Chapter Thirteen

SUPPOSE

TO BE SURE, BEHIND THE THOUGHT LURKS THE AFTER- THOUGHT—SUPPOSE, AFTER ALL, THE WORLD IS RIGHT AND WE ARE LESS THAN MEN? SUPPOSE THIS MAD IM- PULSE WITHIN US IS ALL WRONG, SOME MOCK MIRAGE FROM THE UNTRUE?

—“Of the Training of Black Men”

In 1995, my birth mother, Tess, wrote a book about her choice to give me up for adoption, our reunion eleven years later, and our subsequent fifteen-year relationship. My willingness to participate in media publicity had been something of a deal breaker during the contract negotiations, and I had agreed, for the most part, without giving it a second thought. Despite fifteen years of painful dissonance and emotionally charged expectations between us, we had shared considerable joy and growth and laughter. Besides which, she was everything to me. And because I knew how strongly she felt about writing the book, I wanted to support her in that effort.

Even though I had not read the manuscript from cover to cover, I had allowed for a much-edited version of an afterword by me to appear as the book’s final comment. After the book’s publication, we launched a three-day publicity junket in New York City, which included a taping with NPR’s “Terry Gross,” an appearance on Good Morning America, and interviews with a handful of local and national newspapers. I believe it was one of the newspaper interviewers who asked me how I identified myself, given that I was of mixed race, had been raised by white adoptive parents, and, on the face of it, had later been reclaimed and reparented by a white birth mother. I told the reporter that I identified myself as a black woman, and by that point in my life, I did. Whether or not I felt like a black woman, or knew what it meant to be one, was perhaps a different matter altogether. But for certain, I identified myself as such.

That night over a celebration dinner at the swanky Upper East Side restaurant Elaine’s, Tess told me that she had been uncomfortable with something I had said to one of the reporters earlier. “Oh?” I said, thinking she was probably going to chide me for hogging airtime, or for not deferring to her enough during the interview, or for mispronouncing or misarticulating an important meaning or message, or for being overly presumptuous about the reporter’s interest in me.

“I would appreciate it,” she said, “if you didn’t go around calling yourself black.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You came out of my body, and I am white.”

It was a stunning moment for me, because it seemed— especially after years of increasingly heightened anxiety surrounding the issue of my racial identity—that I should be able to call myself whatever I wanted. And I had chosen to call myself black. Not biracial, not mixed, certainly not white, but straight-up black; it was easier, made sense to me, and felt right. Identifying myself as black was my prerogative. It also made me feel as though I was somehow able to disrupt the inevitable prejudice assigned to me, because even as I understood that I would forever be categorically perceived as black by contemporary culture and the Census Bureau, it mattered to me that I make the decision to be black on my own terms. It was a relief. I had not had the courage or the wherewithal to call myself black when I was growing up, but I knew all along that black was what I was. And now, suddenly, the woman who had given birth to me was telling me I was not black at all— that, in fact, it was a virtual impossibility.

In the essay “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois posits the following uncertainty: “Suppose this mad impulse within us is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue.” He is talking about the impulse of black Americans to be treated as human beings. My mad impulse was different, though perhaps about as intuitive. Here I had taken twenty-five years to get comfortable with the idea of my blackness, and the one person who couldn’t really be argued with as far as my origin was concerned was telling me that, comfortable or uncomfortable, the idea was just an idea. In effect, my sense of self was merely an illusion.

There is, then, an underlying objective in Du Bois’s strange yet deeply compassionate musing, and that is addressed to black Americans: If at any time you rest easy that you are worthy as a human being, remember that there are unexpected and indomitable voices ready to remind you that you are not.

The myth of the Venus Hottentot, or the Hottentot Venus, and the social construction of the black female body in America as a vehicle of uncontrollable sexual desire, is born out of a real life, a real experience, and a real woman. She was known as Saartje Baartman, a Khoi woman born in Cape Town, South Africa, in the late 1700s, then taken to London in the early 1800s and exhibited as a freak show to satisfy Europe’s then morbid fascination with the genitalia of South African women. Her exhibition did not prove successful, though, and she was sold off to an animal trainer in France. After her unexplained death in 1816, her genitals were cut off and presented to the Academy of Science as proof that Khoi women were not human.

