Tracy Deonn Walker
This essay was selected from the editor’s call for submissions from unpublished writers.
I once was a Girl Scout. Our weekly troop meetings took place in a reserved room on the second floor of a local church. Each time my mother dropped me off at the entrance, sending me away and up the stairs wrapped in the thin but warm cloak of her smile, she must have known that I was the only Black girl in the group. Me? I’d yet to step into that fact. Looking back, this room was almost certainly the first space I’d encountered framed specifically as a site for female empowerment. In fact, that Girl Scouts meeting room may have been the green-vested, badge-bearing, tilled earth within which my own nascent feminist self began to take root. Unfortunately, that particular soil, and perhaps even that particular feminism, has restrictions on what should grow.
One evening the girls in our troop were on the church’s playground, chatting on top of the merry-go-round as it spun slowly, in motion only due to someone occasionally dropping a foot to push it along. We were on our own. A group of preteen girls talking and laughing, unsupervised after the troop meeting, while the moms met inside to talk about boring mom things. One of the oldest girls, Lisa, began to gush about a cute boy in her class, and the group, emboldened, picked up her cue and began to share their own stories of junior high romance. No one was really going out with anyone, but our daydreams of doing so grew solid, almost real, as we continued to share. Excited whispers and giggles passed from girl to girl as we spun, eager to participate in one of our first experiences of “girl talk.” This type of talk, and the nervous release of hushed secrets spilled, made me feel connected to these girls. To my troop. By the time it was my turn, I had been energized enough that I spoke my own secret without hesitation. I told my troop about a boy on my bus that I had been crushing on for months: Cody. Cody who played soccer and liked grunge music. Cody who wore the most in-fashion Adidas jacket of the time. In green. Cody who sat at the very front row of the bus and smiled and scowled in equal parts. (This made his thoughts mysterious, I’d decided. And mysterious was attractive.) Cody who ever so casually said “hi” to me in the halls and had no idea that each time he did so my heart began to race against my rib cage. Cody.
As soon as I finished my brief description of Cody, Lisa pounced quickly onto the name.
“Wait, wait. Is Cody white?!” This caught me off guard.
How did she know? Was “Cody” a white boy name?
“Yes.” I confirmed that Cody-the-crush was indeed white. Lisa’s giggles set off immediately.
She asked us, asked the entire group: “Wouldn’t it be funny if Cody and Tracy got together and had babies? Because they’d be ‘swirly’ like chocolate and vanilla ice cream! Oh my GOD! How funny would that be!”
The troop laughed in unison at the concept, and I’m certain I did too, even as a part of me was mortified. Even as a part of me realized that this space may have been for girls, but not girls like me. This was the first hint of trouble that my desires—my attractions, what I like, what makes me happy—might not be good topics to share in social spaces. This was the first indication that being a Black girl meant treading carefully. This was the first time I realized I might have an identity illness.
I stopped talking about Cody.
* * *
I grew up hating Black History Month. I didn’t want to hear about George Washington Carver and his peanuts. I knew who Rosa Parks was. I hated hearing about slavery and the Underground Railroad. I didn’t care that much for Martin Luther King Jr., although I did appreciate his speeches. They were good speeches. I generally liked historical figures, but the famous Black people we learned about each February weren’t just historical figures. They were judgmental, needy ghosts. They stared back at me from their photos and from the black-and-white sketches in my history book, demanding that I care. They needed me to care deeply, and they knew precisely when I skimmed over their chapters and lives. And they weren’t the only ones who watched me carefully during Black History Month. My white classmates eyed every Black kid in the room during those lessons. Sometimes not for anything in particular, I’d guess. Mostly just for big reactions. They wanted to see me respond to a month dedicated to people who looked like me. But there was no room, no space, no way for me to be excited about Black History Month; excitement about being Black is scary to white people; this much I’d learned. I’d always been an observant child. This default setting was less out of shyness than an overabundance of social awareness. I’d noticed that whenever something culturally “Black” entered our social sphere, be it a hip-hop song on the radio or a dance craze, my white classmates who recited the lyrics and knew the dance gained instant cool points. They were superstars. But I have clear memories of my white peers’ eyes growing into wide, uneasy saucers when watching Black students do the same. Blackness by way of whiteness was appropriately filtered, but Blackness by way of Blackness was too raw. Uncut. Scary.
