Black Is the Body Page 8

  I am fascinated by the fact that my daughters never question the authenticity of their father’s paternity, considering the racial difference between them. Isabella is happiest when she can begin and end her days with John. “Daddy, you should get a tattoo of me going like this,” she told him years ago, mugging like Shirley Temple. At around the same time, she informed me calmly that it would be most convenient if I died first, so that her daddy could take care of her without my interference. John is the one she goes to when she has a bad dream. “You can’t comfort me the way Daddy does,” she once explained to me gently. Even when John becomes irritated by the chaos that the girls create and leaves the room, Isabella trails behind him, an identical scowl on her face and a stuffed animal under her arm.

  “No one on Earth wants to be with me as much as Isabella wants to be with you,” I sometimes complain to John. He pats my shoulder pityingly, like a prince dispensing coins to a pauper.

  5. Holy

  My daughters’ biological mother is dead, but she is an active presence in our lives. Isabella says her birth mother appears in her dreams and sometimes signals her presence by turning the light on and off in their room. “She is your mother in heaven,” I tell her, “and she entrusted you to me.” Like a divine priestess, like a holy ghost, I believe she blesses our union.

  “Adoption is a holy sacrament,” said the priest at a ceremony my parents arranged to welcome our daughters into our church family in Nashville. I believe this is true. I have the same feelings about adoption as I do about zebras, in whose astonishing, majestic presence I think, This must be God at work.

  When we met the girls’ maternal grandmother, she said I was her daughter returned to her from the dead. She compared me to Mary, Mother of God. I was glad; I felt unworthy. I felt her quiet agony over her daughter’s death. I looked at my new daughters and realized immediately that I would spend my life trying to reconcile myself to the terrible coincidence that brought about our union, and the fact that my greatest joy was occasioned by someone else’s tragedy.

  But tragedies happen. People die and the living must take up where the dead left off. This is our duty; this is our joy. A friend once told me that she had never felt more like a woman than when she was pregnant. When the girls were placed in my arms, I had never felt more deeply human.

  6. Bounty

  Our daughters have known they were adopted from the moment they were capable of knowing anything. Some stories about adoption emphasize poverty or lack; a child unwanted or abandoned, a lost history. The stories we tell the girls are about bounty. You are adored on two continents, I tell them. You have two worlds, two countries, two languages, and two stories to tell about how you came to be. So far, this strategy seems to be working. One of their favorite babysitters did not know they were adopted until the girls told her. The babysitter reported to me that in response to this news she had said, “Ohhhh,” in a high pitch and put on a sympathetic face. Giulia knew the look. “Well, it’s not sad,” she explained.

  For as many Ethiopians as there are in Vermont, exponentially more live in Washington, D.C. When the girls were two years old, we traveled to D.C. to meet our Ethiopian adoption liaison for dinner. It was his first visit to the United States. He had spent the day playing tourist, visiting monuments and museums. “Americans,” he said, “you know how to preserve your stories.”

  We all met up at Queen of Sheba, one of the many Ethiopian restaurants in Washington. When I took Isabella to the bathroom, Giulia agreed to stay behind with the waitress, a beautiful young woman in traditional dress, who knelt and held Giulia’s hands.

  “Twins?” asked the waitress when Isabella and I emerged from the bathroom. I nodded.

  She asked me what part of Ethiopia they were from.

  “Tigray,” I said.

  I knelt with Isabella while the waitress began to speak to Giulia in Tigrinya. Giulia alternately nodded and shook her head.

  Then, Giulia looked at me and put her arm around my neck. She pulled me closer as her conversation with the waitress seemed to pull her deeper and deeper into memory. You belong to me, said her fierce two-year-old grip. I leaned in until our bodies made a bridge between the present and the past. With all of my might, I assured her through my skin, And you belong to me.

  We do belong to each other. But Giulia and Isabella also belong to something and somewhere else. They belong to a history preserved in the recesses of their minds and hearts; in their bodies, too, perhaps down to the level of the cell. Where the girls’ identities reside in the worlds between past and present, there and here—that is a story that they will make up on their own.

  There is one story that is unequivocally true, and that true story goes like this: I am their mother on Earth, their here and now. The one who prepares them for spelling quizzes, smells their breath to make sure they’ve brushed their teeth, and nags them to tidy their room—that’s me. I am the present and, with any luck, the future, too. As they grow older, questions about their past will not be the only ones I won’t be able to answer. They will come upon other mysteries in their lives, and I will encourage them to view the mysteries of life as vitalizing and not crippling. But like everyone else who resides on Earth, they will have to go there to know there and, ultimately, find out about living for themselves.

  Black Is the Body

  Black History

  My brown daughters became black when they were six years old. They were watching television one day in February, Black History Month. A commercial came on. It was more like a thirty-second history lesson, a commemoration of a pilot, a poet, or a politician; a First Black, as a writer I know calls them. Them being the racial pioneers, the inaugural Negroes, the foremost African Americans to break through racial barriers in their chosen fields. By “break through,” I mean, of course, secure the regard of white people.

