I, TOO

“I don’t know what that white boy did to you,” my cousin Nina said, “but whatever it was, it must’ve been bad.”

That wasn’t her way of asking me to tell her all the nitty-gritty details of my breakup with Andreas, which was now nearly a year behind me. She was commenting upon the recent change in me, one of many she’d witnessed over the span of our relationship. I was no longer the goody-goody girl she’d encountered on her first visit to California when we were both children—though as far as she, in all her savvy urbane know-how, was concerned, I probably had more than a little of that child left in me. For her part, she still had a portion of the sass that had hit me like a cold front long ago. But our child-selves were buried beneath other things, having been tempered by the growing up we’d managed to do in the dozen or more years since we first met.

The change Nina detected was knotted into the dreadlocks I was cultivating, and it was stippling my underarms and legs, left unshaven in defiance of I’m-still-not-quite-sure-what. It was evident in the newly acquired rhetoric—phrases like “the White Power Structure,” “Women of Color,” and “the Black Community”—that had begun to pepper my speech.

I’d gone militant.

If Nina was right, she’d succeeded at pinpointing a connection I hadn’t myself been willing to acknowledge. As far as I was concerned, my awakening had started in the fall of sophomore year, with a course on African American literature. When we read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I’d felt, possibly for the first time, like I was capable of looking at racial injustice without blinking and of really listening, letting things unfold before me, jab at my heart, and kick my mind into motion. Reading the novel, I’d understood something I hadn’t ever considered: listening to a protagonist is easier than listening to a person speaking in the flesh, even if the two might be saying the exact same thing. The protagonist invites you into such an intimate proximity, asking only to be heard, and then proceeds to say a thing like, “I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility.” If someone said that to my face, my esophagus would tighten, my temples would flush, and my heartbeat would thump louder in my ears. I’d retreat, too ashamed and too guilty to stand there listening to what the world had insisted, again and again, upon doing to a person with skin hued like my own. And yet the voice on the page, saying these very things, entered me differently. My eyes raced across the lines, chasing down every sentence. It was more than simply loving to read, more than simply loving a good story. It was about realizing I was capable of opening my eyes and ears in such a way as to accept the truth of what I was reading and admit the pain.

Novels, essays, and poems about race in America did hurt, but they buoyed me, too. I’d never read so many books by black writers before. Ellison, Hughes, Hurston, Baldwin, Wright. I’d recognized a version of my own daydreaming, my own longing for the future and for true experience, in Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie’s “Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made” became my own tendency to lurch with all my imagination toward a moment when my life would magically begin. And once that bond was cemented, once I’d claimed a piece of the character’s subjectivity as my own, it was almost as though following Janie through the rural black world of the novel, immersing myself in her experience and in the details of the place she belonged to, was a way of undoing the fear and squeamishness with which I’d once reacted to Mother and her corner of the South. Janie, or rather Zora Neale Hurston, returned a piece of what I had rejected when I was too young to know better.

I could feel these novels healing and enlarging me. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo reminded me of the vibrant cacophony of voices making up my extended family—the playful and pointed way words could take on a life of their own, signifying (another new yet instinctively familiar concept for me) in many directions at once. I felt a heady joy that Jean Toomer’s Cane might sweep from one register to another so quickly—that one writer might be able to claim dominion over so many different lexicons, saying, “You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed” in one breath, and “Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering” in another—without seeming concerned with who was listening, trusting that the reader was listening in the exact right way. These texts allowed two different parts of my person to mingle, perhaps for the first time. The part that lived in and understood blackness as a thing apart, a thing unto itself; and the part that lived in and understood language as a vehicle for deep feeling and complex thought.

One night, the phone in my dorm room rang. It was a friend from high school, a tall gangly blond boy named Jacob, who had always been shy and clumsy but brilliant, a voracious reader. We’d talked on the phone in high school about Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. Jacob was a year younger than me, and our friendship hadn’t lasted long past my graduation, but it was a thrill to hear his voice again, and because we’d always shared what we were reading, I tried to tell him about the books I’d been devouring in my class.

