Yup, it's true. It's a little-known fact. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were all black.
Hmph. What brought this theory on, you say?
Well, they are doing the kids' Christmas play at church. Alan, age eighteen, has been drafted as Joseph. He doesn't want to be Joseph. He thought that if he skipped all the practices, they would give up on him, but it didn't work. They still want him to be Joseph.
Fred was talking to the woman organizing it, and Fred said, "Angelo could be Joseph instead." Angelo, you will recall, is the teenager that we adopted from Haiti.
Now, you have to understand that this woman is a teacher, a kind soul who has taken neighborhood children of different races under her wing at various times. A saint.
But guess what she said? I'll repeat the whole thing so you get the full effect.
Fred: "Angelo could be Joseph."
Program director: "But he's black." Pause, during which she was probably thinking about how that sounded. "Well, I guess that wouldn't matter."
Fred says he shouldn't have told me this, and he's right, because it's one of those things that went straight into my long-term memory banks. I will remember this until I die. I will bitch to the other nursing home occupants about it when I'm ninety.
Angelo is unpredictable. I would not necessarily want him as Joseph in the play, simply because he might decide to do something inappropriate at the last minute, or get mad and not do it at all. But he looks fine for the part. The picture above, actually, is a drawing of what some scientists say a male of Jesus' time and location would have looked like. It doesn't look much like Angelo, but it doesn't look like Alan either.
But I tell you this. Little Francie, adopted from Haiti at age two--if I ever hear anyone tell her she can't be Mary because she's black, there's gonna be hell to pay.
