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Considering the Neo-Mammy.

Yesterday, PostBourgie published my essay on the idea that Hollywood is slowly reconstructing its traditional archetype of the “Mammy,” to curious, problematic, and vaguely uncomfortable results:

Hmm. It isn’t often that Hollywood strives for any sense of honesty about what was really going on in the hearts and minds of black domestics, as they scrubbed floors and diapered white folks. Though The Secret Life of Bees is no trailblazing manifesto, it isn’t exactly mamby-pamby in its discussion of black-and-white-woman relations in the 1960s, either.

Read it all here and be sure to leave a comment.

Posted on by slb

Collapse.

Five years ago, Nine baked a rainbow cake to impress Ahmir, who she’d been seeing for three years by then. Three years was, by far, the longest she’d made a relationship last. There’d been 22-year-old Levi when she was eighteen; he stuck around for a year. And when she was 21, there was Damon, who she dumped after six long-distance months. Her relationship with Ahmir was uncharted territory. Was he a blessing or a barnacle? She hadn’t decided. Until she did, it made sense to continue crafting a certain self-mythology for his benefit.

She wasn’t much of a baker, though she’d been at it since toddlerdom. To keep her occupied, her mother would shake a bit of unsifted flour and tap water into a shallow bowl for Nine to mix. Mixing had been a favorite pastime of Nine’s ever since. Stirring ingredients by hand, in rhythmic, clockwise motion, was nothing short of cathartic. Over the years, she’d come up with her best lines of poetry while absently creaming butter and sugars. She’d discovered her ability to hit high notes in accurate pitch, while melting German chocolate on a stovetop.

On the Sunday of the woebegone cake five years ago, Nine had cooked an entire meal. Seafood alfredo (sauce from scratch). Steamed lemon-butter broccoli. Garlic bread, also from scratch. It was a good meal—great if you you were Ahmir and used to subsisting on value menu items at McDonald’s.

And so Nine’s mythologizing gained momentum. The dinner was more than enough to reinforce her position as a steady girlfriend. But the cake, if properly executed, might just secure a proposal.

It was a basic white cake—not from scratch. If it were about the mixing alone, she would’ve been just fine. But there were layers. Nine knew nothing of layers and how to pour the batter evenly between three round pans or how long to let each cool before attempting to wrest it from its metal casing or how to balance one atop the other, neatly, unbroken.

Still. All this might’ve been managed, were it not for the jello. Three different kinds were required. (After all, how else would the cake be a rainbow?) This meant adding careful measurements of hot water to the the powdered gelatin and a delicate hand to drizzle each color atop each layer of cake.

She tried. Oh, how the girl tried! She held her breath, watching the cherry and lemon and lime liquid-jellos soak into the white cake, staining it red and yellow and green. She placed the layers onto a cleared rack of the refrigerator and waited the necessary two hours for the liquid to gel.

Things seemed to be going well, and if she cleared this hurdle, there was only one more to jump: the even slathering of Cool Whip frosting. She pulled each layer from the fridge and smiled that her cake seemed to have reached its proper consistency. But when she tried to jimmy one tier from its pan, she realized she’d been far too liberal with the jello drizzle. It’d seeped straight through to the bottom and stuck. Each rainbow color was a fault line, her every movement, no matter how gentle, an earthquake. There was no way the remaining white sections of the cake would survive as a whole. This, she thought, must be what her middle school geography teacher was trying to tell her about tectonic shift and its potential repercussions for California.

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Welcome to 2009.

Hello, friends.

We’re already five days into the new year. Just two days ago, I was in Baltimore, happily spending the end of my winter break with my mother and grandmother. Now, it’s back to the frigidity and conservatism of Grand Rapids… not that there’s anything wrong with that. (:-/)

Classes began at Grand Valley today, though I don’t start teaching until tomorrow. At 8 am. Which means waking up at 4:30 almost every Tuesday and Thursday for the next fifteen weeks.

I know normal people with normal careers are totally sitting there, like, “Get over yourself. Waking up before dawn comes with the territory of adulthood,” but even at 29, I have yet to accept this.

Anyway, between teaching four classes this winter and (hopefully, finally!) getting a driver’s license, I really do intend to write and update this site. Thanks to all of you who’ve read what’s here and who’ve left thoughtful and encouraging comments. I do so love a good comment.

Here are a few book recommendations to start your new year off right:

1. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I know it’s late to be recommending a book that’s been out long enough to win a Pulitzer and be printed in paperback, but still. I’d be doing Junot Diaz and you a great disservice if I let buzz die on this amazing novel. Read it, if you haven’t already. I’d love to discuss it with you. I read it back in October and I still contemplate it, regularly.

