Black Is the Body Read online

  The night of our dinner is an emotional one. I tell them that they are the kind of students a professor dreams about. They give me a gift certificate to the restaurant that David and I frequent. I give them copies of Some of My Best Friends and inscribe each one. Eric demands a hug, and then they all do. I happily comply. We talk about meeting again as a class, maybe once or twice in the spring. Two students who are going abroad promise to keep in touch through our listserv, which we all agree to keep active until the end of the academic year, at least. After they leave, the house is quiet and empty.

  Weeks later, I post “Incident” on our listserv and ask them to respond with their reactions. Weeks of silence go by. After some prodding, Lauren posts an analysis of the poem, and then her personal reactions to it. I thank her online and ask for more responses. More silence.

  I get emails and visits from these students about other matters, some of them race related. Eric still comes by my office regularly. Once he brings his mother to meet me, a kind and engaging woman who gives me a redolent candle she purchased in France. She tells me her son enjoyed African American Autobiography. Eric and I smile at each other.

  A few days later, I see Eric outside the campus bookstore.

  “What did you think about ‘Incident’?” I ask him.

  “I’ve been meaning to write you about it. I promise I will.”

  In the meantime, Nigger is back in its special place on my office bookshelf. It is tucked away so that only I can see the title on its spine, and then only with some effort.

  Interstates

  1.

  John, my parents, and I are heading south on Route 55 from Nashville to Hazlehurst, Mississippi. He is driving; my father rides shotgun. I sit in the back with my mother, holding my breath. The entire car is silent, all four of us as still as stones.

  “We have to pull over,” John says.

  It is a midmorning in July. I try to focus on passing cars.

  “There’s a gas station a few miles up,” my father says evenly. He shifts in his seat.

  The front left tire is flat.

  John and I have been engaged for several months at this point in my life story. This is not his first visit to Nashville, but it is his first trip to Mississippi, where he will meet my extended family—my mother’s mother, sisters, cousins, and nieces.

  The car belongs to my father, who has entrusted the wheel to John as a symbol of his acquiescence to the new order of things, namely John’s having supplanted him as the Man in My Life. But it was only a gesture. When he gave John control of the car, my father did not anticipate that John would actually exercise the authority to take us on a new course. But he does. He pulls over, right there on the shoulder of the interstate, somewhere between Memphis and Jackson. Within minutes John is underneath the car while my parents and I stand in a grassy depression near him. I feel pride as I watch my fiancé’s strong, tan arms move in confident, rhythmic silence as he replaces the spent tire with a spare that is, distressingly, nearly flat itself. And I ache for my father, who shifts quickly from side to side, wordlessly hurrying John. There we stand—my black family, as vulnerable as an open window. We are bound by history and helplessness. I focus on John, willing his whiteness and masculine strength toward us, imagining these qualities shielding us from harm, like armor.

  The eyes of white men in jeans and work boots travel from John to me to my parents when we arrive at the nearest gas station, which is not the one my father mentioned. He and my mother stay in the car while John, dirty and sweaty, strides into the store. I follow him, carrying a small, impractical purse and decked out in oversized sunglasses. We buy water, fill the tank, and then we’re back on the road.

  My mother, in a voice sugared with amusement and pride, will tell this story to many people for many years to come. It is a story about how a black family used to do things one way, and then a brand-new white man came into their lives and nothing was ever the same.

  2.

  My father is a creature of habit, someone who holds tradition in high regard. The reason for his reluctance to stop before we reached the gas station, however, had nothing to do with habit or tradition. Instead it had to do with history, both small and large. His preferred gas station had proven to be a hospitable place over the years. Several times he had received service there without incident, something no black person traveling through the South has ever taken for granted.

  When my father arrived in Nashville to attend Fisk University in the 1950s, a black body had to travel along known routes, relying upon the experiences of other black people. For many years, a guide called The Green Book informed black travelers of places where it was possible for them to sleep and eat. It was a map of a modern underground railroad. Black bodies out of place would likely encounter insults to their dignity, or worse. The Green Book ceased publication in 1966, but to this day, there are cities and towns in this country in which the perils inherent in traveling black have not subsided.

  John was not ignorant of the root of my father’s anxiety. But the danger presented by the flat tire took precedence over any other type of danger. Somewhere between the clarity of his focus and the complexity of my father’s anxiety, perhaps, lies the difference between living white and living black in America. That there is a difference is indisputable; how deep the difference runs is impossible to ascertain. I see the difference. Mostly, I despise it. But my belief that difference can engender pleasure as well as pain made it possible for me to marry a white man.

  3.

  Before the day of the flat tire, the pattern of this trip had never changed. My mother, brothers, and I always stopped at the same rest stops and gas stations. We always left before dawn in order to reach Memphis, where we had breakfast with my mother’s aunt and her family, by midmorning. I had my own routines. I would spend weeks before the trip stockpiling enough books and magazines to last me through the eight-hour ride to Hazlehurst, and then through the long, hot days of visiting relatives. On the first leg, it was so dark in the car that I read by street lamps until fatigue weighed my eyes shut. After breakfast in Memphis, four hours of driving remained. I read and read until my fantasy life beckoned, at which point I hugged my reading material to my chest and daydreamed my way to Mississippi.