“But,” he countered, “is African American literature as good as our literature?”

The statement struck me as layered. For one, he’d presumed that he and I belonged to the same our. Having grown up together, I suppose that, one way or another, we did. But the them his our presumed was pointed both at me and away from me, for if I grew up to be a writer, as he knew I one day hoped to do, the books I’d write would not belong to the our he assumed, the our he recognized and privileged.

“Oh, but you’re different,” he said. “Race doesn’t really count for you.” He was doing the thing that whites sometimes do to the blacks they admire, which is to strip them of their blackness, as if doing so were a kind of favor.

I had talked about this at length in my seminars on race, but I didn’t feel hopeful that Jacob would follow me through the nuances of such an argument, so my next tactic was simply to answer his question directly. “African American literature is part of the canon. It’s American literature. Invisible Man is an American masterpiece.”

But Jacob’s hesitation, the pause before he assented, drowned out everything else we had to say to one another.

When I hung up the phone, I was fuming. “Who does he think he is?”

My roommates sat by, listening to my rant. Two of them were white, but they certainly knew what I meant. It was the early 1990s, after all, and everyone at Harvard was caught up in the conversation about Identity. At least everyone I knew. Identity was a badge, a discipline, a spectacle. It was something you could claim, something you could deconstruct, something you could interrogate, something you could even wield if need be. Identity surprised us during those years, spinning in countless ways upon axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and whatever else we were willing to consider. It was exhilarating to be so astute, so dexterous, so chameleonic. It was also helpful, at a time of life when so many feelings remained out of reach, burrowed deep beneath the skin, to believe that identity was something that could be mastered.

The spring of sophomore year, galvanized by the thinking imparted by my first-semester foray into Afro-Am (that’s what we called the discipline, back then), I’d enrolled in an eight-person seminar, which introduced us, in the first weeks, to the work of Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X, and W. E. B. DuBois. I also took an Afro-Am cinema class taught by Spike Lee, who flew in from New York once a week for the lecture. During discussions, Lee poked fun at a white girl in the class named Stokely and a black boy whose speech had been tricked out with urban slang in what may have been an effort to compensate for the fact that he’d graduated from Exeter. My studies convinced me I was beginning to live in a new language. I discovered cultural critics who taught me to interrogate notions of Otherness, who argued that loving blackness was a means of political resistance, and who gave me the terms within which to consider a thing called Black Consciousness.

Conversation in the seminar room, which sat across the street from the Yard and let in some of the commotion of Mass Ave., was lively. There were many of us who were exploring the discipline not merely for intellectual edification but as a means of recovering something we believed had been withheld by the mainly white schools many of us had attended and the culture, which, when we were children at least, had the habit of making us feel guilty or ashamed for the victimization of blacks by slavery and racism.

But it wasn’t just about self-esteem. We discussed that in the first class, when we’d covered the texts that had once designated Black Studies curricula for just that purpose, to repair black self-esteem. But that was decades ago. The language of such a time, and many of the theories and practices it had given birth to (theories of “Afro-Centric architecture,” for example), was already dated, played out. Now it was much more fruitful to interrogate the subtleties informing the conversation about race and to “read” (my new favorite verb, at least when applied to things that weren’t literal texts) the relevance of a whole number of offshoots from the topic. That semester, I wrote a paper exploring why so many black revolutionaries had become conservatives during the Reagan era. Privately, I wondered if the assignment might help me learn more about my father, who had never been a revolutionary, but whose service in the military had made him even more fiercely patriotic, and who had voted for Reagan, both times.

Afro-Am meant many things to me and galvanized me with new energy for my studies. But there were moments when I also doubted that it was enough to become an expert on Blackness. Maybe it was enough for the white students in the class, who had no literal skin in the game as I saw it, but for a person like me, how could Afro-Am ever fully be a bloodless pursuit? Wasn’t there always going to be an unconscious ulterior motive behind the things I sought to clarify for myself and for others?