  “See, we’re black,” Giulia said to Isabella.

  “No, we’re brown,” Isabella responded.

  “Yeah, but they call it black,” Giulia explained.

  Despite my efforts to shield them, my daughters had somehow gotten wise to the absurd and illogical nature of American racial identity. Blackness, Giulia had figured out, had nothing to do with actual skin color. Blackness, she had come to understand, was an external identity, external to her, anyway. Race was something other people identified, something they said but not necessarily saw. Blackness, she had intuited, was a social category; not a color but a condition. And like it or not, it was time, she was informing her sister, to get with the proverbial program. In spite of me, but also because of me, my brown daughters were becoming black.

  My heart sank.

  It was not blackness per se that caused my heart to sink. I enjoy being black. But it took me a long time to get here, to this place of racial pleasure. My earliest experiences of blackness were defined by an unpleasant and uncomfortable hypervigilance. Being black meant that you had to be constantly aware, that you could never really be at ease. Early on, I got wise to the fact that being black in a white place meant that the world was not a safe place, not for you.

  In my family, race was not a construction, or a theory, or an outdated consequence of history, but the active, living foundation of our reality. Race determined the contours of every choice we made; every mundane public act we performed was a project with a name. When we moved into our house, it was called integration. When my older brother and I entered the public school system, it was called desegregation. The split between black and white was not metaphorical; railroad tracks divided black and white Nashville. On the white side of town, South Nashville, we played a role in a grand project of enormous proportions. We lived in South Nashville, but in North Nashville we could be black in a way that was not possible in any other part of the city. In North Nashville, no one white was watching. We could relax. We were free.

  North Nashville was where
my father practiced medicine and where we attended events at Fisk University, my parents’ alma mater, and one of this country’s oldest historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. North Nashville was where we attended church in a small chapel that was established for the faculty and students of Meharry Medical College, from which both of my parents received their graduate degrees. Among the parishioners in the chapel were men and women I called Aunt and Uncle even though we had no biological relationship. We shared something bigger and more profound than blood: history. Inside the church we celebrated our belief in God and a common pride in how we all made it over and broke through. We were a community, a black community, built in spite and because of racism. Because if it had not been for white supremacy, schools like Fisk and Meharry might never have existed.

  But my daughters were not born under the shadow of this history. They are black by ideology and affinity, but not by blood. When they were twelve months old, they assumed dual citizenship in both America and African America.

  * * *

  —

  Once, when we were out of town visiting John’s extended family, I told them the Black History Month story. I could see that the story unsettled them. I tried to explain my reasons for having wanted to protect my daughters from the language of race, but my explanations seemed only to make them more impatient. “Don’t you want them to know their history?” John’s cousin asked.

  I knew what she meant. She meant American slavery, segregation, and the civil rights movement; Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks; Martin, Malcolm, and other First Blacks. February stories, which, as American stories, belong to her, this white American woman, more than they do to my daughters.

  “I am an African who lives in America,” Isabella explained one day. She was recounting a conversation she had had with a third-grade classmate. The African Children’s Choir had come to Burlington, and the class had taken a field trip to see them perform. Later that day, Isabella’s classmate, in an attempt to identify the difference she perceived between Isabella and the children on stage, had referred to Isabella as an African American. Isabella corrected her: “While the law may state that I am an American, I am African.”

  “When I came to this country…” she continued. Astonishment made it difficult for me to continue paying attention. That my daughter had such a fine sense of her place in the world I had not known. Her implicit assessment of my role as essentially a porter in this stage of her life journey felt wholly appropriate.

  My daughters and I flip through picture books of twelfth-century Ethiopian underground churches carved out of rock. I show them websites that feature both centuries-old drawings and modern photographs of Ethiopian kings and queens. “Yours is the only African country to fight off the colonizer,” I remind them often. Every mother thinks her daughters look like angels, but my daughters do resemble the doe-eyed, haloed brown cherubs that dominate Ethiopian Orthodox Christian iconography.

  “Why did white people make black people slaves?” Isabella asked one February afternoon.

  “There’s been slavery all over the world,” I told her. “Even in Ethiopia.”

  I am proud that my daughters were born in a world where not only slaves but also angels and aristocrats look like them.

  In the world in which I grew up, Jesus was blond and blue-eyed. I almost got into a fight in high school when I informed a white classmate that Jesus probably had brown skin and definitely had hair like lambs’ wool. My classmate was just as baffled as he was enraged. He was as blond and blue-eyed as, well, Jesus—or Santa Claus, upon whose whiteness television show host Megyn Kelly once insisted. Having grown up in a culture whose icons looked like him, how could information like the news I shared about Jesus not shake my classmate to the core?

  * * *

  —

  I envy my daughters’ history, as have African Americans since the time when we were Negroes.

