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How the 3/5ths Live.

From an outsider’s perspective, say, from the purview of a citizen whose great-great-grandfathers were land owners, voters, arbiters of the unamended Constitution, we spend a lot of time lamenting. We deflect our own savagery by blaming it on their ancestors. Our hearing turns conveniently selective when they insist that they are not their ancestors. They know full well that, after our brief exchange — wherein they will glumly wonder, How can black people be so unforgiving? — they will go home and turn a key in the lock of a house they’ve either purchased outright or will pay off before the age of 30. They know how easily they qualified for their low-interest mortgage. They know their parents’ pristine credit, ensured by their grandfather’s investments and assets, inherited from their great-grandfathers dividends, insured by their great-great-grandfather’s land ownership, made that possible.

And they know our great-great-grandparents — both of them — and their six- and seven- and nine-year-old children worked that land with no pay. They know neither generation had anything to hand down to our grandparents. They know we inherited not assets, but in most cases, debt. They know that if our parents benefited from the Cosby-fication of a Black Middle Class, it was as recently as the late 20th century and was not achieved without the splintering of entire communities. They know our gains can often be threatened — nay, ravaged — by the strong winds of a single recession.

They know that, when we are poor, it is not often because of bad breaks, bad investments, or passing on the right kinds of plentiful opportunities. It is because we were written into the annals of this country’s history as 3/5 human and, centuries later, we are still seen by many as such.

It is because they get to deny this, even as it profits them, even as their satirical publications bandy about their particular brand of ironic hipster racism and they get to laugh, defend it, and call us (and our nine-year-old youngest-ever Best Actress Oscar nominee) oversensitive and incapable of comprehending satire — incapable, of course, because we are missing those vital two-fifths of humanity that house the white man’s funny bone, presumably.

And look at what white folks’ humor hath wrought: renderings of our president, his wife, and their daughters as apes, as Hottentots, as savages; ridicule of our athletes as animals; co-opted use of an incendiary racial slur as a synonym for friend; rampant Islamophobia; incessant hypersexualization of our men, women, and children.

Forgive us our straight faces.

From our own vantage, we are exhausted. Too often, we are winded, expending so much oxygen on explaining in detail to those who surely must already know how our humanity has been impinged and why we are deserving of verbally unmolested heroes and schools that do not subscribe to a playground-to-prison pipeline for our children. We’re positively spent, managing the endless task of finding and heralding more First Black _____s to Ever ______, spent after having to point out that, if all things were equal, we would’ve stopped “pioneering” in fields they’ve dominated and from which we’ve been historically barred, ages ago.

If we decline an opportunity to attend their “healing racism” initiatives, if we remain silent when they ask us why we don’t have to wash our hair daily, if we sigh with deep exasperation when they say they “don’t see race” — even as nooses are still being hung at schools, crosses still burned on laws, sentencing still disproportionately favors harsher penalties for minority offenders, and the few black actors we’re allowed still can’t enjoy their nominations and awards the rest of us having to wonder if they’ve only been offered them because they played criminals, slaves, pimps, or domestics — we have our reasons.

And no, if you can’t possibly imagine what they are, we’ll waste no further air elucidating them for you.

We have our own means of navigating what this country has apportioned us — and they are intricate, communal, and, at times, quite deeply flawed. But if we are to always be treated as abstractions, having the form of humanness but not the entitlements thereof, we will continue to keep our ways clandestine and our cards close to the vest. We will accept their apologies as publicly as they issue them, while being as slow to trust their sincerity in private as they are to believe we’re owed them in the first place.

It is not so difficult, overcoming. You need only have ancestors whose flesh was cracked open like melon rind and torn from their limbs by hounds. You need only have children who can continue to smile when adults, hiding behind anonymity, call them the kinds of names they are never allowed to repeat. You need only have the grace to accept “heartfelt remorse” from people whose ability to produce such was made suspect the moment they thought to offend your children, in such particularly callous ways to begin with.

We’ve grown good at it. It is the one thing privilege cannot buy.

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In Memoriam: Hadiya Pendleton.

It’s so likely I saw her, amid the Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth reenactors, among the surviving Tuskegee Airmen, and the surprisingly soulful Isiserettes from Des Moines. It’s likely her performance, marching and shimmying as a majorette with the other band members from King College Prep got a shoulder-shake out of Sasha, a mellow head-nod from Malia, a slightly offbeat soul clap from the president.

The most prolific photo of her, splashed across websites under headlines regarding her death, looks like it may have been taken for a school ID. Her smile is faint, but her eyes are soft. At a recent news conference, her father addressed the at-large gunman, saying, “Man, you took the light of my life.” With just a glance at her, so incandescent with promise, it is easy to understand how true that must be.

