Black Is the Body Read online

  I don’t know how long I watched others rush past me before I walked back toward the coffee shop. I don’t remember how long I stood there, trying to understand, before everything in me rejected what I saw, and I charged back into the shop to retrieve my watch, my keys and glasses, so that I could drive home. Why did I do this? It doesn’t make any sense. But however I try to explain it—my stubborn West Indian heritage, a Freudian state of denial—the same thing happened next.

  I found myself face-to-face with the odd man, and he had a knife in his hand. At this point the knife would have had a substantial amount of blood on it. I don’t remember the blood. I do remember asking him not to kill me. I meant it, of course, but at the same time it just seemed like the thing to say. I felt I was playing a role; I felt that the die was cast. I had turned and met my fate. But I was watching as much as I was experiencing. My witnessing was involuntary. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the anonymous narrator recalls being “fixed to the spot” while he watches a white mob lynch a black man. Like the narrator, I was fixed to the spot.

  Why? I did not move because I did not want to excite this man. I did not move because I had to see what was going to happen next. I did not move because I was afraid. I did not move because I was free from fear, as many report feeling in the moments before death. I did not move because I knew that he would hurt me if I did. I did not move because I knew he would not kill me. I did not move because I didn’t believe he had the knife I saw in front of me. I did not move because I did not know what to do. Maybe all of the above, maybe none, maybe some combination—I will never know for sure.

  I saw the knife before it entered me. What was the sensation upon impact? I don’t remember. But I do remember that when he pulled it out of my gut, I fell to the ground. What did it feel like? Strange. Weird. Unusual. Lying on the ground, I beseeched God for help. When I neither felt nor heard a thundering reply, I started to laugh. I knew that I needed a hospital, not God. But I call this a “God moment” anyway, because when I laughed, my wound gaped open, and I looked down and saw and then felt the thick, warm blood rush over my fingers. It is time to get to a hospital, God was saying. I got up, and ran again.

  I was more afraid of being in the dark without my eyeglasses than I was of running into the man with the knife again. I have been wearing glasses since I was eight years old. The last time I had gone without my glasses in public, I was not allowed to walk down a street without holding the hand of an adult. I had never been on a city street alone without my glasses. I was on the eve of my twenty-seventh birthday when I was stabbed. The last time I had been out in public without my glasses I was not permitted to be awake at 10:24, which is the time it has become at this point in the story.

  A figure ran toward me, a man. I was afraid; I stopped. He must have seen my fear, this man, because he waved his hands in the air and shouted, “I’m a good Samaritan! A good Samaritan!” I trusted his words, his biblical reference, and let him lead me to some steps across the street.

  From Officer Pitoniak’s incident report, composed at 22:24 on August 7, 1994:

  This investigating officer did find one white male subject and one Black female subject on the stairs of an apartment complex located across the street from 24 Whitney Avenue. Both subjects had stab wounds to the stomach areas and Bleeding Profusely. Due to the extent of injuries and calling for medical assistance this officer was not able to obtain any identification of victims.

  What’s your name? What’s your Social Security number? I fired these questions at the white male subject shortly before Officer Pitoniak arrived. The young white man, whom I had never seen before, was sitting on the steps a few feet away from me. He was going into shock, and I was trying to keep him from doing so. I kept up my round of questioning, and he mumbled some answers. “I’m going out, I’m going out,” he said, and fainted. It was only then that I really looked at him. He’s white as a sheet, I thought. Literally, white as a sheet. This is what it looks like, I thought. The young man had pale skin, light-blond hair, and wore a white oxford shirt. The contrast between the blood and his skin, hair, and shirt must have been dramatic, but I don’t remember the blood. I watched him. The more he faded away, the less able I was to ignore what was happening just under my hand. An EMT came close to me and asked about the young man, and I answered him. I talked and talked, told my story, posed as a witness, even as I was seeing sparks and hearing static and the EMT’s badge started to blur. Trained to recognize the signs of shock, the EMT cradled my head and took my hand away from my side. His gloved hand, like my bare hand, became wet with my blood. He said something to his partner, who was tending to the white male subject. Suddenly, there was a commotion around me. He laid me down carefully on the steps. He held my bloody hand as his team moved me onto the gurney. At some point, our eyes met and we laughed. The more I laughed, the more I came to. The more I laughed, the more my wound gaped open, which made us laugh even harder. It was all so absurd.

