When I was born, the nurses wrapped me in a yellow blanket. My parents told this story over and over again. How I was such a wonderful baby, such a beautiful baby, that the nurses, the nurses in the hospital, they wrapped me in a yellow blanket.

A yellow blanket. Not a blue one. Or a pink one. No, they wrapped me in a yellow blanket. And every time I heard that story I got mad.

Blue is for boys. Everyone knows that. And pink is for girls. But what is yellow for? I know that there are planets with more than two choices. But here, here on Earth, you only get to choose from blue or pink. And, frankly, I didn't care which. Boy or girl. Girl or boy. Either choice would have been fine with me. But what was my choice?

In a yellow blanket, not blue or pink, I was sent home from the hospital. And how proud my parents were, of their different, their beautiful, their special little baby.

That story haunted me all through my childhood. Haunted me in the schoolyard where I sat alone under a tree. Watching the boys play baseball in one corner while the girls jumped rope in another. It haunted me in the bathtub. It haunted me in my dreams. And it haunted me later, when the hair started growing on my upper lip, in my armpits, beneath my Fruit of the Loom white jockey underpants. Wrapped me up in yellow. Chicken. Scared.

When I was born, the nurses wrapped me in a yellow blanket. Not a blue one or a pink one. And my parents were so proud of that. They told the story over and over. But it took me more than twenty years to own that story. Twenty years to be proud of who I am.

When I was born, six pounds and seven brown ounces with a head of curly thick black hair, the nurses wrapped me in a yellow blanket. Not a blue one or a pink one. And I'm wrapped in it still. And I ask myself, over and over, how did those nurses know, when they wrapped me, newly slipped into this world and still jet-lagged, how did they know on that new spring night in 1951--that I would be as different as I am? A walker. Rememberer. And a teller of the stories of our people. That nobody else can tell, but one of our people.