This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(8)

When she finally enters those prized spaces that you told her about as a child, she’ll have everything she’ll need to succeed: looks, deference to man, suppressed sexuality, silence. A good ol’ twenty-first-century mammy, ready to give, ready to serve.

She will be the talk of the town, the new Negro socialite, the one whom countless black girls must emulate if they want to get anywhere and have a man on their arm while doing it.





After a few years, you will notice some other things about her: she’s getting physically smaller until she needs a booster seat to sit at the table. Her man can’t enjoy fucking her because he feels like a pedophile, but he feels too comfortable to leave her so he cheats on her again and with more than one woman this time around.





Her voice gets higher-and higher-pitched until the register she reaches is so high that no human ear can detect what she’s saying, not even her own.





Without her body ever reaching orgasm, without ever housing a penis that recognized that her vagina was not a ground for domination, the only hole that hasn’t closed up down there is the one through which she urinates. Neglect will do that to the body.





Soon, she won’t be able to move. Doctors cannot diagnose her as comatose simply because she can’t speak when spoken to. They believe she can still feel; she simply cannot move. Perfect, you think. The less she moves, the more mobile she can be. People will remember just how comfortable she made them feel, and they will take pity on her.





But they don’t. Her name rings a bell, they snap their fingers to try to conjure the letters of her name, but they ultimately give up and return to eating their watercress sandwiches or cheese and charcuterie. They do not remember her name or how she made them feel. They blame it on her not speaking up enough when she was around. Her body collects dust. She stops menstruating.

She stops urinating. She does not speak. She cannot eat. You are waiting for her to die, but not sorrowfully because this was the plan all along. Black girl children aren’t supposed to live; they’re supposed to exist. When she dies, you know you should not mourn for her because now that she’s dead, she lives more expansively than ever before. Where there is no man, there is no world that can make her feel less-than. Yet you do mourn for her because maybe it was not her time to go. Maybe there was something else that you could’ve done to make her shrink but not die, as if one can happen without the other.





Nevertheless, you fold back into the community, where you teach other black girls the same ritual but with more fine-tuning.

You’re sure that you’ll get it right this time. The world forgets the former black girl child when they accept another token who whets their palate like a new flavor of the month. The man finds another woman, and he makes love to her with all his clothes off, pants and boxers hitting the ground, watch on the nightstand, and that woman comes over and over again. When he closes his eyes the moment after orgasming, he sees your child’s face and silently thanks her for preparing him to be the man that he is today.





This is how a black girl becomes docile.





3

The Stranger at the Carnival




I loved amusement parks as a kid. For native New Jerseyans, it’s basically a tradition to go to Morey’s Piers and Raging Waters Water Park in Wildwood as soon as the weather is sunny. Until I was about eleven years old, I was too afraid to ride the roller coasters. I’d choose to go inside the fun houses instead. The large distorted mirrors would make me feel like I was an exaggerated version of myself, or even someone altogether different. The first things to grow enormously larger were my breasts; then it would be my hips and finally my butt. I was already a well-endowed kid, so there wasn’t much make-believe there. The fantasy came from watching little white girls giggle and whisper in each other’s ears as they posed in front of these mirrors, puckering their lips, leaning forward and placing their hands on their knees so that their butts pushed out. Their curvy reflections resembled my female relatives, and these girls loved it. They would laugh at how ridiculous they looked.

And as soon as they walked past the mirrors, they would go back to being stick thin and tall.

The face cutouts were another form of entertainment. I’d see kids, both black and white, whose parents had coaxed them into sticking their heads through the holes so that they could take pictures above the painted bodies on the board. These cutouts were always on top of white bodies. I never participated. Frankly, I thought it looked ridiculous: my black head on top of a white body. It was a deformity that I could not forget about in the land of make-believe. Since my mind couldn’t fantasize about this possibility, there was no way I was going to make my body reach a state of being, that being whiteness, if my mind wasn’t already there. After the cheerleader incident, that “state” had been marked off with barricade tape. Besides, if I wanted to transform, I was going to do so entirely. Anything less than that was not worth the trouble.



One of my fondest childhood memories is from when I was three years old. It was evening. A group of black women, including my mother, either stood or sat at the table in our kitchen. There was an almost mystical glow emanating from the overhead light. One of my mother’s longtime friends put me in a booster seat and, with a thin comb, began to divide my thick hair into sections and slather a white substance on it from the roots to the tips. When I was little, aside from my nose, my hair was the only evidence of my race. I barely had any melanin, and I burned in the sun; I was so much lighter than everyone else in my family and church community that people joked that I was the milkman’s baby or the daughter of a white man. But my hair was black, obsidian like ink, and grew into a massive afro.