Black Is the Body

by Emily Bernard

  Giulia was five years old. How ridiculous, I thought, as I picked up my child early from kindergarten in order to make her appointment at a beauty shop. But I needed help. As much as Isabella disliked her hair being pulled and stroked by combs and brushes, she endured it. Giulia, on the other hand, made for the door whenever she glimpsed a hair-styling instrument headed in her direction. “It’s just basic grooming,” I tried to reason with her as she darted around the room. Sometimes I held firm and forced a pick through her curls even when doing so required me to physically restrain her. But more and more I resorted to some superficial sculpting with my palms on her way out the door. There were a few mornings when I told her just to put on a hat.

  I didn’t realize how far from grace we had fallen until the stylist at the beauty salon gave me a look that was so offended and alarmed that it was easy to conjure an image of her dialing Child Protective Services. Her alarm linked arms with my guilt. I looked at Giulia, whom I had sworn to protect. My job was also to serve as a custodian of her beauty, was it not? I had failed, and not only as a mother, but even worse, as a black mother. My lovely child’s disorganized head had exposed me as an imposter, a pretender. A white mother’s inexperience with her black daughter’s hair might have been forgivable, but I was supposed to know better. I bowed my head. Giulia and I left the store with bags full of treacly hair-care products, all of them bearing the name of the salon. Those bottles, half empty, lined the bottom of the cabinet under the bathroom sink for several years, until I finally threw them out.

  * * *

  —

  When my mother died, I decided to cut my own hair; I wanted to wear my grief. I was living in New Haven at the time, but the stylist I had seen as a college student was out of the question. I pictured Mr. Jacques—tall, black, and as sharp as a barber’s blade—and his look of scorn at even the suggestion that I would cut my hair. I saw him only for occasional trims, which he deigned to execute only after scolding me. “God gave you all this hair,” he muttered once while poking at the ends with tiny scissors. He reminded me of where I came from, so I kept seeing him. For the purpose of mourning my mother, though, I chose a stranger—a white stranger. The stylist I chose was tall and blond and did not question me or ask me what my parents would think. She moved my head from side to side, her shears cocked and loaded.

  “More?” she kept asking as she steadily clipped her way around my head.

  “Yes!” I was exhilarated. But after she was finished and I saw that most of my hair had disappeared, I cried.

  I got used to my short hair. Then, I came to love it. Then, I forgot about it. I had acclimated completely to my new hair when a cousin commented on Facebook that my short hair enhanced my resemblance to my father. I was pleased by the comment and imbued it with larger, symbolic meanings. My short hair may have started out as a memorial to my mother, I thought, but it had come to represent the peace that had settled between my father and me in the wake of her death. I told my father, thinking he would feel the same. He did not. “Girls should look like their mothers,” he said, leaning on the first and last words to make sure that I understood.

  * * *

  —

  My mother had what is known as “good hair” in the black vernacular. Her hair rituals were simple, but when I was a child, I found them glamorous. I sat as close as I could while she gathered a bouquet of her hair and pulled a plastic teal-blue comb through it all the way to its fine ends. When I asked if I could comb it, she said no, and waved my eager hands away. As a child, her straight hair had exposed her to envy and adoration from family and strangers. It had excited jealous cruelty in people she loved and unsettling reverence from those she didn’t. She did not want me to fall under its spell.

  At the beginning and end of each day, my mother wore her hair in a loose braid. But before she left the house in the morning, she wound it into a bun that she fixed in place with large hairpins. Over the years, my mother talked idly about cutting her hair, but she never once even trimmed it. She kept her glory intact, but she kept it out of sight.

  “Cut your hair, lose your glory” is what my mother heard growing up in the Bible Belt. The saying derives from a passage in 1 Corinthians: “If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.” My grandmother cut her hair once when my mother was young. “If I had wanted a woman with short hair, I would have married one,” my grandfather told her. So she grew it back. For most of my life, my grandmother kept her hair coiled in a braided bun just like my mother, taking it down only to wash and comb it.

  * * *

  —

  When it was long, my own hair was too abundant for buns, and no combs or hairpins could tame it. In middle school, I tried braiding it at bedtime like my mother, hoping that the restraint would force my hair into docility by morning, but my hair was willful and quickly revived itself after a night in captivity. I slathered on creams and pomades to keep it small and close to my head, but my hair had big dreams and wanted to know the world. When I entered high school, I tried straightening it myself with a flatiron, but no matter how much heat I applied, the frizzy bits at my temples could not be subdued. All the while, I cut out photographs of black models and actresses with bone-straight hair. They looked happy and confident. If I had hair like theirs, I assumed, the rest would be mine, too. I remember one picture of a model taken against a white background, as if her hair and clothes were all there was to her life. I believed that if I could get my hair perfectly straight, I wouldn’t have to worry about it, or any of my other teenage problems, anymore.

  Even though my mother thought it was a waste of money and foolish, to boot, somehow I convinced her to allow me to get my hair relaxed when I was sixteen. There is nothing relaxing about a relaxer. You lie back in a sink for endless minutes while the sodium hydroxide sets in. The deeper the burning sensation, the more successful the process. Once your hair is relaxed, you’re not allowed to scratch for an agonizing three days. Give in to the itch and burn your scalp. I could never be faithful to the mandate not to scratch, so I eventually gave up on the relaxer and surrendered to my natural hair texture, but not happily. Once my mother pointed to a Donna Summer album cover that featured the singer’s face surrounded by long curly locks. “You have hair like this girl,” my mother said. I burst into tears right there in the record store. I went back to bands and barrettes.