I watched the entire Inaugural Parade at home with my daughter and my grandmother who, after two solid hours of pomp and pageantry, still managed to say with rapt satisfaction, “God, I love to watch people march.”

Hadiya Pendleton was among those proud marchers, many of whom were black. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that day was among the most blackness-affirming days I’ve ever witnessed firsthand in this country. Our first  biracial president entered his second term in office. The great civil rights stalwart and matriarch Myrlie Evers-Williams brought forth an invocation. He was serenaded by this generation’s most spectacular black pop star. And in his parade, droves of black folks beat drums and channeled black civil war soldiers and performed the soul songs we grew up hearing our mamas play while cleaning on Saturday mornings.

For us, comparatively safe in our living room, it was a good day to be black in America. But it was not a day of ceasefire. Even in DC, just miles from the celebration, someone, somewhere, faced his or her customary threat of gun violence.

The same was true of Pendleton’s native Chicago, where for years, the president lived and worked before moving to another predominantly black city and where daily, our own die at some indiscriminate bullet’s behest.

In inner cities, homicides don’t pause to honor inaugurations, not even of a black president who “should” — by the logic of some — make them feel such a spike in self-esteem that they begin to belt their pants at the waist, tell kingpins they’d rather work at McDonald’s for that good, honest minimum wage, and turn their guns over to nonprofits in exchange for canned goods and GED prep courses.

In inner cities, no one ever says to reporters, in the wake of multiple murders within minutes, “I thought we were safe. I never dreamed this could happen on my block.”

Even Hadiya Pendleton, whose school was in a relatively safe area and who sought shelter in a park not known for violent crime, must’ve known how possible it is for an unarmed child to be killed without provocation in her own city.

She was an honor student.

It’s true that I may have seen Hadiya marching across my TV screen last Monday, may even have glanced at her as I do so many of the young black girls I teach, and wondered how closely her look and her life resemble what my own daughter’s will be when she’s older. But I wouldn’t have needed to to understand what’s happening to her.

Rather that traveling across the Atlantic to Paris as she’d planned, Pendleton is traveling through the national news circuit, no longer a girl, now a disembodied reputation.

Rather than having the luxury of unqualified mourning, those who survive her have to spend these irretrievable moments of reflection and grief stockpiling reporters with Hadiya’s “positive” attributes and exceptional experiences. Those who survive her feel the need to insist that she is different than some of the other black Chicago bodies that are reported as little more than large and senseless homicide numbers. No gang affiliations. No bad grades. No “wrong crowd.” Beautiful, built for greatness. 

She didn’t deserve this.

It is fitting that Hadiya’s connection to the president is being used as her narrative hook: gun control reform is an issue that’s risen to prominence in recent weeks. Addressing it was one of the first orders of post-inauguration business. It would be difficult to write about this girl without twisting the knife of irony: she lived and died in the place where the president began his political career, yet had she not performed in his D.C. parade, no one outside of their city — which has been slowly burning from within for years before recent mass shootings in suburban areas forced the government’s hand on gun laws — would know her name.

Now that we do know it — now that the president knows it — we expect him to amplify it the way he’s so often done when children from the quiet alcoves of the country have been slain. We expect it, if for no other reason, because Hadiya marched and raised her own voice for him.

But he may not. And even if he doesn’t, we have our own imperatives. We have our own voices to raise, our own unctions to march. We are, after all, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

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Mother as Mountain, as Sky.

When he surfaces, so long after you’ve abandoned imagining that men like him exist, you are flummoxed, but only fleetingly. You do not realize at first how ready you’ve been.

You thought you would be more hesitant, that your years since becoming a mother had morphed you into martyrdom, a voluntary consignment: its length the duration of your daughter’s childhood, its berth too wide to breach.

He enters into view and as you regard his easy grin, it occurs to you how long you’ve been blocking your natural flow of endorphins, denying estrogen surges, enabling a kind of psychic sterilization.

You believed you would spend a full 18 years depriving yourself of new love.

But in that flash between flummoxing and pardon, an iron gate has unlatched. You, remembering suddenly that you are all woman, as well as all mother, hear an echo, a flutter: I am no martyr.

If you were, you wouldn’t be hastening toward him. You wouldn’t be brushing your cheek against the course range of hair on his face and purring like a cat who’s found a home. You wouldn’t entrust him with your hands, wouldn’t gaze down at the half-moons scalloped under his fingernails and wish on them.

Your gait is neither measured nor wary; you rushed to him. It has been too long since your heart hoped for more than the half-love that co-parents can sometimes rekindle, for more than the comforts of a companionship not unlike broken in boots or limb-stretched sweaters. You’d nearly forgotten how it felt to steal away when all was quiet and whisper feverish nothings to someone who does not yet know you well enough to discard or destroy you.

