This Will Be My Undoing Read online

  I do not know where I first encountered the phrase “fast-tailed girl.” My mother doesn’t either. It is always used by older generations, as it was used by the older generations before them. I’ve heard it spoken most by black Christian women, and men use it from time to time. “Sluts” or “whores” are terms used more in white spaces; black girls are “fast-tailed” or “ho(e)s.” A “fast-tailed girl” may be a black girl who wants attention from men, gets pregnant out of wedlock, spends too much time talking to boys, wears dresses or skirts that are too short, crosses one leg over the other with too much thigh showing during this rearrangement, et cetera, et cetera. It would be wrong to unilaterally categorize this phrase as slut-shaming. On one level, it is. On another level, though, “fast-tailed girl” is a weaponized phrase intended to protect black girls, although its impact tends to be the opposite.

  Only black women know black girlhood well enough to understand that once a black baby girl exits the womb, it is not enough that she is alive and well. Even before she’s born, folks want to know whether she will be light- or dark-skinned, have good curly hair or a thick afro, share her father’s big lips or have her mother’s big nose. All of these cultural burdens weigh down her body before she is fully formed. Once she is brought into this world, everyone silently acknowledges the battles that she will fight just for being born a black girl. She cannot just be good; she has to be better than good in order to meet the white female standard. This black girl cannot just be presentable in terms of hair and style; she has to be acceptable. She cannot just be conservative in terms of sexuality; she has to be closed off. Black girls are not afforded the luxury of just being girls. They are never innocent or cute. If only a black girl can be a “fast-tailed girl,” then she is not a girl at all, but a beast.

  There is no male equivalent for a “fast-tailed girl” within the black community because male sexuality is not only encouraged but praised. Boys are boys, and men are men. Female elders may purse their lips and speak about a black boy’s player ways with the ladies, but he is not admonished for being potentially promiscuous like black girls are. When he is criticized for his dress, if his pants sag, it is not because this means that his dick is accessible to anyone, or that he is a sexual deviant. He is criticized for his dress because no one wants anyone to assume that he is a lazy good-for-nothing person. No one worries if he’s talking too much to girls; in fact, this may even instill pride in his father (though his mother may worry about an unexpected pregnancy). Black girls, however, are oftentimes treated as outsiders inside black spaces.

  Even though neither my grandmother nor my mother graduated from college, they bought into the general cultural narrative that college is where American women are supposed to find their husbands. I never got into a relationship in high school, for fear of being academically distracted, and so they felt that Princeton was my time to find love. But my mother assumed that because I was entering into an extremely white institution, I would most likely not marry someone black. Furthermore, black women outnumbered black men almost three to one at Princeton, and black Americans were the minority compared to the number of Africans and West Indians. I was always open to dating a man of any race, but I first wanted to prove her wrong by any means necessary. I suppose I was less concerned with matters of love and more concerned with showing myself and my mother that I was not unattractive to men of my own community. But when I got there, I soon realized the challenges that I faced.

  I joined the Princeton Association of Black Women, and one of our recurring conversations was about our dateability on campus. Mostly we were not in relationships, and this was not out of choice. We all knew that black women were much more likely to remain unmarried compared to white women. We all idolized Michelle Obama for being able to find her equal, even if she hadn’t met Barack until well after her undergraduate years. When I was a junior, I successfully “bickered” Cannon, one of Princeton’s eleven eating clubs, which was mostly populated by the university’s top athletes. Because the eating club system was the center of campus social life, and because I hadn’t previously been successful finding my place within it, I felt validated and aimed to take advantage of my new status by trying much harder at parties to be “seen” so that I could leave Princeton saying that I was in at least one relationship.

  Although I attended Cannon’s parties every once in a while, downing vodka and tequila while wearing crop tops, my drunken confidence did not entice any guy to come my way. I realized just how unattractive I was when, one night while I was sitting in Cannon’s main living room lamenting to another black female Cannon member about my frustration at being single, one of the black football players sat down beside us. I considered him a friend. In fact, he was one of the reasons why I’d gotten into Cannon in the first place. But when he got comfortable on the sofa, he needed our help. He and the rest of his teammates were making a list of the most attractive black women at Princeton, and he then proceeded to list a Who’s Who of those in my class, asking me to fill in the blanks. I was not among them and I was too afraid to ask why. At that point, it didn’t matter. I was invisible to the men I wanted most to attract. I felt like I was an untouchable, at the bottom of our caste system, destined to be both unloved and unsexed.

  It didn’t help that just weeks before this incident, I had been stood up by a black grad student in the Neuroscience Department, despite the fact that he’d pursued me on a crowded, poorly lit dance floor at a party and asked for my number. We’d hung out at the Woodrow Wilson “Woody Woo” fountain right in front of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and talked about music and our family lives. He wanted us to see a Broadway show together, and to break me out of my fear of watching scary movies. I wanted him to be mine. He was good-looking enough and talkative, and that seemed adequate.

