Every black woman in America—whether light-skinned or dark, with high cheekbones or not, full-figured or thin—knows what it is like to be viewed as an exotic. White hands have reached out to touch our hair. Strangers have compared us to Egyptian goddesses or whole tribes. Our smiles, hair, or eyes remind white people of celebrities, the choices seeming random and even ridiculous sometimes—though always followed with an enthusiastic endorsement of some singer from a bygone era or actress from an obscure movie. White women cry real tears over the vibrant colors that look great against our black skin and the patterns—my goodness—that seem designed exclusively for people like us. By the time every black girl has reached the age of ten, she has been exoticized—pointed and poked at like a Hottentot Venus—as if hair, skin, and cheekbones are itself a costume that invites comment.
On costume day—my high school’s most anticipated event—I decided to dress as a black Scarlett O’Hara. I was working against type before I even understood what that meant. I was intervening in the script of exoticness—avoiding a Cleopatra or Catwoman costume—and finding myself drawn to a symbol of whiteness, the hoop-skirted Scarlett O’Hara dress that appeared in my local department store, labeled as a “Gone with the Wind Dress.” I had never read the book or seen the movie, but I knew intuitively that it would be provocative for me, a black girl, to wear this dress. I mean, aren’t southern belles supposed to be white? I spent days imagining all the drama it would cause when I, a black Scarlett O’Hara, would high step into the auditorium and end with a dramatic twirl!
Despite the pitch of excitement in those final weeks of school, however, I had been feeling a strange emptiness. In the months leading up to the event, even before I had selected the costume, I had already been imagining myself in the South, but it was not the white-centered South of Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara plantation that I was imagining. I had been accepted to Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta, and in the fall I would be moving from my home in a predominantly white Connecticut town to a black world, where I would no longer be an exception. Without really understanding how my predominantly white school and neighborhood had made me feel like an exotic oddity, I was feeling something—perhaps isolation or somehow out of place even as I met with friends, greeted acquaintances, and moved through the halls of my school without much notice.
Perhaps it was with visions of soon living in the South that I selected my Scarlett O’Hara dress. But then again, I wasn’t even that conscious of my feelings. Perhaps it was a way to put distance between me and my predominately white school, the way I had become both invisible (no one ever mentioned the obvious fact of my blackness) and very visible (all eyes were on me if class discussion ever focused on African Americans or surprisingly anything that was nonwhite, even the Middle East). But this also didn’t feel right. I was drawn to the antebellum costume for so many reasons, most of them buried under the swirl of teenage excitement. It was as if there was an old me going through the motions of school and a new me getting ready for a radical new future—a future where I would no longer be that one black kid.
With the distance of years, I feel that this choice of costume was not fully conscious but also strangely purposeful, an effort to break through all the silence surrounding the subject of race in my high school and, more pointedly, the way I was always noticeably the one black girl even as my blackness was something to refrain from naming—I guess out of politeness or just discomfort or some effort at being, in the language of the times, “color blind.”
Perhaps the clearest indication of my school’s effort at “color blindness” was in eighth grade when I was voted—in a contest that I didn’t try to win and perhaps didn’t even deserve to win—best dressed. The yearbook had been published and I was shocked to discover that I had won. Out of all my peers, and especially my best friend, by whom my wardrobe was inspired, I had been given this privileged place in our middle school. Of course this makes my first year of high school hard to explain: I purposely stopped dressing in the preppy way that awarded me the title “Best Dressed,” turning, instead, to the less conventional garb of a hippie who wore moccasins all year and a beloved peasant skirt adorned with cactus flowers. It is like I somehow knew that by naming me “best dressed” in middle school, my peers offered me a sense of belonging but also made me fundamentally different. They could see my preppy clothes but not me. Was this a pity award? I don’t know. Was this an award for trying to look white? I couldn’t tell. All I have now is a picture in a yearbook and discomfort. Those were some of the feelings swirling around in my body as I chose my costume for that final parade of identity in my high school’s biggest party. I would no longer stay in the shadows. I was determined to be seen.
As I prepared for the big night, I must have been conscious enough to recognize that my Scarlett O’Hara dress would provoke a discussion about race and how ironic it was for me, the only black girl, to be wearing a costume associated with southern plantations and southern white womanhood. I ran my hands down the skirt, feeling the textured silk of the green-and-gold fabric. For a moment I was lost to the past, the dress transporting me to another time. Was my blackness more dangerous now than ever? Were only rich white southern women allowed to wear these elegant dresses or would a slave be given one, perhaps by her white slave owner as a reward for being his concubine? Who (or what?) will my peers see when I walk into the auditorium?