2. Keep the Faith, Faith Evans. As memoirs go, this one is very well done. There haven’t been many (if any) well-written memoirs by ’90s r&b chanteuses. Co-writer Aliya S. King lent a polished, professional, and highly readable bent to Faith’s entertaining romantic and professional life.

3. The Other Hand/Little Bee. Chris Cleave is one of my favorite authors. So I have to recommend his sophomore novel. It isn’t out here in the states until February and it’ll be called Little Bee when it’s released. I read its UK printing, The Other Hand. To clarify: same book, different title. Though I liked it slightly less than his first novel, Incendiary (which I’d recommend reading while you wait for Little Bee‘s release), it’s beautiful and odd in just the right measures; the characters will haunt you, particularly Little Bee, who spends the first half of the book finding the easiest way to kill herself whenever she enters a new room of a house or turns down a different Kingston-upon-Thames street.

4. The Book of Dahlia. I’m still reading this one, but I love it so far. It’s bitingly satirical and Dahlia reminds me of me, my friend Melissa, and most members of Generation X I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

5. Last but not least, I’d LOVE it if you’d preorder the anthology that will contain my very first national fiction publication. It’s called It’s All Love: Black Writers on Soul Mates, Family, and Friends and it’s slated for February 3 release. The legendary Marita Golden edited it. My friend Felicia’s in it, as well as the poet Kwame Alexander (for whom I interned in undergrad, when BlackWords Press was still up and running) and a host of established artists (Pearl Cleage, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. Ethelbert Miller) and up-and-comers. I’m totally stoked and I want you all to support the project.

Do see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but not before reading the short story which is vastly superior.

Don’t see The Day the Earth Stood Still, because it sucks.

Do see Doubt, I guess, but I don’t recommend it with much enthusiasm.

Other than that, welcome to the new year, folks. Have a grand time!

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Delusions and Candor.

You are no flea in petrified amber, no exoskeleton for the world to fossilize. You are not the serendipitous cadaver whose arrival on a research slab will result in the healing of cancers. You are merely a woman of twenty-nine years. If you go, there are few who will mourn you. There will be Marcheline and there will be Hadley, whose eyes will, at first, bubble over like hot springs ever time the number nine is mentioned. Then, over time, even they will only remember to weep for you as they push their fingers into pie crusts and recall your fondness for doughy fruit cobblers.

Your lover will suddenly realize how desperately he wishes to marry, despite the eight vowless years you spent coaxing him toward that commitment, and four months after your burial, he will make some 22-year-old virgin from an AME church his wife. They will have the two sandy-skinned children with coarse, copper hair you’d hoped for. Cumin-colored freckles will cover their angular cheekbones, and one day, while they surreptitiously rummage through the box their father keeps tucked in the attic, their fingers will flutter over the scrapbook cellophane protecting the only photograph of you that he’s kept. For days thereafter, they will wonder who you were, but they will fear their father’s mercurial moods too much to investigate.

Your own father will drink vodka until it renders what’s left of his recollection sterile. He will not allow himself the sobriety required to mourn you, but occasionally, he will find himself plumbing the vestiges, after dementia has scooped out the meatier parts of his memory like a melon-baller. Before long, you will receive word of his arrival in a district adjacent to your own, and when you meet again, you will be strangers.

But none of this should weigh upon your decision to return to Marcheline or to Hadley, to your lover or to your father. None of this has much bearing at all. The illness was congenital. That you would one day find yourself overexerted, then tumble balletically into unconsciousness was inevitable. But the myriad comforts you’ve discovered in this comatose state were not intended. And some day quite soon, you will be forced to emerge, either with open eyes and independent breaths or divorcing from eyes and becoming breath itself.

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The Store.

Jesus works a series of doubles at the only checkout counter that’s ever open, the one where the flickering globular light overhead seems ever in need of repair. Jesus is just over six feet tall, making the long, burgundy, pocketed smock he wears seem prominent and absurd. The smock is unmarked, as are the paper and plastic bags hanging from a revolving corral no higher than his hip, nameless, as is the off-white awning that arches over the entrance.

Under the smock, he is customarily clad in jeans, fraying at the hems, and a white linen shirt with loose stitching. He seems to have a vast array of white linen shirts with loose stitching. His hair, a thick, dusky mass of loose curls about six inches long, is held away from his olive-skinned face by an athletic sweatband. He has the kind of toes one would imagine, long and slender, with sand in the crevices of the nail beds. His footwear tends to vary, within the narrow range of huaraches and flip-flops and Birks. His eyes are an unremarkable brown, but his lips are exquisitely full. He has the nimble, four-inch fingers of a basketball player and Nine has grown to love watching him, as he keys in esoteric codes on the cash register touch screen.

