Black Is the Body Read online

  ALSO BY EMILY BERNARD

  Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance:

  A Portrait in Black and White

  Some of My Best Friends:

  Writings on Interracial Friendships

  Remember Me to Harlem:

  The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Emily Bernard

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Amistad Research Center for permission to reprint “Incident” by Countee Cullen. From the Countee Cullen Papers Collection at Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA.

  Several of these essays appeared in slightly different versions in the following journals: “Teaching the N-Word” in The American Scholar (Autumn 2005); “Scar Tissue” in The American Scholar (Autumn 2011); “Mother on Earth” in Green Mountains Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (2014); “Black Is the Body” in Creative Nonfiction (Spring 2015); and “Interstates” in The American Scholar (Spring 2017). “Teaching the N-Word” was reprinted in The Best American Essays 2006. “Mother on Earth,” “Black Is the Body,” and “Interstates” were Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2015, 2016, and 2018, respectively.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bernard, Emily, 1967– author.

  Title: Black is the body : stories from my grandmother’s time, my mother’s time, and mine / by Emily Bernard.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | “This is a Borzoi book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018022594 (print) | LCCN 2018034693 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493026 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451493033 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bernard, Emily, 1967– | African American women—Biography. | African Americans—Social conditions—21st century. | United States—Race relations. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC E185.97.B337 (ebook) | LCC E185.97.B337 A3 2019 (print) | DDC 305.48/896073—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018022594

  Ebook ISBN 9780451493033

  Cover design by Adalis Martinez

  v5.4

  ep

  For my daughters, Giulia and Isabella,

  who lead me through the world by the hand, saying, “Come on.”

  Interviewer: Then black is a state of mind too?

  James Baldwin: No, black is a condition.

  —Esquire, July 1968

  The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.

  —SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Emily Bernard

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Beginnings

  Scar Tissue

  Teaching the N-Word

  Interstates

  Mother on Earth

  Black Is the Body

  Skin

  White Friend

  Her Glory

  Motherland

  Going Home

  People Like Me

  Epilogue: My Turn

  Acknowledgments

  Beginnings

  This book was conceived in a hospital. It was 2001, and I was recovering from surgery on my lower bowel, which had been damaged in a stabbing. A friend, a writer, came to visit me in the hospital and suggested not only that there was a story to be told about the violence I had survived, but also that my body itself was trying to tell me something, which was that it was time to face down the fear that had kept me from telling the story of the stabbing, as well as other stories that I needed to tell.

  I began to write essays. The first one I published was “Teaching the N-Word.” Over the next few years, more essays followed, along with several attempts to write about the stabbing. I couldn’t tell that story yet because I didn’t know what it meant. It took seven more years for me to understand that the experience of being at the wrong end of a hunting knife was only the situation, not the story itself; it was the stage, not the drama. In The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick writes: “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

  The setting of “Scar Tissue,” which is the essay I eventually wrote about being stabbed, is my gut; the blood let flow by the knife is the trail I followed until I discovered the story, which is the mystery of storytelling itself, and how hard it is to tell the whole truth. Each essay in this book is anchored in this mystery, in blood. They are also rooted in contradictions, primary among them being that the stabbing unleashed the storyteller in me. In more than one way, that bizarre act of violence set me free.

  But, of course, the stabbing has been a source of misery as well as opportunity. For instance, I suffered from recurrent, excruciating stomach pain for many years before another trip to the hospital revealed that I had developed adhesions in my bowel. The surgeon was able to untangle my intestines and scar tissue, but he warned me that the adhesions would return. There was nothing I could do to prevent or predict them. “You’re just unlucky,” he said sympathetically. The pain, he assured me, would be random and severe. It did return, thundered, again, throughout my body, and sent me back to the hospital, where a third surgeon ceded to the inherent mystery of the malady and confessed that medicine was more art than science. The gift of his honesty was, to me, as valuable as any solution to the problem would have been.

  Once I accepted the randomness of the situation in my bowel, life took on a new urgency, and so did the desire to understand it. I turned to art over science, story over solution. I found a voice. The book imagined in 2001 began to take shape in a need to know, to explore, to understand, before it was too late. Insofar as the personal essay is, at heart, an attempt to grasp the mysteries of life, the form made sense to me on a visceral level. The need to understand, in fact, was what engendered the stabbing in the first place: I met the knife head on. Something in me just needed to know.