Sometimes, my classmates and I talked about the work of black writers as if it always involved some kind of tricksterism or sleight of hand: “Phillis Wheatley is speaking in code. Nobody will listen to her if she doesn’t praise the Western God. Nobody would even believe she’d written those poems herself if she didn’t have the white man’s stamp of approval at the front of the book.” But what if such a thesis were equal parts true and untrue? What if the language Wheatley had adopted had also gotten inside of her? What if she believed herself when she said, ’twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too? Would that make her less worthy of our attention?

“It would be a wise idea to concentrate in something in addition to Afro-Am,” my friend Chris told me. He was a senior who had also been in that first Afro-Am lit class. His presentation on Ellison had impressed me. “Ellison wrote for the little man behind the stove,” he’d said. He was proposing a reading of Invisible Man that had been inflected by Ellison’s essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” in which the author recalled being cautioned never to forget about the unnoticed, unassuming little man sitting quietly in the corner—the one who knows more about what is at stake aesthetically and culturally than everyone else. Chris’s comments illuminated for me the sense of Ellison’s epic reach by tempering it with a sense of his humility. That afternoon, I’d felt my eyes trying to morph my friend into my image of Conrad. It was a way of acknowledging my respect for him and my wish to do what he was standing there doing, which looked to me like mastering the material, casting it in a new light, adding new layers to the conversation our professor had prompted. I wanted to be able to do that.

“If you’re interested in the field,” Chris had coached me, “you should think about doing a joint concentration in English and Afro-Am.”

Having a foot in both realms seemed appropriate. For while there was a version of me who knew and revered the literature my old friend Jacob had called “ours,” there was also a version of me who believed she was a nationalist.

As a “nationalist,” I attended Black Students Association meetings and participated in the verbal sparring that often erupted around the topic of black women who weren’t dating black men. I wasn’t dating a black man—I wasn’t dating anyone. Maybe the hurt my heart still felt from having been broken up with (by a white boy, yes; would it have hurt less if he had been black?) required me to claim a kind of strength, an authority. Granted, it was an authority that was merely theoretical—one that lived primarily in the words I strung together in my essays on topics having to do with the countless combinations of gender, race, class, and subjectivity—but as I saw it, a theoretical authority was better than no authority at all. And it gave me a language for thinking about the world, a language that deepened and complicated the ways I saw myself.

Some weekends, needing a brief respite from course work, dorms, dining halls, campus gossip, and roommates, I’d take the bus to New York City. After so many years of living thousands of miles away from my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and of imagining that there were many impassable worlds between us, I was finally getting to know that branch of the family for myself. Those visits had also, finally, wrested the city itself from my father’s narrow view of it, erased for me his contempt for the sprawling, messy, raucous frenzy of the place. There on my own terms, letting my eyes climb past the trees to scale the high-rise buildings that never fully seemed to surrender to the sky, I’d felt filled with agency, as if the magnitude of what was human—the skyscrapers, clock towers, mammoth bridges, and the wide avenues electric with traffic—had enlarged me. I could see very clearly why a person would choose to live in a place like that, why a person might race to fall into step with the river of pedestrians, everyone moving with an aggrandized sense of his or her own going—walking, sprinting, climbing, closing in on something always just a little way off. There was a privacy to the place that intoxicated me. A quiet at the center of that racket into which a person could disappear, if she wanted to.

Sometimes the quiet of my thoughts, and my ideals—which I took to be thoughts I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to act upon, like the one about being a nationalist—was intruded upon by one of my relatives. Like Nina asking what on earth had happened to me. Or my aunt Ursula wanting to know what kind of job I hoped to get with a head full of dreadlocks.

“I’m not interested in the kind of job that would discriminate against me for wearing my hair in its natural state.”