It is new, the nerve endings snapping to attention again, the trail of thoughts that lead far away from nursery rhymes and apple juice boxes, and even the guilt you feel at leaving behind the illusions you’d held so long of one partner, one family, some structure you’d hoped could be retroactively whole, the guilt at shattering what’s left of the glass.

It is all so new.

When you tell your ex, he is stunned; he could no more foresee it than you could. You realize you were grasping at the selfsame straws. You realize how empty of half-moons your hands have been.

There are fears you are holding at bay, but rather than repressed, they must be purged. You will not enter this new house haunted. For your daughter must understand her mother as a woman who can handle complexities, who can cast an alchemy of friendship and motherhood and romance that sates us all. She must understand that we do not only receive one chance, one love, one faltering per lifetime. We are a species that thrives amid opportunities; it is only when we bar ourselves from seizing them that we truly fail. She must know that love can be the most nourishing opportunity of all; the more you let in, the larger you loom–and right now, her mother is a mountain, is a sky.

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Stretch.

The sky can be sliced, can be serrated. When we fly, clouds pull apart, the first heaven reconfigures, an unblemished celestial landscape forever alters with exhaust. It has become commonplace, flying. We view it not as an enchantment, but an inconvenience. We are not awed by the height we reach nor the speed with which we may exit one icy clime and find ourselves in the warm embrace of another. We forget that this is only possible — earbuds stuffed into auricles, pillows plumped under our heads — because someone stretched.

Someone enacted an idea with a reach that exceeded his grasp. With a pounding heart and a galloping mind, he sketched, he planned, he fashioned and tested and failed. He had help. He was lifted, both by those whose ideas dovetailed with his own and those who doubted his ability to ever reach higher than they could. He s t r e t c h e d, and in so doing, built something that serrates the sky.

I have gone whole days without stretching, gone full weeks, many years, a lifetime lifting toward spots much lower than those I could reach. I’ve been meek. Once my nana accused me of shrinking: you’re too young to be losing height and too old not to stand like you know you’re tall. Stretch.

Her mother was diminutive. She lived to be 95 and in her final years, when you entered any room where she stood, it felt hallowed. After decades of curling down, she felt close to heaven. My great-grandma trained as a teacher then married a factory man-turned-preacher and raised 10 children, quietly. Old photographs show her sitting, stoic and adolescent, amid her sassier sisters who would grow up to buy land, write poems, perform monologues, ride camels in Egypt.

I like to believe she was content. Perhaps family was her reach. Perhaps her laborious, love-glazed meals were all she needed to grasp. But it was only when her husband passed and left her with a decade alone that I saw her s t r e t c h. She ventured a joke, a smile, a risque repetition, and basked in the laughter that followed. She tested opinions on her tongue, rolled advice around her molars, conjured a voice more confident than I’d ever heard her use. By then, the bones in her back had calcified; her spine, not unlike a comma, separated her new and independent will from years of dependent clauses: if the children are well, if my husband allows, if the weather lets up, if the grandbabies need me. If I can.

Stretch.

My posture is not what it should be, nor is my opinion of myself. This, like my talents, desires, and eyes, is an inheritance. But so are long arms, a galloping mind, an appreciation of aircrafts and their ability to serrate the sky.

Stretch.

This year has been one of reaching, of fingertips pushing past practical possibility. I have stretched my perceptions. Stretched the confines of an INFJ personality. Stretched my patience till it was pulled thin and pliable as taffy. Stretched writing past entertainment, past preciousness, past secrecy till I reached activism. Stretched a dollar till it hollered, forgot its diminished value, and yielded to my will. Stretched beyond my agenda to help others reach an apex. This year has felt like a rack, like I was not so much the agent of my reach than a slave to it.

Stretching is rarely triumphal. It is born of discomfort, desperation. It is born of disgust and necessity. It comes from dangling: yours from the end of a rope and that of the thing you most desire, within sight but just above the air you can touch.

It aches, makes you painfully aware of the parts of yourself you neglect. Stretching intensifies your accountability: the stronger it makes you, the more you can carry.

I am carrying so much more than I ever believed I would.

S  t  r  e  t  c  h.

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The Jesus Year.

At 33, she was no longer appalled by herself. She had taken self-inventory, considered her broken parts, set about mending them. For her opinions and decisions, she was beyond apology. She knew leanness, empty pantries, the anesthesizing tartness of liquor. She knew when to laugh. She did not quite recall the electric pulse of new lips against hers. She still had very little idea how to comport herself in the company of men; they were still hunting her gaze and trying to hold it, still asking with concern if she was all right. She still worried that her large, imploring eyes were an undertow: if she looked at men full on, she would drown them.

