Black Is the Body Read online

  Going Home

  My brother Warren calls on Thanksgiving to tell me that my grandmother in Mississippi has passed away. Her health had been declining steadily for several years. A series of strokes left her weaker and weaker. Severe arthritis turned her strong, wide fingers gnarled and stiff. A foam collar helped the constant pain in her neck that made it difficult for her to hold up her head. The gout that had afflicted her for years had made walking a chore. But when she felt well enough, and the weather was particularly nice, she went outside to wander slowly through her garden, where she grew peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, and lettuce.

  I step into the mudroom in order to talk to Warren, from whom I also learned of my mother’s death on the morning of Christmas Eve five years ago. “Remind me never to take a call from you on a holiday again,” I say to him. We laugh grimly and then make plans to meet in Mississippi in January. Actually, we make plans to make plans. Both of us are occupied today. Our brother James and his family, and my sister-in-law Joan and her family, have come to Burlington to spend the holiday with us. This is the first Thanksgiving that John and I are hosting, and we have been immersed in planning the menu and prettying the house for weeks. I say good-bye to Warren and bend to pick up my daughters’ stray gloves and hats. Laughter and busy conversation drift in from the table in the other room.

  It’s not right. It’s not right to hear from my brother in New York about my grandmother’s death in Mississippi while I am in Vermont. We have already had our first snowfall. It is currently eighty degrees in Mississippi. It isn’t natural, but here we are. I share the news of my grandmother’s death with the rest of my family. James and I accept condolences and say things like “It was her time” and “She lived a good, long life.” Before we eat, we bow our heads and count our blessings. My grandmother was ninety-four years old.

  * * *

  —

  On the morning of my trip to Mississippi, the line at the US Airways counter bulges left and right and snakes back toward the shop where you can purchase Vermont sweatshirts, maple syrup, and chocolates. I have already bought Vermont gifts for my aunts and cousins. I stand at the back of the line, trying to pull my body and bags as close as possible. A white woman behind me exclaims, “Lord, have mercy!” She has left her watch behind. Suddenly, I can feel her breath on my neck. “Have you got the time?” she asks. I turn the face of my watch toward her. She likes my watch; she likes my bag; it’s so cold here; am I from Vermont?

  I turn around. Thank you; it is cold; no, but I’ve lived here for thirteen years; I’m actually from the South.

  She is from North Carolina. I suspected she was from the South the minute she leaned in so close to me. A black friend from Boston, a singer, once toured through the South with his musical ensemble. Southerners had no respect for other people’s personal space, he reported upon his return. This regional characteristic must be a consequence of the geographical advantages the South had over the North, he speculated. In other words, because southerners had so much physical space, they did not have to carve out imaginary space in public places by hiding behind newspapers on the T, for instance, as he typically did.

  The woman from the South chats happily about what a good time she has had in Vermont. She wears bright gold chains around her neck, neat black pants, and shiny loafers. Her fingernails are painted tomato red. There are bronze highlights in her hair and a thin layer of makeup on her face. Her pink sweatshirt I recognize as the same style as those available in the gift shop behind us. It is as if she has tried to dress casually in order to fit in with the laid-back style of Vermont, but her accents have betrayed her. I think about the monochrome black color of my clothing, my fingernails raw and bitten to the quick. My South is black, but I will stand out there as dramatically as I stand out in Vermont.

  The line through security moves slowly. Ahead of me, I see a black man wearing a sweatshirt with “Tennessee” emblazoned on the front, a pronouncement of his otherness as frank as his dark skin. We smile at each other the way black people do when we are surrounded by white people. The smile says, You are here, and I am, too, and Isn’t it interesting the way things turn out?