Even as I struggled against the invisibility that comes with being the only black girl, I had no language to explain this to myself. As I look back I can now see the way the Scarlett O’Hara dress was an inspired choice my senior year in high school. I ached to be seen; I wanted to force my peers’ eyes open: force them to recognize me, even as my efforts to be seen got ridiculously mixed up in a symbol of white women’s sexuality.
Being seen, however, comes with its own challenges . . . and blindnesses. In Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Florens—while just a child of eight—is targeted as a sexual object, causing her mother to ask a “kinder” slave owner to purchase her daughter. Jacob Vaark, the reluctant slave owner at the center of the story, is the best master that Florens’s mother can hope to have for her daughter, and she begs him to rescue her daughter from the desires of a Portuguese slave owner. This is the mercy of the novel, a transfer of ownership, one that saves the young girl from a life of rape and sexual subjugation. In this powerful glimpse into the past as well as in the more famous Beloved, Morrison imagines the degradations that black women faced and the trauma of violence upon their bodies.
Why do we need to know, so many years later, the specific ways that black women in the antebellum South experienced this constant threat of physical and psychic violence? What can it tell us about the reduction of black women in our own time to a fetish? Mae Gwendolyn Henderson and others have explored the ways that trauma (much like that found in PTSD) becomes “imprinted on black bodies, internalized in the black psyche, and passed down to subsequent generations.” Recently, a host of internet sites have also addressed the relationship between the fetishization of women of color and racism. The popular website Everyday Feminism, for example, offers “4 Reasons Why Calling a Woman of Color ‘Exotic’ Is Racist,” with the fourth reason being the way it reduces “women of color into animals, props, and costumes” and targets them for violence. In Rachel Kuo’s words, “The myths that equate ‘exotic’ with ‘promiscuous’ have led to violent impacts where experiences of sexual assault by women of color are minimized, and worst of all, normalized and legitimized.” And the extremely popular Button Poetry features Allesandria Rhines’s spoken-word poem “Truth Is,” which boldly states: “Fetishes are for the fools who can’t tell the original from the copy. I am neither, for I am, the truth.” There has been, indeed, an explosion of writers addressing the dangers of the fetishization of women of color and its link to white supremacy and slavery, and although many young women of color may not have always had the language to name these early assaults on their bodies and humanity, many of us carry those first disturbing experiences around with us like invisible bruises.
About a year before donning my Scarlett O’Hara dress, I was at a local outdoor food stand, and I was uncharacteristically by myself. I stopped there after working at my summer job. It was late afternoon, the time in the afternoon when the sun is at its warmest before it slowly descends into the horizon. Still very much a kid, even as I was proud of earning my own money and making plans for college, I treated myself to an ice cream cone. An older white guy approached me from the side. He said hello. I focused on my chocolate ice cream cone, enjoying the last of the sprinkles. I responded to his friendly hello, but now I sensed him wanting more from me. Maybe he was a dad—I started thinking—of one of the kids I babysat. And I didn’t want to be rude and so I looked more directly at him. But there was nothing familiar at all about him and he was standing too close. He didn’t have—I realized—an ice cream cone in his hand, and his hands rested on the counter as if he hid something under one of his palms, waiting for me to guess left or right.
“Are you from around here?” he asked.
The sense of danger finally sprang up inside me. I had not yet learned how to remain silent and just move away. I still worried too much about how my actions were perceived, and then he said it: “You’re so exotic looking.”
It was not the first time I heard that word applied to me, but this time it felt more threatening, and I had not yet learned how to keep from smiling out of politeness. With a dwindling smile still on my face, I moved away from the counter, put the rest of my cone in the trash, and walked away.
A little thrill, despite the sense of danger, ran through me. I was in a movie now, walking slowly down the block, not looking back until I turned the corner, and then I sprang into a run for a block and then jogged the rest of the way home. Two steps inside my house, the sound of the front door closing behind me never sounded so reassuring. In the safety of the kitchen—now catching my breath—I told my mother that I stopped for an ice cream and that I didn’t finish it all, that it was too much. I said nothing about this man and our exchange. I felt shame. I washed my hands at the kitchen sink; the sound of the water filled in what had not been said and would not be said.
