This Will Be My Undoing Read online

  Lorraine Bethel, a black lesbian feminist poet, wrote a poem called “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” about buying a sweater that was once owned by a white woman. When Bethel smells the sweater, its scent is comfort, a delicacy that she will never know in her life. This comfort that Bethel describes is one that I believe black women secretly desire, but also eschew. There is pride in getting by with less. We do it, our mothers have done it, and our female ancestors have surely done it, too. There is a pride in still being here in spite of it all, and that’s a feeling that white women will never be able to experience. But even though black women may not want to be white women, “frustration” and “anger” would be plausible words for how some of us may feel about all the benefits of their whiteness that they receive—luxuries won without any exhaustion, without an investment of labor. We never had organized groups like the KKK believing so strongly in our purity that they would lynch any sun-kissed man for even looking in our direction. We are never in mainstream spaces without someone asking, Why? With white women it’s, Why not? Our existence begs more questioning. Their existence doesn’t and, in fact, often comes with praise for just having shown up. We are afterthoughts; they are the nuclei. White women have been the basis of feminism, and they have fought for their rights at the expense of black people. Elizabeth Cady Stanton once asserted, “The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the Negro . . . but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first . . .”

  And arguably, white women have a vested interest in a patriarchy that is more ruinous towards black women’s bodies than their own. Our pussies do not unite us. It is easy for white people, especially women, to cut away at our bodies like we are meat on a slab. It was easy for nineteenth-century white women to wear bustles to make their asses look bigger; easy for Rachel Dolezal to slap on a wig and brown foundation and call herself black; easy for Kylie to wear cornrows and be seen as an innovator. We are not seen as people, but rather as parts that can be appropriated and tailored anytime and in any place.

  When black women look at Rachel Dolezal, we see someone who used our skin and hair as a cloak. She never lived in a black woman’s body, because if she did she’d know that to be like us is to always dwell in a place of war. Our bodies are vulnerable; we await attack as we salt our wounds from the last one. We are the mules whose origins we cannot fully imagine, but now is our time to reclaim our dreams about ourselves. What is the black woman, and how do we go about procuring this knowledge about who she is? We’ve been finding out who we are through the influence that we have upon everyone else and the influence they have on us. Black men, white men, white women—each one of these groups has had a stake in our bodies, even though we’ve never given our consent. We have to get our bodies back somehow, but we must navigate our own bodies first. How do we turn inward? How do we find a place of refuge within them?

  I’ve never been asked what I am in my own imagination. What is a black woman to herself out from under the shadow of the white woman? For black women, whiteness and white womanhood linger over our heads, smothering our consciousness every day. But we are not the inverse of whiteness—or white womanhood, for that matter. Still our bodies find a way to come back to us distorted like images in fun house mirrors. We know something is wrong with the distortions, but we cannot say what. This is the magic that I believe Claudia talks about in The Bluest Eye. But if we are not the opposite of whiteness, then what are we? Maybe the truth is that we are invisible to ourselves. The truth is, we are all clamoring for something ancient within our souls that is still virgin from white touch. We are nostalgic for something that we cannot claim, an artifact within ourselves that was not chained when our foremothers were transported across the Atlantic to the New World. The Portuguese call this “saudade,” feeling a loss or absence of something that we know will never return.

  We may never find it, but we must keep digging anyhow. It is an arduous battle to piece together our existence while we are trying to resist during our individual lives. I do believe in the Audre Lorde saying that you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. But we’ve been working in that house for centuries. We may know the tools better than the master, and we must know all the ways in which they operate in order to destroy the master’s power over our lives. We must consider white womanhood. If we abandon that prematurely without studying its influence, then we will not know all the ways in which that power functions so that we can trap it before it traps us. But we must not dwell on it for too long. For as long as white women have been appropriating our bodies, we have been insulted and afflicted. And frankly, I am tired of being in such an abusive relationship that I never agreed to in the first place. There was never any honeymoon period. There is no need to consider those who take without giving, speak without listening, and use feminism as a way to unify without analyzing black women’s differences and their complications.