She was losing her taste for grease-soaked potatoes. Only certain pizza seemed palatable now. She understood the purpose of bicarbonate and Tums. Cold weather was beginning to set her joints ablaze. On occasion, the prospect of death, which she had never feared, began to unsettle her now. Breath caught in her throat whenever she imagined her daughter muddling through menstruation, sifting through racks of prom gowns, tackling FAFSA and early admissions applications, or readying her wedding without her. Death was no longer an abstraction; it had measurable consequence.

At 33, she began to pray a bit more for a longer life. She began to pray a bit more in general. She knew that most people who were raised in an insular faith, then ambled into a larger, less devout world, redoubled their belief as new parents. But hers was an inching back, rather than running. She wanted to be careful, discerning conjecture from catechism. She wanted a faith that felt self-possessed; she did not want her place in eternity determined by anyone else’s fears or cliches or convictions. She did not want to waffle.

If this was the year when her life would most fully parallel her Savior’s, she would spend it empathizing. How would she feel if she knew her fate was sealed, was clearly marked, was imminent? How well would she sleep, if she were apportioned — every day of this year– a greater measure of mankind’s fickleness and suffering? What would it mean to know that thousands of years after she shed this sinew and bone and skin, the streets she had once tread would be filled with the discarded bodies of others, that the sky which God had opened to receive her spirit, would be filled with the endless din of missiles and drones? How would she reconcile the selflessness being asked of her with the selfishness that would consume every corner of the earth later? Would she feel the injustice of it all, the colossal affront? Would she understand how very young she still was?

Since she was not Him, not without sin or fill with preternatural wisdom and unable to prostrate herself in humanity’s stead, what would she be able to do about it?

This is the mystery she’d spend the year solving, the question she’d spend her life answering.

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Exeunt.

“Am I a mean person?” I ask, in the minutes after he tells me he isn’t sure he ever plans to marry. But what I mean is: did our relationship break something vital inside you? Are you ambling through this hereafter, ever aware that a cog is rattling, that a filament has burst leaving all in the corner of yourself I once occupied hollow and dark? Am I supposed to be doing something more about this? I will put forth a truncated version of these queries just before we end our call. He will not know how to answer.

Now, he stops short but recovers quickly. “No.”

“You paused.”

“I was trying to find the right word for what you are.”

So am I.

We are two-dimensional to each other now, a collection of sounds and footage, electronic data across thousands of miles. The realest artifact left of those years we spent in love can be heard squealing with glee in the background of our calls or else parroting the few eavesdropped words she can clearly pronounce.

She is the only memento I’ve kept.

It’s all this shifting. Our transitions have been swift and our space so limited. Each encampment is heavier to fold into itself and transport; at every pass, more must be sloughed.

It has always been difficult for me to determine what is worth salvaging.

The word he settles on is eccentric. “You’re very particular. You get upset when people behave in ways that you wouldn’t.”

“That’s fair,” is what I say, though I’m not sure how ‘eccentric’ his example makes me. I think he means ‘idiosyncratic.’ The strangest things cause me internal combustion: being followed by a student to the lectern as I’m entering a room, before I’ve set down my briefcase or taken off my coat; wet footprints on rugs in a bathroom; someone else opening or polishing off food that I’ve purchased; being told what I should and shouldn’t share online; the expectation that I should forget a rejection, when its din and ache still ripple through me like an echoing chime.

I have been mean to him. We both know it; this is not why I asked.

He tells me that he’s comfortable now, that he considers his role as a father to be an honor and a sacrifice, and it is all so familiar, this rhetoric. It’s similar enough to the phrase he’s turned so often before, an idea that, perhaps, every single father must utter a few times aloud, in order to fortify himself for the work that lay ahead: regardless of what happens with us, I’m going to be there for our child. 

I wonder how fully he understands the way this falls on my ears, how clearly the truer sentiment presents itself in the hearing: caring for our child is a point of pride in a way that caring for you was not. 

In all its iterations, I believe it. But it never gets easier to hear, not even now, after we’ve heard and said so much worse.

“Everything is harder, ” he muses more to himself than to me. Then we talk about changing careers, earning certifications, making ourselves more financially solvent. The naivety is seeping out of our dreams, and we hear too little of ourselves in the other’s aspirations.

It occurs to me that this has become an exit interview of sorts, the last and loosest of our ends being tied. All of what I’ve hoped and feared is converging. The years-long work at repairing the rattling cog has finally been exhausted.

