I have packed lunches for my three kids, cautioned my husband to go early to the bus, called him from the car to make sure the kids are on it, breathed one final sigh of relief as I park the car, grab my bag, and join my friend at the train station. It is 7:15 a.m. Not bad.
I am a black woman, traveling with a black friend, to the newly opened black museum located in a historically majority black city. It is not the first time I have made such an observation, remarking upon the significance of blackness, but this day feels especially notable. History is all around me. My history. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has made me feel something that I have trouble naming as simply pride or connection or, for that matter, any one thing.
When I was a small child, my mother taught me the importance of history in defining yourself. It is one of my earliest memories, and it comes to me when I read Toni Morrison’s words in Beloved: “Definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.” It is the kind of quote that you can puzzle over, but I take the quote as permission to willfully become the definer of my own life, snatching it out from the hands of those who wish to do the defining for me, even if that person is a kid. A kid who called me “nigger.”
I was five or six, playing on the school playground. We lived in a predominantly white neighborhood in a small Connecticut town, and it was during recess, perhaps as I positioned myself at the top of the tallest slide, that the word was spit out. And actually the details of the surroundings are fuzzy, but really it’s the lasting impact of the word I heard—heard for the first time—that matters. I know the sting of it sent me marching home from the bus stop after school with that word cupped inside my hand like a crumpled piece of paper. It was a new word to me and I wasn’t sure what it meant. I remain unsure what it could have possibly meant to the other kid (was it a boy or a girl?), who probably said it with the kind of youthful malice that does not recognize its force or lasting impact.
And I remember being propelled by the word, launched homeward by that force. I picture throwing the door open, with all the explosive sound of a Hollywood movie, but—to be honest—ours was not a loud family. A little background TV or radio but few explosions or door slammings. Whatever my entrance looked and sounded like, my mother recognized its import.
Before I could speak, she stopped what she was doing abruptly, hardly allowing her head to turn fully from some chore (vacuuming?), and she took me into her arms and then absorbed what I had to say as if she already knew every word—or rather the single eventful word—that had been spoken.
Does every black mother recognize that look on their child’s face? Is every mother ready with a “I know, sweetie. It has happened. Hasn’t it?” Does every mother prepare for this moment, ready to teach her child what it means and, more important, what it doesn’t mean. And then, also, the unhappy truth that it will happen again but that we are not defined by that word. “Definitions belonged to the definers,” Morrison writes, “not the defined.” This, then, is a story of how my mother took control of definitions.
I remember her reaching for my face, placing both hands on each side, lightly, as if she were steadying me, a gesture that was not in our lexicon of gestures. Perhaps mothers know they must act in uncharacteristic ways to wrest the definitions back from those who seek to define us against our will. With her soft hands still on my face, she told me what I was: a beautiful, little black girl. The next part, however, is what’s important. Maybe this is the part she had rehearsed, but I suspect instead it was something I had already heard many times before—but never with more meaning.
She told me that I was not only a beautiful black girl but one who had beautiful black women standing right behind her. Sitting at the kitchen table that afternoon, the fingers of her left hand touching the sister fingers of her right hand, it was as if she were forming a ship that was pointing toward me, and she proceeded to give me a history lesson, starting with Harriet Roberts, my oldest relative in this new world: “Free and black in Virginia in 1775.”
And then she told me about Carrie Rawlings Baugh and Eva Wood Randolph, great-grandmothers who were not mammies but college graduates. She spoke their names proudly, allowing the sounds and rhythms to swell with importance. And then she spoke other names, the more familiar names of my grandmothers Dorothy Johnson Kendrix Hunt and Olive Randolph Baugh, also college graduates and teachers. There was a clarity in the articulation of each long name, and they issued from my mother’s mouth as if she were speaking in a grand lecture hall.
“That is your history,” she said. “That is who you are and where you come from.” I like to think that I nodded, gave this sign of assurance because I know now that she was probably rattled also. If I nodded—if I could remember that little gesture—it would give the memory a sweet side, but I can’t even recall that or how she ended things with a phrase (“Now go off and play”) or a gesture (a hug or pat on the head). But I remember this gift she offered, something that would not replace the hurtfulness of the word but something to do battle with it, something big like history.