  I had no desire to see my natural hair until I went to Princeton and I saw many black women abandon the creamy crack and hot comb. Maybe it was due to a lack of sufficient funds or black hair stylists around the area, but nevertheless, I was inspired. One evening, two of my closest friends helped me to undo my Senegalese twists and wash my hair. Once the water hit my scalp, my strands did not rotate around one other in the stream. Instead they transformed into tight coils whose definition could only be seen if they were separated from one another with the use of hands or cream that consisted not of sodium hydroxide but shea butter, jojoba oil, coconut oil, aloe vera juice, and avocado oil, among other things. There was no pain, no burn. I stared at myself in the mirror, afraid to touch my own curls out of fear that they would snap off in my hands. I felt naked, unsure of my own natural beauty.

  I went to a dorm party later that evening, and there I received more compliments than I ever had with any other style. At first, I was confused. I wondered if people were just being nice because they knew I was deathly insecure and they wanted to make me feel better about my hot mess of a hairdo. My afro barely touched my shoulders. How could anyone consider this beautiful? But they did. I will never forget the increased breadth of sensation I experienced when I walked out of my dormitory and felt the undulations of the wind coursing through my scalp. I didn’t have to worry about when I would need to schedule my next perm because the wind had gotten the best of my style. I’ll never forget how self-conscious I felt walking from one end of an Ivy League campus to the other, worried that I would feel less deserving than I already did. But damn, did it feel good to be free.

  When my mother found out about my natural hair, she worried that my hair would break off because I wouldn’t be able to take care of it. So I watched YouTube video after YouTube video on how to moisturize, preshampoo, wash, deep-condition, and create two-strand twists. When I washed my hair with SheaMoisture products while showering and stepped out to return to the mirror, I did not immediately grab a towel to cover my body. Instead, I watched my hair spiral into tight coils again, the water hiding in and around my scalp, and I became aroused. I thought maybe this was because I was naked and watching water bead down the hills of my breasts, but I was looking only at my hair. For years, I had complied with a tradition and restrained my sexuality, the appeal of my hair, through perms and relaxers and hot combs. But this place, more than any other site on my body, was the domain of my humanity.

  And if I step away from the mirror altogether, I can really look at myself: my skin, my large afro, and my curvy frame. The realization of who I am is more visceral. I look down at my thick thighs and my large breasts, and I know that I have this body. This body is mine and I hold on to it. I want to know how I exist in my own imagination. The black female imaginary is what happens when you see yourself as another black woman may see you. The black female imaginary is what happens when you look at your
self, when your body is what you hold on to and your mind focuses inward to inquire about who you are, not outward to actively combat what is out there. I know that as a black woman, I am a problem. I am a contradiction of what it means to be human, but I am still here anyhow. I speak, I talk, I think, and I walk with a swivel in my hips. Perhaps it is the black female imaginary and not whiteness that is strange and mysterious, but I prefer it to be that way. When I see other black women whose behavior and decision making towards their appearances I cannot understand, I know the parts I’m searching for in me are already in them and vice versa. We need to collect our many imaginations together in order to build a body of knowledge. We are fighting just by living.

  I have been natural for over ten years now. My hair is longer than it’s ever been. Defining my curls takes a concerted effort. My afro is thick. My shrinkage is massive, although I prefer it this way. My hair holds much more than it ever has, and I feel like I am living who I really am. Rubbing coconut oil or shea butter into my curls becomes a meditative process, a way in which to maintain my beauty. If my hair is considered wild, so be it. I prefer it that way. Thankfully, a huge natural hair movement is happening. Many natural hair bloggers, video content makers, and even regular black women are emerging in our culture, so the dichotomized images of black hair are becoming less so.

