Am I an African? I wondered.

A few months earlier, I’d been sitting in a plaza near the Spanish steps in Rome with a Jewish roommate, Stephie, who looked Italian.  I was living overseas in London and we’d skipped our Art History classes about Italian art to actually go see the works in person.

We were sipping cappuccino like MC Lyte, pretending to be cosmopolitan when a few native Italian men asked if they could sit and chat. Going through the pleasantries, the men asked where we were from. Stephanie rattled off a few generations back tracing her family back to her great- great-grandfather heading to America on a boat from an Old World country I can no longer recall.