At school the next day, I told my friends about this older man and how he kept moving closer and how he kept calling me exotic. I looked to see if they believed me and they did. They were full of sympathy and disgust, calling the man “creepy,” and now I had a word for him rather than the word he had placed on me.
In my subsequent retellings to other friends, I said that he called me “beautiful,” not “exotic.” I was not ready to face what race has to do with this encounter. It was easier to throw him into the category of the old creepy guy and avoid that word for a little longer. I didn’t ask them if they had ever been called exotic, not wanting to disappoint myself with the answer, and I certainly didn’t tell them about being called this exact same word by one of our neighbors, somebody they all knew.
It was the summer before my encounter with this man, and I had just finished babysitting. The mother had an older son my age, and he was at the kitchen table with us while the younger boy sat in front of the television. We were talking about kids and television when the mother suddenly reached behind herself for a magazine and opened it to a black teenage model, probably my age. She pointed to the picture, showing it to this older son, my peer, both of us instantly uncomfortable. I did not know this boy well, but I had ridden the bus with him and I saw him in the hallways all the time. I knew what was going to happen before it happened. She held the magazine out to her son and said, “Isn’t this girl pretty? Look,” she said, tipping the magazine out to him like a tray. And then she swung the magazine toward me; the picture of the black model seemed to float off the page and onto my lap.
I didn’t respond. The boy shifted in his chair. But the mother was either ignoring his discomfort or unwilling to stop herself. She was going to finish what she started. “Look at Piper,” she said, shaking the magazine until it made a satisfying sound. She put it back on the table, free to focus on me. “Isn’t she pretty?” She was smiling. I was not. Her son certainly was not. And then she said the word: “Doesn’t she have an exotic beauty, just like this girl in the magazine?”
I felt the heat moving up through my body. In everything she said, she never used the word “black” or “African American,” but she had a magazine to make her point. And it was not mean-spirited at all, just misguided and racist. She wanted to change the world, one son at a time. She wanted to embrace “black as beautiful” right there in her kitchen, and I was her prop. I had been nominated as attractive enough while the available white girls (I assume) either were, or were not, attractive, no magazines needed as evidence, no special word needed to qualify. Here in the tight quarters of her kitchen, this woman’s son had been given permission to be attracted to me, and we both cringed at her efforts at racial uplift in the incubator of her kitchen. It was not a surprise—nor was it a disappointment—that this boy and I never dated, and after that awkward moment we kept an even greater distance than we already had, the word “exotic” doing nothing to endear him to me or me to him.
It was not that I ruled out all white boys. If I had such a rule, I would have never—being almost always the only black person around—kissed a boy at all. It was while serving as a hostess at a local dining hall for seniors that I met Ricky. We had youth in common and very little else. I remember both of us at the end of the night rushing to complete our duties, knowing we would get together soon to make out. It is as if we were waiting for the others to leave, making sure we were in close proximity to one another as the last body was out the door, the click of the door setting our bodies into motion for the furtive kissing and secret rendezvous in the back room.
But this romance is a secret romance between a black girl and an Italian American boy. We met in this way and only in this secretive way, every night for weeks. I can completely remember feeling nervous about getting caught and this added to the excitement. It only occurs to me now that someone, perhaps everyone, knew what was going on, our secret romance perhaps more public than I ever realized. The crazy paradox weighs on me now. How much did I know about my early life as the only black girl in a sea of whiteness? So much was at work. Why did I rebel in this way, here at work, with this boy/man who was no one I would have socialized with in the daylight of my town? A nineteen-year-old Italian American working as a dishwasher, sometimes sous chef, in the kitchen his brother in-law managed. At the time, it was fun to have this “relationship” because it seemed I would have never been permitted to be any white boy’s public girlfriend. Even Ricky, who I felt equal to, if not better than (I was going to college), bested me when it came to his racial identity.
The one time we ever socialized outside of work was when our manager hosted a party for the staff at his house. Ricky and I betrayed nothing about what was between us. But his sister, who was married to the manager, was wary of me. Her gaze conveyed so much, as if she could see inside to the truth of her brother’s attraction to me. She steered Ricky away from me. She brought him over to her friends and looked at me, a warning to make sure I kept my distance. Years later I would learn about Italians’ specific fears of interracial relationships, something about the Moors and all, but in 1989, all I knew, all I learned through my years in high school, is that it didn’t matter if white boys were attracted to me in the dark, but in the light of day such an unspeakable thing remained hidden and unspoken. When I left that party, I felt broken. I will never forget what it felt like to be viewed by Ricky’s sister as such a jezebel, and I never wanted to be seen that way again.