My lips part. There are other things I want to say: as co-parents, what we get isn’t so much closure as cauterization — we sear our pain shut to survive our shared duty; there is more than one way for a family to be “intact;” if given a mutually exclusive choice, children will opt for their parents to be happy rather than together; and I am ready — so far beyond ready– to be happier than this. I know you are, too, and this is what we both deserve. Then I’d whisper the confession that always cripples me: no matter how anemic the possibility, I would’ve held on as long as you did.

Next time, things will be sweeter. I will not be coy. I will not secret parts of myself away. I will not offer a man decades when days will do.

This is all I can predict of the next time. But I feel a great sense of relief knowing there will be one. This is not a grace we would’ve been so easily afforded, had we married. This, I suppose, is part of why we never did.

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The Ripple of Reelection: Thoughts on Voting as a New Mother.

I am imagining a teenage future. In it, you are inches taller than I, your WNBA-length fingers hovering over the hologram-enabled screen of the latest palm-sized tablet. You are engaged in no fewer than six conversations, aside from the one I am about to initiate. I will not know by looking at you if you are ready to listen.

We will have this talk two years before you’re old enough to register. My hope is that whoever has taken office then will bear some cultural, ideological, or experiential resemblance to the man we re-elected last Tuesday. If she does, what I have to  tell you will seem less like a tall tale or a fable. If he does not and if your memory is less than keen, you may believe I’m romanticizing an invented past.

The truth is: when you were two, we voted for Barack Obama to reclaim the highest office in the land. I pressed a decisive finger on the electronic ballot screen, with you in my arms. You were as still and as quiet as you are when we first enter sanctuaries on Sunday mornings.

You have always understood when a moment calls for reverence.

By then, we had been standing in the hallway of a local middle school for two and a half hours. We were part of a serpentine trail of mostly brown bodies, a community very clearly comprised of members of the working and middle classes. The air around us pulsed with purposeful energy.

Though some complained at the length of the wait — projected, at first, to be three hours —  most were either patient, but steely, or bursting forth with optimistic banter: It’s good to see so many out, exercising their rights– and look at all these young folks!

The youth vote is cherished. Earning it makes us feel calmer about the imminent state of the world we’ll leave behind. An eighteen-year-old, regardless of whether she is won over by rhetoric, emotion, or careful study of each candidate’s platform, is a sapling in a marshland, a newly hatched chick in an aviary for the endangered. For the parents, the middle-aged, and the elders, you — more than any candidate or speech — are the hope of our nation.

I did not know this at your age. I’d heard it, but only as saccharine sentiment, as lyrics in a chart-topping Whitney Houston pop cover, as so much white noise amid the drone of my own angst. Even at 19, I could not be convinced that my participation was integral to the maintenance of a functioning democracy. But I still began to vote that year, like the dutiful descendant of a people once considered three-fifths human that I am.

It seemed a moral obligation, if mostly a ceremonial one, every ballot cast a pouring of libation for the brothers and sisters who are no longer here.
I wasn’t sure what it meant. Between the influence of the electoral college, the fact that my state rarely yielded close-call election results, and my general ambivalence about candidates and their concern for the needs of people like us, voting did little to make me feel less insignificant.

This changed, of course, with the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where Barack Obama, then a mere Senate candidate, delivered his iconic Audacity of Hope address. I suspect that, by these, your teenage years, this speech will have been canonized in history texts and delivered ad nauseum in youth oratory contests. But you will no more grasp what it meant to hear it in real time than I can ascertain how the marchers felt on the Mall, as the musings of Martin Luther King Jr. billowed around them like a baptismal tide.

For better or worse, politics that engage the emotions are most effective with the portion of the electorate whose attitudes most resemble mine. Political agents with the power to move you will always be able to compel you to act, even when you can’t entirely comprehend why. What moves you, however, is more a reflection on you than on them. And this election, this battle to retain incumbency, was a prime example of that.

Those moved toward the idea of a diverse and inclusive America, wherein citizens and lifelong residents can carve their home-shaped space, voted for progress and forward motion, voted with an eye toward an inevitably altering national landscape. Those wistful for the days of fewer liberties for all and a glut of power and wealth for those who’ve always held it cast their vote for the man who promised to redeem what they believed they’d lost. And more than in any other election during which I’ve been eligible to vote, the distance between those movements widened.

An hour after we’d entered the voting line, I looked down at you, absently smoothing wisps of your hair, and worried that you wouldn’t hold up for the slow march toward the school cafeteria.

But regardless of how long it took, you rallied. You played foot games with the elderly man behind us, got a cluster of first-time-voting teens to join you in a game of follow-the-leader. You peeked around my legs as though they were pillars and used them to hide your face from the family five feet back.

It occurred to me that, as a people, we have always known when to wait. Even when restless or resistant, we can intuit the import of tarrying. It  mean the difference between triumph or a trap.

