This Will Be My Undoing Read online

  But the more I watched, the more violent my fantasies became. I transitioned from watching blonde women being doubly penetrated to imagining myself being doubly penetrated as part of some bacchanal in the middle of a tropical rainforest. In a glass enclosure, scientists studied the frequencies of my moans. The men were always those who I knew very well. For a while I was infatuated with a white man ten years my senior, and I envisioned him laying me down underneath a moss-draped cypress tree near one of Louisiana’s bayous. It was night, and a strange, thick mist billowed nearby. Apart from the loud crickets in the background, we were alone, kissing underneath a crescent moon. But when I pushed a little deeper into this fantasy—while stimulating my clit, of course—I realized that our clothes were not modern. He wore a long, loose linen shirt, a jerkin, and breeches. I wore a Victorian-style dress and scarf. My God. Was I his concubine? Was I a maid? Was I even free? I tried to back out of the fantasy, but all of these oscillations led me spiraling into one of the most intense orgasms that I’ve ever had. When I lay back on the pillow afterwards, staring at the ceiling, I was disappointed by what my mind had produced. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t disassociate sex from social context. There were many other instances where I received the most pleasure from visualizing myself as being unequal to a man: a secretary to a high-powered attorney, a grad student to a professor, a patient to a doctor. I was never his equal. I was never someone he had to address with my rightful name. All of these fantasies ran opposite to my desire that I be loved fully and treated respectfully. But I suppose what made me orgasm revealed the darkest truth about myself: I couldn’t see how genuine, healthy love could be associated with sex because sex seemed all about power and I had none of it even without taking my clothes off. At the time, the word “sex” sounded too precious in my mouth. The vowel squeezed between two consonants was too easy to pronounce. It was violent, domineering fucking. I wanted to be crushed.

  Black women’s bodies are so problematic, so fraught, when it comes to sex. While other parts of black women’s bodies, like our hair and butts and breasts, can be seen and slapped or pinched, it’s more of an effort for men to find their way to our pussies. When we were enslaved, however, it did not matter if our pussies were closed. Black women’s bodies have always been open territory, and our pussies would be opened by force and plundered until rubies were drawn. I wonder if “fast-tailed girl” is the terminology of the intergenerationally traumatized. Our visible bodies may already be sexualized without our consent, but if we can withhold sex or rob a man of the prospect of having sex, then somehow we will be “saved” from being a “fast-tailed girl.” But back then, our parents could do little to nothing at all to protect us. There was no withholding of sex. There was no prospect of being “saved” from anything.

  But the fact is black girls are sexualized whether or not we withhold sex.

  Why can’t we be wild? Because we are already wild. Why can’t we enjoy sex? Because we are already sexed without clothes ever having been peeled away from our bodies. Why can’t we be free? Because we were never free.

  Immediately after moving to Harlem, I joined Tinder.

  Kelvin and I went on two dates before he told me that I was looking for a serious commitment that he was not willing to give. There was Etienne, a Malian guy who stood at a staggering six feet, six inches; he tried to woo me with his alleged sexual prowess, but inevitably this scared me off, and I told him that we were better off friends. Leon, a wealthy, suave Nigerian guy who worked in marketing and boasted about his salary, wanted us to spend half of our date in his BMW. When I asked to spend time with him again—since he was attractive and successful—he told me he was busy and never left the door open to schedule anything in the future. All the while, I was writing more online, and this led me to meeting David.

  David was a black investment banker with a strong penchant for African-American literature, and he contacted me through a Black Harlem GroupMe message because he wanted to discuss an article I’d recently written about gentrification. Because I had just moved to Harlem, and my friend circle mainly consisted of people from Princeton, I agreed. What I’d thought would be a short meeting at a local café turned into a two-hour-long stroll around the neighborhood, during which we talked about gentrification, blackness, street harassment, and Toni Morrison. I was impressed; I hadn’t expected an investment banker to revere—almost worship—Toni Morrison. He was able to quote lines from Sula and Paradise with ease. Our stroll culminated on my front stoop, where we exchanged numbers. I quickly willed myself to forget about him, trying hard not to fall too fast for a stranger—that is, until he reached out several hours later and hinted that he would love to see me again.

