Black Is the Body Read online

  I visited my older brother in New York once during my high school years. He had an internship in the city for the summer and assured me that I was more than capable of finding my way to his office from the airport. I wrote out the route in painstaking detail: shuttle to subway to his office building. I was proud of myself when I found the correct subway stop. I lost my footing as soon as I entered the subway car.

  It wasn’t the number of people that disconcerted me. It was the sight of so many people standing close together—some touching, some standing face-to-face—and not talking. I felt as if I had stepped into a science fiction movie. In the South, at least when I was growing up, if someone passed you on a street and said nothing, it meant something.

  Stranger still was the fact that even though they were not talking to or looking at each other, the subway riders were obviously aware of each other. On another subway ride that summer, I saw a woman step out of a subway car and then turn and shout that she had left her bag on the seat. One man held the door open while another man grabbed the bag and gave it to the first man, who handed it to the woman. Thank you. No problem. So they are human, after all, I thought, and felt tremendous relief. But that was it. After their acts of human kindness, the men on the subway retreated into science fiction silence.

  Now I am one of the subway zombies. I’ve even mastered the tight choreography required to navigate a New York institution like Grand Central Station. The trick is not to look directly at the always-dizzying number of bodies zooming toward you. It can be disorienting, like looking too closely at the windshield when you’re driving in the middle of a Vermont snowstorm. Today when I am in a subway car in New York, I grip the cold metal pole and look up and around and pretend I am alone in the world.

  The slower pace of New England reminds me of the rhythm of the Deep South of my mother’s childhood, a place with which I identify because it is, like New England, a place I know mainly through stories. I read The Scarlet Letter and the poetry of Emily Dickinson on family trips down to Mississippi, where I spent hours in the homes of relatives and eavesdropped as the women in my clan spun tales about the world.

  John grew up in Lenox, Massachusetts. The neighboring town of Great Barrington was the childhood home of W. E. B. Du Bois and the site of the country home of James Weldon Johnson. I do not believe it is a coincidence that I fell in love with a man from the same geographical region as the settings in the books I read as a child. I recognized the topography of Lenox on the first day that John took me home to meet his family. We passed the hill where a young woman on a sleigh crashed into a lamppost and died a death that inspired Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome.

  “I remember,” I said. I had read the book in high school. The hill was much less impressive than the one in Ethan Frome. But I knew it. I knew the hill as it had imprinted itself in my brain and body, into the marrow of my imagination. It has always been impossible to separate the romance between me and John from the romance between me and the geography that produced him.

  I felt at home in Lenox that day, and for over thirty years have called New England my home—where cemeteries sprout like fields of wildflowers and there is, always, a Main Street. I feel a singular affinity for the place, particularly whenever I am somewhere else and asked where I am from. My favorite high school English teacher complained that people use the word “love” too loosely. The same word, she said, could not possibly capture, for instance, one’s feelings about one’s mother and, say, ice cream. I use the word “home” just as promiscuously. I have used the word “home” to refer to hotel rooms, houses, apartments, and, on two occasions, a tent that wasn’t even ours, but borrowed from my friend Estelle. There has always been a place to call home in every country, city, and town I have ever lived in or visited. But the places in which I have most felt at home for much of my life have always been somewhere else.

  Unlike me, my daughters are at home in Vermont. “They are true Vermonters,” I say of them so often that they have now begun to say it about themselves. I see it in their relationship to the natural world. By this I mean that they seem to believe that it is a good idea to wear shorts and T-shirts in sixty-degree weather. I sneak fleeces into their backpacks and enjoy the irony: my daughters were born near the Danakil Depression, yet here they are in South Burlington, undaunted by even the harshest winters. It took me many years of successive snowfalls to understand that I should come to expect snow in winter and not treat it as if it were a freak occurrence, as it is still treated in many parts of the South.

  For my daughters, the experience of being black in a white place is not strange. To the contrary, it is an everyday fact of their lives. But there will most likely come a time when that everyday fact will mean more to them than it does now. For this reason, like other parents of brown children that we know, John and I take advantage of every opportunity to show our daughters that they are not alone. Dark skin stands out in a white place. Hypervisibility has its drawbacks. Kiran, a young poet whose parents emigrated to Vermont from Pakistan, tells me that with wearing a hijab comes a burden of representation. “I always hold the door open,” she says, “because I might be the only Muslim that person has ever seen.” At the same time, the hijab makes it easy to identify and be identified by other Muslims with the same beliefs. To be visible is to be vulnerable to a particular kind of judgment, but it also makes it easy to identify one’s kin.

