This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(4)

Jamirah moved to Williamstown from Virginia the summer before our freshman year of high school, and at first she seemed just as mild-mannered and meek as I was. The most popular girl in our year was Tiana, who was two years older than everyone else, and one of the most unapologetically black girls I’d ever met. During our industrial science class, she would often go to the nearest mirror, take out a toothbrush from her purse, scrape gel onto it, and smooth down her edges. Her laugh could be heard from one end of the room to the other, and she expressed her excitement by clapping her hands. On the flip side, whenever she was disgusted, she pursed her lips, rolled her eyes, and jerked her neck. I was always nice to Tiana because that was my natural disposition and also because I was afraid of her. Everyone was—hence her popularity.

Although Jamirah and I were both soft-spoken, Tiana must have recognized something in Jamirah that she didn’t see in me. Maybe it was because Jamirah immediately started following Tiana around, and consequently Tiana swept her up quickly. Soon, Jamirah became just as boisterous and brash as Tiana and her crew. It didn’t bother me much in the beginning because I wasn’t black like them. They were the kind of “black” that I was not supposed to be, a.k.a. those black people, the ghetto ones, the ones who made the rest of “us” look bad. My mother taught me to suppress those habits that Tiana was known for. As opposed to the other black girls, who wore graphic design T-shirts and hip-hugger jeans, my mother dressed me in cardigans, argyle socks, and plaid skirts so that I would “look the part” at all times.

Tiana and most of her group were in remedial and college-prep classes, and I was on the honors and advanced placement track, working in courses where I was one out of only a handful of black kids, and that is a generous estimate. The worst times for me were the periods when I wasn’t distanced from those who were not on the same academic trajectories: lunch and gym. I hated these egalitarian periods most because they were when I received the most abuse from Jamirah and, to lesser extents, from her friends.

At lunch, she’d yell at Tiana to draw attention to my neck or lack thereof while I was literally sitting right across from her at the same table. She made fun of my wardrobe, my intelligence, my speech, my looks—any and everything that made me a person: “Look at her. She ain’t got no neck. What the fuck you got on? The fuck is that shit?” I was always afraid that at gym, she would push me face-first into one of the lockers and start a fight out of boredom. Both she and Tiana frequently made idle threats about wanting to jump somebody while we changed, our half-naked bodies further emphasizing just how susceptible we all were to an ambush.

It was a kind of meanness that I have never seen matched. I did not know why Jamirah hated me so much. We didn’t like the same guys, didn’t frequent the same places after school, and didn’t speak much to each other. But perhaps this in itself was the reason. I did not want to be boisterous and brash and assert myself in the throes of the black community at high school. I maintained my timidity, preferring to be invisible so that I could commit to my studies and escape from Williamstown in four years. I confided in a few friends about Jamirah’s relentless bullying, and they urged me to retaliate, but I was too afraid of the consequences. If I swung on her—even though I’d never fought before—I’d get suspended, and that would mean that I’d get a bad reputation with teachers. I wouldn’t get those stellar recommendations I needed for college. I dreamed of getting an MD from Columbia and someday taking over my father’s medical practice. I feared I would be categorized as “one of them”: those black girls who were on the bad path in life and would end up pregnant before graduating high school, the black girls who would probably go as far as community college before settling for a waitressing job at a nearby Applebee’s.

Even in middle school, the black female body was always a target for destruction. Violence was a legitimate way to resolve arguments. Talking was not a conclusion but rather a trigger. You fought someone who talked badly about you or someone who wanted your man. In other words, you fought to maintain your space in an environment where your place was already on the margins. For what black girl wants to be even more invisible than she thinks she already is? Fighting was a way to assert that you were present and in motion. Fighting brought you respect that institutions refused to give you. I thought I wanted to be invisible. I wanted those institutions to respect me, and I believed I could earn it through silence, through assimilation. But my path of nonviolence only led to a cascade of madness.

I didn’t need to lie in bed with my curtains closed because whatever light permeated my windows could do nothing to dilute the darkness welling in my spirit. I spent many nights hidden underneath my covers, hot tears streaming down my puffy cheeks, unable to voice my pain even in private. In my head, I replayed my daily humiliation in front of all my classmates, and there was no sign of it letting up. I thought of no other escape than to commit suicide, but despite having called the local suicide hotline, I had no concrete plans for flinging myself out of this world. I just hoped that I would one day disappear and find myself on a transcendental plane where there was no more pain and humiliation. Secretly, I envisioned that all the tears I cried would drain my body and my mom would eventually find my desiccated corpse in my bed. I prayed to God to take my misery away from me, and my prayers became more impassioned the longer the harassment continued.

After realizing that my despondent behavior was not symptomatic of PMS—since it dragged on for weeks—my mother ultimately found out what ailed me. She spoke to the Williamstown High School administration about my problems and they did nothing, chalking up the bullying as a rite of passage. She then suggested that I transfer to a private school but I was too afraid to start over again. Since I could not be protected by the higher powers, one of my sisters offered to come to the school in sneakers, ready to fight Jamirah. I rejected both suggestions because I wasn’t entirely lonely. I had a few friends, one of them a boy named Dennis, who told me that Jamirah’s envy was the reason she bullied me. Dennis was one of my closest friends; he had moved to Williamstown the same year as I did. We lived only five minutes from each other and spoke for hours through the telephone on the weekends, talking about anything and watching shows together. He was my saving grace, and I figured it was better to suffer in high school with him by my side than to transfer to another school and start all over again. Not to mention I thought the change in schools, along with classes and extracurriculars, would make it difficult for me to get into a top college.