  * * *

  —

  My connecting flight to Jackson is delayed. I have five hours to roam Washington-Reagan International Airport. The delay is a gift. I am free, accountable to no one in this building. I find a Starbucks and then drift to an empty gate with no posted flights, as if the workday here has yet to begin. Like hotel rooms, airports are blank slates, settings in which it is possible to put aside real life, at least for a while. I unload my computer bag and rub my sore shoulder. I sit down, caress my coffee cup, and watch the people passing by, imagining the stories they carry. Anything is possible.

  A small group has gathered underneath a television monitor near me. There has been a shooting in Maryland. Two people are dead, including the shooter, Darion Aguilar. He was sweet and gentle, says Aguilar’s mother. He had an obsession with Columbine and dressed to resemble those shooters. I stand and join the small crowd in front of the monitor. Judging from his face, hair, and name, I presume that Aguilar is Latino, or black, or both. “He had to be black,” my mother would say, and shake her head, whenever she read or watched a news report about a black man who had committed a crime, as if the blackness of the criminal was itself a crime against the race as a whole. I brace myself and wait for some mention of Aguilar’s race but there is none.

  A commercial comes on and the group breaks apart. As they turn in my direction, I can read the people from the way they are dressed: white airline personnel, black men in maintenance uniforms, and travelers of all races. A white businessman with his suit jacket hooked over his shoulder saunters past me toward the window. The cardboard circle around my coffee cup drops to the floor at the same time as a black man pushes a broom near my row. He picks up the cardboard strip and holds it toward me. We smile at each other. Everywhere around me are black men: travelers and workers, manning kiosks and computers, reeling off flight information into microphones. The farther south I get, the more black men I see. The more black men I see, the safer I feel.

  Not every black person here is black in the same way. The woman with sleek dark braids selling electronics at a nearby kiosk tells me she is from Ethiopia. Brazenly, I insist on a secondary kinship by showing her pictures of my daughters, who were born in her country. As soon as she is able to finish her studies, she tells me, she will return to Ethiopia. Standing and sitting next to kiosks up and down the hall of this terminal are brown men and women with accents from African countries and the Caribbean. Some of them are here to stay but work extra jobs in order to send money to families back home. Others plan to make their way back someday. All of them are in between, here now but always elsewhere.

  A black woman with short natural hair and gold, wire-rimmed glasses scans tickets into a machine as my flight boards. A balding white man in a business suit and I approach her at the same time. I step quickly in front of him and my heart races. The semester has recently started, and my students and I have just completed the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. For the last few hours of my layover, I have been reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. In this moment, I am acutely aware that, in the not-so-distant past, relatively speaking, relative to the history of the human race, that is, a black woman stepping in front of a white man would have been a consequential act. So much of the history of black and white, I think, is contained in the arrangement of our bodies. Probably the white man is not thinking these thoughts. But maybe he, too, is considering my act as one with historical significance. Maybe he, like me, marvels at the transformation in the choreography of race relations, and how remarkable it is, the way things have turned out.

  * * *

  —

  My phone buzzes as soon as we land.

  Where are you?! reads Warren’s text. He arrived in Hazlehurst early
in the afternoon.

  In Jackson, I punch into the tiny keyboard. I’m starving. Should I eat?

  NO.

  But I can’t wait. I stuff the fast-food wrappers into the glove compartment of my rental car and drive south to Hazlehurst. Along the way, I worry about my family in Burlington, my students. Have I left enough work for them to do in my absence? I know they are grateful for the two days of freedom. I roll down my window and take in the cool Jackson air. I am free, I think for the second time today. If I wanted to, if I had to, I could disappear into this city where no one knows me. I could begin again.

  * * *

  —

  Driving while daydreaming always ends the same way for me. I’m lost, I text my brother after pulling into the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. I have been circling the same landmarks: Walmart, the Holiday Inn Express, the Sonic drive-in, and this grocery store. I thought I would be able to feel my way to my grandmother’s house; I thought the map of Hazlehurst was stenciled inside of me. I was wrong. Aunt Julia comes to find me in my aunt Ann’s Chevy Tahoe. When she rolls down the window, my breath catches: her face is my mother’s face. I follow her home, flush with both sorrow and joy.

