Black Is the Body Read online

  When I went to pick up Isabella, Gilbert’s mother and I chatted while our children said good-bye. Isabella gave Gilbert one of her signature bear hugs. His arms dropped to his sides and a stunned, glassy look spread over his face. It was the look of love, pure and true.

  After the playdate, Gilbert stepped up his game. He asked Isabella on an actual date. (“What did you say?” I asked. “Well, I told him I couldn’t cut school,” she told me.) And then, in early February, he told her he was going to draw a Valentine’s Day card with a picture of them kissing on the lips. He wrote her a note I found in her backpack. “Your hair is pretty,” read his four-year-old scrawl. He signed it with a drawing of a heart.

  But a week before Valentine’s Day, Gilbert told Isabella that he was only going to give the light people cards that year. She would get her card the following year, he promised.

  I didn’t hear about this until bedtime, when so many revelations come to light. My first—and last—instinct was that Gilbert had not meant the comment maliciously. But Isabella told me that what he said had hurt her feelings. I emailed their teacher. It was important, I believed, that she know that race—racial difference—had reared its head in her classroom in a potentially destructive way.

  The next day, the teacher arranged a sit-down between the kids. Gilbert offered an apology, which Isabella accepted and—according to Isabella and the teacher—the two of them spent the rest of the day playing happily together.

  What changed in Gilbert? I may never know. Surely, someone, something, got to him and made him look at Isabella differently. In general, Gilbert was aware of Isabella in a way that she was not aware of him. She was used to seeing white people; he was not used to seeing brown people. I believe he was trying to make sense of what it meant for him to care for a girl whose skin was so different from his. Years from now, he will be embarrassed at having said such a thing, or at least that’s what I like to imagine.

  That’s what happened to my friend’s grandfather, an immigrant from the Netherlands. One of the first people he met when he arrived in the States was a black man. They shook hands, and my friend’s grandfather looked down at his palm, expecting the black man’s brownness to have rubbed off on his own hand. The best part of the story, my friend told me, was that whenever his grandfather repeated this anecdote, he always said, “Somewhere, right now, there is a black man telling a story to his family about that fresh-off-the-boat Dutch guy who thought the color of his skin was some kind of hoax.”

  Every time I am reminded of this story, I think of the exchange that took place between Malcolm X and Alex Haley in a U.S. airport. Haley was admiring an arriving family of European immigrants. They were about to learn their first word of English, Malcolm predicted: “nigger.”

  A Regrettable Choice

  I have heard it said that a rite of passage in every black parent’s life is the moment when his or her child comes home and asks, “What does ‘nigger’ mean?”

  I don’t remember bringing the question to my parents, but I’m sure I must have, because I cannot remember a time in my childhood when I did not know what it meant. For as long as I can remember, I knew that “nigger” meant to be different, to be outside, to be less.

  The first time my daughters heard the “n-word,” as it’s often called, I was the one who said it. I had given a talk on my work on the white author and archivist Carl Van Vechten and his personal and professional involvement in the Harlem Renaissance at a book festival in Woodstock, Vermont. My daughters wanted to come, and I consented on the condition that they sit quietly and pay attention. Not five minutes into my talk, they had made their way up to the podium and begun tussling over the pointer.

  Later, I accused Isabella of going back on our agreement and not paying attention. “I was paying playtention,” she explained, “playing and paying attention.”

  “Okay, then what was my talk about?” I asked her.

  “It was about a white man who made a regrettable choice in the title of his book.”

  “Do you remember the title?”

  “No. What was it?”

  “Forget it. It has a bad word in it,” I said.

  “Was it the F word? The H word? The S word?”

  No, no, and no.

  * * *

  —

  I was able to distract her from the topic until later that evening, when she introduced the mystery to Giulia, who ran down the same list of consonants. Finally, I relented. The title was Nigger Heaven, I said. The word was “nigger.” What does it mean, they wanted to know? I hesitated. It was a big moment, a moment I had been dreading since before I became a parent, and I was not prepared. “It’s a bad word white people sometimes use to put black people down,” I finally told them. Well, that’s it, I thought. Their childhood is over. They were quiet for a moment. Then, Giulia put her hand on her hip. “Well, that’s rude,” she said. I reared back. It is rude, I thought, and maybe that’s all it will be for them.

  About a week later, Giulia came home from spending time with a neighborhood girl—eleven years old and white—who told her and her sister that a person could get arrested for using the “m-word,” Giulia reported.

  “It’s the n-word,” I said. “It’s the word we talked about a while ago.”

  “No, it’s the m-word. Two lumps,” Giulia corrected me, and held up two fingers in a peace sign.