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  In his 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin recalls his experience of living in a small Swiss village whose residents had never before encountered a black person, a situation he had not anticipated. “It did not occur to me—possibly because I am an American—that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro,” he wrote. His first visit lasted two weeks; he assumed it would be his last. Yet he returned the following winter, and the winter after that. “But I remain as much a stranger today,” he wrote during that second winter, “as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.” His body fascinated the residents. His smile, hair, and the color of his skin astonished them. “In all of this,” he continued, “in which it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.”

  In my first year of teaching at the University of Vermont, I had a young white female student in a class who had never spoken to a black person before she came to college. She saw a black man once at a bus station, she said, and wanted to start a conversation, but couldn’t think of a good cover for her curiosity. At college, she quickly became part of a black community of friends. In fact, she was persuaded to tell me this story by two of her black girlfriends, who flanked her in class and teased her good-naturedly, clearly enjoying the story—so foreign to them—about what it meant to be white in a white place.

  For many students, the experience of being a member of a minority group here is not easy. My friend Estelle works directly with minority students. She suggests that they view their college experience in Vermont as a four-year study abroad program. That particular option expired for me many years ago.

  Estelle and her husband have lived in Vermont for over thirty years. When they arrived, there were only a few hundred black people in Vermont. They raised three children here, including two sons who have had damaging encounters with local police. A story of one of those encounters made the front page of the local paper. It has taken every day of those thirty years for Estelle and her husband to arrive at a point in life where they could call Vermont home.

  African Americans who have lived in Vermont for decades have big stories to tell. Curtiss Reid Jr., a native of St. Louis, moved to Vermont in 1979. At the time, there were only four black men in the entire county. During the first six months of his life here, nearly every police officer he encountered wou
ld stop and interrogate him. It stopped when, eventually, he became known as “the black guy on the bicycle.” When I ask him what the term “home” means to him, he says that home is a place where he is recognized.

  Curtiss was six years old when he discovered the night sky. His mother had sent him to a camp in Eureka, Missouri. The view of the sky, unobstructed by city smog, changed him. He knew he would have a life in which the natural world would be at its center. He was once married to a black woman from Alabama who never felt at home here. When she accused him of loving Vermont more than he loved her, he did not deny it.

  Curtiss shakes his head in amusement when I tell him about the scoreboard in my head. Like my daughters, he is a true Vermonter, and has dedicated his life to the place. He founded the African American Heritage Trail and serves as executive director at Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity. His footing in the world of Vermont is sure; he has no doubt that this place is home.

  I wish I were like Curtiss. I wish I felt his assurance, and that the glory of nature and the night sky were enough for me. I wonder often if my inability to feel at home here is a consequence of a general uneasiness that colors my experience of being in the world. I wish, too, that it didn’t unnerve me every time someone questions my choice to live here.

  “How do you do it?” asked a Brooklyn native recently after comparing the racial virtues of New York to the generally monochrome world of Vermont. She asked the question in the smug way of New Yorkers who believe that the cultural kaleidoscope of their world somehow confers upon them a special kind of moral rectitude. I felt a rush of bewildering emotions: distress, envy, and indignation. I started to defend the place to which I have yet to feel allegiance. I wanted to show her a picture of the life I have built here, a good one, with close friends, neighbors, students, and colleagues, a job I enjoy, a house I love, and brown children who are relatively safe. Such a picture would not satisfy her, I knew: she would see only the whiteness of its border. And no picture can capture the ineffable essence of a life.

  There were other pictures that I did not want her to see. For instance, the image of me preparing to leave the house I love, the care I take to make my body presentable, the primping, combing, and the application of lotions and pomades; the daily rituals I perform to conceal and reveal; to curate the despised blackness of my body and cultivate a respectable racial self that is always, like it or not, engaged in the act of representation. Even a short trip to the grocery store is an event that demands this self-surveillance. Yet it’s never enough; no amount of grooming can protect me, can assuage the continuous feeling of vulnerability. The only thing that makes it bearable is the discovery that others perform these rituals.

  “You do that too!?” A friend and I lean back in our chairs and laugh. Our laughter is honest and free. As we confess our stories to each other, my heart fills with relief to discover that the anxiety that had made me feel ashamed and damaged is not unique. I am also aware of the irony: without our mutual sense of alienation we would perhaps not have this communion to enjoy.

  How do I do it? Day by day, story by story, contradiction by contradiction, brick by fucking brick.

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  I couldn’t do it without role models, black people who found a way to make a home out of this white place. Dr. H. Lawrence McCrorey moved with his family to Vermont in 1966 from Chicago, where he had been a professor at the University of Illinois. A job offer at the University of Vermont was promising, but so was the opportunity to keep his wife and children safe from the race riots spreading like fire through the city.

