white father had once been brown, as he and his mother are. When Michael Brown is killed in Ferguson, Z asks his mother if white people are afraid of those who are brown and follows it up with “Is Daddy afraid of us?”

Mira has been aware of skin color all her life. Her parents left India soon after they were married and made their home in New Mexico where “they were the third Indian family to move into the state.” Their son and daughter were born in Albuquerque, where they grew up assailed by questions and opinions about their brown skin. While their classmates want to know if they’re “Indian like feathers or Indian like dots,” when they go to meet their relatives in India, Mira, browner than her brother or parents is characterized as “a darkie.” 

“It makes you seem like a servant,” a cousin explains, “ and the good boys only want to marry wheatish girls so everyone is just feeling bad for your parents.”

“I’d been the wrong color in America my whole life but it hurt worse somehow, knowing it was the same in a country full of people who (I had thought) looked like me.”

Mira’s parents had never had a conversation together until after their arranged marriage. A happily-wedded couple, they’re certain the same solution will work for their daughter. Instead while living in New York City, Mira meets a man who had been her classmate in elementary school. When they marry, both Mira’s Christian parents and Jed’s Jewish ones are “warm and welcoming.”

Then in 2016 politics begins to divide them. Clinton versus Trump draws lines between people who love each other .Muslims face deportation and bigotry comes out into the open. What once were “microaggressions” flare into racial attacks. Mira is assaulted on a subway and none of the other passengers come to her aid. At a party given by her mother-in-law, some of the guests look at her skin and assume she’s one of the household help. And for Z’s new questions, Mira struggles to find answers.

Published in 2019, Good Talk is as painful now as it was when it was written. When one of Mira’s friends asks in 2016, “Damn. What are we doing to the babies,” the question scalds with fresh urgency. When Mira tells her husband how she has copied his confidence in order to walk into a room alone but now the rooms are harder to get into, her pain echoes with renewed clarity.

Written as graphic literature, illustrated by Mira Jacobs, Good Talk conveys emotions and behavior through its drawings as vividly as it does in its honest and thoughtful conversations. This is a book that needs to be read and reread, staying in print and placed front and center on shelves in libraries and bookstores. It offers no easy answers but a thousand avenues for discussions, now more than ever.~Janet Brown