Then, as has been the case with so many things in my life after you were born, my reasons for voting became crystalline. As we stood on that line together last week, I realized just how greatly what we were doing as a precinct, as a city, as a state, as a country would impact how you live, how you’re educated, how you’re employed, how much debt you’ll acquire, how high a tax you’ll pay for the life you lead, how you’ll retire, how you’ll view equality….

The ripples were endless.

Someday soon you will apprehend what it means to be American. It is to feel at once horrified and resplendent. It is knowing that your life is, in many ways, a summation of your country’s choices. Until then, vote for whichever reasons you wish. Wait until the revelations come to you.

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Making Room.

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.” — Virginia Woolf

What if the work does not reference slavery? What if it is not a tome of epistolary yearning between sisters flung far apart by callous white folks or cruel, womanizing black men? What if it does not speak of a revolution? What if we decide not to pay lip service to civil rights martyrs or paint vivid pictures of black pathology that resonate with liberal audiences and make them mourn over urban blight during awards season?

Will there be room for us?

What if we write of the unfamiliar and the work, foreign as it is to what is understood as black experience, is accused of inauthenticity, is labeled fraudulent, misguided, evocative but empty? What if we are told it is rhythmless–and we thought you people had soul, had souls? What if it is quiet and absent of baleful wailing?

Will there be room for us?

So many of our women have not been sitting indoors all these years. And it is these women with whom readers are well-acquainted: the enslaved, the political prisoners, the domestics. We were not being coddled, sheltered, or treated as delicate and pretty, if disposable, possessions. We were broodmares, carnival attractions, wet nurses to children who were not our own. We were whipping posts, cooks to those who owned us, cotton-pullers, one-room schoolteachers, laundresses. We were out earning when our husbands could not. No, we were not known for remaining indoors. So many of us have not worn corsets or pined in bay windows or rode in covered carriages. But some of us have. Ask Jessie Fauset and every woman character she constructed. Consult Phillis Wheatley, pre-freedom, post-fame. We are here in the suburbs, in academies. We are Eat, Pray, Loving, too–and dabbling in the dark arts of Tiger motherhood or putting into practice the French parenting principles outlined in Pamela Druckman’s Bringing Up Bebe.

And we want equal room. We do not wish to be relegated to a sliver of shelf space cleared to accommodate this country’s untidy racial history. We want space for a wide range of life experience. We want our expatriatism romanticized and our motherhood honored. We want to publish work about our boarding school upbringings as easily as we find publishers for our tales of being raised in boarding houses wherein fifteen families shared a washroom.

We want to confess that our creative force has never been hidden, diminished or repressed under the weight of household duty or a projection of feminine delicacy and virtue. We have carried it into the world, lifted it as song into the skies above cane fields, kneaded it, along with bread, into narratives we invented and told to the children we nannied, painted it in the sheds our husbands built in the back of our sharecropped farms, penned it in prison cells. We want to confess this without being called reverse racists, without being complimented for being so articulate, without fielding accusations that our creativity would not be so remarkable were it not for affirmative action. We want to confess this without being called traitors to feminism, without being told we’re minimizing white women’s struggle.

Sometimes we want to write about things other than struggle (and still be eligible for the big prize).

Is there room for us?

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To Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Re: The Burning of Sharmeka Moffitt.

Revision: Like many who’ve attempted swift and supportive responses to the news of Sharmeka Moffitt’s burning, I took her at her word and wrote with the assumption that she’d been attacked. Frankly, the police investigators’ conclusion that the alleged attack was likely fabricated does little to change many of the views expressed in this essay: black lives are undervalued. And the fact that racism is still so overt and prevalent in Louisiana and surrounding Southern states made such a fabrication quite plausible. We may find that Moffitt suffers from mental illness (it would difficult to believe she’d immolate herself under any other circumstances), and we may never know what motivated her actions. Perhaps those motives are no longer our business. I hope she receives the treatment she may need, but more, I hope that her experience isn’t held up as rule that disproves the existence of racial animus, rather than the rare exception where it was not a factor or cause.

Immediately after the awful barbarism which disgraced the State of Georgia in April of last year, during which time more than a dozen colored people were put to death with unspeakable barbarity, I published a full report showing that Sam Hose, who was burned to death during that time, never committed a criminal assault, and that he killed his employer in self-defense.

Since that time I have been engaged on a work not yet finished, which I interrupt now to tell the story of the mob in New Orleans, which, despising all law, roamed the streets day and night, searching for colored men and women, whom they beat, shot and killed at will. […] We do not believe that the American people who have encouraged such scenes by their indifference will read unmoved these accounts of brutality, injustice and oppression. We do not believe that the moral conscience of the nation — that which is highest and best among us — will always remain silent in face of such outrages, for God is not dead, and His Spirit is not entirely driven from men’s hearts.

