Black Is the Body Read online

  My students clapped and laughed.

  “That’s what I said.” My tie-dyed student sighed.

  James looked at me slyly. I narrowed my eyes at him. Thanks a lot.

  SEPTEMBER 2004

  Several months ago, I was waiting to cross Main Street in order to get to my office after class. It was late April, near the end of the semester, and it seemed as if everyone was outside. Parents were visiting, and students were yelling to one another, introducing family members from across the street. Everyone was giddy with the promise of spring, which always comes so late in Vermont, if it comes at all. People smiled at me—wide, grinning smiles. I smiled back. At the same time I tried to steady the thrumming of my heart by breathing deeply and repeating to myself, You are safe. You are safe.

  Traffic was heavy. A car was stopped near me; I heard rough male voices. Out of the corner of my eye, I looked into the car: all white. I looked away, but I could feel the men surveying the small crowd that was carrying me along. As traffic picked up again, one of the men yelled out, “Queers! Fags!” There was laughter. Then the car roared off.

  I was stunned. I stopped walking and let the words wash over me. Queer. Fag. I remembered my role as a teacher, a mentor, in loco parentis, even though there were real parents everywhere. I looked around to check for the wounds caused by those hateful words. I peered down the street: too late for a license plate. All around me, students and parents marched to their destinations. Didn’t you hear that? I wanted to shout.

  All the while I was thinking, Not nigger. Not yet.

  OCTOBER 2004

  Nate jumps in.

  “Don’t you grant a word power by not saying it? Aren’t we in some way amplifying its ugliness by avoiding it?” he asks.

  “I am afraid of how I will be affected by saying it,” Lauren says. “I just don’t want that word in my mouth.”

  Tyler remembers a phrase attributed to the writer Farai Chideya in Randall Kennedy’s essay. He finds it and reads it to us. “She says that the n-word is the ‘trump card, the nuclear bomb of racial epithets.’ ”

  “Do you agree with that?” I ask.

  Eleven heads nod vigorously.

  “Nuclear bombs annihilate. What do you imagine will be destroyed if you guys use the word in here?”

  Shyly, they look at me, all of them, and I understand. Me. It is my annihilation they imagine.

  NOVEMBER 2004

  Some of My Best Friends, my anthology of essays about interracial friendship, came out in August, and the publicity department has arranged for various interviews and other promotional events. When I did an on-air interview on a New York radio show, one of the hosts, Janice, a black woman, told me that the reason she could not marry a white man was because she believed if things ever got heated between them, the white man would call her a nigger.

  I nodded my head. I had heard this reasoning before. But strangely I had all but forgotten it. The fact that I had forgotten to fear “nigger” coming from the mouth of my white husband was more interesting to me than her fear, alive and ever-present.

  * * *

  —

  “Are you biracial?”

  “No.”

  “Are you married to a white man?”

  “Yes.”

  These were among the first words exchanged between Janice and me. I could tell—by the way she looked at me, and didn’t look at me; by the way she kept her body turned away from me; by her tone—that she had made up her mind about me before I entered the room. I could tell that she didn’t like what she had decided about me, and that she had decided I was the wrong kind of black person. Maybe it was what I had written in Some of My Best Friends. Maybe it was the fact that I had decided to edit a collection about interracial friendship at all. When we met, she said, “I don’t trust white people,” as decisively and exactly as if she were handing me her business card. I knew she was telling me that I was foolish to trust them, to marry one. I was relieved to look inside myself and see that I was okay, I was still standing. A few years before, her silent judgment—this silent judgment from any black person—would have crushed me.

  When she said that she could “tell” I was married to a white man, I asked her how. She said, “Because you are so friendly” and did a little dance with her shoulders. I laughed.

  But Janice couldn’t help it; she liked me in spite of herself. As the interview progressed, she let the corners of her mouth turn up in a smile. She admitted that she had a few white friends, even if they sometimes drove her crazy. At a commercial break, she said, “Maybe I ought to try a white man.” She was teasing me, of course. She hadn’t changed her mind about white people, or dating a white man, but she had changed her mind about me. It mattered to me. I took what she was offering. But when the interview was over, I left it behind, along with the microphone and sound effects and “words from our sponsor.”

  * * *

  —

  John thought my story about the interview was hilarious. When I got home, he listened to the tape they gave me at the station. He said he wanted to use the interview in one of his classes.

  A few days later, I told him what Janice said about dating a white man, that she won’t because she is afraid he will call her a nigger. As I told him, I felt an unfamiliar shyness creep up on me.

  “That’s just so far out of…it’s not in my head at all.” He was having difficulty coming up with the words he wanted, I could tell. But that was okay. I knew what he meant. I looked at him sitting in his chair, the chair his mother gave us. I can usually find him in that chair when I come home. He is John, I told myself. And he is white. No more or less John, and no more or less white, than he was before the interview, and Janice’s reminder of the fear that I had forgotten to feel.