  The same EMT came to visit me in the hospital before I went into surgery. He seemed somber and shaken. Watching him look at me, I realized that my situation was dire. I tried to mirror his grave expression and warned myself that getting stabbed was serious business, but I wanted to laugh with him again. The incident still seemed mostly ridiculous.

  Emily Bernard, 26, is listed in serious condition at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Her birthday is Thursday.

  —from “The Victims,” New Haven Register, Tuesday, August 9, 1994

  On my birthday, a white couple—a man and a woman, middle-aged—brought chocolates to my hospital room. “It just seemed so sad that you had to spend your birthday in the hospital,” said the woman while her husband looked on sympathetically. I was moved to tears, which was surely a consequence of the morphine as much as the purity of their kindness. The morphine was there to shield me from pain, a consequence of healing, my body reassembling itself. A word about the pain: it didn’t hurt, the knife. That and the fact that no one died are the two things I always make sure to say in my version of this story.

  I did experience terrible pain on the night of August 7. The person responsible for it was the surgeon on call. I lay on a gurney, feeling helpless and afraid. The surgeon walked over and without saying a word to me, or even looking in my direction, plunged his fingers into my gaping wound. I gasped and instinctively grabbed his hand. It was only then that the man looked at me, and said icily, “Don’t. Touch. My. Hand.” His eyes were Aryan-blue and as cold as his voice. I asked questions about what was happening and he refused to respond. Only the attending nurses treated me with any kindness or respect. Whenever I tell the story of the night I got stabbed, I always say that the person who did the most injury to me, who left the deepest wounds, was not Daniel Silva, but the surgeon.

  If my story is about pain, it’s also about rage. Rage is a physical condition, I’ve learned from this experience. I feel it now, when I recount the story of the doctor and recall his face, voice, and hands.

  Sometimes, rage surfaces without warning when I am out in the world. A few months ago, I was walking in downtown New Haven when a young man—presumably a Yale student—suddenly broke into a run. This happens all the time. People run because they’re in a hurry to get somewhere; they run to cross the street before the light changes; they run to greet someone they are happy to see, which was the case on this day.

  This happens every day. But every time it happens to me, alarms go off in my body. Blood rushes to my ears, adrenaline spills through my bloodstream like lighter fluid. My heart pounds, my pulse races, my temple throbs. Fight or flight—I’m ready to fight; the machine inside switches into gear. It doesn’t make any sense: I’m watching a young brown-skinned man in an argyle sweater and chunky glasses hug a young white woman in a flouncy white skirt. Such a sight would normally fill me with happiness, but my body is nearly bursting with rage. He hugs her tightly and lifts her off the ground. She
wiggles her feet, and they laugh. I smile and come down.

  But it takes a while for the machine to grind down completely and my body to feel normal again. This reaction on the part of my body always throws me. More than my scar, it reminds me of how much of this story I carry inside of me.

  “You never get angry about it,” a therapist once said to me during a conversation about the stabbing. I explained to her, as I have explained to many people over the years, that I did not look into the eyes of someone who was really there, that—and I know this sounds odd—it wasn’t personal. He didn’t know me. She cocked her head; she wanted something raw. I wanted to cover up. I remembered a conversation I had with a fellow graduate student at a party a few months after I was released from the hospital.

  “Emily, he didn’t hurt your…lady parts?” she whispered excitedly.

  “No.” I laughed and pulled my jacket together. At the time I was writing an essay about Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I understood then what Janie, the main character, meant when she likened her husband’s insults to her body to “talkin’ under people’s clothes.”