Today is like the others. She, untethered from the trappings of consciousness, finds herself unceremoniously present with no recollection of arrival. Soon, she will materialize in some other holding cell, perhaps among an unusually vivid array of memories or in a dark corridor amplified with self-narration. And when she does leave Jesus’s curious company, it’s unlikely she’ll recall how she exited.

Until then, here she is, wanly pushing her empty cart, allowing herself to be zigged about by its rickety front wheels.

Jesus spritzes the conveyor belt with Windex before pushing a cloth in circular patterns across it. After watching it streaklessly dry, he folds the damp cloth and tosses it into a bin below the counter.

Like ivy along old brick, an inexorable pity creeps all over Nine. “This store is a front, isn’t it,” she whispers, more to herself than to Jesus, who chooses to ignore her, as is sometimes his wont.

He leans against the cash drawer, slinging one long leg in front of the other before folding his arms over his broad chest and lifting his wrist to aim the tiny remote control in his hand at the black and white surveillance monitors dangling over the automatic sliding doors.

It must be awful, Nine muses, to have to hang out in the abandoned recesses of someone else’s body, waiting for decisions to be made. She watches Jesus yawn, and there’s something endearing about the oval his lips form and the satisfied little sigh that escapes his throat.

He’s as stuck here as she is.

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Do Disturb.

Contrary to her family’s expectations, Nine had made herself at home in the sterile, freakish underworld of St. Mary’s Hospital. She liked the crinkle of the accordion tubing and sacks that wheezed and sighed as often as she did. The rubbery footfalls of the nurses and the snatches of their gossip and gripes she’d gathered since her arrival provided a great distraction from the constant cinema flickering inside the dark cavern her brain had become. Nine also enjoyed the metal clack of her chart whenever the doctor opened it, the perfunctory snap of the occasional latex glove, and the understanding that, ever so often, needles and chutes were curled into her veins like crochet needles, eliciting a pain that would be excruciating if she were still able to feel it. While, for others, the constant drip of saline may have seemed ominous, she rather relished the music the liquid created. And the warm sponges squeezed into basins beside her daily reminded her of a woodland stream and, by extension, she often imagined a red-cloaked heroine in the Hans Christian Andersen tradition, foolishly courageous, skipping through a slalom of tall, barren trees.

But there were also sensations she did not favor. She did not, for instance, enjoy the company of visitors and willfully closed her ears to their nervous chatter. She did not like their nostrils and the suddenness with which they honked or slurped back snot. She detested the soggy, germ-soaked Kleenex they left to harden in her only wastebasket. She did not like the smell of the carnations they left behind, once the water grew murky and the velvety petals browned. And there were other agitations, far less superficial and more alarming than these others: the strange awareness that preceded her heart’s intent to stop; the sizzle of defibrillator panels as they shot electricity through her greasy skin; the jolt of expectation to open her eyes when her sluggish heartbeat reluctantly returned; the firmness of her boyfriend’s touch, waning with each increasingly infrequent visit.

These were the occurrences that reminded her. There are decisions to be made, came a voice over the PA system of her subconscious. The store is closing.

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Retracing.

Work backward. Think of the moment they married, between the 8 and 11 o’clock services at your church on that July Sunday when you were ten. Think of the accordion partition, cordoning off their nuptials from the simultaneous Youth, Singles, and General Sunday School classes being held in various other sections of the sanctuary. Think of iridescent streamers that should’ve been there, descending from the walls in curling tendrils, or the tiny votive candles with their wavering yellow-orange flames, or the delicate boxes of cherry cordials offered as party favors. Pity that you had to dream them. Pity that they were whipped from the same imaginative froth that conjured unicorns, castles, and faeries to fill all your lonely spaces. Think of the eleven or so guests–three of whom you did not recognize–gawking at the vow exchange like a side-ring act at the circus.

Remember that you felt pretty. Your hair had been hot-combed for the occasion and wrangled into a menagerie of rubberbands, twisted into a series of puffy little ropes. You could hear the plastic pink barrettes at the ends clacking gently whenever you turned your head. You were turning your head all day, eager to hear all the overlapping grown folks’ conversations. Like a chorus in the round, there were toasts and traditions and whispers of lingerie.

There were no warnings.

Consider the pomp and the tumult: the non-alcoholic champagne for toasting; your grandmother’s ex-boyfriend, pitching his lilting baritone above the din of clinking glasses; your mother’s cavernous absence, once as she absconds to Centennial Lake for wedding photographs, then later, as night falls and her new husband whisks her off to Delaware.

Who honeymoons in Delaware? You should have noted that. You should have recognized forboding when you felt it.