  Our first real date took place at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side. He asked me about my dreams and aspirations as we went through the aisles of new fiction and nonfiction. I didn’t have to hide any part of myself. Needless to say, I did fall hard for him, and that spiral of desire led to a crash landing. I was a frequent texter and David wasn’t, blaming his late responses on personal issues and exhaustion from work. I’d badger my girlfriends asking how to interpret his text messages, and whether his interest was still there. When we were spending time together, he was entirely engaged in the moment. But when we weren’t actively spending time together, I thought that I was dating myself. I desperately tried to hold on to our chemistry, waiting anxiously by my cell phone, but I knew he was steadily pulling away from me. We stopped talking altogether when he told me that he did not have it in him to be in a committed relationship. He was stressed out over his job, the prospect of going to law school, and the responsibility of supporting his mother and sister back in Texas. I didn’t hear from him for months until I was published on The New Yorker’s website and he congratulated me on my achievement.

  Believing that, after the long silence, this meant that he was finally ready for me, I woke up at six o’clock on a spring morning to a text from him asking for me to call him as soon as possible. When I did, I soon discovered that he only wanted to be friends with me, although he left the option open for casual sex. I told him that wasn’t what I wanted; I yearned for love within a committed relationship.

  “You sound like you’re falling into the trope of the overachieving black woman who has super high standards,” he said.

  And I shattered all over again.

  Although he later apologized—and I accepted that apology—I felt like a failure on a much larger level than I ever had before. Rejection wasn’t because I was too clingy, too outspoken, too aggressive, or too talkative. I was rejected because I was a black woman who was too successful. Somehow all my achievements that I had worked so hard to accrue seemed to be steadily whittling away my dating prospects.

  In the beginning I thought that my anxiety about dating was mine, and mine alone, until I started paying more attention to popular culture and the ways black men fuel this dilemma. Tyler Perry has made millions off of characterizing successful black women as bitter, pretentious, single shrews who need a man to soften their behavior (see Daddy’s Little Girls), or who insult black men (see Madea in The Diary of a Mad Black Woman and I Can Do Bad All by Myself, and Angela in Why Did I Get Married?). This is not to say that these kinds of black women do not exist, but it is disappointing that Perry, one of the most visible black filmmakers of our generation, perpetuates these stereotypes. What is it about our goals that leads to our stigmatization? Is it because there is a deep-seated fear black women will outpace black men, and the only way to remind us of our place is to withhold love and affection? We may be accepted out there in the world with a good-paying job, but that world will never give us love because it wasn’t designed to. But when we return to the folds of our community and find that we are denigrated for the skills we used to survive, what else can we do but suppress ourselves just so we’ll have somebody?

  Coined by Moya Bailey, and further developed by Trudy Hamilton of the now-defunct feminist blog Gradient Lair, the w
ord “misogynoir” describes the hatred towards black women specifically manifested through American visual and popular culture. It is so rampant that to try to conceive of ways to eradicate it would be to pull the threads of society apart altogether. Leslie Jones’s continual harassment on Twitter for being a black woman in Ghostbusters is a prime example. Anytime you see an animalistic or masculine image of Michelle Obama, that’s misogynoir. Whenever black women’s lives are used as props to empower white women, such as the “phenomenon” of Miley Cyrus twerking or Lily Allen’s “satire” in the “Hard Out Here” video, that is misogynoir.

  I don’t want to believe that David deliberately intended to hurt me, but at the same time he is too smart not to know what his statement meant. I wish I could have asked him why he hated me so much before emphasizing to him that, despite what he’s been told, I am not his enemy.

  It felt like no matter what I did, whether I lived at my mother’s house in New Jersey or my apartment in New York, wrote in obscurity or heightened visibility, took initiative or became more submissive, my romantic life always floundered. And because David is black, his comment made me feel like I failed not only on a societal and gendered level, but also on an ethnocultural one, and this failure textured all my past dating experiences. What if I could not keep a man around long enough because I was a black woman who didn’t know her place? What if the modifier of being a black woman vacuumed all my other qualities away? It is an insecurity that I am constantly trying to tease out of my consciousness, but that is hard to do when you’re reminded of the statistics about black women’s marriageability, or lack thereof; every time your grandmother asks yet again if you’ve met anyone; when people crack jokes about why black women’s attitudes are the reason black men flock to white women.

  An NYPD sniper tower was set up on Lenox Avenue between 129th and 130th Streets in Harlem, just a short walk away from where I lived during the summer of 2016. I do not know for sure why it was there. It looms in front of the Pioneer supermarket, which is not exactly a hub of illegal activity besides occasional shoplifters whose pictures are posted on the left side of the glass door as you enter. Central Harlem in general is not that crime-heavy. I have walked home at one or two o’clock in the morning, unscathed. I’ve never been mugged, or heard gunshots. I first thought that because the tower rose around the Fourth of July, maybe the NYPD was preparing for some shit to go down during Independence Day celebrations. But no, that couldn’t be it. I moved in around this time last summer, and there had been no sniper tower.