I can now see how the steely rigidity with which I rattled off my new beliefs might have been disconcerting. My mother was unsettled by my new appearance; she thought I looked unkempt, though she grilled me less about what else my appearance signified. But my aunts were not my mother, and they gave themselves permission not just to worry but also to badger me.

“There’s a little boy at my school,” Aunt Ursula had told me, “whose mother put his hair into dreadlocks. I see him on the playground yanking it out, one lock at a time. He feels stuck. It’s not fair.”

“You can be black without going overboard about it,” another voice had chimed in. “Why stir up trouble trying to make such a big statement?”

They were telling me that blackness wasn’t a costume and it wasn’t a battle but something most people lived inside of quite naturally, not wrestling with it or feeling obliged to wave it around. Like it or not, they also meant to remind me, blackness was also a factor that made some aspects of life harder. Of course I knew what they meant. Of course I knew they were right, but up until that point in my life, I’d mostly kept my understanding of blackness inside. Couldn’t my aunts see how elated I felt, finally having the permission and the tools to voice my own thinking about race and to unpack such thinking for others (whether or not they wanted to hear it)?

As far as my New York family was concerned, I was late to the party. They’d lived a great portion of their lives in the South, after all. Even my cousins who were raised in New York had had the benefit of regular visits to Alabama, where they, unlike me, had felt at home. They’d been given the language I hadn’t or hadn’t been willing to receive, and it freed them from having to talk their way through what being black meant. Had they been told to always be twice as good? Maybe, but they’d also been told it was a flaw of the white world to require such a display.

I made a trip to New York one weekend in order to visit the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of the New York Public Library devoted to the African diaspora. I’d read about it and was eager to be in the space, to soak up the feeling of all that black art, all that black thinking. My aunt Carla had driven me there, and on the way home, she’d given me a tour of the Harlem neighborhoods, weaving along the blocks of Striver’s Row and, farther north, pointing out the abandoned buildings that had once been magnificent, too, but that now stood gutted like doll houses on burnt-out blocks. After dark, as we were heading back down Lenox Avenue, I’d pointed to the silhouettes warming themselves around garbage cans whose contents had been set aflame.

“Wow!” was all I could say, spinning around in my seat to take in the sight for as long as I could. There was something about it that delighted me, something real, something that reminded me, perhaps, of the invisibility Ellison’s protagonist described.

“When I graduate, I want to come here. I want to live in Harlem, with all these beautiful black people,” I announced. It felt like a homecoming. The little sliver of blackness I’d known growing up in California, a sliver that sat inside the walls of our family house, or inside the silence of my mind, leapt now in joy to know that there was an immense realm whose facets gave back occasional glimpses of itself.

“Those men are homeless,” Aunt Carla said. I could hear the echo of my father in her voice.

“But there’s something so…so beautiful about them.” It was the only word I could access quickly enough to answer her. I didn’t want to be just my old self, the one for whom race was a private meditation and nothing more. And while I surely didn’t want to be one of the homeless warming myself by the heat of a trash can set afire, I didn’t want to be a stranger to that reality forever.

“Your parents did everything they could to make sure you wouldn’t have to suffer. Why would you want to go backward?” Aunt Carla was asking.

It was a question that on one level made sense to me. But on another, it didn’t, and I wasn’t able to answer it—not yet.

On the Greyhound back to Boston, signs everywhere told me how much farther there was to go. Bridgeport. New Haven. Providence. I treasured that feeling of drifting between places. It helped erase some of the anxiety about where, in the real scheme of things, I was supposed to be headed, and it helped take my mind off the loneliness I sometimes felt now that I was no longer in love, no longer anybody’s urgent destination. Moving over ramps and bridges, and back and forth across lanes, I relaxed my grip around the confusion, the sorrow, the independence, the wanting, the shifting allegiances, the insatiable wondering that fueled so much of my life. High above the ground, watching the bus’s shadow skimming north on Interstate 95, I felt vacant, expansive, subjective, far away. Like a cloud pushed along by the wind.