  Aunt Ann and my cousins are waiting at my grandmother’s house. When we arrive, I distribute the presents I bought in Vermont. It’s after midnight and everybody is exhausted, weary from travel and waiting and eating from the feast on the table that Aunt Julia had prepared in anticipation of our visit. As I pile fried chicken, yams coated with roasted marshmallows, and black-eyed peas cooked with ham hocks onto my plate, I think guiltily of the fast-food wrappers. I eat and sit and talk with my family and make plans to eat and sit and talk with them again tomorrow.

  My brother James calls to say hello and ask about sleeping arrangements. He’s curious in particular to find out who will be sleeping in the bed in which my grandmother died. It was going to be me, but now that James has brought it up, I feel a little weird about it. Warren offers to trade rooms.

  Soon I am lying on a bed with a wrought-iron frame in a room that my mother’s three sisters once shared. I lie on my back with my arms folded behind my head as soft laughter emanates from the living room. I am warm and safe in a sturdy old house in this faraway place with people whom I love and who love me back. I have just fallen asleep when I hear the song of a summer bird, a robin or a blue jay. The sound is as improbable as it is gentle and pure. I drift back to sleep, and the bird’s song borders my dream like a piece of thin, delicate lace.

  * * *

  —

  Neither Warren nor Aunt Julia heard the bird last night, I discover in the morning. They are already sitting at the table eating breakfast by the time I emerge. The sky is slightly overcast, but the sun’s bright judgment pierces through the curtains anyway, insisting that we begin the day. It’s time to pay a visit to my grandmother.

  A homegoing is an African American Christian funeral service. Like passing or crossing over, the term going home is a euphemism for death. The roots of the homegoing tradition date back to the Atlantic slave trade, and reflect a belief that one’s pure African soul would return to the motherland upon death, where it belonged.

  I read about homegoings in a book. My grandmother couldn’t have cared less about Africa, or homegoings, and wasn’t interested in having any memorial service at all. She had outlived so many friends and relatives, she said, that she didn’t think a service would be worthwhile. She asked that her body be taken directly from the funeral home to be buried in her family’s plot behind her church. Her pastor wanted to hold a service anyway, but her children forbade it.

  Warren, Aunt Julia, and I drive to the church to have a look at the gravesite. As we walk the rocky, uneven path to the family plot behind the church, I think about the services I attended nearly thirty years ago when I spent a summer in Hazlehurst with my grandmother.

  * * *

  —

  Ostensibly, I was in Hazlehurst that summer in order to conduct a research project on the history of my family. It was not an easy summer. My grandmother and I argued. One of the things we argued about was my approach to the project. The distant, anthropological lens I had adopted made her wary. She was suspicious. Why was I so eager to go to church, for instance, when so many people my age did everything they could to avoid it? Mostly, I wanted to go because I was bored. Also, the excitement of an authentic Southern Baptist church service, I thought, would enrich my work. It would be another story to take with me when I left, a story that I could bring to New Haven that would impress my friends and the summer research coordinator.

  As much as she disapproved of how I was going about my work, my grandmother was also proud of me, and pleased to introduce me to her church community. I followed her into the small brick building and matched her pace as she worked her way down a line of men and women, shaking hands and extending personalized greetings. “You look as sharp as a rat’s tail on a frosty morning,” she said to one man in a maroon shirt and black suit. “All right, all right, now,” he said as he took her arm at the elbow and shook her hand. Smiling faces beamed in her direction, everyone hoping for the blessing of her wit. All right, all right. My grandmother, known as Miss Dotsie, moved easily from one person to the next, less walking than gently rocking down the line. Most of the time I spent with her that summer was in her house, where the world came to her. Here she was, out in the world, and it was ready for her. It had been waiting.

  The service began with an organ and a prayer. The choir, whose members were outfitted in long red robes, began the first song, “Have You Got Good Religion?”

