Black Is the Body Read online

  I can’t stand the image of my extraordinary grandmother waiting humbly and silently to be recognized by white people. Miss Dotsie, who wrung the necks of chickens until they snapped, who cut off the heads of snakes with a garden hoe; this force of nature about whom tales both factual and apocryphal were spun, are still spun, standing and waiting simply to be seen. The deeper Aunt Julia gets into this story, the more layers she adds to her portrait of black life in the Jim Crow South, the more riled up we both become. We put on our jackets and head to Wilson’s.

  At first, Aunt Julia says she will stay in the car. But as it becomes clear to her that I am not only willing but eager to create a scene, she decides it would be best if she accompanied me. As a cover, she advises me to ask for a pound of cheddar cheese. I walk up and down the aisles slowly, casing the joint. My aunt’s eyes meet mine across rows of crackers and canned goods. A little black girl, maybe ten years old, holding grape soda and a small bag of Funyuns, observes me seriously and then waves.

  “May I have a pound of cheddar, please,” I say, as I stand among the other customers, some black, some white. The pitch of my voice is the kind you might use when talking to a person with poor hearing against whom you are nursing a grudge. Behind the counter are white men and women wearing white coats and plastic gloves. The white man holding the cheese nods and cuts the block into precise, identical slices.

  Oh, well. We wander out, take the cheese back home, and drive to Aunt Ann’s house on Extension Street.

  * * *

  —

  I come from a family of readers, so the afternoon plan is to go to Jackson, forty miles north, to visit the nearest bookstore. Before we leave, I browse the shelves of Aunt Ann’s bulging bookcases: James Patterson, John Grisham, and Stephen King, her favorite author. Like her sisters, Ann has enough books to outfit a small lending library. But there is always room for more books. We make the trip to Books-A-Million in Ann’s Tahoe. I sit in the back with my cousin and her two children while my aunt recounts the story of the Jefferson family during the era of civil rights. She remembers how her mother’s brother Frank and his wife, Bea, both of whom she adored and calls the loves of her life, donned their own rifles in the war between the Jeffersons and the activists. Uncle Frank blocked the driveway while Aunt Bea fired a warning shot in the air at the home of the most hostile antagonist. That particular aggressor never bothered another Jefferson again.

  In my story about my husband’s first visit to Hazlehurst, John is received immediately and warmly into the bosom of my maternal line. Aunt Ann tells a different story.

  “Tell Emily not to bring that white man to my house,” she instructed my grandmother.

  “Emily is your niece,” my grandmother reminded her.

  “Emily is welcome but he isn’t.”

  Neither John nor I had any idea what was waiting for us when we pulled into Aunt Ann’s driveway. When they heard the car, Ann’s husband, daughter, and a family friend fled to their rooms. Aunt Ann looked out of the window and saw John and me in the driveway, laughing and talking. “You looked like best friends,” she said.

  I love this romantic tale, but since I am as difficult as anyone else in my clan, it is just as likely that John and I were arguing in her driveway. Either way, however, the story ends the same way.

  John won her over with what he didn’t do. “He didn’t try to hug me or call me ‘Auntie,’ ” she explains. He didn’t impose a false intimacy. Unlike generations of white people in the South whom my ancestors had no choice but to endure, John did not presume that her body was his to touch. Instead he held out his hand for her to shake.

  “Now I don’t think of John as white. He’s just family,” she says.

  What has happened in the world while my aunts, cousins, and I have been nosing around a bookstore, driving to and from Jackson, telling family tales? Aunt Julia and I turn on the news as soon as we get back to Hazlehurst. Which of the world’s bank of stories have made it to the screen? The usual reports of violence, despair, success and failure, winning and losing, and, in Hazlehurst at least, talk and talk of snow. My flight to Vermont leaves tomorrow.

  * * *

  —

  It’s not the snow as much as the ice, Aunt Julia informs me the next morning. I knew it had snowed as soon as I woke up; the room was dazzlingly bright with its reflection. My aunt and I stand on the porch and observe the transformation of our street, the houses and cars now sparkling and frozen. We scoot our feet along the stone path to my rental car, which is encased in a thick film of ice.

  “We can scrape it off with a credit card,” says my aunt.

  “Aunt Julia, there aren’t enough credit cards in all of Hazlehurst to get the ice off this car.”

  Instead I turn the heat all the way up and let the engine run until the leather seats are warm and the windshield is beaded with water. I suggest we drive downtown and have a look around. I take the roads leading to the town square inch by inch. My flight to Burlington has been canceled.

  We are not the only ones in the town square, standing and taking pictures of this odd, breathtaking scene. Icicles hang from poplar trees; people slip along streets like nervous amateur skaters. Two cars have been abandoned at the bottom of the bridge. Aunt Julia and I watch as a green Mustang fights valiantly for purchase, sliding back and starting forward, again and again, like the little engine that could. After some practice, we are able to walk with confidence past the granite Confederate soldier standing guard in front of the courthouse. Enough excitement. We warm our hands on the dashboard vents and creep slowly toward home.