I was surviving middle school only by being as barely Black as I could possibly be. In order to blend in, I needed to care about Black History Month exactly as much as my white peers did, which is to say, not very much at all. But this was the one month during the year when everyone around me wanted me to care, needed me to. They needed me to know the lyrics and do the dance. But I couldn’t do any of those things, and even if I tried, I couldn’t do them like the cool white kids did them. Every February I was asked to be Black on their terms, but I was much too white to respond. I hated those eagle-eyed historical figures in the textbooks that had lived through slavery and who, for one month each school year, kept me muzzled and bound and trapped and anxious in ways that they could have never imagined.
Stay neutral. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t raise your hand when they do the Black History Month trivia game, even if you know the answer. Head down and it will pass. Every February 1, I attempted to shrink into the tiniest possible speck in the classroom.
One February my seventh-grade science teacher, who had undoubtedly been tasked with weaving Black history into her curriculum in some fashion, started a portion of her lesson with a line like this: “Some people in the 1800s believed that Black people were meant to be slaves or given lower-class jobs because they thought that Africans were too unintelligent to do anything else.”
What a bomb she’d just dropped. I prayed that I wouldn’t be called on to reply to whatever ridiculousness this well-meaning white woman was hoping to impart. Heads were already turning my way. I remember sinking into my chair. I remember the loud soundtrack of internal groans beginning its loop inside my head.
My teacher continued her speech, and I’ll never forget the self-satisfied and superior tone of her voice as she said the next sentences: “But, everyone, look at Tracy and Latoya! They have some of the highest grades in this class! That idea was obviously racist and not true. Just a stereotype. If it were true, Tracy and Latoya wouldn’t have such good grades.”
Fuck.
Somehow she’d pulled a triple whammy: she’d reminded everyone that we’re Black, revealed that we get better grades than other students, and demanded that everyone give us their attention. The first I knew. The second I’d only guessed at, but it’s not something you get confirmed in public. Especially in middle school. The last, well, that just countered the very purpose of all of my Black History Month evasive maneuvers.
Everyone turned to me, and I immediately shot Latoya a brief look. We weren’t friends, but in that moment we understood each other. Her eyes met mine, and we turned in unison to the front of the classroom, ignoring the other glances. Shields up. Don’t respond. It’ll be over in a couple of weeks. You won’t be their designated Black spokesperson anymore. At least until next year.
Did my teacher really need to rely on Latoya and me to help prove her point? Could she not have sought out any other evidence that Black people weren’t morons? Did she—did anyone—have lower expectations of me at the beginning of the school year because of my skin? Had anyone in the room been surprised that I was smart?
There was a lot of room in the silence that filled the air after this “lesson.” Just not room enough for me.
Always, as the month of February began, anxiety trickled in like smoke under a closed door. By the time we’d hit the second or third week, I’d find myself sitting stock-still in my chair, jaw tensed, heart racing as we learned about slavery and peanut butter and traffic lights and sit-ins. I wanted to run. I wanted to explode. I wanted to claw at my face and skin. It gets like that when you’re trying so desperately to pass and the world won’t let you, no matter where you go.
I didn’t realize how visible my reactions were until one year a friend reached out and tapped my trembling shoulder during a screening of a film about civil rights.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“This isn’t me,” I said back through clenched teeth.
* * *
I was one of those suburban kids who grew up playing competitive soccer for years in rec leagues. I was an only child, but my mother had to upgrade to a minivan just so she could cart all of my stuff around each week for practices, each weekend for games, and every few months for tournaments. And, of course, so that she could keep up with the frequent demands of carpooling.