  It was odd, knowing that an acquaintance, a polite, genteel young black woman, had considered my lady parts. But insofar as any story I have ever heard belongs, in some way, to me, my story belongs to her to recount as she pleases. I cannot dictate how she will use this story any more than I could control the knife that let flow this story in the first place.

  * * *

  —

  John, my husband, knew the story of the stabbing before he knew me, having read an essay about the incident by Bruce Shapiro, who was also stabbed that night. “One Violent Crime” was first published in The Nation and then reprinted in Best American Essays. I don’t know when this came up in the course of our dating, but I remember feeling both a little weirded out and also reassured: weirded out, because it is always peculiar to have people know something intimate about you before they know you; reassured, because it’s one less thing about yourself, about your past, that you have to explain.

  Even though John was already acquainted with this chapter of my history by the time we met, he has had to sit through numerous renditions I have told over the years. Once, not long after we decided to marry, we were in New York. I had just given a talk to promote my first book. After the talk, we met up with Susan and Brian, who worked at my publishing house, in the bar of the hotel where John and I were staying.

  I had recently experienced another bout of recurring abdominal pain occasioned by adhesions, but at the time, I didn’t know what adhesions were. Adhesions are, in essence, a complex dance between one’s scar tissue and intestines. Since the stabbing, adhesions have sent me back to the hospital twice. The first time, the dance had been gaining in intensity for years without my knowing it. The dancing stopped but the dancers were still intertwined; I could no longer process food. Yet I was vomiting, stream upon stream of thick yellow bile. And the pain—it was like being ripped in two, tissue by tissue; I was being ripped in two, no similes necessary. Then, as mysteriously as these episodes began, they simply ended.

  Brian knew about the pain I had been experiencing. That night at the bar, he asked me how I was feeling. I said I suspected the abdominal pain had something to do with the stabbing, although no doctor had yet confirmed that, and Susan said, I didn’t know you were stabbed, and I said, Oh, you didn’t know? And Brian said, You’ve never told me the whole story. So off I went. I told the story in all of its glory, lingering on the gruesome details. At some point, John got up abruptly and walked away from the table. Brian looked concerned, but I was sure that John was only going to the bathroom. I turned back to the table and to my story, but Brian kept his eye on John, who suddenly fell backward on the floor of the bar, flat as a domino.

  It was remarkable—John falling backward like a tree having met an ax. His head went thunk as it hit the marble floor. The lights in the bar came up so swiftly that it was as if God himself had flipped the switch. Brian was suddenly at his side, cradling his head, pelting him with questions like “What’s your name?” “What’s your Social Security number?” “Who’s the president?” Brian and I must have watched the same television crime dramas. John lay on his back on the floor in his suit jacket. His eyes were dazed, straining to register Brian’s face and the words coming out of his mouth. It was all that talk of blood, he would tell me later, the blood that I don’t remember, the blood that was, according to police reports, all over the walls. Brian said it was the most romantic thing he’d ever witnessed, but I think the fainting had to do with being a man—women, after all, become well acquainted with blood over the course of their lives. At any rate, the story of my stabbing belongs to John, too.

  My daughters, Giulia and Isabella, are not products of my body, but they have been careful observers of and frequent travelers across the terrain of their mother’s skin for many years. Since they began to talk, they have had questions. Their questions about my scar lead, inevitably, to a knife. What happened, Mommy? A man hurt me, he was sick. Why, Mommy? He was really sick. Like he had a stomachache, Mommy? Yes, a really bad stomachache, but it was in his mind, and he didn’t have any medicine. The girls fall silent, worry tight across their foreheads. It will never happen to you, I say, and it will never happen to me again.

  Being a parent brings up the question again of what to call this story. Over the years: The incident. The stabbing. My stabbing. The accident (what my parents called it). What does Isabella call it? Your face, Mommy. Your face.