  It was God’s will, my father says when I call him that night to tell him about the canceled flight and our afternoon adventure.

  * * *

  —

  Aunt Julia had believed she could move back to Hazlehurst and keep her life in California, too. But maintaining my grandmother’s house and health while keeping up her San Jose condo proved impossible. The decision to narrow her life into this small place was hard, but easy, too. The pastor at my grandmother’s church told Julia she was needed at home in Hazlehurst. That was all she needed to hear. She maintains her friendships in California via letters and the telephone, which rings as often as it did during the long-ago summer I spent with my grandmother.

  Around the same time that Aunt Julia lost her mother, she lost her longtime love, Walter, who lived in Jamaica. He died of a sudden heart attack.

  My grandmother was always skeptical of romantic love. In her experience, men were work; marriage was duty. Two more children, both girls, were produced by the union of Dotsie and Jeff after Aunt Julia was born. The couple lived unhappily together on and off between my grandfather’s military tours, until he passed away at the age of sixty-one.

  Once, Aunt Julia showed her mother a postcard she had received from Walter on which he described how much he missed her and how often he thought of her. My grandmother studied it and then handed it back to her daughter. “I guess I never really loved anyone,” she said.

  Aunt Julia loved my grandmother, even though and because she was difficult. She loved my grandfather, his hard nature notwithstanding. She loves the house that was built in spite and because of the mutual stubbornness of her parents. She loves the plants that surround her beautiful Jefferson face, and that flourish in the oxygen they all share, the fuel that turns the engine of her stories.

  * * *

  —

  That night as I lie in bed, a song comes billowing out of the darkness, “Nightshift” by the Commodores:

  You found another home

  I know you’re not alone

  The singer’s voice is vivid and tender. His pace is even and sure. I imagine a kind man, a black man, sitting on his porch on this winter night, compelled to sing this song of promise, of welcome. I close my eyes and let the song hold me, blend me into the night and this place, and fe
el the boundaries between here and there disappear, the song rubbing away the distance between then and now, like water eroding stone.

  * * *

  —

  “Are you ever coming back?” a student jokes in an email the following morning, after I write to inform my class that my flight has been delayed yet again.

  The second delay turns out to be brief, just a few hours, long enough for Aunt Julia and I to linger over coffee while we watch newscasters interview city residents about how they fared in the storm. In between the news segments, we talk. We continue to talk as I pack my rental car. My suitcase, relieved of its gifts, is much lighter on this side of the journey. When I get into the car, Aunt Julia puts out her hand to take the lone fast-food wrapper that I missed. She stands by the driver’s window as I try to convince her to visit us in Vermont. I wish it were possible to collapse the space between us; Mississippi and Vermont feel like opposite ends of the world.

  “Don’t get lost,” Aunt Julia teases as I start the engine. She stands at the gate as I pull away slowly and wave. It’s time to face the road ahead, and make my way to points north.

  People Like Me

  “Home is longevity,” Ellie says when I ask what the word means to her. Ellie and I grew up together in Nashville. During our high school years, we slipped each other notes every day in class and spent hours every night on the phone. On weekends, we practiced dance moves side by side in front of mirrors in the rec room of my house. Never, during those years, could I have conceived of a life in which she would not be a constant presence.

  Ellie teaches high school in St. Louis, where she has lived for most of her adult life. I have lived in Vermont for seventeen years, since John and I arrived to assume faculty positions at the university. Seventeen years and I still do not call Vermont home. Maybe I never will.

  It is impossible not to like Vermont in the same way that it is impossible to dislike nature itself. This state contains some of the most breathtaking vistas in this country. Yet when I sit by Lake Champlain, or next to one of the many pristine natural springs, I see myself superimposed upon the landscape, raised and slightly askew, like a sticker in an activity book my daughters enjoyed when they were younger.

  It is impossible, also, not to be tempted to idealize Vermont as a state with social justice woven into the fabric of its history and culture. I called my parents to gloat when Vermont came in first on the night of both elections that made Barack Obama president. I bragged when Bernie Sanders, then a congressman, called a meeting for people of color at a church in downtown Burlington purely to find out how we were faring. As of this writing, Vermont is one of the few states in which no black man has been killed during a traffic stop. I cherish these details and list them for people who ask me what it is like to live black in such a white place. But Vermont, like any place, is complicated. Perhaps the reason why no black men have been killed by police during traffic stops is because there are few black men here in the first place.

  Can I make a home here? Every day for the last seventeen years, the question has tagged along with me. My daughters’ bus driver and I trade book recommendations in the morning as the girls clomp up the stairs to their seats: Stay. In the parking lot of the grocery store, a white man with a slick bald head looks at me, at my license plate, and then shakes his head in disgust: Leave. A thrilling early winter snowfall: Stay. A long, bitter spring of stomping through the slushy, dingy remains of that same snowfall and its successors: Leave. The tallying is continuous and exhausting. It is less a thought than a sensation. I hear it like the ticking of an old-fashioned scoreboard. Stay. Leave. Tick. Tick.