  When I was a child, my reveries concerned the present: friends, toys, and animals that intrigued me. As an adolescent, I fantasized about the future: what kind of career I would have, where I would live and, most of all, whom I would marry.

  Like many fathers, perhaps, mine expected his daughter to bring home someone who looked like him. At some point, however, he must have realized that, since my entire social world was white, there was little chance of this. His concession to this fact must have happened after he sat me down in high school and suggested that I attend Spelman so that I could find a nice Morehouse College man to marry. My mother knew her husband and predicted what he would say to me. “Just keep your mouth closed,” she instructed me privately before sending me to the dining room table, where my father waited to dispense his advice.

  “White boys only want one thing from black girls,” my father warned me when I was an adolescent. He didn’t have to explain. I knew what he meant, and understood that he was only trying to protect me from a history that had long preceded me. White exploitation of black female bodies was once a staple feature of life in the American South. I knew the story of my mother’s mother, who, as a young woman, had barely escaped the predation of white boys in a pickup truck as she and a few friends walked home one night from a long day of work. The night was black as pitch, the path in front of them barely illuminated by faint lights from houses separated by acres of fields from the road. As the truck crept past, my grandmother could see the pale, hungry faces peering at them from the open window.

  “If that truck turns around, let’s split up and run to the fields,” she told her friends. As if on cue, t
he headlights reappeared. The women ran and crouched, their hearts beating fast, praying and waiting as the rumble of the engine faded and the truck disappeared into the night.

  I shuddered when I imagined my magnificent grandmother scared and running through a field to escape assault at the hands of those white men. While the image moved me terribly, my father’s words did not.

  By the time I reached high school, my father and I had been at odds for several years. There were no neutral topics. In particular, he objected to the nascent feminism I was cultivating. Once, after church, he found me in a conversation with a peer of his, another doctor, a middle-aged black woman.

  “Men are intimidated by strong women,” said Dr. Jones just as my father appeared. Sometimes I found Dr. Jones abrasive and patronizing, but in that moment, I was thrilled to be taken seriously by this professional woman, so I nodded vigorously, even though my own experience in the world of romance was limited.

  “It’s time to go,” my father said as he pulled me by the elbow toward the door.

  “You know, the reason why Dr. Jones isn’t married is because men don’t like her personality,” he told me on the ride home. “I don’t want you spending time around women like that.”

  At this point in time, it was clear that my father wasn’t crazy about my personality either. I was mouthy and rude, he complained to my mother. He admonished me often for talking back. As he continued to disparage Dr. Jones, I kept my mouth closed and resolved to make a point of spending time around her and other women like that as often as possible. Defying him was my mission, much more urgent than my feelings about the doctor, and even more compelling than protecting myself from white boys with bad intentions.

  Most of all, I didn’t want to be a consequence of history; I wanted to invent my own story. That was before I understood that the drive to create a new story for oneself is the oldest black story there is.

  Invent my own stories I did on the long car ride between Nashville and Hazlehurst. Among my reading material were teen magazines with pullout posters of heartthrobs, like white teen idol Leif Garrett. In one, he stood against a wall, dreamy, moppy-haired, and half nude in a slick black shirt unbuttoned to his navel. I mounted the poster on my bedroom wall, right next to a picture of the Swedish tennis star Björn Borg that I had ripped out of one of my father’s issues of Sports Illustrated.

  There were black men among my trophies, too, like El DeBarge, the crooner whose “Love Me in a Special Way” I listened to over and over through padded headphones while lying on my back next to the stereo. Jim Rice of the Boston Red Sox looked like Adonis, staring into the outfield, his bat slung over his shoulder in a picture I found in Time magazine.

  It was never about the bodies. It was the dream of something else, another life, far away from Nashville, the foreign country of men—women, too—where conversations were heavy and sophisticated but unburdened by any talk about race.

  4.

  John is hungry. As we enter my grandmother’s house he looks expectantly at the table in the dining room. Aside from a bowl of fruit, the table is barren. Much else distracts him, however, as he makes his way down a receiving line of the women in the clan to which I belong. My grandmother, delighted by the simple novelty of his presence, pulls him in for a hug. The joy in the room is palpable and satiating, at least for me; John is looking for a more practical kind of nourishment.

  The language of food is John’s mother tongue. An Italian American, he grew up in his parents’ kitchen, where the proper texture of homemade pasta was the topic of robust controversy. At their dinner table, stories of past meals were remembered in aching, enchanting detail. They lived in the Berkshires but traveled to New Jersey for their cheese. Friends and relatives made pilgrimages to enjoy the spectacle of bounty that was their garden.

