Heads of the Colored People(17)
I find the pose, clenching my stomach muscles to support me. I delight in my ability to lift myself up this way. I can’t see the new woman, but I feel she is watching from the safety of Child’s Pose.
I don’t know how long I have held myself in Forearm Stand; it could be five seconds; it could be a minute. Sweat pours from my forehead onto my mat in the space between my two perched arms. I look forward to Savasana, where we will lie very still and focus our awareness on “being in this body.” My arms give out, and I try to regain my balance by “activating my core.” One leg flops to the side. I try to land in Wheel Pose, but the fall is so sudden that my body and brain disagree about their directions.
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Last summer, when I turned thirty-three, my body started bleeding again, and the stress from that has revived the sweating problem. Nothing traumatic precipitated this change, and the absence of that trauma is somehow traumatic in its own way. I have been eating fine, well even, so many green smoothies, so many salads, very few grains. I avoid all the glutens. My husband and I had decided I should try getting off the pill, which I convinced my mother to put me on after another accident in high school, so that we could prep for trying to conceive. The pill dried up the bleeding for sixteen years, but it dried up all my other juices as well. Now I’m supposed to be “detoxing,” cleansing myself from synthetic hormones. I try to believe the bleeding is just part of the purgative process, the toxins pouring out to make me new inside, like the sweat is supposed to do in hot yoga, like a release after a large meal. If I stand up too fast, after an inversion, which I shouldn’t do anyway because it worsens my “condition,” I sometimes have a big bleed; I tell myself it’s just blackberry jam, nothing to fear. The resulting anemia has made me prone to fainting.
I have heard that Christinia is an OB-GYN somewhere in the South, maybe here in Tennessee, an expert in hormonal imbalances. Funny that we both ended up so far from California in some shared ironic reverse migration. Funny that she fixes “feminine problems” now, when she was my problem then. Sometimes I wonder if a black woman I pass in the street is her, if I have unknowingly nodded acknowledgment to or feigned distraction to avoid eye contact with her. When I choose new doctors, I pore over the in-network lists, avoiding Chrissys, Christinias, Christinas. I wonder if I am taking the wrong approach, if somehow only she could tell me what is really wrong with me, could read my body better than a stranger.
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When my head hits the ground, I don’t feel the pain at first, just the impact. There’s a quick bite and wetness in my mouth, the taste of my own blood, a stranger and a friend at once.
I am struck by the clarity of all things. I see colors more brightly, briefly. I understand. Sometimes the enemy who looks like you is but a preparation for the enemy who is you. The violence directed inside mitigates the violence that comes from outside. It prepares you, creates calluses, fills holes.
The other black woman, the new one, does not have white lint on her feet. I see them up close when she comes—with Biniam and half the class—to see if I’m okay. There are only four black feet, besides mine, in the bunch, so it’s easy to recognize hers. Her toenails are painted fuchsia. “I’m a nurse,” she says, hovering above me. “Nobody touch her.” She checks my airways, shifts my body to Recovery Pose.
The steam and the smell in the room are nauseating. I vomit without my permission. Everyone but her backs away. “Looks like a concussion,” the black nurse says. Biniam’s feet have disappeared from my line of vision. The woman touches my forehead, my hair, and does not squirm at my sweat on her hand. Moments later, or maybe minutes, I can’t be sure, I am lifted by someone—not her, for I can still see her—onto a moving bed.
If the class goes on without me, I will miss Savasana, my favorite part. There is the smell of my own sweat and the bile on my breath and the blood where I bit my tongue. My body has failed me again. Though I have buffeted it, it will not conform. Six months later, after my first of many surgeries, a doctor will pronounce the word “endometriosis” as the cause of all my bleeding. She will remove the patches and implants that have covered my organs; the chocolate cysts will grow back, again and again. Years later, I will wonder why I competed with that woman in the class, why Christinia competed so much with me. Years later, I will be more informed but no better.
My head and torso are locked in position, but I can still move my fingers and toes. As they carry me to the van, I spread my limbs on the gurney and take my own Savasana. I lie very still, making imperceptible movements in my mind, scanning my body, considering its parts, its defenses, being aware. I recall that I’ve been doing this yoga since I was a child. I wish I were more evolved.
FATIMA, THE BILOQUIST: A TRANSFORMATION STORY
There are happier stories one could tell about Fatima. In the nineties you could be whatever you wanted—someone said that on the news—and by 1998 Fatima felt ready to become black, full black, baa baa black sheep black, black like the elbows and knees on praying folk black, if only someone would teach her.
Up to that point she had existed like a sort of colorless gas, or a bit of moisture, leaving the residue of something familiar, sweat stains on a T-shirt, hot breath on the back of a neck, condensation rings on wood, but never a fullness of whatever matter had formed them.
The week she met Violet, Fatima had recited “An Address to the Ladies, by their Best Friend Sincerity” before her eleventh-grade AP English class. She blended her makeup to perfection that morning, but the other students barely looked at her, instead busying themselves by clicking and replacing the lead in mechanical pencils or folding and flicking paper footballs over finger goalposts—even during the part she recited with the most emphasis: “Ah! sad, perverse, degenerate race / The monstrous head deforms the face.” They clapped dull palms for a few seconds as Fatima sulked back to her desk. But they sat up, alert, when Wally “The Wigger” Arnett recited “Incident” and said the word that always made the white kids pay attention.