Recall how unaccustomed you still were then, to the tenor of your stepfather’s accent, how it still reminded you of coconut and calypso. Because you were young, you were full of stereotypes. Because you were young, you knew nothing of Jamaicans you hadn’t gleaned while watching the “Hey, Mon!” skits on In Living Color. Because you were young, you thought brown skin meant common culture, that Black Americans and Black Jamaicans understood one another. You did not know that patois was not language, but lifestyle.

But you mustn’t drift into the lofty.

Think of the Peptol pink of your dress and how you grinned and you grinned and you grinned. Think of the navy blue suit worn by your best friend in the world, a boy (named Kenya). Note now, as you never could have then, that he was your insulation. He, of the goofy faces and marathon games of tag, he whose single-mother upbringing left him mannered and intuitive and kind. He, who encouraged you to forget what you were getting into and allowed you a well-deserved respite from all your tiring precocity. You would love him, long before you understood why and long after he disappeared.

Pull the recollections around you like an electric blanket. Pull, until you’re so uncomfortable that you smother and wriggle and sweat. Pull until you have no choice but to let go.

Only then will it become apparent that when they were pronounced man and wife, you called him Dad because your own father was missing. In those days, you uttered the word with abandon. You uttered, unaware of what would come: the ten-year litany of accusations; your volleying waltz across their marital chessboard; your mother’s cavernous absence.

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Dejame.

Nine was born Ninah Jude Brown in a cold single-bed room at Sparrow Hospital. It was 1979 in Lansing, Michigan, which meant that the White nurses were merciless in their “care” for her unmarried mother, Marcheline, as she writhed and shook her legs at the sheets like they were puppies nipping her ankles. These angels of mercy in their trapezoidal bonnets and bobby socks pursed their lips disapprovingly at Marcheline’s bare ring finger. Knowing there’d be no hovering husband to complain on her behalf, they refused her a cold compress as sweat poured from her feverish forehead, denied her ice chips when her lips cracked and her tongue went coarse, and would not hold her hand as her uterus contracted, for fear that the melanin would rub off.

In her epidural haze, she even thought she heard one of them tsk, “When will these nigger-girls ever learn?” Months later, Marcheline would rather absently repeat this to her mother, who stood several feet away, pushing pureed carrots beyond Nine’s puckered lips. Her back turned, Marcheline would fail to notice how her words bolted up her mother’s spine and rocked her for a moment, right where she stood, baby spoon suspended just out of Nine’s reach. Then came the tremble with unspeakable anger at her own hospital ward tale, wherein the nurses weren’t White but were just as full as vitriol and there was no sweet anesthetic to muffle their judgmental asides. Just as Nine would begin her hungry whimpers, her grandmother would emerge from her swoon of recollection and Marcheline would rush away from the bathroom mirror with makeup impeccably applied and race for the honking car downstairs in a sweater dress seemingly designed to make her date forget her new motherhood.

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Nine.

Nine had always found the house on Joshua Tree Court dystopian. The entire community, lined with imported saplings and prefabricated town-homes, felt like something shiny the leaders of a New World would build after decimating every person, place, or thing that came before them. That the shutters were painted a pretty shade of purple was little consolation.

While her parents were picking out cheap interior fixtures—railings that would become rickety within a year of wear; faucets that would soon lose water pressure; sinks that never seemed to drain right; and taupe-colored carpeting that would mottle within months–Nine wistfully imagined her family back in their two-bedroom apartment across town, where the high school she’d attended for the past three years was just two streets away and her semi-estranged grandmother lived in a building one block over.

After her family settled in, Nine’s stepfather, Paul, who she’d been inexplicably calling “Dad” since she was ten years old, planted star-gazing lilies in the tiny front yard, because they were her mother’s favorite flower. This also did little to hearten Nine, who felt a prickling heat crawl up her arms, like a warm-legged troupe of invisible tarantulas, for the entire first year that they lived there.

“Dis child so insolent she doan know a good ting when she see it,” Paul lamented, watching Nine drift sullenly from room to room of their new home, openly, if silently, pined for the days before he was a part of her family. “In time she come to realize what she have.”

But Nine’s uneasiness persisted, as did the idea that she was living in some alternate world, where dread numbed emotion better than Icy Hot.

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I Hated “Lakeview Terrace.”

I really did. If you want to find out a bit more about why, check out my review over at PostBourgie.com:

I should probably tell you right now that this movie isn’t about Abel Turner. It isn’t about Lisa. And it certainly isn’t about Ron Glass, who phones in a few scenes as her father, Harold Perreau.

In fact, this film treats all of its Black cast as tertiary in order to reveal its true intent.

This is a film about how hard it is to be a White man married to a Black woman.

It gets better. Read on.