  * * *

  —

  I tell my students in African American Autobiography about Janice. “You would not believe the indignities I have suffered in my humble attempts to ‘move this product,’ as they say in publishing,” I say. “I have been surrounded by morons, and now I gratefully return to the land of the intellectually agile.” They laugh.

  I flatter them, in part because I feel guilty that I have missed so many classes in order to do publicity for my book. But I cringe, thinking of how I have called Janice, another black woman, a “moron” in front of these white students. I do not tell my students she is black.

  * * *

  —

  “Here is a story for your students,” John says. We are in the car, on our way to Cambridge for the weekend to visit friends. “The only time I ever heard ‘nigger’ in my home growing up was when my father’s cousin was over for a visit. It was 1988, I remember. Jesse Jackson was running for president. My father’s cousin was sitting in the kitchen, talking to my parents about the election. ‘I’m going to vote for the nigger,’ my father’s cousin said. ‘He’s the only one who cares about the working man.’ ”

  John laughs. He often laughs when he hears something extraordinary, whether it’s good or bad.

  “That’s fascinating,” I say.

  The next time the class meets, I tell my students this story.

  “So what do we care about in this story?” I say. “The fact that John’s father’s cousin used a racial epithet, or the fact that his voting for Jackson conveys a kind of ultimate respect for him? Isn’t his voting for Jackson more important for black progress than how his father’s cousin feels?”

  I don’t remember what the students said. What I remember is that I tried to project for them a sense that I was untroubled by saying “nigger,” by my husband’s saying “nigger,” by his father’s cousin’s having said “nigger,” by his parents’—my in-laws’—tolerance of “nigger” in their home, years ago, before I came along. What I remember is that I leaned on the word “feels” with a near sneer in my voice. It’s an intellectual issue, I said, beamin
g at them, and then I directed it back at myself. It has nothing to do with how it makes me feel.

  * * *

  —

  After my interview with Janice, I look at the white people around me differently, as if from a distance. I do this, from time to time, almost as an exercise. I even do it to my friends, particularly my friends. Which one of them has “nigger” in the back of her throat?

  I go out for drinks with David, my senior colleague. It is our weekly ritual. We go out on Thursdays after class, and we always go to the same place. I know that he will order, in succession, two draft beers, and that he will ask the waitress to help him choose the second. “What do you have on draft that is interesting tonight?” he will say. I order red wine, and I, too, always ask the waitress’s advice. Then we order a selection of cheeses, again soliciting assistance. We have our favorite waitresses. We like the ones who indulge us.

  Tonight David orders a cosmopolitan.

  We never say it, but I suspect we both like the waitresses who appreciate the odd figure we cut. He is white, sixty-something, male. I am black, thirty-something, female. Not such an odd pairing elsewhere, but uncommon in Burlington, insofar as black people are uncommon in Burlington.

  Something you can’t see is that we are both from the South. Different Souths, perhaps, thirty years apart, black and white. I am often surprised by how much I like his company. All the way up here, I sometimes think when I am with him, and I am sitting with the South, the white South that, all of my childhood, I longed to escape. I once had a white boyfriend from New Orleans. “A white southerner, Emily?” my mother asked, and sighed with worry. I understood. We broke up.

  David and I catch up. We talk about the writing we have been doing. We talk each other out of bad feelings we are harboring against this and that person. (Like most southerners, like the South in general, David and I have long memories.) We talk about classes. I describe to him the conversation I have been having with my students about “nigger.” He laughs at my anecdotes.

  I am on my second glass of wine. I try to remember to keep my voice down. It’s a very nice restaurant. People in Burlington do not want to hear “nigger” while they are eating a nice dinner, I think, chastising myself. I am tipsy.

  As we leave, I accidentally knock my leg against a chair. You are drunk, I tell myself. You are drunk and black in a restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. What were you thinking? I feel eyes on me as I walk out of the restaurant, eyes that may have been focused elsewhere, as far as I know, because I do not allow myself to look.

  * * *

  —

  Later that evening, I am alone. I remember that David recently gave me a poem of his to read, a poem about his racist grandmother, now dead, whom he remembers using the word “nigger” often and with relish. I lie in bed and reconstruct the scene of David and me in the restaurant and our conversation about “nigger.” Was his grandmother at the table with us all along?

  The next day, I see David in his office, which is next to mine, on the other side from Todd. I knock on the door. He invites me in. I sit in the chair I always sit in when I come to talk to him. He tells me how much he enjoyed our conversation the night before.

  “Me, too,” I say. “But today it’s as if I’m looking at you from across something. It has to do with race.” I blame a book I am reading, a book for African American Autobiography, The Black Notebooks by Toi Derricotte.

  “Have you read it?” David is a poet, like Derricotte.

  “No, but I know Toi and enjoy her poetry. Everything I know about her work would lead me to believe that I would enjoy that book.” He leans back in his chair, his arms folded behind his head.

  “Well, it’s making me think about things, remember the ways that you and I will always be different,” I say abruptly.