  Each essay in this book was born in a struggle to find a language that would capture the totality of my experience, as a woman, a black American, a teacher, writer, mother, wife, and daughter. I wanted to discover a new way of telling; I wanted to tell the truth about life as I have lived it. That desire evolved into this collection, which includes a story about adoption that is as pragmatic as it is romantic; a portrait of interracial marriage that is absent of hand-wringing; and a journey into the word “nigger” that includes as much humor as grief. These stories grew into an entire book meant to contribute something to the American racial drama besides the enduring narrative of black innocence and white guilt. That particular narrative is not false, of course, which accounts for its endurance, but there are other true stories to tell, stories steeped in defiance of popular assumptions about race, whose contours are shaped by unease with conventional discussions about race relations. These other true stories I needed to explore, but I was mainly driven by a need to en
gage in what Zora Neale Hurston calls “the oldest human longing—self-revelation.” The only way I knew how to do this was by letting the blood flow, and following the trail of my own ambivalence.

  I was not stabbed because I was black, but I have always viewed the violence I survived as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized American race relations. The man who stabbed me was white. But more meaningful to me than his skin was the look in his eyes, which were vacant of emotion. There was no connection between us, no common sphere, yet we were suddenly and irreparably bound by a knife, an attachment that cost us both: him, his freedom; me, my wholeness. Revisiting that wound has been a way of putting myself back together. The equation of writing and regeneration is fundamental in black American experience. So, if race was not an essential factor in what brought me into contact with a hunting knife, I have certainly treated the wound with the salve that I inherited from people whose experiences of blackness shaped their lives as fully and poetically as it has shaped mine. I am most interested in blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness, in fear and hope, in anguish and love, just as I am most drawn to the line between self and other, in family, friendship, romance, and other intimate relationships.

  Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges sometimes randomly and unpredictably in life as I have lived it. It is inconsistent, continuously in flux, and yet also a constant condition that I carry in and on my body. It is a condition that encompasses beauty, misery, wonder, and opportunity. In its inherent contradictions, utter mysteries, and bottomlessness as a reservoir of narratives, race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.

  Scar Tissue

  I have been telling this story for years, but telling is a different animal from writing. In the telling, I have shaped a version of it, one that fits neatly in my hand, something to pull out of my pocket at will, to display, and to tuck away when I’m ready, like a shell or a stone or a molded piece of clay. The story I have honed over the years is as neat as my scar; it is smooth, and tender, and conceals more than it reveals.

  * * *

  —

  Here is how the newspaper tells the story:

  STABBING SPREE SENDS 7 TO HOSPITALS

  Seven people were wounded, two with life-threatening injuries, when a man pulled a knife at an Audubon Street coffeehouse late Sunday and began stabbing people.

  The attack, occurring about 10 p.m., caused pandemonium and a virtual blood bath at Koffee? at 104 Audubon St.

  There was no apparent provocation, police said.

  The two victims most seriously hurt were covered with blood, and it was difficult to tell how many times they were stabbed, police said.

  “There was a lot of blood,” said Detective Sgt. Robert Lawlor. “There were some very serious injuries.”

  Bloody handprints were visible on a window, where one of the victims apparently climbed out. Numerous trails of blood led from the coffeehouse, which is in the city’s arts district, near the Creative Arts Workshop and Neighborhood Music School.

  “We have no idea what provoked him,” Lawlor said. There were about 10 people in the coffeehouse at the time, he said.

  —New Haven Register, Monday, August 8, 1994

  The first time I read this article I laughed when I got to “blood bath.” Blood bath? It sounded like something from a trailer for a slasher movie. But it wasn’t a movie, and there was a lot of blood, evidently, although I don’t remember that part. I remember it differently:

  On the night of August 7, 1994, I walked into a coffee shop called Koffee? on Audubon Street in New Haven. I was a graduate student in the American Studies program at Yale, and I was there to work. I had James Weldon Johnson with me, specifically his 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, about which I was writing a paper. I was having a hard time concentrating that night so I went to Koffee?, which was not far from where I lived, and was one of the many spaces in New Haven where students went to read and write and talk. It was a typical coffee shop in a typical college town.

  I was frustrated with my work, so frustrated with my inability to concentrate that I was giving the evening only one last chance. It was late, nearly nine o’clock. Maybe too late, maybe just call it a night. I debated with myself, walking slowly the three yards from my car to the door of Koffee?. I was probably talking to myself, as I do all the time, muttering about all that I had to do. A man on a bicycle and I approached the door at the same time. Beside him stood an average-size, average-looking brown dog on a leash. The man was listing on his bike, rocking side to side, as if he himself had not made the commitment to go inside the shop (maybe, maybe not). Our eyes met. He looked like Gallagher, the 1970s comedian—the same long hair and bald pate, the same thick moustache. Or at least that’s what I remember. To this day, when I think of Daniel Silva, I think of Gallagher, whom I rarely—if ever—thought about before that night.