Every Sunday morning that we didn’t have a game my mother would drag me early to our practically all-Black church for youth Sunday school. I am not a morning person, and Sunday school seemed more like a social experiment than an opportunity to learn about God, but I was also a middle schooler who thought weekends were supposed to be about soccer, reading books, and writing fan fiction, so my perspective was undoubtedly skewed. None of the other kids in Sunday school went to my actual weekday school. I think my mother hoped that going to a Black church on the weekends would help take care of my cultural education on Blackness, an education that I wasn’t getting during the week. Possibly an extra hour of Sunday school each weekend with my Black peers would really help that tutoring take. “School” was in the name, but it didn’t feel like an education. It felt like a prescription.
This particular Sunday the group of a dozen or so teenagers was seated at a table and our teacher was leading us in a discussion about free time—how we use it, how it can be in service to God, and the role of hobbies in our lives. One girl raised her hand to list the type of free time activities that she thought were against God. An oddly critical way into the discussion, I remember thinking. A chief category of concern for her was music and her specific example was a Nirvana song with typically grungy, screamy, ragey lyrics. The room nodded solemnly; this was clearly against God. I looked around the table and guessed (correctly, I’d wager) that none of the other Black teenagers in this room had ever listened to Nirvana on purpose or long enough to learn the lyrics. I had. I liked them. I thought about speaking up and offering a counterargument, citing another example of lyrics from the then-alive Kurt Cobain, but I didn’t. I’d recently made the mistake of turning the volume up on the radio when a Smashing Pumpkins song came on. A family member had turned to me and said, “You listen to too much white people music.” It had been a harsh diagnosis.
The discussion turned again to the best ways for teenagers to spend free time. This time the teacher spoke to us about the value of athletics in keeping our bodies, our temples, healthy and active. A boy sitting next to me turned and asked what sport I liked.
I answered without thinking, “Oh! I play soccer. I love soccer!”
“ ‘I love soccer!’ ” He mocked me, voice high and overly enunciated, affecting a hard r to the end of the word “soccer.” His shoulders shook as he exclaimed, pointing at me. “You sound like a white boy! ‘I love soccer . . .’ ” He was laughing too hard to continue the conversation, but I already knew it was over.
I didn’t talk about soccer to Black people again.
When Kurt Cobain shot himself, I brought it up only with my white friends at school.
* * *
My unrequited love for white boys continued throughout middle and high school. After Cody, there was Jack. After Jack, Tyler. After Tyler, Bryce. I pined after them just as any awkward teenager pines after their crush, but by eighth grade I knew without asking which ones would never, could never, see me as a romantic interest. For some reason I pined after those boys the most. Even though I didn’t think it would magically change my situation, I’d study the girls my crushes dated as if they were beautiful animals in the wild. I’d look for common traits: the brands on their jeans, the words they said, the way they held their backpacks. I couldn’t adopt their pale skin and eyes, but maybe I could learn enough to . . . something. I even tried mimicking their hand gestures and ways of speech. Sometimes they studied me, too.
One day at recess I was chatting with a popular girl named Brittany (who was also my friend. Mostly. Sometimes) and she suddenly reached out to touch my hair.
“Your hair is so . . . fun,” she said, gazing at it with wide blue eyes. “The way it sticks up and just stays.” Brittany was popular because she was very pretty and very nice to everyone. She had straight blond hair and smiled with so many dimples you couldn’t count them.
“I guess so,” I said quietly. Her hands were still in my hair, tugging on it and playing with the chemically straightened dark strands. I wanted to extract my head from her reach, but I didn’t want to seem rude; she was popular and nice.
“I think it’s really . . . cool,” she said thoughtfully. Brittany was so kind that when her tone went from overly positive to neutral, as it had just then, you knew she must have been thinking something less than kind but was too polite to say so.
She withdrew her hand and wiped her fingers on her pants. The white girls who touched my hair and its oils without asking always wiped their hands on their pants afterward. Like what I had, what my hair had, like my Blackness was contagious. I know now that they had been rude to touch me and comment on me without invitation, but that knowledge could never work itself past my shame.