It has been said that Saartje Baartman was enticed to London by the promise of fortune for merely allowing people to look at her body. Whether she was enticed or forced or taken, however she arrived in London, it is fairly certain that she did not anticipate being treated like an animal, or objectified as something she could not possibly have felt herself to be—nonhuman. There is no record of a first-person account from Baartman, no record of her own voice or perspective.

In 1990, the poet, playwright, and essayist Elizabeth Alexander introduced with the title poem of her groundbreaking collection of poetry, The Venus Hottentot, an idea of what that first-person account from Baartman might sound like: “I am called ‘Venus Hottentot.’/I left Capetown with a promise of revenue… . I would return to my family a duchess, with watered-silk/dresses and money to grow food,/rouge and powders in glass pots… . That was years ago… . A professional animal trainer shouts my cues.”

Like the black Americans in Du Bois’s “Of the Training of Black Men,” freed of chains and ready to put into practice a life of self-worth, Saartje Baartman indulged the same natural longing. And so, too, did I. It is the urge to be wholly of oneself, self-defined, and regarded as human.

Elizabeth Alexander

I came to the Venus Hottentot through scholarly reading and research, and so she was really just an idea to me at first, to echo that Du Boisian language of instinct and identity. I found everything I could about her that was available, which wasn’t a whole lot at the time, the late eighties, and what seemed absent, of course, was her voice—her interior, her self, who she actually was, not just things about her and not just a self seen. This is what I’ve come to believe poetry can bring to history: We can imagine those voices that we might not have on the historical record. We don’t have her diaries or letters, but in poetry, or in the theater or in fiction, for that matter, we can imagine in an informed way what that voice and perspective might have been. That was the challenge that I couldn’t ignore. Then she began to speak to me, and the first line that she spoke was, “I am called the Venus Hottentot.”

There’s that great black vernacular expression, “Don’t call me out of my name,” and I thought, Here is someone for whom we don’t have the name her mother and father gave to her. We know that she was called Venus Hottentot, we know that in Europe she was called Sara Baartman, we know that in Afrikaans she was called Saartje Baartman, but we don’t have her Khoisan name, the name her parents wanted her to have. So that seemed an amazing starting place—to think about that kind of conundrum, and then to move on from there.

I didn’t actually know what was driving me while I was writing the poem, but I did realize after the fact that there was something I understood very profoundly about being a young black woman who was sometimes seen as a racialized, sexualized spectacle, in a way that I think most young black women have experienced themselves at some point. It is that way in which the gaze racializes and sexualizes you when you don’t want to be racialized or sexualized. But that wasn’t something I was prepared to write about in the voice that was me, Elizabeth, in 1987.

And so, in terms of Du Bois, even as we may walk around thinking of ourselves as racially complicated people, what does it mean in this postidentity era to stand the ground of our blackness nonetheless? What does it mean to say, “Maybe this is not all pathological, or not so essentialist that it obliterates the complexities of identity”? What does it mean to sit with and contemplate our complicated blackness? I think that is a very important ground to mark these days, because a lot of the current discourse on the subject can be dangerous. Certainly as it is played out in some academic circles, where we sometimes have gender studies and race studies that have very little to do with women and black people, there is this idea that we can somehow move beyond our identities instead of moving beyond the limitations of our identities. I don’t think we ever can move beyond our identities. I think what we can do is simply continue to define ourselves in our multifacetedness.

Back, then, to Du Bois and the inherent question as to whether or not we deserve to be here. My own personal impulse has always been to go back and look at the flip side: How have we survived despite all of the incredibly concerted soul- and body- and identity-killing efforts that has been visited upon us? That’s what I find most remarkable: Why are we still here? What does it really mean— and not in a glib, sloganistic sort of way—to be the children of survivors, to be the ones who survived, when you look at the odds not just of surviving the Middle Passage but of surviving slavery; not just surviving lynching and segregation but surviving the ongoing legacy of spirit killing?

If we are wrong about being here, so what if we are? Because the ongoing effort is, and will be, how we can continue to bolster our communities without being unduly nationalistic, because many nationalisms have a simplemindedness to them that I don’t necessarily think helps children to be critical thinkers and strong people. How do we teach our children to be aware, to question, to be tolerant, to be resilient and righteous? How do we nurture their brilliance and bravery?