The innocent and youthful relationships I had with white boys weighed on me. I see that now. But it was all so murky at the time. As I walked through the halls at school, I saw the faces of the boys who would kiss me, grope me in the dark if they were drunk at a party, but would never let our hands touch in the light. These conflicting experiences always left me feeling hollow, like a ghost—only real to these boys in their dark, drunk hazes.
By my junior year, I settled into my invisible status and set my sight and outward desire on an unattainable crush, Brent. He was a senior and I loved him. Loved him in the unabashed way only possible perhaps because we never once spoke. I always saw him from afar; and I don’t think he ever saw me. But having Brent as a crush, an object of my desire, let me exist on an equal plane with my friends. They too coveted older boys as boyfriends but would never talk to them either. It was as if having a crush on Brent would let me exist as part of my school’s public culture and not always only as part of the party culture. Brent had a younger sister, Lena, who was in my grade, and I tried to be her friend. But I really couldn’t because I couldn’t get past the fact that she seemed unworthy to be his sister. He was so golden and beautiful and she was just so plain. I would watch them get into their mom’s old station wagon and long after him. When I look back, my (non) relationship with Brent saved a small shred of me from having to actually face the deep inequality and difference that shaped all my friendships and relationships. I could just be like any other silly girl who decides to only “love” a boy she cannot have. And usually this was enough, but of course this defense could only hold up so long and there were many times that I wouldn’t be able to ignore the gap between me and my peers.
I sat in math class, Algebra II, and Matt sat behind me. He was a grade older, but somehow he was placed in my junior-level math class. He was goofy but nice and we had developed a little friendship based on the shared proximity in class. It was fun and we flirted a little. Then the annual horrible thing happened, swimming during gym class. I loved to swim and had been swimming since I was a little girl in Florida. I was actually on my high school swim team as a freshman. And I had learned to deal with my hair through the years. But swimming in the middle of the day cut off the usual rituals to get my hair back to “normal,” as normal as I could get with my curly, frizzy relaxed black hair. During the school day, though, I swam and then quickly pulled the front part of my hair back and went to math class. I was sitting, as usual, in front of Matt, when all of sudden a girl in the row next to us said, “Matt, doesn’t Piper’s hair look good?” Oh my God! I felt as if she had exposed my nakedness or something. My hair was a mess and Matt was kindly ignoring it until that girl pointed it out. But of course my hair was a mess. I was not white and I did not have white hair. I couldn’t jump into water and have my hair bounce back. I needed heat, rollers, and lots of time.
That day something shifted. Matt had just been a boy and I had just been a girl. We were friends and our relationship had been light and in that class I had been kind of free. But as every black child learns at some point, that freedom is fleeting and abstract; to believe in that freedom fully could come at the cost of your personhood. I have no idea if this girl was being mean, curious, or just . . . I don’t know. But the way Matt looked at me that day, as if I had sprung horns, ripped something inside me. He wasn’t even cute. I wasn’t even attracted to him. I just had been able to be simply a girl next to a boy. Now I was black and strange and he, white and normal.
The vexed relationship with the white boys at my school only changed once, or so it seemed at first. In high school a boy moved to our town from Texas. He looked at me and treated me with an outright desire that was completely absent from the boys I grew up with who avoided me unless it was dark. But the boy from Texas seemed to regard me in a public way, even if still strictly as an object. I wasn’t sure what to do under his intense gaze; I just knew he pursued me in a totally new way. It was exciting, and I felt strangely seen. My skin warmed as if under a bright light. My heart beat and fear and interest bubbled up in me. Once we were at a party, and it was still daytime when he tried to kiss me, but I walked away. Thankfully, even without the insight I now have about the ways of interaction and encounter between white men of the South and the black women they once owned and persisted to see as objects, I resisted his intense desire. Something told me that whether in the dark or light, a white boy could never really see me.
As we approach four hundred years from when the first African stepped from a boat and onto land that would be called the “New World” and then America, the ever-insightful Morrison imagines that moment as a convergence of many foreigners in a new land. At one point, Florens is sent off into the wilds in search of a cure for her mistress’s “Pox.” When she finally comes across other settlers, they are not sure that Florens is human at all: “One woman speaks saying I have never seen any human this black. I have says another, this one is as black as the others I have seen. She is Afric.” Even after Florens shows the letter from her mistress, asking for safe passage to complete her mission, these people gather together and decide to inspect Florens. She is told to take off her clothes, and they inspect her teeth, examine her skin, and look between her legs.