  John has eaten commercial spaghetti sauce only once. He talks about the incident the way other people shudder at memories of nasty car accidents. He doesn’t care for the concept of the potluck; I suspect he secretly believes it was conceived for lazy people. Some of his closest friendships are based exclusively on mutual culinary passions. When I met him, dinner for me consisted of tuna fish that I ate out of the can, standing by the sink, more often than I care to recount.

  Everyone who knows him has a food story about John. My mother never forgot the first time he ate at her table. She served a slow-cooked pot roast, dripping with gravy, yams dressed with honey and lemon, and bright, buttery sautéed green beans. John also remembers that meal. I don’t.

  He appreciated the flavor, color, and texture of the food, but even more, he understood the love and labor involved in its preparation. He saw that my mother was offering him a glimpse into her world, who she had been and who she was now. As much his mother’s protégé as her son, John understood the dynamic between women and kitchens, maternal sacrifice and sweat. Beneath his words of praise for my mother and her demure reception, an unspoken, visceral understanding coursed between them in which I had no part.

  Years before, the father of a friend from college—a trim, angular tennis player of New England stock—stopped in on my parents when he was in Nashville for business. They had never met before. He was a direct person, artless yet charming. In her fashion, my mother welcomed him with a traditional southern breakfast—creamy grits, ham, sausage, eggs over easy, perfectly cooked. My friend’s father had a bite here and there, commenting all the while on calories and cholesterol. When my mother recounted the morning to me, she sounded more bewildered than offended. Now she was bewildered again: her daughter had found a man who had the skills she had proudly determined not to pass on. “My daughter doesn’t cook,” she once bragged to a friend who was clearly confused by the boast. Now, here was her daughter, engaged to a man who did. “We marry our mothers,” my friend Catherine once told me.

  Their kitchen communion was probably the reason why my mother sat alone with John after that first meal, sharing intimate stories from her past. She talked about Mississippi and the joys and privations of her childhood. She talked about her parents: the pleasure her mother took in the natural world, and her father’s military commitments that took the family to Germany for a year. She segued into stories about the racism she had experienced in the Jim Crow South. My mother was, like her mother, a true raconteur. In the telling of her stories, in all of their horrible richness, she showed John the scars of her anger and bitterness. I fought the urge to protest, to insist that he had nothing to do with her history, just as I, as a child, had not wanted to be claimed by the history of American racism. But I remained silent; the stories weren’t for me. John was silent, too, ingesting her words as seriously and respectfully as he had consumed the food she served him. He knew she was explaining that her lovely home and exquisite meal were evidence of struggle and triumph, emblems of her resourcefulness and strength. When she cooked, she remembered and bested the past. In the kitchen, she created a new world. Her conversation was an invitation for John to enter and witness the miracle she had made.

  My father had left the table, as usual, just after the meal. Eventually, I excused myself, too, leaving John holding a napkin-covered glass, tapping his fingers lightly on its sides, rocking his heels a bit to the rhythm of my mother’s stories.

  5.

  “Emily’s going to marry a preacher,” snickered one of my Mississippi cousins to another as we lumbered along in my grandmother’s car on a dirt road on a blazing August afternoon. I sat in the back by myself, my palms sticking to the buckling leather, my cheeks burning. I was twelve years old. I had been a bookish child who grew into a deeply self-conscious teenager. I appeared, I am sure, disconcertingly detached from the world around me. People sometimes found it hard to feel at ease in my presence. I may have been odd, but prim enough for a preacher I was not. No one saw the passion that burned inside.

  I encountered people like me only as characters in books an
d on television. On the tube, I found my perfect white boy: Richard Thomas. He was loyal and prompt, arriving in our den every Thursday night to play the role of John-Boy on the television series The Waltons.

  Like me, John-Boy was bookish, solitary, a dreamer. He was an intellectual, a poet. His artistic ambitions set him apart from everyone around him. His heart-shaped face, the large disc-like mole on his cheek, and his ever-present pout consumed me. He would understand me, I thought. Every week, I willed myself into the Walton residence where John-Boy and I would sit at their long wooden table and tell each other things we had never before said out loud.

  John-Boy’s turn on Roots: The Next Generation changed my life. It was the actor Richard Thomas, to be precise, who played Jim Warner on the sequel to the miniseries Roots. Like John-Boy, Jim was a lover of poetry. The only person who shared his love of art was a young black schoolteacher, Carrie Barden, who, like my parents, attended Fisk University. Carrie and Jim fell in love and eventually married. Their married life bored me; their secret courtship, however, I found thrilling.

  For obvious reasons, no one could know that Carrie and Jim were becoming intimate. They developed delicious strategies to keep their secret, like discussing the work of Joel Chandler Harris while sitting back to back in Jim’s carriage. Literature bound them. For Carrie, it was the source of her purity; for Jim, his passion. Carrie tried to resist, but she was pestered by dreams of Jim. On his part, nothing could keep Jim from Carrie, not the disapproval of his family, not even Carrie herself. “I will marry you!” he hollered as Carrie ran away.