This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(28)

I was too young to really engage with this image. I was only sixteen years old and I wasn’t raised in a particularly political home. I did know, however, that we were Democrats and that in my community, the Easter bunny was more believable than a black Republican. I had heard of the possibility of a potential black president but only within the realms of comedy, such as Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, Dave Chappelle’s “Black Bush” skit on his Comedy Central show, and Richard Pryor’s “Black President” skit on his show back in 1977. It seemed like only through black comedy could I, and many others, consume the idea of a black president. Perhaps this was the only space where we could delight ourselves with the idea, through laughter, because if we seriously considered it, we would have worried that he would be assassinated as soon as he was sworn into office. But when you, Barack, and your daughters, Malia and Sasha, walked across the stage after it became official that he would become president, I went into my mother’s bedroom where my stepfather, Z, was peacefully lying on his side of the bed. He smiled at me, but we did not say a word to each other because something in our cores was shifting and we needed time to ourselves in the midst of being close to each other. I will be honest and say that I do not remember President Obama’s full speech, but what I can vividly recount is the single tear that fell down my left cheek. It was the first time I had cried from someone’s oration, but it was more than that. I had an actual image of black ascendancy. It was not a two-dimensional portrait, a subject of a comedy skit, or an idea casually thrown around among ourselves, but a physical reality. But I did not dream of becoming president like Barack. You were the one who enraptured me. Barack’s voice was merely the background noise to the relationship that I, and millions of black women around the world, would have with you.

Your story reads almost like a myth. Your great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson, the first documented member of your family tree, was born on Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina, which is over 450 miles away from the White House. Slaves lived in tiny whitewashed slacks that lined the dirt road en route to this rice plantation, and it was there that Jim, after emancipation, worked as a sharecropper, toiling in the rice fields along the Sampit River, and lived with his wife, Louiser, and their children. We don’t know how Jim died, but local historians believe that his body is located in an unmarked grave that commands a view of old rice fields on the outer limits of White Creek.1 Robinson, his wife, and his children comprised the last illiterate branch; each descending branch of the family was more educated than its predecessor.

Born on the South Side of Chicago, you showed your intellect quite early on, skipping second grade before entering a gifted program in sixth grade. After graduating as salutatorian from your magnet high school, you went on to Princeton University, a place where your teachers told you that you would never be accepted. I know what that’s like, too. My white female guidance counselor suggested that I go to community college when I was in the top 5 percent of my class and assumed that my parents weren’t wealthy enough to afford a place like Princeton. When you read your acceptance letter, did you grip the edges of the paper out of fear that it would disappear? Did you cry?

When you were making your way to campus, were you afraid? Back in 1981, Princeton was considered the most conservative of the Ivies; it still is. But I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that your experiences with racism were more overt. Your classmates asked to touch your hair like you were an object that could be crushed down to the small size they needed you to be in order to make themselves feel great. When the mother of your freshman roommate, Catherine Donnelly, discovered that you were black, she called her alumni friends to object, even going so far as to visit the student housing office to get Catherine’s room changed. Her grandmother begged Catherine’s mother to take her out of school entirely. Catherine Donnelly’s grandmother wanted Catherine out of the school immediately and to be brought home. How did you feel then? Did you ever walk down Prospect Avenue—“The Street,” as we call it—and marvel at the eating clubs, some of them eerily similar to plantation houses? If you dared to walk down The Street, were you afraid that some drunk white jock or the son of some finance tycoon or a scion of some political dynasty would yell “nigger” as you passed or throw things at you? Where did you find your place of refuge during your four years there, and how can many other black women, who are still fighting for recognition and respect, find theirs?

You do not know the impact that you had on the black female student body during my time at Princeton, even while we waited with bated breath for you to return to campus, to no avail. It felt cruel that you would not at least stop by and talk to us. But our complaints tapered off when we more deeply considered just how much unnecessary affliction you endured as an undergraduate. This story of your suffering at Princeton is yours and yours alone, but if we could have known more of it, perhaps we would have felt less alone. Still, we forgot that you aren’t just our First Lady, but the whole country’s, and that perhaps you simply didn’t have the time. We wanted a piece of you to ourselves because whether or not we could articulate it then, we know now that some of the ways in which we see are only possible because of our shared identity as black women. We wanted to hold on to that preciousness for dear life.

I entered Princeton in 2010, exactly twenty-five years after you graduated, and your ascendance sparked an almost cult-like following among black female students; you provided hope as we obsessed over black male desire. We outnumbered the black men three to one; it was a sort of bloodbath. Statistics told us that our professional success would imperil our chances of ever getting married, and we were quite aware how much the odds were against us at Princeton. There were very few black women who were successful in finding relationships. The perpetually single ones like me overanalyzed this incessantly rather than chalking it up to luck, God’s favor, or anything in between.