Black Is the Body Page 6

  I imagined that I should work on fashioning a disposition as modest and demure as Carrie’s, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Instead I recognized myself in Jim’s furious passion, his fervor, recklessness, and the ferocious, boundless desire that lay just beneath the placid surface.

  6.

  Our trip to Hazlehurst was occasioned by a family reunion. About a month before the trip, John and I received a flyer in the mail describing the weekend events. We were living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the time. On the program was a list of all of the meals: a fish fry, country breakfast, and, finally, a barbecue on the family property that we call the Jefferson place, which consists of nearly two hundred acres, eighty-three of which are pristine woodland, save for a few acres cleared for family use. John started dreaming of the feasts long before we arrived in Nashville to join my parents for the drive to Mississippi.

  The first event of the reunion, the fish fry on the Jefferson place, is already under way by the time we reach my grandmother’s house. After introductions, John watches as my father sits down in the only easy chair in the room and becomes immediately engrossed in a baseball game. The women gather at the dining room table to trade details about a family squabble concerning reunion business that has soured feelings about the reunion altogether. Hours pass as the house buzzes with female muttering and the incessant droning of the television and air-conditioning unit. We miss the fish fry because the women are talking. We miss the fish fry because my father wants to watch baseball. No one asks John what he wants, not even me, caught up as I am in the savory details of the family feud. Eventually, my aunt Julia emerges with a plate of spaghetti covered with homemade sauce. She and John have enjoyed a warm relationship ever since.

  Ever an optimist, John sets his sights on the country breakfast to be held the next morning, also on the Jefferson property. The family feud has not been resolved by the morning, however, and my father signals his intentions for the day by immediately descending into the overstuffed leather chair in front of the television. John tries to rally the family, but between the feud and my father we are stuck. He appeals to me, but I am riveted by the gossip and too intimidated, as always, by my father’s silence to try to influence the course of the morning.

  The final reunion event, a barbecue, is scheduled for the afternoon. John successfully herds my parents, aunt, and grandmother out the door. The heavy, heady smell of grilling meat saturates the air from a hundred yards away. We are spared the wilting sunshine by the awning of a gazebo that has been erected for the reunion. John peers excitedly around the brown bodies in front of him as my curious relatives, one by one, walk over to us and welcome him to the family.

  We are near the front of the line when my father approaches, laughing and shaking hands all the way up to our place in line. He takes my elbow and says he wants to make it back in time for the second half of yet another baseball game. My father has ruled the family and we have always done as he pleased. There was never a choice. But now there is a choice. “We are not leaving until I get some of this barbecue,” John says in a voice that is friendlier than the voice he used on the highway, but just as firm. I hold my breath, but my father goes back to glad-handing, ceding to John’s assertion of authority just as easily as he had entrusted to him the steering wheel of his car. My mother, who has been watching, is clearly impressed—another story about John for her to tell.

  John himself has told this story many times. I wince when he does because the family reunion story is a shameful reminder that, when presented early with an opportunity to perform the duties of a good wife-to-be, I failed. But that imaginary wife who wags her finger at me in judgment was not, and never had been, the kind of wife John wanted. At any rate, he has put up with my passive relationship with food as well as the more obnoxious elements of my personality. As for me, I endure regular critiques of the way I boil eggs. “We marry the problems,” said another friend.

  For my aunts, the family reunion story has served as a cautionary tale. They have made sure, in every subsequent visit, that the dining room table is crowded with food when John crosses the threshold. In fact, their favorite food story about John is set during one of those later visits. John entered the house, sweaty from the drive, and focused immediately on the mountain of food prepared in his honor. He dispensed quickly with greetings and headed toward the table, where he piled macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and potato salad onto a plate. Spiced, blackened shrimp and chicken wings coated in barbecue sauce disappeared into his mouth. That was the moment, my aunts say, when they knew for sure that, beyond and beneath his skin, John was one of them.

  7.

  The gazebo that had been built for the reunion was the source of the family feud. My cousin George, my grandfather’s nephew, lives in a trailer on the property. Some members of the family worried that after the reunion George would transform the structure into his personal workshop. They were right. Two years after the reunion, John and I sat beneath its shade among a collection of George’s stuff: tools, car parts, a refrigerator, old washing machines, and fishing equipment.

  Like most of the Jefferson men, George is solitary, reserved, and very tall. His dark-gray dreadlocks fall to his shoulders; his skin is a deep, even brown. He is a sometime carpenter, full-time jack-of-all-trades, a hunter of deer, and a collector of things. He is at ease in the natural world, so much so that it is hard to imagine him anywhere else, and even harder to imagine him in the New England in which John grew up. And yet the two men took to each other quickly. John teased him about the junk as the three of us sat under the gazebo. Both of them laughed when John nearly fell off a rickety lawn chair.

  “Let’s go fishing,” George said to John. I stayed behind and stepped out from under the awning to enjoy the steady Mississippi heat and sunshine that my body craves during the long winters and cold, muddy springs in Vermont. They came back with a floppy freshwater trout that George gutted and fried on a grill, one of the only working pieces of machinery under the gazebo. The dirty chaos that surrounded us made it difficult for me to concentrate on the small glory of the meal. But John and George ate the flaky, delicate fish with their hands, sucking every morsel from its reedy bones.