When you first enter the National Museum of African American History and Culture, you descend sixty feet, three floors down, to the beginning of the “History Galleries.” This history begins in the 1400s, when interglobal travels saw African, European, and other peoples crisscrossing the globe. The descent into the depths of the museum is felt through the modern convenience of an elevator—fast and quiet—but in this place I do not take the descent for granted. I am dropping into time. I am underneath the ground, not six feet under but sixty feet under with the ancestors.
For the first time, I am aware that most other museums are horizontal, inviting you to move forward, left or right, sometimes backward. Sometimes, these other museums allow you to ascend or descend one level, but here you are required to first descend as if history were a plumbing of depths rather than a step backward, as if history is buried rather than placed at our side, as if the past is something we walk on rather than walk across. And this makes sense to me. Shouldn’t we be displaced and disrupted to view the shackles from a slave ship or the Edisto Island Slave Cabin? Shouldn’t we have to make our way up and out of the horrors of a ship manifest with the names of its ninety-two recently enslaved people or the wrought iron slave collar with its accompanying lock and key?
After reaching the bottom, the oldest part of the history, you then move upward, eventually coming to the modern era, to the brighter spaces that hold Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac and Gabby Douglas’s leotard. But there will also be—not shying from the painful past—the multicolored shards of glass from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which was bombed by the KKK in 1963, killing four girls and injuring more than a dozen others. This museum does not fool us into thinking that racial progress just keeps marching on, certainly not effortlessly and certainly not wholly. In the middle of this vertical museum, between the depths of the past and the more recent history, is the Contemplative Court. This room has a water feature to assist in your travel through history. In this room, there are no artifacts, just the reverberating sound and sight of water and these words from Martin Luther King Jr.: “We are determined . . . to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” I spend time with the metaphor (“justice . . . like a mighty stream”) and the beautiful connection to water, which falls from above—illuminated and resounding. It is brilliant. I am walking through the room, passing others in contemplation, sharing this space with them and the ancestors, who feel close.
And what an antidote this peaceful room is to our current moment, where we are bounced back and forth between different times. What if American history is progressing, slowly maybe, with hitches and restarts perhaps, but progressing nonetheless? We all have been taught this forward progress as the way time works in America: slavery, emancipation, the Civil War, and a huge leap to the civil rights movement. (Reconstruction is largely untaught and thus unknown.) President Obama. Postrace. Post-Obama. How could it be otherwise? In his farewell to the nation on January 10, 2017, back in his “hometown” of Chicago, President Obama acknowledges this forward progress: “Yes, our progress has been uneven. The work of democracy has always been hard. It has been contentious. Sometimes it has been bloody. For every two steps forward, it often feels we take one step back. But the long sweep of America has been defined by forward motion, a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all, and not just some.”
But in a workweek that invoked time’s cruel nature, beginning on Monday, January 16, 2017, with Martin Luther King Jr. Day and ending with the inauguration of Donald J. Trump on Friday, January 20, 2017, an alternative narrative of time seems possible. After Trump was elected, Imbram X. Kendi asked in “Racial Progress Is Real. But So Is Racist Progress,” “What if there have been two historical forces at work: a dual and dueling history of racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racism? What if President Trump does not represent a step back but a step forward?”
American history progresses with two heads: “racial progress” (the fight for equality and civil rights) and “racist progress” (white supremacy) in the eternal struggle for the country’s soul. At a February 1968 Black Power rally, H. R. Brown attempted to solve the paradoxical question of black freedom, which is at the crux between the two heads of American progress: “There is no in between. You’re either free or you’re a slave. There’s no such thing as second-class citizenship.” This is not a theoretical idea; it is reality. How can you be free and black if as a parent, no matter your class status, you still have to “school” your sons for when they’re pulled over by police, when they’re at their white friend’s houses, in mostly white neighborhoods, or walking with Skittles and iced tea in their own father’s gated community? There may be comfort in the idea of second-class citizenship, especially if the dream of first-class citizenship dangles on the horizon as we march through the seemingly single time in America.