  Sexuality is harnessed through black women’s manes. Its wildness and expansiveness is a sight to behold. It is something that many institutions try to tame but cannot. And I, for one, enjoy living my life as a provocation.

  I am who I am despite imposters, despite the carnivalesque images of my body reflected back at me by our society. I am a stranger and I like it.

  4

  A Hunger for Men’s Eyes

  But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

  —1 Corinthians 7:9 KJV

  When I was a child, I held in my head a concrete image of marrying at twenty-two. It seemed to me then like the perfect age because I would be finished with college, and I’d figured that women were over the hill by the age of twenty-five. On my mother’s side of the family, the oldest member, male or female, to get married had been twenty-six. My grandmother married at sixteen and my mother at seventeen. They had children less than two years into their marriages. I assumed that I would follow in their footsteps, not only because there was a clear pattern but also because I did not know how long I would be able to contain myself.

  Aside from being off the mark about when a woman should reach personal milestones, unsurprisingly, I also had no idea what marriage entailed. I’d never envisioned a wedding gown, the exchange of rings, a first dance. I just imagined infinite kisses and bodies pressed together, the stuff I saw in R-rated movies when I was around twelve or thirteen. What exactly those bodies did, I wasn’t sure, but I knew it had to be good since neither party wanted to pull away. I was raised not to explore my sexuality with an unfettered curiosity unless it was set within the parameters of marriage. I believed that as long as I had a diamond ring encircling my finger, I would be in the clear.

  I was around eleven years old, and it was summer. I was spending time at one of my cousins’ homes in South Jersey. Another cousin, Mia, who was only a couple years older than I was and whom I saw about once a year whenever her mom decided to come into town from Ohio, joined me in one of the spare rooms, where I was changing into my bathing suit to meet the rest of my family in the pool. I do not remember how we got on the topic of breasts, but I suppose it was because mine were either exposed or spilling over the cups of my bra because I was a 34C before I was in the sixth grade. Surprised, Mia commented on how big I was, and I nervously half smiled as I always did whenever these remarks were directed towards me.

  And then she asked me, “You aren’t scared?”

  I jerked my neck and asked, “Scared? Scared of what?”

  The tone of her voice shifted and her reply sounded like a whine. “When I go back to school, I have to worry because the guys in my year pinch the boobs of any girl they see and I’m next.”

  When I looked at Mia, however, I was surprised that she didn’t look terrified, but instead she seemed sort of annoyed, sort of excited. Her eyes were downcast, but her lips were upturned. I do not know if she was smiling to ease the tension. She was a mess of contradiction; I’d actually heard a note of fear and resignation.

  “Can’t you tell someone if they do it to you?” I naively asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. They gon’ do it anyway.”

  There was nothing more to say and we finished changing.

  I forgot about Mia’s words until I began sixth grade. The racial hierarchies of male desire were much more apparent that year. At the top there were the white girls, whom every boy wanted. White girls were always considered the most beautiful and popular, but they were mostly out of reach. Latinas were beautiful and popular, too, but more accessible; the boys considered them more sexually mature. Anyone of Asian descent was on the margins. As for the black girls, if you were not light-skinned, you were automatically considered the least attractive. It wasn’t unusual for me to hear dark-skinned black girls called “burnt,” as if they should be discarded because they’d been left on the heat for too long.

  My male classmates openly competed to see how many butts they could slap at recess. Only the Latinas and black girls were targets. Sometimes, I would see girls looking over their shoulders and subsequently running away, smiling, before boys caught up with them to smack their butts and then run in the opposite direction. If a girl was slapped, she rarely got upset because at least she was considered attractive enough to slap. She was being watched, a guy just had to touch her, and who didn’t want that?