For those of us whose day-to-day experiences are racialized, we nonetheless all have dream space, private space. I don’t think that that space is raceless, or that it is without markers of identity, but I do think it’s a space where those markers are rich, complicated, and not always resolved. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways in which we sometimes work collectively and let some of our complexities fall away because we want to get something done, but I do believe that the overall quest should be for everybody to feel that they have access to the private, complicated space within them.

My parents are race people. I come from race people. So there was always the sense that we had a responsibility, and some of that responsibility was simply to be civilized. We were aware, and I don’t mean this in a cosmetic way, that we had to do well and to do a good job—to represent. That was always clear. I don’t think it ever even had to be articulated. It was never articulated to me that we had to be twice as good as white people, but that was absolutely imparted nonetheless. There would be challenges, and so therefore we had to be prepared. We couldn’t be raggedy in any way. And there was always a sense in both the way my parents were in the world and what they did for and with other people that you had a responsibility to share your privileges and gifts, whatever it was that you had, but particularly with other black people.

I grew up in Washington, D.C., during the 1960s and 1970s, and the idea was that we were firmly marching toward the sunlight. We were “overcoming.” My parents were integrationists. They believed that we were changing history. When my father went to college, they wouldn’t give him a white roommate. When I went to college, anybody could be your roommate. There was clear progress being made. It was the era of Martin Luther King, Jr.

People in my family had known Du Bois, so he was known to me as “Dr. Du Bois.” One of my great-aunts would sometimes refer to him as “Dr. Dubious,” because she didn’t agree with some of his ideas. I don’t know what those particular ideas were, but when you have someone who was as productive as he was, for as long a span of time as he was, and as certain of himself as he was, I think there were many people who might consider themselves as generally in his camp but who also had various ideological skirmishes with him. So that’s how I first knew of Du Bois—that he was someone you didn’t call W. E. B. Du Bois, that you called him Dr. Du Bois, and that the “Dr.” part was important. He was someone we were proud of, and critically engaged with.

One thing I remember that struck me about Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk was his description of coming from Massachusetts and going to Fisk. That spoke to me, because as I began to study black literature as part of my undergraduate education, I was at the same time taking it very much into my own identity. The family joke was always, “We sent her off to Yale University and that’s where she became really black.” In this intensive study of black culture, I was taking all that I was reading and, first of all, finding what would be my life’s work and great abiding love, but it was also helping me to think about what it meant to be a black person in unstereotypical terms.

I had gone to prep school in Washington and to other schools with mostly white kids, and reading Du Bois, I saw this great race man who had grown up in a white environment—and the miracle for him was going to Fisk and discovering this whole wide spectrum of black beauty. He was just blown away by it. The idea was amazing to me that someone could come into racial consciousness at that point in his life—in other words, that it wasn’t something you were born with and had a clear sense of from the beginning, something that was always with you, and you knew what it meant to be your kind of black person—here Du Bois was in process. And now we think of him as the greatest race man of the twentieth century.

One of the things I think about today in terms of Du Bois is that he really set a very high standard for getting one’s work done. There is a wonderful Du Bois statistic—I don’t remember it precisely or where it comes from—that says when you average out everything that he ever wrote, that he published an article or an essay or a letter to the editor, or a story, or a book, something like once a week for his entire adult life. It’s plausible, when you consider his body of work. That tells me that he was able to sit down at the typewriter and simply ask himself what he thought, and trust that his thinking and studying, and all that he knew, would be available to him when he was ready to write what he needed to write. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of agonizing for Du Bois about footnotes or whether or not people would agree or disagree with him. He just committed himself to the word, and put it out in the world. And so now we have an incredible record of a productive life’s work, but more important, he weighed in on the issues of the day for something like seventy years—and I think that’s very important, because so much of our good thinking and good energy as black people hasn’t made its way to publication.

There are reasons that so much of our history has been expunged or wasn’t recorded in the first place. The call of history is a chasm that’s just waiting to be filled, for the dots to be connected. So to have that written record from Du Bois, that archive, for black people is especially precious. If you think about all the black lives that we don’t have in biography form—you could write about incredible black people for the rest of your life in any particular area and never have enough time to do it. If you can accept that there is never enough time and never enough on record, then you can begin the hard, good work of adding to the record, and that will be enough.