— Ida B. Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and his Fight to the Death, 1900

Authorities say Sharmeka Moffitt, 20, called 911 from Civitan Park about 8 p.m. Sunday after she was allegedly attacked and burned by three men wearing white hoodies while she was on the walking trail in the southern end of the park.

The girl lives, burned. She is in critical condition, the flesh of her arms, her chest, one leg: wet and raw and unrecognizable. This is literal: the burn unit, the stench of singed skin and its tenderness.  But I imagine her consumed by a different fire: yours, an ancestral blaze, a blood memory she could hear whispering its recollections: they came for us on foot. They still come for us.

The girl is twenty. She was not old enough to vote in the last election. She has come of age in the era of Obama; they are selling her generation a fraudulent bill of goods, goading them into renouncing racism’s existence, forcing them to admit how much better they have it than you did. We are ever reminded of what we are now permitted to pursue. The you should be thanking us is still implied.

You and the girl are more than a century removed from one another. But in Louisiana, it is likely she has known the mob violence you risked yourself to expose. Segregation, for her, is not a construct flattened into outdated history texts. In her state and those surrounding, high schools are still struggling to house all their students’ races under one roof for senior proms; judges can still deny interracial couples marriage licenses; and Ole Miss is just electing its first black homecoming queen. In 2012.

I would hope she understands, as you did, that progress is amorphous. It is not a steady climb. And the success of one person of color does not ensure protection for all–even if that success comes in the package of a presidency.

I believe you were with her that Sunday night. You were on the path, as the three men approached, observing, as you so often must, the outcomes of your handiwork. You must have been telling her to hold her ground, to breathe and leave enough air in her lungs to call the police: You must make them see you; these days, their eyes, if not their hearts, are duty-bound.

If it was not you with her that night, it may have been one of the many whose stories you reported. It may’ve been Sam Hose himself–or the detective, Louis Le Vin, who thoroughly investigated his death, before saying, “I made my way home thoroughly convinced that a Negro’s life is a very cheap thing in Georgia.”

Much has changed, Ms. Wells-Barnett, but the value this country places on the Negro’s life has not. Blood still runs in streams along our streets, still stains the backseats of police cruisers, still splatters our suburban sidewalks. And the outrage, if it surges at all, is fleeting and underreported. It is easier to claim we are exaggerating, that these instances are the isolated exceptions to a post-racial rule, that this latest burning is an act of barbarism, the likes of which the country has seldom seen. We pretend that black women have always been safe walking paths, that crime scenes rife with obvious evidence need days and weeks of speculation before the heinous acts committed there can be labeled as hate crimes.

It is tempting to pretend. We long for a world where all that are left to fight are dusty institutions who still grapple with the idea of affirmative action or actors and comedians who doggedly insist on appropriating  blackface and racial slurs to enliven their flagging careers. Would that these were our biggest challenges!

Then we could say with certainty that your work was done.

But some of us still toss in the night, thrashing until our bedsheets become  our restraints. For us, it is impossible to feel free when our people are still being dragged and burned and shot unarmed. Our gains, however considerable, in politics, in media, at homecoming dances, do not serve to lessen the degree of Sharmeka Moffitt’s burns, do not act as a sufficient salve for our people’s suffering.

Like you, we cannot rest. We will not. We open our eyes. We publish the stories. We distribute them, even when they are met with squirming discomfort or outright denial. This is your legacy. This is the world you’ve left us: burning, but still alive.

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The War on Shame.

1.

For some, it begins with the circled vulva on an ultrasound, a slow dawning in the doctor’s office. It isn’t just a girl; it’s a lifetime of guerrilla warfare, a draft that cannot be dodged, an avowal to safeguard her from the predators who could make them grandparents in as a few as 9-12 years.

Somewhere far deeper, it is a tacit admission that, despite their most valiant efforts, this insular protection may not be possible.

For some, it is an incremental unease, deepening with every diaper’s denuding. Even as these parents powder and wipe with precision, they are averting their eyes. When the baby reaches down, curious as to which organ or appendage is so difficult for her parents to face full-on, they swat her hand away, awakening her awareness that a part of her, some intrinsic part, can elicit an admonition, a sudden rebuke.

She cannot know that it isn’t the reaching that’s wrong; it is the world she’s inheriting. It isn’t her hand being roughly pushed aside; it is an idea, a recollection of a story, wherein a girl, not much older than she—a ten-month-old in Lesotho—was raped by a man who believed her virginity would cure his disease. It is the abhorrent day care facility, the abusive relative, the cracked-but-licensed caregiver that crops up ever so often on the evening news, alerting us that our girls and their bodies aren’t as safe as we’d hoped.