  Larry was revered in our community. He was a doctor, professor, and an administrator of the highest rank. He was also an accomplished jazz musician, a saxophonist, and a poet, a writer of sonnets and limericks. When I met him, he was seventy-five and one of the most handsome and magnetic men I had ever met. He died in 2009.

  John and I met Larry and his family at a dinner party at Larry’s home in the spring of our first year in Vermont. We ate and drank heartily that night. After dinner, Larry treated us to a bawdy new limerick he had written. A few of us walked to the lake, which was about a hundred yards from Larry’s house. It had been a tumultuous year for me. John and I had married that summer shortly before we moved to Vermont. My mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I had survived a bout of adhesions in my bowel that took a surgeon eight hours to untangle. I felt rattled in a global way, and I wasn’t confident about any of the decisions I had made. But as John and I drove home that night, still warmed by the good cheer around Larry’s table, I watched the night sparkle on the lake outside my window and thought, for the first time since I arrived, I can do this. I can make a life here.

  I wanted my students to learn from Larry, so I asked him to visit my classes almost every year. He might have objected to what I was requesting of him, which was, on some level, simply to come and be a black man for my white students, some of whom had never been in a room with a black man, much less a man like Larry. But Larry did not object. He was used to it. When he arrived in Vermont, he was one of only two black faculty members at the College of Medicine, but his responsibilities extended well beyond the classroom. The university president depended upon him to mediate whenever a race-related problem arose on campus. He was asked to make speeches across the state about the racism in Vermont that lay beneath the state’s facade of social justice. He was an activist by nature, but also by necessity.

  For my students, he told many well-rehearsed stories. Stories about his life, including the racism he had experienced in Vermont. He described his work to end Kake Walk, a particularly odious fraternity tradition at the university, where white students dressed up in blackface and competed “fo’ de cake.” Larry told them that defeating racism was a continuous struggle but that we must always confront racism, which was ingrained in this country’s fiber, and which had been learned but which could be unlearned, just as he had learned to untangle his own biases.

  My students were awed by the handsome man with his thundering, sonorous voice and polished stories that did not coddle. One student, however, was visibly uncomfortable during Larry’s stories about racism in Vermont.

  “If it’s so bad here, why don’t you leave?” Her question was defensive, but I like to think she meant to ask its gentler cousin: “What makes you stay?”

  “Because I love it here,” Larry said evenly; he had heard this question before. “This is my home.” The student was silent.

  I learned exactly what my students learned that day, which is that being at home does not necessarily mean being at peace.

  Larry’s visibility came with a cost. He received hate mail, some of which contained death threats. Over the years of dinners and visits to his home, he showed me one of the letters. I glanced at it quickly. The childish scribble itself was unnerving. His daughter Leslie told me that she found all of the letters neatly organized in a file in his office after her father died.

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  What does it take to make a home? I call Leslie and ask her not long after I ask the same question of my childhood friend Ellie. Home is family, she says. Vermont itself may not feel like home to her, but like many people I know, Leslie appreciates the fact that life here can be lived on a human scale. Incidents of racism that might be dismissed in cities with a higher percentage of African Americans are treated seriously here. When two young women of color in Burlington received flyers advertising the Ku Klux Klan, the incident inspired a downtown rally. Vermonters take pride in the accessibility of public officials. When I invite the Burlington police chief to visit my classrooms, he comes. He talks to my students about the importance of diversity on the police force. I am proud to show him off to my students, but sometimes I wish he were the kind of swaggering redneck I see on YouTube clips, an authentic, power-hungry brute for my students to enlighten and bring to heel. Our police chie
f may be an aberration compared to others in his profession, but his ethics are perfectly in line with the city he represents.

  I like telling my New York friends about our police chief. I talk him up the same way others wax on about the mountains and the snow. But there are aspects of life here that I am inclined to leave out of my story of living black in Vermont, such as the fact that African Americans are consistently overrepresented in the state prison population. In fact, the Vermont incarceration rate of black men is the third highest in the country, proportionally speaking. And while no shootings have yet occurred, African Americans are 85 percent more likely to be stopped by the police than their white counterparts. Like the black body I work so hard to refine for public view, I find myself tempted to shape an image of Vermont that conforms to fantasies I have been nursing about New England since childhood. It is a temptation I find difficult to resist.

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  I can’t stop thinking about Larry’s hate mail. I think about the letters when I am at the grocery store or the post office or the farmer’s market, wondering if the person ahead of me buying milk or stamps or handmade soap authored the hateful, menacing sentences about a man I loved and admired. I picture Larry reading them and calmly filing them away so that he would never be able to pretend that Vermont was not home to racists just as much as it was home to Bernie Sanders, whom he had called a friend, just as he was a friend to the police officers and other public officials whom he alerted about the letters. Because the letters bore no return addresses, the police investigation went nowhere.