  One April afternoon, I stomp through the snow and slush on a walk from campus to the public library downtown. “Ethiopian Boogie Benefit,” a poster on a bulletin board announces. The event will take place in June in Lincoln, Vermont. The poster, decorated in red, yellow, and green, stands out among its neighbors: plain paper advertisements for yoga classes, book groups, and missing pets. But even more inviting than the colors are the images of people: brown men, women, and children, Ethiopians presumably, save a lone white man in sunglasses and a baseball cap playing a guitar. The top of the poster features two Ethiopians in flight: one grasps his shins in an acrobatic tumble, the other walks upside down in the sky.

  The event is a fund-raiser for a nonprofit organization, Action for Youth and Community Change. This will not be a sober exchange of ideas, the poster promises. Instead it will be a celebration of “the Vermont/Ethiopia connection.” Not only will there be, possibly, flying Africans, there will be Ethiopian food and music to accompany them. Most precious of all to me is the promise of an evening in an interracial setting with people happy to spend a night that way—people like me.

  What fortune, I think, and write down the information. The scoreboard ticks: Stay.

  * * *

  —

  “What brought you here?” I ask a young white woman I meet at my parents’ church in North Nashville, where I spent every Sunday morning until I went to college, and whose congregation has always been composed mainly of students and faculty of Fisk University and Meharry Medical College, and therefore has been almost entirely black since its inception in 1955. The woman is new to the city, a recent transplant from Massachusetts.

  “I am finding it difficult to lead an interracial life here,” she says, meaning Nashville.

  “So you came here for a dose of blackness,” I joke. I am immediately sorry when I see my words have embarrassed her.

  “I understand,” I explain. “So did I.”

  I was never able to live an integrated life in Nashville, either. My family lived two lives: a free life in the black world of North Nashville and a guarded one in the white world of South Nashville. It is one of the many pleasing ironies of my life in Vermont that here, in the second “whitest” state in the union (after Maine), for many years I lived in a neighborhood that was more integrated than the one in which I grew up.

  “In the South, white people want you close but not high. In the North, you can get as high as you want but they don’t want you close.” I grew up hearing this maxim repeated by friends and colleagues of my parents throughout my childhood. The choice was easy for me. For as long as I can remember, I knew I would forsake close for high.

  This formula has not been borne out in an absolute way in my experience, at least in terms of my life in the North. But the part about the South is uniformly true. While the South, like all of America, is still largely segregated, the lives of black and white southerners have always been intertwined, even though our relations have been more often treacherous than not.

  On a late afternoon in the spring of 1985, I sat in a coffee shop adjacent to my high school. I was talking with Justin, a classmate, about our college plans. It was May and graduation was approaching. After working our summer jobs, we would both head off to schools far away from home.

  Maybe the proprietor overheard us. Or maybe he was drawn to the unusual sight of a white boy and a black girl sitting together in his shop, sharing doughnuts and laughing. For whatever reason, he came over to our table.

  “How y’all doing?” he asked. He noted how much fun we appeared to be having. We told him that we would soon be leaving for college.

  “California,” Justin responded when the proprietor asked where he was going. He received an approving nod. I faltered when the man asked me the same question. I wasn’t surprised when he said, “Now, why would you go all the way up there?” Justin laughed. I laughed, too, even though I felt a tremor of hostility underneath his question.

  “Don’t we treat you good down here?” He balanced his fists on his hips.

  “Oh, yes! I love the South,” I said, still laughing. “This will always be my home.”

  I went on about what I would miss, how cold the North was, how hard had been the decision to leave home. All the while I was conscious of
his fists, and the way he leaned his torso toward me. His brows furrowed as he listened, but he wasn’t really listening. Rather he was straining to hear a truth beneath my words, his eyes behind his glasses beaming like interrogation lamps. I kept my body rigid and waited for him to walk away. It was time to go.

  But the man was right. I was hiding something from him: myself. “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” wrote African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1890. Justin and I said good-bye in the parking lot. As I steered my parents’ car toward home, I thought, This is what I’m leaving behind.

  That summer I put thick black marks through the calendar days that separated me from the day when I would finally begin my life up north. But I could not leave the South behind. I still can’t. James Baldwin said, “You never leave home. You take your home with you. You better. Otherwise, you’re homeless.” However uneasy is the history of relations between blacks and whites in the South, it has made me, and it claims me still, just as it claimed the proprietor of the coffee shop; we were ensnared in the same historical drama. I was forged—mind and body—in the unending conversation between southern blacks and whites. I don’t hate the South. To despise it would be to despise myself.

  * * *

  —

  The North was a dream that I borrowed from other people. In high school, I was allowed to take for credit a course on African American literature at Fisk University. I read slave narratives whose protagonists longed for northern states not only to escape slavery but for affirmation of their humanity. I was introduced to the African American literary culture of New England, as well as the Harlem Renaissance, many of whose greatest talents, like W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and James Weldon Johnson, studied or taught at Fisk at some point during their careers. I read the works of Du Bois and Johnson and their searing indictments of the hypocrisies of northern liberalism. I was undeterred. If I wouldn’t be thoroughly content in the North, I figured, at least I would be freer than I felt in Nashville.