In 2013, when I first heard about Trayvon Martin, what struck me in the gut was Poor boy, he thought he was free. Free to walk, live, move, defend himself; free to be insulted that he was being trailed and stalked. And like so many before and so many after, he stood on the thinnest of lines, trapped in the chaos and darkness, teetering between risk, protection, and survival, and into the abyss of white violence he fell. So. We exist, here and now, through the doubled time of American history, racial progress and racist progress. With the presidency of Obama and the Black Lives Matter Movement, racial progress happens and yet, with the election of Trump, white supremacy steps forward at the same time.
Spending more time than expected in this room free of artifacts, I am now ready to take in more history, even as I know the rooms above will hold their horrors, such as Emmett Till’s casket and a gas mask with a filter canister, the kind seen in apocalypse films, but this one worn during the 2014 demonstrations in Ferguson in response to the killing of Michael Brown. There will also be James Baldwin’s passport and Muhammad Ali’s boxing headgear. I am trying to locate the feelings that accumulate in me as I walk through all this history. There is so much history, some of it new and some of it very familiar, and so there are no words and certainly not just one word to name this feeling that I am desperate to convey, once leaving the museum, to family, friends, and even complete strangers. Somebody should interview people as they leave the museum to see what words (or faltering with words) happen.
To be a black person in the United States since 1619 is to be at once the embodiment of white people’s desires, fears, and pathology and simultaneously, if possible, a black self that is not defined by white people’s imaginations. The complicated ideas of race operating in the United States, the notions we hold about the meaning of race, can shape black people’s experiences and how they self-identify. The moment or epiphany when black people recognize that their race, perhaps embodied in skin or merely in notions of “black blood” (or “one drop of”), has deep meaning in the context of the United States. I have chosen the term “epiphanal blackness” to describe this moment when what it means to be black is revealed
Many black people have this moment at a very early age, the way I did on the playground. Black people will say to me, “Oh, yeah, I know that moment.” They may know it, but they don’t have the name for it. I want to name this moment so that we can gather all the stories together—despite their differences—to recognize the shared character of what happens. The first time I was called “nigger,” I had no language to define what was happening. Epiphanal blackness names this collective experience. Black people are seen and understood as different, and this is the way race is conceived and experienced. When black people have their epiphanal moments, they are forced to feel this difference. African American novels, films, songs, and memoirs have especially explored this moment.
In a 1998 interview, Morrison describes what I am calling “epiphanal blackness” as a “profound revelation. The moment you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything. And it’s a profound psychological moment.” She is describing something that every black person knows, and writers long before Morrison have depicted this profound event and, importantly, how it causes a renegotiation of everything.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the young protagonist does not recognize herself in a photograph and marvels, “Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.’” Emphasizing the suddenness of the epiphany, Janie says, “Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!” Despite this shock, it is hardly debilitating for Janie, who goes on to determine her destiny against all odds.
Epiphanal blackness is also at the heart of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, but here it is described without the photograph and without the clear statement of recognition (“Ah’m colored!”). Before Pecola’s moment of epiphanal blackness, she marvels that some beautiful flowers, dandelions, might be called weeds. She is trying to make sense of the hierarchies of the natural world as well as race, and we learn that she “owned the crack that made her stumble” and she “owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away.” In “owning them” she feels “part of the world, and the world a part of her.” This powerful sense of ownership is quite different from Janie’s early shock of being black, and would seem to form a foundation for Pecola’s independence from the weight of racism. But while Janie moves from feeling shocked at her blackness to an extraordinary freedom in the world, Pecola moves from “ownership” and power to a debilitating sense of blackness as something to escape.
In an interview in Telegraph, Morrison explained, “Before we get onto the ‘black is beautiful’ thing, may I remind you what it was like before, when it was lethal?” And it is lethal for Pecola, who goes crazy at the end of the novel. For Pecola, epiphanal blackness—without the counterforce of a strong ego or, even better, a strong support system—is confirmation of her meaninglessness. In naming this moment “epiphanal blackness,” I hope to trace the many ways this moment and the renegotiations of everything can shape experience negatively or, as I will describe later, positively.