  “To know where the Negro is going one must know where the Negro comes from,” writes Trinidadian writer and activist C. L. R. James in his 1939 essay “The Destiny of the Negro.” He castigates capitalist pseudoscientists for attempting to “deprive the Negro of any share in the famous civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia.” Before him, W. E. B. Du Bois—author, activist, social scientist, statesman, and arguably the preeminent First Black in American history—composed The Star of Ethiopia, an American historical pageant, which opened in New York in 1913. The play, which, in one of its productions used almost one thousand actors, attempts to capture black history in its entirety.

  Du Bois described the drama in his essay “The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant”: “It begins with the prehistoric black men who gave to the world the gift of welding iron,” he wrote. “Ethiopia, Mother of Men, then leads the mystic procession of historic events past the glory of ancient Egypt, the splendid kingdoms of the Sudan and Zymbabwe down to the tragedy of the American slave trade. Up from slavery slowly…the black race writhes back to life and hope…on which the Star of Ethiopia gleams forever.”

  My daughters’ connection to Africa does not have to be fashioned or dramatized, invented or recuperated. It is a concrete reality to which many African Americans aspire; that aspiration is represented in the term “African American” itself. So much of the complexity of being African American inheres in the fact that we are, in fact, Americans, products of this soil yet rooted in something, somewhere else.

  Becoming American

  “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder,” writes Du Bois in his 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk.

  When I was growing up, some of my West Indian cousins found the unreconciled strivings of African Americans tiresome and confusing. Educated in the States at HBCUs, they exasperated their classmates by insisting that black alienation was self-imposed. Why couldn’t black people embrace a national identity? asked my cousin Anita. She claimed she couldn’t understand it. I was not surprised when she returned to Trinidad after college.

  During a trip I made to the island with my family as a teenager, a couple of years after Anita left the States, I tried to get her to identify one of her friends in the clumsy, ill-fitting American racial terminology that she had come to detest (it was, after all, the only terminology I had to use).

  “Is he biracial?” I asked her about a young man to whom she had introduced me. “Indian and Chinese? Black and white?”

  “He’s Trinidadian,” she said, managing, somehow, not to roll her eyes. The conversation ended as abruptly as did her relationship to America. What had been promoted by her elders, including my father, as a land of professional opportunity, proved to her to be an intolerable ideological straitjacket.

  My father was different. Unlike some of his nieces and nephews, he embraced blackness, threw himself into it with a kind of romantic fervor. He landed on these shores from Trinidad at the dawn of the civil rights movement, and his passion for blackness intensified with the rise of the Black Power movement. “Black,” he remembers, was a term coined by Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, who was my father’s contemporary in age and a fellow Trinidadian.

  “When did you become black?” I asked my father as I began to write this essay. As he reminisced, I considered the parallels between him and Carmichael: both graduates of HBCUs (Carmichael went to Howard), both christened with undeniably British names (my father’s first and middle names are Harold Oswald), and both, as children, subjects of the Crown.

  My father took to blackness quickly, but Americanness—not so much. I remember joking around once at the dinner table with my brothers as my father stared at us as if we were from outer space. “Where did I get these American children?” he wondered out loud.

  For my father, blackness was i
n here, organic and natural, but Americanness was out there, a consequence of chance and opportunity. He might have wound up in England if it hadn’t been for his uncle, another graduate of Meharry, who offered him America, where he begot children who would not only grow up on the other side of what appeared to him—at least that night at the dinner table—as an unbridgeable, ineffable divide, but who would also continuously frustrate him by mispronouncing words like “advertisement.”

  Valentine

  February has proven to be a weighty month for the brown girls in my house.

  In her final year of preschool, Isabella found herself in the middle of a romance. Ever since she was a toddler I have felt prescient pity for the boys who will fall in love with Isabella. Once they have fallen, I am certain that they will not be able to find their way back out. Gilbert was the name of the first boy who tumbled. He was an affable child, tan and green-eyed, with long, dark eyelashes and round, dimpled cheeks. Exceptionally tall for his age, Gilbert always seemed to be standing around with his hands in his pockets whenever I came to retrieve the girls. However, there was one time I saw him stand behind Isabella, who was busy at a craft table, and unaware of Gilbert as he gathered her braids lightly and let them fall, over and over, gather and fall, his eyes full of wonder, as if he were playing with a magical beaded curtain.

  In October, Gilbert invited Isabella to his birthday party. The girls and I had a conflicting engagement, so Isabella told him she would be unable to attend. Gilbert’s mother called; her son was beside himself, she said. He admired Isabella, in part because she had never been sentenced to a stint in the “blue chair,” the punishment chair, where he himself spent a fair amount of time. Her smile made him happy, he told his mother. In lieu of the birthday party, she asked if Isabella could come over the next afternoon for a playdate. Even though it was a weekday, I was moved by Gilbert’s plight, so I agreed. I thought Isabella would at least be amused when I informed her of the degree of Gilbert’s fondness, but she only shrugged.