  “I hope not.” He laughs and looks puzzled.

  “It’s probably just temporary.” I don’t ask him my question about his grandmother, whether or not she is always somewhere with him, in him, in the back of his throat.

  * * *

  —

  John is at an African American studies conference in New York. Usually I am thrilled to have the house to myself for a few days. But this time, I mope. I sit at the dining room table, write this essay, and gaze out the window.

  A few hours later, he calls and describes the activity at the conference. He tells me delicious and predictable gossip about people we know and divas we know of. The personalities, the infighting—greedily we sift over details on the phone.

  “Did you enjoy your evening with David last night?” he asks.

  “I did, very much,” I say. “But give me more of the who-said-what.” I know he’s in a hurry. In fact, he’s talking on a cell phone (my cell phone; he refuses to get one of his own) as he walks down the street.

  “Oh, you know these Negroes.” His voice jounces as he walks.

  “Yeah,” I say, laughing. I wonder who else can hear him.

  * * *

  —

  Todd is married to Hilary, another close friend in the department. She is white. Like John, Todd is out of town this weekend. Since their two boys were born, our godsons, John and I see them less frequently than we used to. But Hilary and I are determined to spend some time together this weekend, with our husbands away.

  Burlington traffic keeps me from her and the boys for an hour even though she lives only blocks away from me. When I get there, the boys are ready for their baths, one more feeding, and then bed. Finally, they are down, and we settle into grown-up conversation. I tell her about my class, our discussions about “nigger,” and my worries about David.

  “That’s the thing about the South,” Hilary says. I agree, but then start to wonder about her grandmother. I decided I do not want to know, not tonight.

  I tell her about the incident with the men in the car and their hateful words. I confess that the reason I don’t like to cross Main Street is due to a persistent fear that something like that might happen.

  “Did you grow up hearing that?” she asks. Even though we are close, and alone, she does not say the word.

  I start to tell her a story I have never told anyone. It is a story about the only time I remember being called a nigger to my face.

  “I was a teenager, maybe sixteen. I was standing on a sidewalk, trying to cross a busy street after school to meet some friends. I happened to make eye contact with a white man in a car that was stopped in traffic. Anyway, he just kind of said it, kind of spit it up at me.

  “Oh, that’s why,” I say, stunned. She looks at me, just as surprised.

  DECEMBER 2004

  I am walking down a Burlington street with my friend Anh. My former quilting teacher, Anh is several years younger than I am. She has lived in Vermont her whole life. She is Vietnamese; her parents are white. Early in our friendship, she told me her father was a logger, as were most of the men in her family. Generations of Vietnamese loggers in Vermont, I mused. It wasn’t until I started to describe her to someone else that I realized she must be adopted.

  Anh and I commiserate often about being minorities in Burlington, but we usually do it silently. In quilting class, we would give each other looks that said, You are not alone or Oh, brother when the subject of race came up in our class, which consisted entirely of white women, aside from the two of us.

  There was the time, for instance, when one of her students explained why black men found her so attractive. “I have a black girl’s butt,” she said. Anh and I gave each other the Oh, brother look, then bent our heads back over our sewing machines.

  As we walk, I tell her about African American Autobiography and the discussion my students and I have been having about “nigger.” She listens and then describes to me the latest development in her on-again, off-again relationship with her boyfriend, a scuba instructor.

  “He says everything has
changed,” she tells me. “He’s going to clean up the messes in his life.” She laughs.

  Once, Anh introduced me to the boyfriend she had before the scuba instructor when I ran into them at a restaurant. Like the scuba instructor, he is white.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said, and put out my hand.

  “I’ve never slept with a black woman,” he said, and shook my hand. There was wonder in his voice. I excused myself and went back to my table. Later, when I looked over at them, they were sitting side by side and not speaking.

  Even though Anh and I exchanged our usual glances that night, I doubted we would be able to recover our growing friendship. Who could she be, dating someone like that? The next time I heard from her, she had broken up with him.

  I am rooting for the scuba instructor.

  “He told me he’s a new person,” she says.

  “Well, what did you say?” I ask her.

  “In the immortal words of Jay-Z, I told him, ‘Nigga, please.’ ”

  We laugh hard for the next two blocks.

  * * *

  —

  In lieu of a final class, my students come over for dinner. One by one, they file in. John takes coats while I pretend to look for things in the refrigerator. I can’t stop smiling.

  “The Books of Your Life” is the topic for tonight. I have asked them to bring a book, a poem, a passage, any kind of art that has affected them. Hazel has brought a children’s book. Tyler describes the television show Saved by the Bell. Nate talks about Freud. Dave has brought a photograph. Eric reads “The Seacoast of Despair” from Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion.

  I read from Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid. Later I will wonder why I did not read “Incident” by Countee Cullen, the poem that has been circulating in my head ever since we began our discussion about “nigger.” What held me back from bringing “Incident” to class? The question will stay with me for months.