Here is Morrison describing the moment for Pecola as the shock of being seen as a void, an absence, nothing. When Pecola enters the neighborhood store, she becomes aware that the storekeeper does not even see her. “She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition—the glazed separateness.” This experience of being viewed as nothing is not new to Pecola, but the scene registers the epiphanal blackness as an emerging awareness that shapes her psyche. Unlike the shock that Janie experiences in looking at a photograph of herself, Pecola’s moment of recognition emerges with the repeated confirmation of white people viewing her as an absence: “She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes.”
Despite the devastating portrait of the debilitating effects of racism, The Bluest Eye is ultimately a novel of power and self-determination. In contrast to Pecola’s descent into internalized racism, Claudia and her sister, Frieda, exemplify the power of self-love and have their own moments of epiphanal blackness or the profound awareness of being black that causes a renegotiation of everything. In ways that are impossible for Pecola, Claudia resists the cultural tyranny of whiteness by dismembering her white doll, rejecting Shirley Temple, and critically observing the preferences given to everything light and white.
When they walk Pecola to her mother’s place of work, Claudia observes the way racism shapes the very landscape of her world—with the white homes displaying privilege and the lawns conveying wealth.
The streets changed; houses looked more sturdy, their paint newer, porch posts straighter, yards deeper. Then came the brick houses set well back from the street, fronted by yards edged in shrubbery clipped into smooth cones and balls of velvet green.
Morrison allows her young narrator to grow increasingly aware of what money (and whiteness) can buy.
We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic table. It was empty now but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half-stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water.
At the end of this description, the young Claudia provides the most devastating account of how racism and segregation works on the dreams of black children: “Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.” Claudia has a sophisticated awareness of what the effects of blackness have on people—on their lives and dreams. Although she describes her dreams as located in a site of whiteness (the forbidden park), these dreams do not debilitate her but rather outrage her.
Her control over the sites and symbols of whiteness are seen most powerfully in her relationship to white dolls. Making the novel a perennial favorite with young people, Claudia asserts her control over a white doll that was given to her for Christmas. Although she knows very well “what I was expected to do with the doll: rock it . . . even sleep with it,” Claudia chooses instead to dismember it. She understands that her resistance to the doll is radical, knowing very well that “adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” But Claudia represents the willful dismissal of the white beauty standard and the rejection of conformity.
It is both surprising and not surprising that her parents, representative of a strong black family, also expect her to love the white doll. In this way, Morrison shows that indoctrination into white beauty standards is a feature of the older generation ready to be rejected by some members of the younger generation. Claudia displays not only a wise independence but also a sophisticated sarcasm when she argues, “What was I supposed to do with it? Pretend I was its mother?” Instead, Claudia chooses to look out for her friend Pecola, failing ultimately but attempting to mother her nonetheless. Faced with epiphanal blackness, Claudia renegotiates everything by shifting her hatred of the white doll to her love of Pecola, her community’s most vilified subject.
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison tells us, “Love is never better than the lover.” For Christmas, rather than the dreaded white baby dolls, Claudia would love to have an experience. If any of the adults ever asked her, she would tell them: “I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” Claudia knows that experiences, not things, bring love. She is invested in family and community while Pecola wishes to escape into a world that is foreign, into whiteness itself. At the end of the novel, Pecola is babbling to herself, psychotic and split in two, while Claudia selflessly asks what she could have done to save Pecola. In recognizing the devastating effects of internalized racism on Pecola, Claudia renegotiates everything, including her responsibilities to her lost friend.
Claudia understands that her world has been forever changed. And so what happens if we think of epiphanal blackness as not only the profound moment of recognition but also a lifelong negotiation of everything in relationship to this initial awareness of blackness? What happens if we recognize the coming into racial awareness as not static or a one-time event but a series of epiphanies that shape the life of black people in a culture built upon racial and racist hierarchies?