By high school my hair had been straightened for so long that I didn’t really know what my natural hair looked like. I just knew that the curls, like weeds, needed to be caught early and fought back. My mother drove me once a month for this gardening. At sixteen I could go to the salon by myself, and so I sat one Saturday, watching in the mirror as Pam, my stylist, processed my naturally curly hair so that it was straight. She pointed to the way that my hairline drew down into a point high on my forehead and said, “You have a widow’s peak.”
“Oh, yeah,” I replied. “We learned about these in science class. They’re genetic.” I smiled, proud that I’d retained that knowledge and could share it.
Pam smile-grimaced back at me in the mirror and tut-tutted. “They mean you have some white people in you.”
I’m ashamed that it felt like a compliment as much as an insult. I think she meant it both ways. It didn’t matter what her intentions were, though, because it was a reminder of what I already knew. Had already learned. My body’s Blackness needed to be controlled or converted to whiteness as much as possible, but I also needed to be Black enough, which I wasn’t. I didn’t really know which ways of being were most important, but I knew that sitting in that chair was my race ritual. When she was done with my hair and I stood up to leave, Pam always beamed at me as though I’d been cured.
* * *
I had my pick of the universities I applied to, thanks to great grades, a fantastic high school education, and superb letters of recommendation. My teachers loved me, even if they sometimes pointed out that I was “quiet” in their classrooms. Their semi-frequent encouragements to “speak up more in class” couldn’t compete with the years of social silencing I’d experienced, or the internal voice that policed my body, words, and interests. A “drop in the bucket” would be an exaggeration of the impact of their suggestions.
I went to college with my omnipresent diagnosis of racial unwellness and conflict of womanhood, just as I went to college with AP credits and a new set of Bed Bath & Beyond twin long bedsheets. I went to college smart and quiet.
But school brought me new language. New language brought new ideas. And new ideas led me to new people. I gravitated toward artists and creatives because they celebrated the unknown and the surprising. They spent hours trying to capture the misunderstood. And they encouraged me to make art.
The thing about making art, and writing in particular, is that it demands honesty. Art doesn’t want your lies or your armor. Art wants your bloody truths. A blank page wants to be filled. It doesn’t judge what you write down. And so I started to write down my identity confusion. I wrote down my frustrations. I wrote down my dis-ease. I wrote my longing. Poems are especially welcoming to the small experiences that feel like violence.
It just so happened that my artistic community included spoken word poets and performers. I’d written poetry and even read it out loud, but never thought of myself as a performer. I knew nothing of “slams.” I eventually ventured onto the stage with other people’s words, and that felt exciting and bold. It felt like I was spinning. Like the merry-go-round again. Except this community, this group, these audiences, they wanted my secrets. Their kindness was more than the simple absence of cruelty.
I took classes on cultural studies and poetry by women of color. I devoured Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back, because the women in that anthology spoke of living in “the borderlands.” Living in the in-between and the fuzzy cracks within feminism and racism and oppression and spiritual survival. They lived in the racial nowhere that I grew up in and somehow, miraculously, spoke from that space. The space that had taken so many words from me.
I wondered if I could write from the in-between too, and, ever the good student, I asked my mentors for advice. Some of my professors urged me to write about the Black Diaspora, but the old specter of Black History Month rose inside my chest. (Am I this? Is there room for me here? This isn’t me.) Others suggested that I refer back to key sources and figures in the canon. I looked there to see if I could fit, but I didn’t see anyone who wrote about what I knew of performing race poorly. I didn’t see anyone writing about the particular type of social shrinking and cultural bending that I’d experienced growing up. About how being brown is not enough to be Black. I found amazing essays by critical race theorists, post-colonialists, and gender theorists, but while our symptoms were similar, our conditions were not. The more I looked for a lineage, the more I felt like a faulty clone. I felt lost again. No one seemed to have the same identity illness diagnosis that I did.