  When my mother and her sisters were young, the two man-made ponds on the Jefferson place were always stocked with fish, and the grounds were replete with family. Jeffersons lounged in rocking chairs on the wraparound porch of the ranch-style home where my grandfather was born and raised. His brother and sister-in-law, called Brother and Sister, raised their thirteen children on the property. “It was like a fairground,” my aunt remembers. Family and friends from all over Mississippi came on weekends to cook, eat, pick berries, and visit on the porch and grounds. The children played games and ate apples, peaches, figs, and plums from the trees that populated the land.

  The Jefferson family inherited this Edenic place from its own Adam and Eve. The original owner of the property was Thomas James Jefferson and his wife, Susan (Susie) Keys Jefferson. Thomas James Jefferson was the son of a white man, a slave owner, whose surname was Meeks. Meeks had a common-law wife, possibly named Mary, who was black and a slave. The family story goes that Meeks essentially gave up the social privileges that went along with his white skin and lived with his black family for the rest of his life. His son, Thomas James, severed his ties to slavery by casting off the name Meeks when he became an adult and took on Jefferson instead. His brother, James Alfred, my great-great-grandfather, did the same.

  Choosing a new name was not an uncommon practice among enslaved African Americans upon liberation. It may seem curious that Thomas James would renounce his ties to slavery by adopting the name of a slave owner, but his father would have grown up hearing a lot about President Thomas Jefferson, who died within a few years of Meeks’s birth. Maybe he was intrigued by the relationship between Sally Hemings and President Jefferson, which had been a public scandal since the first term of Jeff
erson’s presidency. Whatever the reason, Thomas James was hardly unique in his choice of surname. According to a recent Census Bureau survey, 75 percent of Americans with the last name of Jefferson are black. As a “black” name, it is surpassed only by Washington; 90 percent of people bearing that surname are African American.

  My great-aunt was named Vergia Octavia Jefferson, but she was always called TJ, after her uncle, Thomas James. His father may have abandoned his whiteness, but at least some of his white descendants socialized with their black relatives; Aunt TJ would occasionally entertain them at her home. Her brother, my grandfather, however, like Malcolm X, despised the white blood that ran though his veins. He hated the fact that he was biologically bound to the Meeks family and wanted nothing to do with them. He counted some white people among his friends, but he didn’t want them among his kin.

  8.

  John enjoys the Meeks-Jefferson story almost as much as I do. He and I talk a lot about race. We like racial difference—to experience it and then discuss it. There are interracial relationships in which each party claims not to see racial difference. I don’t understand those couples and consider their relationships fundamentally humorless.

  For John, race is a topic of intellectual interest and aesthetic enjoyment. He listens to and writes about jazz, blues, and soul music. He has always had black friends, and I am not the only black woman with whom he has been romantically involved. “A white Negro,” a friend smirked when I first described John to her. She meant it derisively, and I forgave her. I knew the barb was borne of envy. Her boyfriend was awkward. When he drove a car, he jerked his foot up and down on the brake, as if it were the pedal of a sewing machine. When John drives in the summer, he glides down the street with his elbow out of the window like a hero in a movie about noble neighborhood toughs. When we first met, I saw that he moved through the world with a fluidity that was both unself-conscious and theatrical. John would say that this is Italian masculinity, and that it has very much in common with black masculinity. One of the things first pointed out to me by the woman who introduced us, a black woman, was how well he could dance.

  I was thirty-one when I met John. By that point, my father had taken a broader view on what kind of man I should choose for my husband. My father, who was born in Trinidad, liked the fact of John’s Italianness right away. “Italians and Caribbeans,” he said, “we care about food. We care about family.” My father wasn’t any more of a food person than I was in those days, and compared to my mother, at least, he spoke very little about his family. But he was clearly impressed by John, an intellectual who was unafraid of physical labor, who felt as content in front of a football game as he did inside of a book. He was something upon which my father and I could finally agree. I was surprised and annoyed by how much this pleased me.

  “Emily needs someone to ground her,” my father once said to my mother, who relayed his curious diagnosis to me. Because I had done all of the things they had expected of me—performed well in school and become a professor—I felt I had been grounded all of my life. The truth is that I have used my marriage to John as an opportunity to fly.

  Our relationship was born at a way station. We met in New Haven at the home of a mutual friend. At the time John and I were living temporary lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, respectively. When we decided to marry, I moved to Harrisburg to take an adjunct position at Penn State. We were in Harrisburg when we dreamed up a trip to Sapelo Island, one of the Sea Islands of Georgia located on the Atlantic coast of the southeastern United States. The culture and history of the place intrigued us as a site of resilient Africanness. For almost three hundred years, it has been home to the Gullah community of Hog Hammock. Sapelo is unique in that it is a state reserve whose livelihood, therefore, is not determined by the whims of tourists. This difference between Sapelo and its neighboring islands was obvious immediately after we landed. In the McIntosh County airport, black men from Jekyll and St. Simons stooped to heft the sleek leather suitcases and bulging golf bags of white men who ignored them.

