Black Is the Body

by Emily Bernard

  Before she can finish her sentence, before she can get past what, another black woman with a white husband interrupts. “What a free person would say?” she offers.

  The black women in the group, including me, laugh hard, brittle laughs, the kind of laughs that recognize painful truths. Our white friends and husbands remain silent.

  The black woman with a white husband who equates whiteness with freedom is me.

  * * *

  —

  Much later, I realized what I wanted to say to Isabella. I wanted to warn her about the dangers of being a black woman, the vulnerability of our bodies. I heard my father’s voice, White boys are only after one thing, and felt my throat fill with disgust, less for him than for myself.

  * * *

  —

  At a bed-and-breakfast in Hampton, Virginia, I become friendly with Barbara, the proprietor, a black woman, and a native Virginian. She gives me visitors’ guides and advice on tourist attractions until I finally confess that I have come almost solely to be among black people, to see dark skin, and for this pleasure, I don’t need to see anything or go anywhere but up and down the city streets. She nods, accepts my confession, but cannot fully empathize. She lives and works among black people, so how could she?

  Before I arrived, I had imagined I would keep to myself during my visit to Hampton, which I had planned as a brief respite from my roles as wife and mother. Instead I spend my time telling stories about my family to whoever will listen. Barbara is a good listener. After breakfast, she sits down with me at the table while I linger over coffee. She is still in her apron, her body turned toward me, one arm on the table, the other draped over her chair, her whole self a sign of reception.

  I tell her what I said to Shanté.

  “White parents teach their children how to live,” she says. “We have to teach our children how to survive.”

  * * *

  —

  My daughters are laughing and playing at the Farmer’s Market in Burlington. A game of tag commences. They choose me as a base, ducking back and forth behind and in front of me. Behind me, Isabella puts her hands on my hips to steady herself as she dodges Giulia’s touch. I cover Isabella’s hands with mine. I want to say something. Don’t act so…What is it that I want to say? Don’t act so…free.

  I don’t say them, but the words sound in my head as clear and loud as a chime.

  “You are not a little white girl,” my mother sometimes said to me when I was young and willful. I resented her words; I knew they were meant to hold me in place, somehow, and force my eyes open to the world as it was. I didn’t understand at the time that she was trying to protect me, as well.

  * * *

  —

  In Hampton I walk the city streets, arms swinging, chin up toward the May sun. Not only have I come to see brown people, I have also come to escape the gray days of nascent spring in Vermont. In the eyes of passersby I might be a woman, a black woman, or a person who appears to be taking a peculiar amount of pleasure in the sunshine. No matter what, here in Hampton, I am not alone.

  Years ago I sat on a panel in the Burlington public library with other Vermonters, white and black. The panel had been organized as part of a community discussion about an incident that occurred in 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is African American and a scholar of international prominence, was arrested upon breaking into his own home after discovering his front door was jammed. Discussion veered from the incident itself to the state of race relations in Vermont. Black participants spoke about the challenges of living black in this state. In the course of the discussion, the South Burlington chief of police, another panelist, had occasion to say, “Dark skin stands out in a white place.”

  He offered the comment flatly but kindly. Like Shanté’s insight, I experienced it as simple truth.

  If only sight itself were that simple. Because the problem is not the visibility of dark skin, but who sees it and what the viewer feels motivated to do next.

  * * *

  —

  People see it but are afraid to say so. It is dangerous to talk about racial difference these days. You might, God forbid, be called a racist, which is, in the eyes of some people, akin to being declared a murderer. So we resort to the seemingly safe terrain of color-blindness, which can be a kind of violence, an aggressive act of willful ignorance.

  “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” explains the narrator of Invisible Man. “Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and nothing but me.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to see race anymore,” whispers my student Dusty at the end of class one day. The course is Race and the Literature of the American South. It counts as a “diversity course”; students at the University of Vermont are required to take a certain number of them. These courses are meant to serve as doses of intellectual tonic whose aim is to introduce sheltered students to experiences of people that do not look like them. They are crash courses in and against bigotry; twelve weeks on the intellectual antibiotic and you are, presumably, cured. Clearly, Dusty and I still have work to do.

  “The whole postracial thing is confusing, isn’t it?” I say.

  We have just finished a discussion of Huckleberry Finn, during which a few white students have described the frustration they experienced in high school classrooms with white teachers who refused to utter the word “nigger” when reading aloud from the book. Instead their teachers breezed past the word as if it weren’t there. One young man says that he had to keep checking his pages as his teacher read. He wondered if his eyes had tricked him, and maybe the word wasn’t really there on the page at all.

  Dr. King’s noble dream has degenerated into a cliché, a catchphrase, like “diversity,” a way out of—as opposed to a way into—complex and textured conversations about race. At best, what the civil rights movement appears to have produced is a generation that is keen to look beyond race, but finds on the other side not freedom but a riddle. The riddle of race, something you see but must always pretend not to see.