  Its tall white presence communicated to all of us that we better not try no shit or else. Sometimes a police car would be parked beside the tower, and when one was not, I squinted up to try to see if there was anyone in that tower, but its windows were tinted black. I wanted to ask passersby on the street what was it doing in the neighborhood, but I assumed that anyone’s guess would have been as good as mine. I always said to non-Harlemites that if, God forbid, anything happened to me, I would go to the black men who sat on top of upturned crates outside the barbershop or the laundromat before I would ask the police for help. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had recently been murdered, and their deaths had triggered another cruel summer of black rage that burned hotter than the heat itself.

  In late July of 2016, I went to an outdoor jazz concert in Prospect Park. I took the 2/3 train home and got off at my usual 125th Street stop. Usually, if I’m in a good mood or have just finished a significant project, I reward myself with food or drink: a bottle of Perrier, some Talenti gelato, strawberries, kombucha. That evening, I decided I could go for some Mentos before I returned to my apartment and ended the night with a shower and Netflix. There was a deli open at 127th Street and Lenox Avenue, and despite the drug addict lingering around the aisles, hoping that someone could spare her some change, I headed inside. This was the same drug addict whom I’d ignored two blocks earlier by not making eye contact and bobbing my head to the music playing through my earbuds.

  As I was entering the store, a man standing to the side of the entrance kept calling me “sweetheart” and attempting to promote a DMX concert. I kept my earbuds in until I approached the counter, as I needed to hear the cashier tell me how much I would have to pay for the Mentos. No sooner did I pay for the Mentos than the man called out to me, and I made eye contact with him before stopping. While he told me about the DMX concert, the drug addict tapped me and held up her right pointer finger. She half smiled, and there were barely any teeth in her mouth. Her hair was disheveled. I hurried to pull out a dollar because I couldn’t stand to look at her any longer; she looked like a figment from one of my nightmares. Once she’d moved on, the man started talking to me about the concert again. Supposedly DMX was having some concert in Harlem and he was in charge of promoting it by passing out flyers. I do not know why he was so aggressive, but nevertheless I felt sucked into continuing the conversation. I asked when the concert was and repeatedly nodded my head, feigning interest in an artist who I thought hadn’t been relevant in over a decade.

  The man, who introduced himself as Charlie, wanted me to take down his number and call him in order to get tickets at a discounted price. I told him I would memorize it, but he was not satisfied with my suggestion. There was disgust in his raspy voice.

  “Nah, see? Why you playin’ games? You Harlem girls are suttin’ else. You think errbody tryna hit on you and I’m tryna do business. I’m tryna make money. I mean, I’m handsome and all but I ain’t tryna hit on you or suttin’. You out here playin’ games, you Harlem girls.”

  “I’m not from Harlem,” I said dryly.

  What I’d wanted to say in that moment was, You don’t know me. In retrospect, I think saying that I wasn’t from Harlem was a way of evading his overconfidence about having all women in this neighborhood figured out to a science. But in that moment, I was scared. His voice was steadily increasing in volume. Anger punctuated each word he uttered like the strike of an organ chord. The rest of Harlem disintegrated, as if both he and I existed in a vacuum. I felt alone. What if he hits me? I thought. What if he grabs and pins me up against the outside wall of this deli? So I took out my cell phone and pretended to enter his number in my contacts directory. Luckily for me, he didn’t lean over to see what I was doing.

  The woman who went into that deli was not the same woman who continued home. As soon I walked to the end of the block and waited for the pedestrian light to signal that it was okay for me to proceed, I knew. Something had changed. I had been violated, but I could not name the line that had been crossed. Charlie did not follow me down the block. He did not make lewd remarks about my body. He did not rape me. And yet men, whether posted up beside another deli or en route to a party, now terrified me. The Pioneer supermarket, the soul food restaurants and nail salons, became two-dimensional, as if they could fall down like poker cards.

  A police car was parked beside the sniper tower, its red and blue lights flickering. Two male police officers, one white and the other black, leaned up against the side of the car chatting with the ease of the old black men who crowd around the street vendors’ tables covered with DVDs and VHS cassettes. The black officer inadvertently glanced at me, and I looked back at him but said nothing. Yet I wanted him to comprehend that my eyes were compensating for my closed mouth; they were yelling for help. But if either of those officers had run to my side and asked what was the matter, I would have gazed at my arms and legs, free of any bruises or marks; looked behind me to see if Charlie had followed, which he had not; and said, Nothing. They would have scoffed, thinking I was crazy. And if I had found it in me to speak up and say that there was a man harassing women at the deli on 127th and Lenox, then what? This was Harlem, after all. Such things were, for all intents and purposes, normal.