  I don’t remember who went in first, but I remember making the decision not to let the oddness of this stranger bother me. Because he was odd. It was the way he was listing on his bicycle; it was the unsettling way he looked at me. His look was familiar, or too aware—not the passing glance of a stranger. Even now, I have a hard time describing it. He was odd; it was instinct. I knew something was wrong with him. Or maybe this is just the cliché of hindsight speaking. After all, we’re talking about a university town, and a coffee shop full of nerds off in their own odd little worlds, people who routinely talk to themselves out loud, as I had been doing that night.

  Here I have lingered longer than I lingered in that moment, which passed as quickly as a proverbial blink of an eye. I looked at the man, made a quick unconscious association with Gallagher, went in to get my coffee, and planted myself at a table. I put my keys on the table. I pulled out my book and notepad. I took off my glasses and my watch. No distractions, just me and the page, as naked as I allow myself to get in public.

  At some point, I looked up and noticed that the strange man had settled into a chair not far from me. I was aware of him as he watched a table full of young girls next to me, presumably undergraduates. They were talking about a sexual encounter one of them had had recently. The girls were loud, sexy, and full of swagger. I had been feeling annoyed by them and their devil-may-care bluster, but now I looked up and saw that the man was staring at them, obviously and, apparently, salaciously. I felt intimidated by his frank stare, but I looked at the girls and they didn’t seem to care, which made me proud of them, and emboldened for myself. Go ahead, talk about sex, I thought. Don’t let this freak scare you. Eventually, the girls left.

  When they did, the man turned his attention to a young woman I imagined to be a medical student or a law student, judging by the size of her very official-looking textbooks. She tried to engage him in conversation. She said something like “Hi.” I didn’t hear his response, but I do know that not long after this exchange the woman gathered up her books and left.

  What happened next? Here’s what I told Detective C. Willougby at 1:30 a.m. on August 8, 1994 (for whatever reason, Detective Willougby recorded this in all-caps):

  THIS DETECTIVE THEN SPOKE WITH ______ WHO STATED THAT SHE WAS SITTING INSIDE THE RESTAURANT WHEN A WHITE MALE CAME IN WHO HAD A DOG. SHE THEN STATED THAT HE WALKED THE DOG OUTSIDE AND HE THEN RETURNED. HE THEN PULLED OUT A KNIFE AND STARTED STABBING PEOPLE IN THE RESTAURANT. SHE STATED THAT HE STAB [sic] HER ONCE IN THE STOMACH AND SHE THEN FLED THE RESTAURANT. SHE STATED THAT SHE HAD NEVER SEEN THE WHITE MALE SUBJECT BEFORE AND SHE DOES NOT KNOW HIM.

  I remember stillness, the hum of low voices and the lights, bright yet soothing, like the talk surrounding me. People talking and laughing quietly. Students, professors, writers; I was the only black person present, but these were peop
le just like me, who looked like me. So many moments like these over the years in coffee shops in so many cities; all forgettable, ordinary, and uneventful. But these particular moments on this particular evening stay with me more palpably than any other moments from that long night. The stillness, the quiet, the hum of low pleasant talk. The sensation of being inside of those moments—it is the only real memory I retain from that night. Yet, just beyond the borders of that quiet, pleasant memory, I can still hear the rhythmic, continuous sound of a dog barking outside, like a warning.

  Suddenly, chaos. Pandemonium. Bedlam. Topsy-turvy. Madhouse. A holy mess. All hell broke loose. The room turned upside down, on its back, inside out, went crazy, flipped out. Other words, other clichés. Fear erupted like a seismic shift in the Earth’s surface, and then charged and pierced and saturated the room like smoke. Fear—a good friend to me that night—chased me toward the back door. But even in the midst of this utter confusion, I paused and listened for gunshots—this was America, after all. I paused, not only to listen for the gunshots but to brace myself—literally tense my shoulders, grit my teeth, and search inside somewhere for the pain, for the tearing impact of a bullet. When I completed that brief inventory and discovered no bullet, I was overcome by a feeling of relief. Hope, luck. A chance. And a door right behind me—and I ran.

  And then I was outside in the back of the coffeehouse. There were no lights; it was as dark as the bottom of a pocket. Others rushed by me—I don’t remember if they were speaking, shouting, screaming, or crying. What I remember is silence, which seemed inexplicable to me even then. I would find out later that what occasioned that queer silence was adrenaline pounding in my ears and deafening me.