  Harrison, another one of my students, tells me that he saw me talking in the hallway with a guy he had played basketball with over the weekend but whose name he doesn’t know. I ask Harrison to describe the guy. “He’s tall,” Harrison says. “He was wearing a yellow button-down shirt. He was carrying a blue backpack. It was around three thirty.” And on like that.

  A particular face comes to mind but I’m not sure. “Was he black?” I ask. Harrison falls silent and looks at me with horror in his eyes.

  And then there is Katie, who, when she has cause to refer to me in class as a black woman, sends me an email afterward apologizing for referring to me as a black woman.

  These days, what I encounter in the classroom is a generation afraid to say what they see.

  I write back to Katie that it’s okay, that I am, in fact, a black woman, and that whatever mistakes she imagines she is making when talking about race, I will, most likely, make them, too.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe I see it too much. Maybe my vigilance separates me from my own family, none of whom, so far, feels the periodic need to be surrounded by brown skin as deeply I do. Why would they? Except for me, they have all grown up, or are growing up, in predominantly white environments.

  In my room at the bed-and-breakfast, I talk with my daughters via our electronic devices. We show each other our respective mise-en-scènes. I turn the camera on my iPad toward an ornamental shoe, a white marble sculpture of a woman’s head with a finger to its lips, and an old-fashioned typewriter. They are impressed by the bed, in particular its canopy of thin white silk.

 
I go to sleep and wake up to the purity of limited choices: the same few clothes, toiletries, books. I could do this, I think. I could live here. Maybe we would all be safer if I were on my own, away from the ones I love and could therefore hurt. I could stay here and not make any more mistakes. John could teach our daughters to live, and I could live here without saddling them with my past, my fears. But then, I quickly realize, I would not be able to touch them. I would no longer be able to feel the yielding texture of their skin when I pull them close, take their hands. This I could not abide.

  * * *

  —

  Race is a social construction for which there is no scientific basis; racism is the foundation of that construction. I read and hear some version of these statements all the time; I repeat them in every course I teach. They are true. But when I am out in the world with my daughters, it is not a construction or its consequences that I fear will hurt them. What I fear are human beings, white human beings, who are not made of theory, but of flesh and blood.

  I walk with Giulia and hold her hand. I cup it, wrap it with my own, and curve it into a tiny fist. I think about the killings, the routine destruction of brown bodies. You’re not taking her, my hand says. Not this one, not today.

  “I love you so much, I want to carry you around all day in my pocket,” I tell Isabella, even though I am well aware of the fact that the same urge to protect her from harm would, if acted upon, result in her suffocation.

  I want my children to breathe, to live and be free. Not only to experience the pleasure of their own skin but also the skin of others. I’m not sure if I have the language to teach them how, but this is what I want them to do.

  White Friend

  Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

  —James Baldwin

  Grocery Store

  Burlington, 2010. Karen and I stand talking in the middle of a grocery store. We are talking about Len, her godson, who is the son of a mutual friend. Karen is white; Len is black. “This is the first time I’ve ever lived with a black person,” she tells me. Len has been living in her house for almost a year.

  The comment is not out of the blue. I have been telling Karen about a course I am teaching called Interracial Intimacy, a course that speaks to one of my deepest beliefs, which is that intimacy—shared space and time—is a crucial factor in improving race relations. I had described to her an article I read about how few people of different races spend time in each other’s homes, in each other’s company in general.

  Karen is sixty years old. She is slender and small, with a narrow face and iron-straight blond hair. She has lived in rural Vermont all of her life. The fact that she has never lived with a black person before is not strange. According to the article, it would be strange if she had lived with a black person before, much less hosted one in her bathtub, which is where the conversation has taken us.

  “The first time he took a bath there was a dark ring inside the tub!” Karen says, her eyes wide with revelation. She lives on a farm. It is Len’s responsibility to take care of the animals.

  She is waiting for a response, waiting for me to confirm this revelation. “Maybe he was just dirty,” I offer. I don’t say, Our color, it doesn’t come off.

  It’s pretty clear to me that Karen realized the unsavoriness of her observation soon after it emerged from her mouth, but she couldn’t stop herself from completing her train wreck of a thought. I know the feeling.

  Karen leaves quickly to go back to her shopping. She tells me she’s needed at home, maybe by Len, I think, who has perhaps since committed himself to cleaning the tub after he bathes. Good-bye, we say, see you soon.

  Now I am standing alone in the middle of the grocery store, having forgotten why I came. I move furtively down aisles, my eyes scanning items without fully registering what they are, hoping not to see Karen again, sure she is just as carefully avoiding me. I want to laugh. Karen’s confession is the most remarkable thing anyone has said to me in a long time, even more remarkable than the daily diet of odd and entertaining observations that my children share with my husband and me. John will be interested, too, but it’s not him I want to tell—it’s Loree.

