This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(3)

This “friend” was Filipina, and several shades darker than me. I had heard rumors that her family was racist and this was why I was never invited into her house, but I’d never thought she was infected, too. After all, she wore fitted hats, dated black guys, and knew the lyrics to more rap songs than I did. She moved through black spaces with so much fluidity that we accepted her as one of our own. But when she called me a monkey, I thought back to the first of those nightly prep sessions. There was no amount of practice or smiling that could obscure the inescapable problem of me being a black girl. Did those white girls look at me as a monkey who had to be treated with artificial cordiality so that I wouldn’t act wild or aggressive? Did I transform into the character of a monkey when I performed in front of those white women, subtly begging for their acceptance without questioning it? Suddenly, I understood more about race than I ever had. It didn’t matter if my “friend” was wrong. I didn’t make the team, and therefore, she knew that I was inferior. Unlike her, who ingratiated herself with black people and moved into our spaces, I could not perform well enough for white girls to claim me as their own. It wasn’t simply because I wasn’t good enough to make the team. I couldn’t make the team because I was not human. And when I looked at myself in the mirror, when I kissed my mother good night, this feeling of being the monkey, nonhuman, haunted me. I should’ve known my place. I should’ve known that when I was around my black friends, I was who I was, and when I was in a white space, I wasn’t afforded humanity. And maybe that was what I was really trying out for, not a cheerleading squad, a chance to be a person. Did I smile to be less threatening? Did I dance to prove that if I kept moving, I could avoid being confined by their preconceived notions of who I was? Just what exactly needed validation?



When I was thirteen years old, my mother’s boyfriend, a revered and well-liked Rowan University professor and psychologist who we liked to call “Z” for short, rose from our leather sofa and bent down on one knee in front of her. I heard my mother’s surprised scream of delight and that was it because I was already on my way back upstairs to hide. I’m still not proud of what I did. She had survived two previous marriages, one marred by physical and verbal abuse and the other by cheating, and a jilting. She deserved all the love in the world, yet I refused to watch it blossom because I knew that my own life in Atlantic County was about to be over.

Z had tenure, but my mother could conduct her real estate business from anywhere. It was only logical that we move closer to the university. After Z proposed and my mother accepted, my older sister Patricia found me upstairs in the bathroom.

I couldn’t look her in the face as I asked her, “Do we have to move?”

“Yeah,” she replied weakly. “But it will be okay. You’ll be fine.”

I wanted to believe her, but this move would not affect her. She was eight years older, had graduated from high school at sixteen and moved out of the house shortly afterwards. As my mother and I packed all of our belongings away in preparation for our move to Williamstown, a suburban neighborhood less than fifteen minutes away from Rowan’s campus, I yearned for her companionship.

My mother tried all she could to get me excited about Williamstown. We drove past our new home in a residential lot. It was noticeably bigger than our old one, complete with four bedrooms, a conjoined bathroom to every room, and a large basement. I saw some cute boys hanging around Main Street and that made my heart flicker, but that flame of excitement disappeared as quickly as it came.

Egg Harbor Township, where I had previously lived, and Williamstown had similarities. In the towns themselves, there were the usual bowling alleys and movie theaters. Families resided there for years, and their children almost always came back to perpetuate the cycle. But Egg Harbor Township at least had Atlantic City nearby, and from more rural Williamstown, with its Heritage’s Dairy store, acres upon acres of farmland, and common sightings of wild turkeys, you had to go a long way to get to Philadelphia. And Williamstown was far less racially and ethnically diverse than Egg Harbor Township.

I was more warmly received by the boys when I started eighth grade at Williamstown Middle School. Immediately, I latched onto and befriended a Colombian named Caterine—one of only a handful of Latinx in the school—who was in many of my classes and showed me the ropes. As she shuffled me along different hallways, the black boys did double takes, sometimes going as far as impeding our path to introduce themselves to us before saying one last hello when we parted ways. I was the new girl, and in this small town any novelty was exciting. Lunch came around, and I was informed through whispers that I was “fine.” The speed at which a teenager’s tongue moves could compete with the speed of light.

Caterine didn’t ask me about where I’d moved from, how many siblings I had, or what music I liked. Instead, she would pass notes in class, asking me if I had a boyfriend or whether I was a virgin. When we went to gym, she gossiped with the black girls about who slept with whom over the summer and whose pussy smelled like tuna. I was both revolted and intrigued. Who knew that thirteen-year-old girls could talk like such grown women? One time during lunch, I was teased for not knowing what an orgasm was, as though that were something I should’ve known at that age—like knowing how babies are made. In Williamstown, sex was more palpable, and I could feel its presence like a gnat buzzing near my eardrums. A girl outright told me, “Dick is like food. Once you have it, it’s a must,” and this was before she accused me of wanting the guy who’d taken her virginity the summer before, influencing her friends to ostracize me. But this paled in comparison to the harassment I’d experience from a new student the following year.