  Our seeing each other lasted two weeks. He never gave a reason for standing me up, only asked to reschedule, which we never did. I remember passing by him in the gym as he quickly averted his eyes. I had grown accustomed to situations like these that had no closure: there was the guy who’d wanted to get dinner in the dining hall, suggested we do it again sometime, then told me he was too busy because he had to work on study abroad applications, only for me to later find out that he wanted to party on a Saturday night with all the girls who were on my football player friend’s list. I began to wonder if something was intrinsically wrong with me, something less obvious than a deficit in looks, style, or personality. I thought that I was suffering from some kind of invisible disease and all the men knew it, which is why they quickly abandoned me. Whether it was the desperation oozing through my pores, or a lack of confidence that wore me better than my own clothes, I felt like less of a woman.

  At Princeton, I spent a significant amount of my time outside of classrooms and libraries at weekly Bible study meetings, where the fear of being single for too long trickled in. Our coordinator did her best to calm our fears by reiterating that patience was a godly virtue and that, according to the book of Proverbs, we were supposed to be pursued and not vice versa. She’d enjoyed an incredibly harmonious and happy marriage since twenty-two, which is what I wanted, but I wasn’t sure that she knew of heartbreak like mine. I wanted to believe her. But I could not be passive. I have always been a driven, outspoken person, and I was known on campus for my fiery debating style and my provocative articles as an opinion columnist for the Daily Princetonian.

  Suddenly, I started to wonder if this was the reason why I was undesirable: I talked too much, and didn’t know how to be docile. Most of the other black women who never seemed to have a shortage of men in pursuit were not as vocal as I was. They seemed less loud, more reserved, and more relaxed in party settings. But by the time I realized this, I was on the verge of graduating and it seemed too late. I had dreamed of marrying at twenty-two, but I had never imagined that I might leave college without ever having been in a relationship or having kissed someone throughout the duration of those four years.
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  At twenty-two, I was trying to have a monogamous relationship with a man named Bradley, a childhood friend and longtime admirer whom I hadn’t spoken to since senior year of high school. I thought I was in love, and I hoped to marry him someday.

  He lived and studied thousands of miles away from me, but to my surprise and delight, about three months before graduation, I received a text from him. I thought that he was reaching out just to say hello, but then he invited me on an all-expenses-paid trip to Nevada so we could catch up with each other. I didn’t hesitate. I yearned for male attention, and I was afraid that my four-year dry spell at Princeton was steadily turning me cold, bitter, and emotionally mute. For the several weeks leading up to the trip, we spoke every evening. We spoke so often, I felt like he was right beside me. As I descended the escalator at McCarran Airport, I saw Bradley—now several inches taller and wider with muscle—standing there with a bouquet of roses. All of the years of loneliness and rejection melted away as we cruised down the highway in his silver Porsche. When we were children, I’d constantly rebuffed this man’s advances, but now that we were adults I was ready. Except that Bradley expected us to have sex, but much to his chagrin I said no because we were not in a committed relationship. It also helped that I got my period on my connecting flight to Nevada. To this day, I believe this buffer was an act of God, signaling to me that the time was not right and he was not it.

  Nevertheless, these excuses led to an argument, and he turned away from me in the bed that we shared. He told me that because he was in the military, he received very little physical contact and that was his way to connect. All of this seemed quite plausible, but I still wouldn’t budge. I planned on remaining a virgin until marriage, but I was trying to convince myself to settle for a committed relationship—it would be a way to make him stay. I cried in that bed and I wiped my tears without him so much as touching my back. He told me that he didn’t want to see me cry and that was that. The next morning, I woke him up, asked him to get a condom, and then I went down on him. It was the most emotionless thing I’ve ever done. I performed fellatio not because I wanted to but because I thought I had to. He’d spent thousands of dollars on me. He was going to be successful and could have had any woman he wanted. I, who was so unsure of myself, had no job prospects after college and needed a reminder that something was not wrong with me, that I could be wanted. I wasn’t going to allow him to penetrate me, but I was going to allow him to be in my mouth for a short while. After all, I thought, it was my mouth that dissuaded men from dating me anyway. I talked too much and gave my opinions too freely. My silence through giving head was my kind of docility. It wasn’t supposed to be pleasurable. It was my duty, my debt.

