It's Always Sunny

I forgot to mention that I drive a taxi.

More accurately, because I can't drive stick, I sit shotgun in what appears to be a Liberian cab.

I am constantly being hailed; this week, someone nearly climbed in the backseat.

The car in question is a Nissan Sunny. I have never had a car and know, like, zero things about vehicles but of all possible cars, my mother gifted me a taxi.

With stick shift.

(My mom has a peculiar sense of humor.)

The Sunny -- and the three-month fog -- got me thinking a lot about all things bright.

I was in the Sunny the other day and the driver stopped for a pedestrian. The girl froze and stared into my car until someone honked and broke her trance. 

"She's looking at you," the driver laughed.

"I doubt that," I said. "She's looking at you."

"Why would she look at me, black as I am? She was looking at you. She saw another bright person and thought it was a mirror."

In Liberia, bright has nothing to do with smarts or luminosity: bright is a skin color. 

I have seen bright people and I am not one of them. Due in part to German ancestry, I think I fall into the red category, as was concluded in the maternity ward many, many years ago.

In Liberia, nearly everyone has exactly the same dark, gorgeous skin so outliers draw notice. And classification.

One day, I saw a car full of uniformed albino kids and wondered if they were being collected, like action figures. Albinism is unusually common Africa (1 in 4,000 compared with 1 in 20,000 worldwide). Thankfully, albinos in Liberia are generally well-regarded (unlike, say, here).

Skin color can be pretty incendiary, as President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf recounts in her autobiography:

Early on during my historic 2005 campaign for the presidency of Liberia, rumors began to circulate about my ethnicity. My detractors began whispering that I was an Americo-Liberian, a descendant of one of those first American-born founders of our land — and thus a member of the elite class that had ruled our nation for long. This was an explosive charge. It could not be brushed off or ignored, not if I wanted to win. It was crucial that the people of Liberia know my background was not unlike their own. 

Madam President is Gola, Kru and German.

She is hovering somewhere between bright and red. Maybe she's bright red, I don't know.