Florens is watching them as they watch her, and she marvels at their inability to see her as human. She thinks: “Naked under their examination I watch for what is in their eyes. No hate is there or scare or disgust but they are looking at me my body across distances without recognition.” I like that phrase, “across distances without recognition.” Calling someone exotic fits in that distance. It describes something that happens today as much as anytime in the history of this country. And this lack of recognition is devastating to the black girl in that New World and today. Am I Florens? Is every black female in America Florens?
When I was accepted to Spelman College, I knew that everything would change. I looked forward to escaping Connecticut, trading in my Scarlett O’Hara dress for something less ironic, more current, and decidedly not exotic. It was an amazing experience to go from seeing no black bodies for days and weeks to being crowded into dorms and classrooms that were filled with black people. Every day for four beautiful years, I felt seen as an individual rather than as the fulfillment of white fantasies of blackness.
While I was there, I waited tables at a popular restaurant in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, a world away from Spelman and Morehouse in the West End. I had to drive fifteen to twenty minutes to the white part of Atlanta for this job, but the economic distance from the West End to Buckhead is much more vast. The businesses in the West End are familiar to many impoverished inner-city neighborhoods: selling Brazilian Wet and Wavy hair, doing eyebrows at the local mall, or selling chicken or soul food. The drive to Buckhead takes one from poor to rich, black to white. This is the path for tourists as well. Maybe a quick stop at the Underground for some safe “black” culture and then on to the North, away from black areas. Everyone I knew from Spelman who needed a job for extra money worked at the Underground or in Buckhead.
We had to leave the comfort of our all-black campus and once again navigate primarily white spaces and there, of course, another blind white guy came out of left field. I had two managers at the chain restaurant: a black woman and a white man. I had been working there for several months and had, I thought, become friendly, if not good friends, with both managers. We had a great working relationship. So it came as quite a shock when one day my black manager told me that my other manager, the white guy, wanted to ask me out because he had “jungle fever.” I felt hurled back to Connecticut, back under the prying eyes of the older white man who called me “exotic,” and the white boys who could only desire me in the dark. But I was a different person now. For four straight years I had been seen as a person, not an exotic, and this visibility empowered me to resist the psychic pain that comes with such labels.
In comedy routines, the actress who plays Scarlett O’Hara always wields the folds of the dress like a weapon. There is something delightful in the power of the excessive folds and weight of the fabric. When the actress twists around quickly, she knocks over furniture, sweeps husbands into the background, and pushes slaves out of the picture. Eventually, that voluminous dress causes the actress to upend herself, the wardrobe upstaging the most accomplished comedian. In television skits, a white actress is always accompanied by some unknown black comic, or worse a white person in blackface, who rolls her eyes like Mammy or cries out like Prissy, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies.” It is apparently very funny—mostly I suspect to white people who have ingested black stereotypes for years. Whether white or black, you don’t have to see the movie to know the mammy character or the sputtering, halfwit Prissy because both are enduring stereotypes in American culture, their likenesses found on salt and pepper shakers, pancake mixes, and lawn ornaments. In wearing a Scarlett O’Hara dress, I would be playing against the stereotype.
When I first saw the costume, I could not have really explained why I was drawn to it, but I knew there was something dangerous in it. When I lifted it off the hanger, the crinkling noise of the fabric made me shiver. It would have been impossible to sort out how much of my delight came from the sheer pleasure of that shiny fabric and the princess-like volume of the hooped skirt and how much of the heat that traveled up to my cheeks came from a barely formed desire to force a reaction from my friends. I do know that after buying the dress, I kept trying to talk myself into returning it, kept worrying about what it would unleash. But the more I thought about the outrageousness of it, the more I found myself committing to it.
As the big day approached, I kept sneaking peeks at the dress, imagining the shocked looks on my friends’ faces. I pictured everyone whispering and even pointing as I approached. Somebody would say, “What? That’s just too crazy!” And then another girl would more boldly state, “That’s a Scarlett O’Hara dress. That’s so wild.” And somebody smart would say, “It’s like you’ve turned a hundred years of racism on its head.” But nothing of the sort ever happened. Instead, my best friend gushed that I was so pretty and another friend asked me where I bought it and a third person said I looked “exotic.”