  B Words

  Donna is the name of the neighborhood girl. In the summer, she drops her bike in the front yard and thunders through our house in her dirty bare feet, on the hunt for my daughters. She runs up to the girls’ room where they each insist that she piggyback them around the house. Then, the three of them tromp up and down the streets of our neighborhood, hopping from pool to pool, outfitted in slick, wet bathing suits and mismatched flip-flops, with tight towels girdling their hips. I watch them from my window. This is what childhood should look like, I think. Outside of this frame, racial discord grows and persists. But inside of the frame is a world that I could never have imagined when I was growing up.

  But the South of my childhood has changed, too. Shortly after the historic 2008 presidential election, I took a trip to Nashville and saw a bumper sticker on the back of a pickup truck that read, “Rednecks for Obama: Workin’ for the man who’ll do more for the workin’ man.” There was a good ole boy at the wheel and a gun rack in the back. From that moment, my story about Nashville had a new chapter.

  * * *

  —

  My daughters will have their own stories, and the ones I tell in these pages may or may not describe them, or even interest them at all. In fact, while watching television with Giulia on another February day, I asked her if she remembered the exchange she had with her sister while they were watching television during Black History Month two years earlier. She didn’t.

  “You know, the thing you said about being black,” I prodded.

  “I’m not black,” Giulia said. “I’m brown like you.”

  “I’m brown and black,” I told her, realizing this truth for the first time.

  It is in here and out there, my racial identity; it is something I have both lived and learned. My racial sense of self is made of rage and faith, pain and joy; it’s a sensory cocktail I remember experiencing every time I heard my church aunts and uncles tell the tales—black tales—about how they made it over and broke through. By black I mean black, not African American; I was born in the same era in which my father was reborn, in the wake of civil rights and the first stirrings of Black Power, and all of their attendant pageants of glorious struggle and triumph. It goes deep, beyond the skin, the organic racial romance that informs everything I do, and everything I write. I am black—and brown, too: Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.

  Skin

  Thomas and his six-year-old daughter Meghan come ov
er for a visit. Our living room is a tight space, so our bodies touch when Meghan and I sit side by side on the couch. For a while, we listen to the conversation between Thomas and John. Meghan touches my hand tentatively, and I understand that she wants to examine the thick silver band I wear on my middle finger. She turns my hand over to study the ring from another angle. I admire her profile, which is nearly obscured by her stick-straight blond hair. She leans forward, turns her own hand over, and puts our exposed palms side by side.

  The dark etchings on my palm have never looked as bold, as thick, as mysterious, as they do now, set against hers, which are nearly invisible, more impressions than actual lines. Married to a white man, having had white friends all of my life, I must have noticed this difference before, but I don’t remember the initial experience of discovery.

  Meghan and I are mesmerized. We hold our palms perfectly still while the room goes quiet. Meghan’s father gently pulls her hand away from mine. He smiles at me. His eyes seem to offer an apology. The men resume their talk.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Meghan is looking down, her hands folded in her lap. My face is hot and I shift in my seat, uncomfortably aware of the nearness of our bodies. The current of mutual curiosity that had united us has been smothered under a heavy blanket of shame.

  * * *

  —

  Thomas doesn’t want me to feel like an object of study, for Meghan to examine me as she did my ring. He wants to save his daughter, too, from being an unwitting perpetrator of a kind of exoticization. One of the reasons I like Thomas is because he is the kind of white person who is sensitive to these things, attentive to what it must feel like to be black in a white place. But just as much, I think, he simply does not want Meghan to see the difference between us. The problem is, she does.

  I had not felt studied or exoticized by Meghan. I had not felt like a curio or an artifact. I had felt like a woman with beautiful hands. I felt only tenderness for the child and her wonder at my palm. The pleasure she took in our difference pleased me.

  * * *

  —

  A few years later I became a mother.

  “Mommy, what color is Daddy’s skin?” asked Giulia. She was three years old. I had just packed her and her sister into the car to take them to preschool. Through the open window they waved good-bye to John before he turned and went back into the house.

  I panicked. Just a few days before, my friend Tina told me that her son had recently made a reference to a “black guy” at school. She panicked. It turned out her son meant a guy wearing a black shirt.

  “Do you mean what color is Daddy’s shirt?” I asked.

  “No,” Giulia responded. “I mean what color is Daddy’s skin.”

  “It’s tan,” I began carefully. “Daddy’s family is from Italy. Your skin is brown because you were born in Ethiopia. Mine is brown because my family is from the United States and Trinidad.”

  She was silent. I was relieved.