  The girls were two and a half years old when I returned to the hospital in the fall of 2008; it was my second bout of adhesions. It was late at night when John and I finally accepted the fact that I would have to go back to the hospital. We asked a friend to stay with the girls while John took me to the emergency room. I can’t know what it was like for my daughters to wake up in the morning and find me gone. Gone I remained for seven days. What sense could this make to a two-year-old? Once I was stable, John brought them to see me in the hospital. What did I look like? Hair wild; eyes glassy from morphine; an IV in my arm; an NG tube in my nose. A nasogastric tube goes through the nose, down the throat, and into the stomach. It is as unpleasant as it sounds and it has saved my life three times now. It was there to decompress my bowel, which was in distress, and it was held in place by several rudimentary pieces of masking tape. It hurt and it looked terrible.

  I could tell how bad it looked from Isabella’s expression. Giulia, who never takes anything very seriously, who has a “well, that’s life” way of approaching the world, hopped right up onto my hospital bed and began fooling around with the call button. Isabella, however, clung to her father, her impossibly big brown eyes even impossibly bigger. She stared at the wild-haired creature and said nothing, shook her head when I held my arms out. She was “fixed to the spot.” Even now, when she remembers the hospital, remembers what it was like for her to see me there, what her adolescent mind seizes upon, what she may continue to seize upon for the rest of her life, regardless of her own wishes or mine, what she remembers is captured in a single phrase that she first uttered in her car seat a couple of weeks after I returned home: “Your face, Mommy. Your face.”

  * * *

  —

  In 1994, I was stabbed in the gut by a stranger in a coffee shop. I have proof: a scar (puffy and wormlike, over the points of entry and exit); another scar, similar in texture but much longer, that covers the work of two surgeons (so far); it covers the points of entry and exit of their own knives. A midline incision, it’s called, and it begins just under my breastbone and ends at my pubic bone, stem to stern, fore to aft. Reminders. Every morning and night. Evidence. I have police and hospital records; newspaper articles; my memories and the memories of others close to me. This happened to me.

  I’ve been telling this story since the night of August 7, 1994. That night, I told this story to doctors, nurses, police officers, fami
ly, and friends. Since then, I have related it to gynecologists, dentists, ophthalmologists, general practitioners, a dermatologist, even a podiatrist, and of course, emergency room physicians—all of these men and women in white coats, and their assistants, too. “Have you ever been hospitalized?” reads every single form in every single doctor’s waiting room. It’s either “yes” or “no.” There’s no box for “I’d rather not get into it today, thank you very much.” So, I tell what happened: in 1994, I was stabbed in the gut by a stranger in a coffee shop. I raise my shirt and reveal my wound. I reassure my listener: it didn’t hurt; no one died.

  “The fact that she’s already telling the story, that’s a sign of healing,” I heard the doctor tell my mother as I drifted in and out of my morphine haze a few days after I was stabbed. The story that has saved me, though, isn’t true. In the story I tell, there isn’t much blood; the police reports say otherwise. In my story, I wasn’t badly hurt; newspaper accounts and hospital records have me in serious condition. In my story, there is no anger; my body begs to differ. Memory lies. To this day, when I speak of the knife, my mind conjures up a small thin blade, flat and tidy. It is a quick, involuntary association, like Daniel Silva and Gallagher. By chance, several years ago, I saw a hunting knife in a glass cabinet. I got close to the six-inch blade and shook my head, backing away. No. That has nothing to do with me.

  But, surely, the knife, as well as this story, has everything to do with Daniel Silva, to whom this story also belongs.

  Ten years ago, I received an email that included a link to an article from Renee, a friend in New Haven. “Is this you, Emily?” read the subject field. I opened the link:

  Daniel Silva, who burned down his house, then stabbed seven people with a knife at a New Haven coffee shop, pleaded guilty to second-degree arson Tuesday and received a suspended 10-year sentence that will allow him to eventually be placed in a halfway house.