  I was anxious about when I would get slapped. I had a crush on a guy named Juan, a Puerto Rican classmate with intense eyes and a suaveness that far surpassed his years. Although I had known him to exclusively date white girls, when he was single his arms would be like windmills, winding up and rolling around to see who he could slap. His hands were quicker than his friends’, and while they often almost got caught by the teachers within a millisecond, Juan always went undetected. I spent countless days fantasizing about when he would choose me to be his girlfriend, or at least say that I was pretty. But as time passed, my hope diminished. So I went for another approach: I wanted to learn how to be cooler. My rapidly growing rapport with a group of black girls could not have come at a better time. Two of them, Kiki and Bethany, had a kind of wit I desperately desired. Every recess, they taught me how to walk while rolling my hips, and they stood on each side of me as I practiced. They watched my jaw whenever I spoke and made me loosen it, to let the words flow and slur together on their own. They critiqued my laugh so that it no longer reached a higher octave but stayed consistent, my chuckles flittering until my diaphragm almost gave out. Finally, I had to become stylish, the hardest achievement of all. Instead of wearing Limited Too and Gap, I wanted Apple Bottom jeans, Baby Phat T-shirts, Timbs, and fitted hats. The Holy Grail was a jersey dress. A jersey dress was tight enough to accentuate curves, long enough to avoid a trip to the principal’s office, and short enough to make a guy notice all that you were working with.

  I purchased a UNC–Chapel Hill jersey dress when I went on vacation with one of my friends and refused to wear it until I returned to school post–spring break. When I pulled the dress over my head and walked to the bus stop, I quietly began to panic. I could not swish my hips in that dress. If I did, I was sure someone would catch a glimpse of my panties. How could I laugh and talk how they’d taught me when I was worried that I could be exposed at any moment? Throughout the morning, I kept my books over my pelvic area and secretly patted my backside behind corners to make sure that I was still protected. At recess, both Kiki and Bethany praised my outfit, and I embellished the story of a ten-minute splurge at an Orlando mall and made it sound like an epic adventure.

  Once the whistle was blown, the signal for us to gather into single-fil
e lines, I saw that Juan and his friends were the last to regroup with our class. Before I wouldn’t have dared pay him mind, but this day was different; today I was wearing a jersey dress. He had to see me now. The jersey dress was the equivalent of a blinking neon sign, saying, Woo-hoo, over here. I glanced over my shoulder as we walked back into the building, our lines dispersing into the usual friend circles. I glanced over my shoulder again and saw that Juan and his friends were looking at me. One raised his eyebrows, another smiled, the other nodded. I smiled and kept walking but slowed my feet. Then suddenly, I felt a light wind and a hard smack landed on my butt. When I turned, I saw that it was Juan. I sucked my teeth and feigned offense and took my seat.

  Juan never ended up being my boyfriend. He got back together with his ex, Casey, a white girl with dirty-blonde hair and blue eyes. She was one of the cheerleaders I sucked up to during tryouts, and she made the team every year. She could have had anyone in the school. She knew it, too.

  Around that time, my mother expressed her concern about how I was dressing and the girls I’d decided to befriend. It wasn’t the clothes themselves but rather the brands and what kind of impressions they gave to others. She did not want me becoming a “fast-tailed girl” because that was not who I was. That was not who she raised me to be. Her voice was clear, her eyes unwavering, and she didn’t smile. This was not a joke, but a message that I needed to heed for as long as I lived on this earth in this body. I might have heard about the dangers of “fast-tailed girls” before, but this was different because the warning was directed at me. I sat still in quiet submission and then left her bedroom more confused than before, desire and propriety battling within me. Years later, when I read Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time, I realized that these sexual childhood games are not limited to America, but are a problem for young black girls across the globe. In the novel, the unnamed British narrator details the tradition of black girls being cornered by their male classmates, who would push their panties aside and stick as many fingers inside their vaginas as they could. The white girls were not a part of the game. The narrator does not say why, but I know why. It is the same reason why the white girls at my middle school did not get slapped on the butts while the black girls and the Latinas were open territory. I love that Smith chooses not to openly articulate this, because doing so would present an issue for which black girls and women have yet to find its origins.