  At that point, the four of us were leading Crayola lives. Except for the hours my daughters were in preschool, we lived in the bubble of the four of us, a family, the skin of whose members ranged from Almond to Sepia, according to the Crayola Color Chart. Before they came to know race, I wanted them to enjoy color. In my mind, in my experience, they were distinct: race was trauma; color was beauty. Between race and color was the distance between our public and private lives. I maintained the distance for as long as I could. I resented it when the distance collapsed. My resentment had less to do with introduction of the language of race into our vocabulary, and more to do with my inability as a mother to enable my children to define the world on their own terms. I wanted their world to be different from the one I had inherited. The language of color sounded like the freedom I craved, freedom from my own past—for them and for me.

  * * *

  —

  I can’t help it, or so it appears. I carry the trove of my mother’s stories inside of me, like an organ. I adorn myself with them, like jewels or thorns on a crown. Stories of her rage, pain, and bewilderment over what she had witnessed and experienced as a black girl growing up in the Jim Crow South. Because she was a skilled narrator, I felt my mother’s stories as much as heard them. Now I tell them myself, because they are interesting, because I can’t resist stories that can be felt as well as heard, and because I feel a need, both obligation and urge, to keep them alive. My mother felt the same need; the stories did not belong to her exclusively. Some of them she had inherited from her mother and grandmother just as plainly as she had inherited from them the shape of her legs and the moles on her neck. My mother’s family had no money. Their name was inherited from a white man. Am I maintaining our only legacy, or am I perpetuating the pain of the past? Is the telling the salve or the wound?

  * * *

  —

  “It’s strange to me,” I say to Shanté, a friend and former student who is visiting from New York. “The girls don’t approach white people with the same wariness, even fear, that I do.”

  “That’s because they’re growing up in a house with a white person who loves them,” Shanté replies.

  * * *

  —

  As my daughters become more interested in the world and my past, I tell them my mother’s stories, which they find curious but alien. Indeed my mother’s stories describe a world that seems light-years apart from the one in which they were born, and the one in which they live now.

  One day when she was in the third grade, Isabella told me she had a story about something that happened to Giulia that day on the bus ride home from school.

  “Don’t tell her,” Giulia whispered to her sister, and I knew the story was about race. She knew I would leap to her defense, or overreact, which my daughters tell me that I do so much that overreacting is just the way that I react. Giulia did not want me to react or defend her. In other words, she did not want me to claim the story as my own.

  Isabella told me anyway. Another third grader, a boy called Farhan, announced to the other kids on the bus that he would “never marry a girl with skin as dark as Giulia’s,” Isabella said.

  I tried to keep the heartbreak out of my eyes as I turned to Giulia, who was petting Shadow, her stuffed cat. “I didn’t care,” she said.

  “You did!” insisted Isabella. “You should have seen your face.”

  What happened after the insult was more remarkable to me than the slight. Patrick, a classmate and friend who lives nearby, a white boy, stood up and denounced the comment as racist. Other kids followed suit.

  “The same kind of thing happened to me when I was growing up,” I told my daughters. “But no white kids ever stood up for me.”

  Upon first hearing it, I feared the incident had hurt Giulia. But the insult is not the part of the story that Giulia carries. In fact, she prompts me to tell it now, when adult friends come over.

  “How did you feel?” Estelle asked Giulia when she heard the story.

  “I could have beaten him up,” Giulia said, “but I didn’t.”

  In her evolving life narrative, the bus story is about herself as a source of power, not as an object of humiliation.

  * * *

  —

  “I know that when the girls go out with John, they’re going to come back,” I say to Shanté, who nods. She knows that I am talking about the killings of black men and women that now seem routine, the parade of deaths that feed the news at a steady march. I mean that the girls are going to come back alive, and that this is because of the color of John’s skin.

  If I have done nothing else in this life, I have given my children a father who loves and protects them. My daughters enjoy the shelter of his strong, solid, male body, which they use as furniture: stool, armchair, and bed. They don’t know it now, but the color of his body, his skin, is also a shelter, a shield, but only as long as they stay close.


  * * *

  —

  When she was four years old, I teased Isabella once about who she might marry. “Your mother would be very disappointed in you,” she responded gravely. For starting such a conversation with a four-year-old girl, she meant, or maybe starting such a conversation with anyone at all.

  Then she said, “I’m going to marry a man. A man with skin a different color than mine.”

  “I—” I started, having no idea what to say next.

  She cut me off. “It’s my choice.”

  Much later, she explained that she meant someone who looked like her father. And why shouldn’t she be free to choose someone like John? She has made a home of his body. Of course she would imagine a faraway future with a man whose skin is the same color and texture as that of the current love of her life.

  * * *

  —

  At a summertime gathering of friends, a black woman who is married to a white man describes a situation at work. A white colleague complimented her on the light color of her children’s skin. Not wanting to jeopardize the work relationship, not wanting to be cast as “oversensitive,” my friend accepted the compliment.

  “I wondered what Paul would say,” she says. Paul is her husband.