  It took two planes to get us from Harrisburg to McIntosh County, and both of them were delayed. It was after midnight when we arrived, and the ferry that took visitors to the island had shut down. An island resident offered us a ride on his motorboat. He, John, and I were alone on the still water that night. The moon looked heavy, worn, and marvelous. The water was the color of obsidian; it sparkled as it crested in gentle, thick waves. We got engaged the next day.

  We met another interracial couple on the island, Sandra and Tim, a black woman and a white man, with a handsome big-eyed child. The five of us quickly became friends. Sandra and Tim laughed when I described the scene of the proposal. John was still on one knee, holding the box with the engagement ring, when a rattlesnake emerged from the woods and wriggled past us.

  Sandra invited me for a walk. We sat on a bench near the water and she told me about the day her son was born. It was the middle of August, she said, and her skin had darkened. She was hot and huge, desperate to deliver. Moments after the birth, white nurses rushed inside her room, not to care for her but to see her baby’s skin; they had made bets on what color it would be.

  The food at our Sapelo hotel was unremarkable. If it weren’t for John, I would not have registered this aspect of our stay, but an unwritten condition of our marriage has revealed itself to be that I improve my appreciation of the world of food. At first I faked it, then I became passably proficient, and finally I became sincerely interested. Over the years we have designed several vacations to suit our culinary curiosity. One summer, we used the guidebook Road Food as a compass. We began with an investigation into the country of barbecue: Memphis, New Orleans, and Texas. The quality of excellent beef was simple to appreciate, but the landscape of the Northwest stumped and overwhelmed me. My heart raced with terror as our drive into Wyoming took us into the clouds. I breathed deeply and read Willa Cather and Gretel Ehrlich in order to unlock the mysteries of the foreign world around me. We ate marbled, juicy steak on the same day as we visited the Badlands, whose rugged, ancient grandness made me nauseous.

  9.

  In its everyday incarnation, our marriage is generally mundane. We live with our two children in the suburbs in a house that resembles the house I grew up in. We are both professors who teach courses on African American culture. Unlike my television John, my real-life John was not exiled by his kin when he chose to marry a black woman. Unlike my white forefather Meeks, John has not felt compelled to renounce his whiteness, at least so far.

  In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford has a revelation while marveling at a bee pollinating a bloom. “So this was a marriage!” She lay on her back and enjoyed the spectacle of a perfect union. For me, marriage is, in large part, the doing of laundry, tending of children and, of course, the preparing of food. The union between John and me is perhaps most fascinating when I see it through the eyes of other people.

  “He refuses to pull the car up all the way into the driveway,” I said to my friend Tanya once on the phone at the end of a long conversation about the routine domestic crimes our husbands had committed against us. “He says it’s because of the icicles that form on the side of the roof. But it’s July!”

  “Marriage is hard,” Tanya sighed, “but interracial marriage must be really hard.”

  I held the phone away from me and stared at the receiver. Tanya is white, and so is her husband. I thought we had been talking as women married to men, that the grievances we held against our respective husbands had to do with sex and not race. Because it was not interracial anything that I had been complaining to her about, but rather the institution of marriage itself, which requires compromise, which is not always easy, at least for me.

  “What’s it like, being married to a white man?” asked Sophia at a college reunion as we walked together across campus. Sophia was born in Mexico. We hadn’
t seen each other in the twenty-five years since graduation. John and the girls were in town, too. He had just called to remind me that he didn’t have the car keys. So, at that moment, being married to a white man was like being married to a man who needed the keys to the car in order to take our children to a museum. I knew she wanted emotional stories, dramatic stories, tales about struggle, uncertainty, and triumph. But the sun was shining, and I was taking a walk with someone whose company I had forgotten how much I enjoyed, so I only had funny stories to tell.

  “Once, John said to me, ‘When black people say, I haven’t done such-and-such in a minute, they mean anything from an actual minute to several years,’ ” I said. We both laughed.

  Then I told her the watermelon story. On the same trip to Hazlehurst that led us to George and his succulent trout, John and I stopped in town to buy a watermelon from a man selling them on the side of the road. The vendor was African American with salt-and-pepper hair; he wore a white T-shirt and jeans. I stayed behind in the air-conditioned car while John and the man chatted. John, who was dressed in a light-blue T-shirt and worn, brown khaki shorts, put one hand on his hip and gestured with the other. I leaned back into the headrest and tilted the brim of my hat toward my eyes. John must be talking about one of his favorite summertime topics, I thought, which is how difficult it is to find a decent peach north of the Mason-Dixon line. When I peeked at them from beneath the brim, he and the man were still talking, bowing deeply as they laughed, like rocking toy penguins.

  John balanced a watermelon in his hand as he returned to the car. I asked him what the man said to him and he smiled.

  “He asked me how I was enjoying retirement,” he said. We laughed a little together, and I remembered why I loved him, for not feeling diminished by being mistaken for some other white man, for not wanting to embarrass the man by pointing out his mistake, and for not taking an inordinate amount of pleasure in his error.