  “Did you tell her that it’s not a stain?” Loree asks when I describe to her my encounter with Karen. We make a few more jokes like that. I had brought her the story like a gift, something to add to our growing trove of shared stories and experiences. But it’s not working out like I planned; Loree’s laugh is heavy, dark, and bitter. She has girlishly wavy flaxen blond hair and eyes as bright blue as a doll’s. She trains her doll eyes on mine; her expression is opaque and serious. Clearly, she doesn’t find this as funny as I do. She’s more disgusted than amused.

  “You’re my only black friend,” Loree told me recently.

  Inheritance

  I like to say that I inherited Loree from John because it usually makes people laugh. But it’s true that Loree was part of John’s human dowry, just like his biological family. And somewhere back there, remotely, intangibly, I inherited all of their history, the way they have indirectly inherited mine.

  Loree and John are both from western Massachusetts. John grew up in Lenox, in the Berkshires, which became known in the Gilded Age as “the inland Newport” for its mansions, known quaintly as “cottages,” summer homes for the wealthy. Loree, however, grew up on what amounted to the other side of the tracks, in Lenox Dale, a part of Lenox that was not featured in tourist brochures. When they were children, “the Dale,” as it was known, was the kind of place that produced a kid like Anthony, who, John remembers, stole a car when he was in the third grade and beat his teacher with her own ruler.

  Loree inherited me, too. Initially we were “John’s friend” and “John’s girlfriend,” respectively, to each other, but a mutual affection grew quickly. What we admired first about each other was how much the other one loved John, who is more brother than friend to Loree. We loved the same man and we loved the same woman: John’s mother, on whom Loree has modeled herself as a woman and a parent. But then we got to know each other, and on it went. This is the story Loree and I share with others when asked about the origins of our relationship.

  But Loree has her own story that contains questions particular to being a white person with an only black friend. “Do I like you so much because you’re black?” She has wondered about this, she tells me. “Would that make me a racist?”

  Only Love

  Like Loree and me, Karen and I share a love for the same woman. Her name is Estelle and she is Len’s mother. She is black.

  I have known Estelle for many years now; I met her within the first few months of arriving in Vermont. John picked her as a friend for me. They met on campus and struck up a lively conversation. “She’s your kind of woman,” he told me with some resentment. He knew what would happen, which is that I would take Estelle over, and we would develop the kind of friendship that women do when men aren’t around.

  Estelle is Karen’s age, tall and strikingly beautiful. Whenever I see her, I am reminded of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God, whom another character describes as looking like her own daughter. Like Janie, Estelle sometimes wears blue jeans and her hair in a long braid. She walks with the confidence of someone who has found her place in the world. She is more sister than friend to me.

  I like to look at Estelle. I like the strong, smooth timbre of her voice and the way she moves her hands when she talks. I like the warmth of her eyes and the dark, delicate freckles on her brown skin. Estelle’s beauty is, for me, one of the benefits of our friendship, but is it actually the reason why I like her so much? If so, what does that make me?

  John has great taste in friends for me; he knows the difference between what I like and what is good for me. It is largely because of him that the distance between what I like
and what is good has collapsed over the last several years. My relationship with him and my children has, not surprisingly, changed the way I think about intimacy. I certainly ask different things of friendships now than I did when I was younger and childless; I ask more and I ask less. I used to want only friends who would fascinate me. Now I want friends who are kind. I used to want excitement, now I just want people to stick around.

  An older friend told me that when she reached middle age, she took an inventory of the people in her life—family, friends old and new, neighbors, coworkers, even acquaintances—and decided that since it appeared she was stuck with them, she was just going to love them. After all, it’s only love.

  It is only love that Karen has to offer to Estelle’s son. Maybe that is all anyone ever has to offer.

  Camp Loree

  For several years, my twin daughters spent a week during the summer on Loree’s farm in southern Vermont. We called the week “Camp Loree.” It is largely because of Loree that my daughters have had the kind of Vermont experiences that inspire people to make pilgrimages here every summer. At Camp Loree, my daughters would ride horses and tend to the sheep that sometimes wandered into her home. During their week with her, the girls lazed in the middle of a lake in inner tubes. Loree would send me pictures of a beaming Isabella shoveling horse manure, and a radiant Giulia holding a bottle in the mouth of a baby lamb. When they leave home and people ask them what it was like to grow up in Vermont, I imagine that among other stories, my daughters will tell about the summer weeks they spent at Camp Loree.

  Loree’s Vermont is the Vermont of poetry and romance. Her home, a restored farmhouse that sits on five acres, neighbors a barn with a peace sign painted on its doors. The farmhouse is a precise reflection of Loree herself: unpretentious, imaginative, and casual; warm and inviting. Friends and family gather around a fireplace in a room with overstuffed couches that gently but persuasively pull your body in inch by inch until you are drowsy with warmth, good conversation, and the sun setting over the mountains outside of big bay windows. To the left is a kitchen in which rich dishes, both simple and complex, are conceived and then executed; where butter and jelly are coaxed into being. The winding wooden staircase is lined with photographs. Guests sleep under heavy, handmade quilts and wake to the bleating of sheep.