We parents are afraid, palpably afraid, not of our girlchildren but of the people they’ll pass in this life–on buses, in schools, in babysitters’ basements–apparitions we will not see, every friend of a friend of a friend we will never have occasion to meet, every stranger who may mean them harm, every forced and pressured child whose only mechanism for managing emotion is to apply equal force.

But none of this is clear to the baby. As she lies, freshly-diapered, on her changing table, she is not apprehending our fear. She’s understanding our gesture of rejection.

2.

Then there will be school; there will be boys and blood. This will be soon, so much sooner than we are prepared to accept. For some, it will begin in clothing stores, where every item seems a machination designed to hyper-sexualize their preteens. In their heads, the mothers will scrawl angry screeds to Justice and Delia’s. But aloud, before they can stop themselves, they’ll snap at their gangly girls, as they longingly pore over leopard print training bras: Don’t you have all these nasty little boys sniffin’ around you.

3.

For those who attend churches, it may begin in late adolescence, when a youth group decides it must say more to its members than, “True love waits.” and “Flee fornication.” The girls will be ushered into alcoves, the boys into back rooms and basements. There will be no overhearing. But this is what the daughters will be told: Be Esthers, Ruths, be Virgin Marys. Do not not be Jezebels. Do not be Hagars.

They will be told that men are weakened by their widening hips, their waists, their urges, that unsavory women–Salome, Delilah, the wife of Potiphar–have been beguiling them since the Beginning. They will be told that they are temptresses, even if they don’t intend to be, so they must be mindful of Lycra percentages and heel heights. They must blot their lip gloss, reduce the dips and rhythms in their walks, only speak to grown men at length when necessary or when spoken to, and even then, this should be done when their wives or another older woman is near.

They are told that if they get pregnant, they will owe the church an apology, that their bodies will become a permanent penance. If their mothers were unmarried when they were born, they will also be told their pregnancies are generational curses.

They are told that when they sleep with men, they ensnare their souls. It will take years, perhaps decades, to untangle themselves. They are advised that it is rarely okay to say yes or to confess aloud the palpable desires they should always pretend–even to themselves–not to have. If their yeses and confessions are followed by an abuse, it may be an unfortunate consequence of their own lusts. They can be healed and must forgive, in order to be forgiven.
They are only to be lauded and are easier to respect and love when their legs are closed. And on their wedding nights, if they’ve managed to retain their chastity, they are told that their grooms will instruct us in the fine arts of marital pleasure and, if by some natural fluke he is also a virgin, they will learn those arts together.

But in that other room, where the boys have been herded, the messaging diverges. They are being reassured about how difficult young women are to resist. They are being told that the just man falls seven times, and that women are often the stumbling blocks that account for those nasty spills. They are admonished to marry “good” girls–and the definition they are given is narrow. She must be willing to submit. She must be faithful, supportive, and–above all else–she should be chaste. She should be pure. The names of kings are evoked–David and Solomon, the father a man after God’s own heart, the son the wisest in the land. It is noteworthy, their youth leader insists, to mention that though David stole a man’s wife and had him killed and though Solomon wed 700 women and held a harem of 300 others, they are not cast aside for their weaknesses. They are not condemned for their failings.

4.

For girls, shame is an endless absorption. There are few messages that can act as sealants against it. Fewer still are the messengers willing to attempt such protection. But I will be one: we are not responsible for their urges. Our bodies are not talismans intended to topple great men. We needn’t conceal ourselves to ensure their moral fortitude. We are not, as a gender, responsible for the fall of humankind. Our faith can, at times, be difficult to reconcile with our womanhood; this does not make us reprobates. We are not pre-conversion Mary Magdalenes for questioning. In governing our own bodies, we must do what we believe is best; we are the only ones who will be called upon to ever give account. But in so governing, we should know that we needed bear responsibility for any assault or accusation that cites our clothing, our girl-aged bodies with woman-sized assets, our suggestive language, or our mixed signals as its cause. We are never to blame for being overpowered. We are not to blame when our no’s go unheeded. We are not to blame if we cannot eke out an audible no. 

We are not just girls. We are lifetime guerrilla warriors in a draft that cannot be dodged. We will need our fight. Every battle is wearying, for our opponents are not just men or patriarchy or institutions. Our adversary is shame, and it takes the form not just of legislators, but of intimates: our families, our friends, and, at times, our faith leaders.

It’s an uneven match but it isn’t unwinnable. Wage it first within; if it’s conquerable in there, where it feels all but inextricable, and you will be armed to win in any arena shame can ever conceive or construct.