Eventually, I went back to the page that didn’t judge and wrote about the quiet intersectionality that lives within my body. You see, because I am a woman of color, I walk around holding conflicts of desire and belonging. I attempt to squash my given self and the things that grow out of my control, like love and curly hair, before they betray me. Sometimes, inadvertently, I nurture those wildlings within. But I cannot eliminate them, either through constraints or encouragement.
* * *
I was twenty-one and a graduate student at the end of a weeklong intensive performance workshop when I found my freedom and birthed my own Black womanhood. Ten students, including myself, had signed up to form an ensemble who would write and produce original work in a culminating performance for the university community at the end of the week. We endured hours-long writing exercises each night and produced short performed pieces each day. We got little sleep. It was artistic boot camp and it was brutal; the pace didn’t allow for reflection and so, inevitably, truest selves rose to the surface. By the fifth day, both my writerly voice and my physical voice were raw, and so was my work. I was tired, but my work felt electric.
We were writers and directors of our own pieces, and could recruit other performers as supporting cast members when needed. When I told my friend Josie, who was white, what I wanted her to do to me, she balked.
“Um. I mean . . . I don’t know if I can do this. I feel really uncomfortable,” she said. My art was frightening her.
I asked her again, pleading. “It’s important to me,” I said. She relented. She’d seen my process all week. She knew where I was going. And she knew why.
The theater was standing-room only the night of the final performance. I’d never seen our space so packed. People were on the floor in rows, cramped into chairs two-on-one, creating heat and buzzing energy by their presence. I’m pretty sure it was very against fire code. We each performed in turns, and then my piece was up. I had gained new words, as I’ve said, and so my poetry was both academic and anecdotal. It was personal and it was critical. I spoke about being far too white to be Black while being far too brown to be white. I talked about the panopticon of race—walking with my white friends past groups of Black students gathered together on the university commons and feeling them eye me. I talked about being squeezed by expectation until I was folded in. I talked about listening to and loving Huey Lewis and the News and not knowing much about rap (that got lots of laughs). I talked about being called an Oreo. Dealing with my hair. My white-people widow’s peak. At the end of my poem, I dropped to my knees, held my hands behind my back, and installed a blank stare on my face. The rest of the piece would take place in complete silence.
Josie appeared then, circled me, and pulled back on my hair. She pointed at it and then gestured to the audience to invite them to inspect the strands. She pulled back on my lips to show them my teeth. Yanked my arms up high, jabbed at me to make a muscle so they could see my strength. She pranced happily from one side of me to the other, grinning as she showed off my features for the audience’s consumption. Showing them the violence of accumulated microaggressions. Of the constant Otherings and Not Enoughs. Of the Why Do You Like Thats. Of white hands in my hair and on my face and Black bodies pointing and laughing.
I heard gasps in the darkness as my imagery hit home. Two hundred people in stunned silence. I was shaking.
Afterward, the audience approached us hands-first. Artists and teachers and fellow students reached for my arms and face. Reached for me. Some people had tears in their eyes. I don’t remember the words they said, but I remember the hugs. The warmth of a palm on my back. Someone clasped my hands in both of theirs, but they weren’t there to inspect. They just held on. Held me. They didn’t have the words for feedback and didn’t offer any. Every look, every smile, every hug spoke of gratitude. So many people thanking me. People saying and whispering, “yes.” I didn’t realize that I’d asked a question, but the faces were nodding in answer, “yes.”
I’ve been in dozens of productions since then and seen multitudes more, but I’ll never forget what art gave me that night. I’ll never forget that art allowed me to redefine the terms of engagement and to fill in the gaps where other people’s words and actions had left me without anchor. I may not belong everywhere, but art, and artists, had said yes to my anger and to my fear and to my resistance. Art had made room for me.
Growing up, my identity existed outside of the borders of expectation and so it was me who was diagnosed as unwell. I know now that I am not responsible for living within the limited imaginations of others, nor am I insufficient because they cannot fully conceive of me. I know this because art once whispered, then yelled, then roared through me that it is the world that might be ill and that I am becoming whole.