Viewing that holiday party scene from a distance of more than ten years, I shudder at having taken my children so close to the deepest cavern of my psyche. Were they blissfully unaware of the anxiety roiling within me? Or could they sense it, the unease flooding me as we walked through the glass doors of that holiday party? Fear comes not only with behavior—fight or flight—but with a scent, strong and acrid. Could my children smell it pouring off me, coating not only their little heads and bodies but the air all around them?
Professionally, I appeared to have taken all the right steps. I had degrees from elite schools. I’d landed prestigious work. I’d done all of this schooling, all of this work, in part so as never to be called Nigger again. But I walked tentatively through my life, unstable, feeling a hollowness inside, as if the very construct of my self was liable to fracture into pieces and fall apart. At any moment I felt I might step on a crack, break my own back.
In the Oak Lounge at Tresidder Memorial Student Union I worried intently about how my Black colleagues might treat my younger child with her pale visage; even a third-rate psychologist would have said the only real harm to my child was lurking within me. And in actuality my colleagues greeted me kindly, cooed over my kids, and no one looked sideways at my girl.
The day after the holiday party I sat down with my laptop, where, propelled by a deep fear of the person I may have become, fueled by an aversion toward the mother it looked like I might be, for the first time in my life I banged out a piece of prose that wasn’t for school or work.
“She looks so unlike me, so unlike what I expected…”
Through writing I tried to stare straight into my heart, to examine it, to get closer, and even to hold my heart in my hands. When I did so, what I found was flesh partially covered with a scab still trying to form over a long-festering wound. I took a deep breath, then I poked the scab and picked at it, then pressed hard and watched what happened. The pus oozed out thick as toothpaste. And when it was done oozing, it had formed a word: Nigger.
I wrote that shit down.
I knew the infection of self-loathing was bad and deep, likely to spread to my precious girl child if I didn’t find a way to get it out of me. I gave myself permission to tell myself that the birthday locker incident had in fact happened. I dared to tell the truth of it inside my head, dared to put it on the page, dared to write it down. Dared to stare at the word some anonymous white American had called me. And to take a deep breath and see that I still lived.
And why the challenge with Avery? I felt her lightness lessened my Blackness among Blacks; I could never pass as white and now, because of her, I couldn’t pass as Black either. This tiny child kicked me deep into a racial crevice, with no ledge to hold on to. I want to drag a Black cloak over my white-looking daughter. To build Black consciousness in a child the world would see as white, by un-hiding her Blackness, by trying to hide her whiteness. So that she’ll love the skin her Black ancestors are in, so she will not sit silently, passing, when someone says “Nigger,” so when she gets asked the “What are you?” question, she’ll claim herself as belonging to me. I even want my girl to be called a Nigger. I want when she hears that for her to know Blackness includes her, too. I want her not to be embarrassed by the Blackness of me as I was once embarrassed by the Blackness of Daddy.
I need a girl child labeled like me so I can feel less alone.
I was extremely fucked up, maybe so fucked up that I might harm my child psychologically. I never wanted Avery to fear that she was anything other than exactly what I’d wanted in a daughter. It was on me to be the mother she deserved. It was on me to work out this race shit.
By the end of the exercise—an essay of some length I revised and revised and revised for months, I’d finally reached an essential truth.
I wasn’t ashamed about Avery.
I was ashamed to be me.