I was crushed. How could I have been so wrong? All day the fabric crinkled as I tucked myself into the ridiculously small desks, floated through the narrow lunch line, or just turned slightly to the right, the skirt swinging into attack mode with no one to attack. My now unimpressive dress, my deflated costume, had failed to knock anyone out of the frame, and I was left dragging it like a corpse from period to period as if a cruel joke had been played on me.
I felt utterly alone inside it. Defeated. I was not ironic at all. I was exotic once again. Trapped in a dress or trapped by their expectation that I would be “exotic” rather than ironic in Scarlett O’Hara’s curtains.
Why did I expect my Scarlett O’Hara dress to invite a conversation about something that lurked in the shadows and never came into the light? Like other taboo subjects, sex and drugs, race was only spoken about in whispers in my school—but with one significant difference. The cultural expectation that race would not be addressed affected me differently than everyone else. When kids whispered about other taboo subjects, I was one of them. But when they whispered about “blacks” or “African Americans,” they did not intend for me to hear and their eyes showed it. I had in fact walked into rooms and seen this, embarrassed them with my presence. That Scarlett O’Hara dress didn’t move the conversation along one bit, but I will always remember it for the way it moved me, surprised me, maybe even educated me about what it meant to be an exotic.
Toni Morrison’s characters—the titular character of Sula, Jadine from Tar Baby, and Bride from God Help the Child—know the dangers of being viewed as exotic. Florens, however, inhabits the colonized “new” world of A Mercy, and the dangers are perhaps the most consequential for the “exotic” slave who must bend to the will of her master. In building a novel around the rescue of Florens from the fate of the “exotic” slave, Morrison turns her attention from the all too common acts of violence against black women to a single act of intervention. The next time I google “black women” and “exotic,” I hope to see white people addressing the work they can do to combat the microaggressions, the fetishisms, and the pervasive violence against women of color. The next time I hear the word “exotic” I pray it is used to describe a flower or a fruit, something that doesn’t feel diminished by the many assumptions behind that little adjective.
This need to move past the objectification of black women as exotic takes on a new import for me as I raise a black girl in this present moment. Through her experiences, in only a slightly more “diverse” suburban neighborhood outside Philadelphia, the lasting ideas of black women’s exoticism swirl around her. As a little girl, my daughter was unsure of how being black related to her, with her light skin seeming hardly different from her white peers. I knew then that it was my job to give her the gift of unapologetic and beautiful blackness. I told her about our family history and the black women in the family who came before us, who knew that being black was more about our minds and hearts and less about our complexions, which run from light to dark. I told her about going to Spelman, a college for black women, in all our vast diversity, a place where white people were the ones who were exotic. I told her that her Nana, my mother, had gone to Spelman and that her grandpa’s mother, my paternal grandmother, had also gone to Spelman.
And then of course there is her hair. Curly, kinky, thick blondish brown, and, like mine on that day I swam in high school, wild, unintelligible and patently different from all her white peers. There was the time she had shown up to soccer practice with it blown out and flat ironed in a ponytail and the next time, after swimming, her wild natural hair was out, only held off her face by a headband. A father of one of her teammates asked me how I got her hair to look like it did: this when it was in its most natural state. It was as if he could not see it or more like he could not understand what he saw. Having to explain black hair to white people is so exhausting, so I just said, I didn’t do anything to it.
My daughter has, thankfully, not internalized the baggage about black hair. One day she went to school with her hair especially big, natural, and full of its glory, and when she came home she told me that people asked to touch it. I was horrified: how is it that white people still can see us as so different, like we’re animals in a petting zoo? I could feel myself get hot, my own memories flooding in. But I also had to admire that she seemed unperturbed. When she told them to “line up and take turns,” she was asserting control over the ridiculous request. Maybe she was even being ironic. In the midst of one more instance of white people exoticizing black people’s bodies, I want to believe my daughter was in control of her body and its meaning. Or am I wrong? Am I rushing to erase the power white people have over our bodies, her body? For her sake and mine? Only time will tell if she will escape the scarring that such moments can have on a body. It is finally her strength that gives me hope.
What an amazing experience to raise children and try to make peace with our own pasts! Oh, how I wished I could have felt so secure in myself, in my place, in my body when I was a little girl. I can’t imagine such strength, but there she is right before my eyes. She is not just my dream; she is, to quote Maya Angelou, our “ancestors’ wildest dream.”