  Have you got good religion?

  Certainly Lord

  Have you got good religion?

  Certainly Lord

  Once the mood was set, the preacher began his sermon. He spoke about faith, forgiveness, and the power of redemption. His message was unremarkable, even predictable, I thought. But then his voice changed. First, he added a little vibrato. Then, a steady cadence emerged and held firm. Finally, his voice took flight.

  “I felt something,” I wrote in my journal that night. I sat mesmerized, listening as the preacher balanced his words precisely in a sacred space between speech and song. He maintained that balance and opened the door wide to the new space he had made. The choir entered, took up his rhythm, expanded it, glorified it, and then the organ joined them. The church was ablaze with something big, something bigger than language, something I had never experienced before. A few women jumped, shouted, and fell to the floor. Ushers were at the ready to assist the fallen. “I wanted to jump up, wave my hands,” I wrote. But the staid traditions of the Episcopal Church in which I grew up held me back. The church was now in a frenzy, the parishioners, pastor, choir, and ushers colliding and cohering, expanding and contracting, one hydra-headed organism. A thin woman in a pink suit and white tights appeared to faint. An usher knelt beside her and cupped her head in one hand, waving a fan with the other.

  “I want so much to be a part of something like that. But I probably will never be,” I wrote. “I was born to be a spectator, to watch and feel but to keep my mouth closed.” The only release I could manage was to cry. I let the tears fall, overwhelmed by the show of organic, spontaneous vitality in the room, and awash in self-pity at my utter aloneness. So, this was real life, I thought, from which I was doomed to stand forever apart. My grandmother glanced at me out of the corner of her eye.

  That night I sang the songs I had heard in church softly to myself as I was getting ready for bed.

  Soon and very soon

  We are going to see the King.

  Hallelujah

  Hallelujah

  We’re going to see the King.

  Even though the words were coming out in the Yankee accent I had been refining since childhood, in my head, I heard the glorious southern cadence of those robed men and women. I whispered the lyrics
and hugged the memory of the wild carpet ride I had taken with them that morning. I felt happy and guilty, as if I had stolen something precious and no one would ever know.

  We went to church again the next week. I tried to walk like an ordinary person up to our pew, but I wasn’t an ordinary person anymore. I had been a witness to a miracle; I had experienced a true revelation. Nothing about me would ever be the same again.

  My excitement wilted as the service began and unfolded exactly as it had the previous week. The preacher spoke, then shook his words with vibrato, which cued the chorus, who matched his gait, which signaled the organist, who added dimension, which stirred the people, some of whom shook loose and dropped to the floor.

  What I had witnessed the week before was less an organism than an elegant machine; not chaos but perfectly crafted choreography. But fascination quickly elbowed disappointment off the stage of my imagination. This was real life—no magic, only practice, commitment, and labor. This lesson, about life, about art, is one I am still learning.

  * * *

  —

  We say good-bye to my grandmother and the relatives buried alongside her and decide to take a walk around the town square. Hazlehurst is the county seat of Copiah County. It is a city, but it feels like a small town, with a population of fewer than four thousand people, 70 percent of whom are African American. Despite its percentage of black citizens, like most cities in America, the majority of the people in positions of power in Hazlehurst are white. Mississippi was once known as the lynching capital of the South, but no one I have talked to here has any stories about that degree of violence between black and white. There is evidence of progress. Blues musician Robert Johnson is touted as an official native son. A plaque that details his achievements is posted next to the train depot. Still, old attitudes endure. The day after the 2008 presidential election, there was no mention in the local newspaper of the victory of President Obama. There was only an editorial reflection on the effects of the campaign season. “Life-long friends became bitter enemies,” wrote Joe Buck Coates. “Workplaces are divided and workers become suspicious of each other’s intentions. Even some families are pulled apart because of ideological differences.” Now that the dust has settled, advised Coates, the most important thing for readers to do was thank veterans for the freedom to vote at all.