  When I returned to New Jersey, I was terrified that he would never reach out to me again. I’d already found a man who was willing to chase me; why couldn’t I have been more docile by losing my virginity to him? But then he texted, and in a matter of weeks we’d said we loved each other and were planning a future together. Separated by thousands of miles and state lines, we tried our best to maintain intimacy through frequent video conversations during which we would get naked, and I would watch him climax. I never did because I had no idea what to do to myself. I assumed that if I squeezed my breasts and he orgasmed, then somehow his pleasure would be transmitted through the computer screen and disperse across all my erogenous zones. One night, he asked me if I wanted to watch porn with him. It wasn’t like I had never seen it before. I had inadvertently watched a few minutes of porn when I was a child, at the Peninsula hotel in New York City. I remember a guy waving a fleshy wand in between his legs; I was too young to understand that was his penis. When I got older, I used to watch soft-core porn late at night if I was bored, but I never touched myself, figuring that the voyeurism was enough. So when Bradley was enough of a gentleman to ask me to pick a clip out of thousands (or millions), my pointer grazed over random ones: “Asian housemaid gets taught a lesson,” “Ebony double stuffed,” “Blonde slut gets manhandled.” But the one that most piqued my interest was double penetration. Bradley could not understand why any of that would excite me. I couldn’t articulate why. He didn’t get off while we watched, so I allowed him to switch to something else, but the memory of watching a woman getting filled in three orifices at once, wondering how that was at all possible, flickered behind my eyes. I did the responsible thing and got on birth control. The plan was for me to fly back out to Nevada during the Fourth of July weekend, where we’d have sex and, I guess, ride off into the proverbial sunset.

  A week before I was supposed to leave, my mother texted me and asked if it was okay to talk. I was in the middle of my first MFA residency, which I began immediately after graduation, and I knew this had to be serious. When we finally connected, she told me that she had been praying for Bradley and me, and she wanted me to make sure that he really loved me before I decided to be intimate with him. At first I was upset, interpreting her concern as an intentional effort to thwart me on my road to true and everlasting love. But out of respect, I allowed her to finish, and then together we prayed that anything hidden would be revealed. That night, as always, Bradley and I talked for hours. I happened to mention how glad I was that we were finally in a relationship that made me feel secure enough to fly out to see him and have sex, but Bradley was caught off guard. He told me that although he loved me, he was not ready to be in an exclusive relationship. He then went on to say that he thought I was enough for him, but in order for him to be sure, he had to experience some things. He still wanted to travel the world and sleep with other women. When I told him that I had waited too long to lose my virginity in such a noncommittal way, we ultimately decided that for me to fly back out to Nevada would not be in my best interest, and we stopped speaking.

  Calling what I experienced after our demise “heartbreak” would be an offense to the depth of my feelings. I didn’t just break. I shattered. I cried whenever someone uttered his name. I kept my cell phone by my face at night, hoping that I’d hear the buzz of a notification and it would be a message from him telling me how much he missed and loved me. Because I did not immediately get a job out of college, I had moved back home and my idleness worsened my suffering. When I wasn’t pitching articles, I was losing myself to grief. I went to two therapy sessions with two different professionals. I took ballroom dancing lessons. I wrote Bradley a letter where I confessed that I thought I was never good enough for him and he responded thanking me for my vulnerability, but sticking to his belief that he had made the right decision.

  In retrospect, I know that losing my virginity to Bradley would have been excruciating because I would have felt coerced and judged myself for not feeling aroused. But back then, I hated myself for thinking that my pussy was any better than those of the billions of other women out there who have healthy and happy sex lives with imperfect yet good men like Bradley—with or without commitment.

  It took me six months to go out on a date again after Bradley, a year to get over him, and two years to recover from the pain. Since I spent most of my time indoors, either at my mother’s house or in a dancing studio, I decided that the only way I would meet men was OkCupid. Within a few short weeks, I’d connected with a guy named Chris, a redheaded veterinary student at the University of Pennsylvania. On our first date we went to the Cheesecake Factory and then a bar, where we discussed our families, political views, and past dating experiences for two and a half hours. He tried to compliment me by saying that he would date any woman irrespective of race, and that when he saw my profile he didn’t see a black woman. I remembered how my outspokenness had perhaps ruined my dating life at college. It was already bad enough that I could not attract black men, and so I kept quiet, afraid to correct Chris about the impossibility of color blindness because he might have mistaken that for aggression. I didn’t want to be a black female stereotype, the Sapphire who emasculates men and usurps their dominant role.

  Since the 1800s, one of the stereotypes that black women
in popular culture fall into is that of the “sassy mammies.” Because they were accepted in white families, their presence gave the impression that their oppression was minimal. The name “Sapphire” came from Sapphire Stevens, an Amos ’n’ Andy character, who constantly mocked her husband, Kingfish, leader of a black fraternal lodge in Harlem, calling him a failure. Both black and nonblack men know the Sapphire very well. She’s Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, Tracy Jordan’s wife in 30 Rock, Omarosa Manigault on The Apprentice: any loud neck- and eye-rolling black woman who dares to challenge a man or voice her opinion. Black women aren’t presented as people to be loved, but rather as sources of entertainment, and black women’s mouths are always a spectacle.