Although we are defined by our histories, self-definition is an active and conscious project. What if love is the answer to resist the progress of White Supremacy, to recover from the moment of epiphanal blackness, to step forward in racial progress and find self-love for the black individual who can self-identify? Black Lives Matter activists often wear shirts that say, “I Love My Blackness and Yours.” For what else is the assertion of Black Lives Matter other than an assertion of the value of black lives, the centrality of black lives, and the love of black lives?
Black is Beautiful. Black and Proud. Black Lives Matter. All of these are assertions of self-love. Love of a black self. As I leave the museum, I am thinking of all the people I want to bring, especially my children. This is their history, much of it filled with violence and sadness. It is not the beautiful litany of names my mother recited to me in order to erase or at least defuse the racial epithet hurled at me as a child. And how will I prepare my young children for some of the horrors in the museum and the questions they may ask? What will be the artifacts that will ignite their own understandings of their blackness? Will it be Chuck Berry’s Cadillac or Harriet Tubman’s shawl?
The silk and linen shawl was a gift from Queen Victoria in recognition of Tubman’s bravery and service to justice. It is, of course, presented alongside the other artifacts from the period of enslavement, but this artifact represents power and beauty rather than tragedy. I imagine leading my children up to the display, working hard to suppress my desire to educate and instead allow them to simply take in the shawl’s meaning.
It is displayed on a soft white form akin to the most unimaginably small torso, not spread flat but draped so that you can see through the fine lace work, the loose threads, the frayed edges. It is a gift from a queen, a gift treasured by Tubman. The two sides of the shawl are pointed and dramatically cross at mid-form. There is almost a religious quality to it, this present from an elderly white woman to an elderly black woman who was born into slavery.
When I first approached the display, it reminded me of first approaching the Mona Lisa, or rather the crowds staring at the Mona Lisa. Here, I am aware of both the object of reverence but also the shared experience of reverence. Some people look as if they are praying and others seem to be committing each thread to memory. I will have no private moment with this artifact, but there is—by way of compensation—an excitement in the communal act of viewing this piece of history with others. This must be what it felt like to be in the first crowd of people to rediscover after its long disappearance some object that has only been described in books. This is how epiphanies work; they sneak up on you, even though they feel as if they have always been lurking under the surface of things.
In front of Harriet Tubman’s queenly shawl, I think—with a sudden jolt that is surprising only to myself—I am a black woman in the first-of-its-kind national black museum looking at Harriet Tubman’s shawl and wondering what it meant to receive this gift from a queen. But maybe I should wonder what it meant for Queen Victoria to read about this small black woman who had such an oversized life.
Ann Petry begins her account of Harriet Tubman with the confused thoughts of slave owners who imagined that she had to be a man, first not believing “in his existence. The stories about him were fantastic, unbelievable. They watched for him. They offered rewards for his capture.” Did Tubman feel pride in what she had done? At a women’s suffrage convention in 1896, she said, “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.” Pride seems everywhere in this statement, inviting us to wonder what sort of renegotiations this former slave went through in order to arrive at this place of strength.
After years of being called a slave, how did she respond to her growing fame and the changed vocabulary that sought to define her as powerful and important? It was William Lloyd Garrison who first called Tubman the “Moses of her people,” while John Brown chose a military reference, referring to her as “General Tubman,” and Thomas Higgins said she was the “greatest heroine of the age.” And what did she make of this gift and invitation to visit from a queen? Tubman’s biographers have described her as feeling too old to make the journey, but one could ask what it means that the queen did not think to visit the conductor, the general, Moses?
But that is what we now do. Thousands of people, from all backgrounds, will come to visit this little remembrance of this larger-than-life woman. As I leave the museum, I can see the Washington Monument and some of the nine other national museums concentrated in this important and historic plot of land. But I have just left “my” museum. The museum I must bring my children to. The museum where a woman born into slavery and dressed by a queen is revered for doing her part to fulfill the national promise of freedom.
There is no word for what I am feeling at this moment. If I were to try to tell you, I would string together many words about pride and community, but I don’t think you would understand what I am saying unless you first understood something about epiphanal blackness, this shock of awareness that leads to a lifetime of renegotiating everything, even a simple trip to a museum, even the flush of emotion upon seeing an old, tattered shawl.