  “What are you afraid of?” asked a friend of my parents, a professor at a local university, a black woman with short, natural hair. “Why do you bind your hair?” It was fellowship hour at church. We were standing side by side, each of us holding identical Styrofoam cups. I held mine tighter and then looked for the first moment to excuse myself. She was right; I was afraid. It was not until college that I gathered the courage to free my hair. Once I did, I shuddered to realize that what I had been afraid of was simply being black.

  * * *

  —

  A psychologist shows a young African American girl a row of cartoon dolls whose skin colors range from paper-white to deep mahogany. The dolls are identical in every other way. All are poised mid-skip with enormous smiles that reach, literally, from ear to ear. Their short dresses are the color of hospital scrubs. So are the bows in their hair, which is styled like the comb of a cartoon rooster. The girl being interviewed wears her straightened hair in sleek ponytails on either side of her head.

  “Who is better? Smarter? Prettier?” the psychologist asks her. After a moment of consideration, the girl picks one of the dolls on the lighter end of the spectrum.

  I freeze the screen on the frame of the array of dolls and call my daughters into the room. “They’re all beautiful,” Isabella says gently, looking at me with concern, as if I have, to her sadness, missed this important life lesson. Giulia picks the darkest cartoon doll. I ask her why. “She looks the most like me,” she explains.

  The interview is a scene from
the 2011 documentary Dark Girls. The test is a modern version of the Clark Doll Test, created in 1939 by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, in which black and white children were presented with dolls whose skin was either deep brown or pale pink and asked which one was smarter, prettier, and better behaved. Overwhelmingly, children of both races chose the white doll. The Clarks determined that racial segregation played a key factor in the negative attitudes toward dark skin. The Clark Doll Test was entered as evidence in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education.

  When is a doll just a doll? Soon after we brought our daughters home from Ethiopia, the parents of a close friend came to visit. They had known me for most of my adult life and had anticipated the girls’ arrival as impatiently as anyone else. They brought with them a pink plastic doll in a pink terrycloth onesie with plastic blond hair and dull blue eyes. As I recounted stories of the weeks we spent in Ethiopia waiting to become parents, I held the doll tenderly. After all, it was a gift from people who loved me, offered to my daughters only in love.

  For a long time, this was the only doll the girls wanted to play with. But ultimately it wound up with their other dolls in the same graveyard: the potter’s field in the back of their closet, where other once-cherished plastic bodies were discarded after cruel amputations and rough, ragged haircuts. During a routine purging, I found their beloved pink doll in the same state, its dull blue eyes tattooed with a rainbow of crayons.

  I said nothing to my daughters about the pink doll; I saw no harm in it. I said nothing either when, at a university event, my daughters rushed to Rose, a friend and former babysitter, and stood on either side of her head, gathering and dividing her long, blond hair, braiding and unbraiding it. Rose looked at me with compassion. She is insightful and sensitive when it comes to the tangled relationship between race and beauty. Neither one of us wanted Giulia and Isabella to lose themselves in Rose’s hair; neither one of us wanted to make them feel ashamed for doing so. Here was a human being whom they loved, a young woman whose hair was long and blond and therefore enviable in a culture that valorizes such attributes. But this enviable hair belonged to Rose, whose every attribute they adored in equal measure. It was not her hair they loved, but Rose, I told myself, and watched my daughters’ eyes radiate with wonder as they weaved their brown hands in and out of Rose’s blond hair. It pleased me to see their joy. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until they lost interest in Rose’s hair and went to spend time with other friends.

  * * *

  —

  I describe the scene with my daughters and Rose to my friend Estelle, and we puzzle over it together. Estelle’s children are adults, each one long and lean. When they are in public, the eyes of strangers light upon them and stay there. They are black but their skin is light, ranging in color from bronze to light cedar. Estelle told me that when they were young, she rarely told them that they were beautiful. It was because of their skin color; she never wanted them to associate light skin with beauty.

  I tell my daughters they are beautiful every day, sometimes several times a day. I believe that what I am doing has an important purpose. I believe that, brick by brick, compliment by compliment, I am building a fortress against the world out there that, studies show, will judge them as inferior for their dark skin. I want to create a running script in their heads, a narrative extolling the particular beauty of their dark skin, should they encounter such discrimination. But I also do this because they are, indeed, beautiful, so when my daughters tell me I am being superficial, this is true, too.

  As superficial as it may be, I take my daughters on pilgrimages to Washington, D.C., Nashville, and New York in order to enjoy the spectacle of blackness. Visiting my father and brothers in Brooklyn over Christmas, Giulia, Isabella, and I find a bench on a street with a row of hip restaurants. We sip smoothies and watch the women who walk our way. There is a girl with a copper-colored Afro so bright it glitters. Here is a woman with a crown of braids that look as smooth as whipped butter. Another one has extensions down to her waist, the tips flaming red. We smile and look and sometimes, frankly, stare. I am grateful that the day is bright and clear, a perfect backdrop to all of this glory.

  * * *

  —

  We all wearied of the exotic pet atop Isabella’s head sooner than I would have predicted. Giulia said I shouldn’t have gotten her sister’s hair flattened at all. “She’s been a brat about it ever since,” she said. Giulia had put all of her diplomatic talents to work in order to have a chance to play with Isabella’s hair. She bribed her twin with toys, money, and promises to be her “servant” for a day. Isabella accepted all the treasures and promises and then yanked her head away from Giulia just as she began to stroke the pet. She was never able to get her hands deep into its coat.

  Giulia was right. Instead of Isabella, I had brought home from Tamara’s apartment a beautiful, obnoxious monster that now cackled as she ran away from her sister who stood with comb and brush aloft. The same creature tossed her Breck Girl hair in the mirror and told her reflection stories in sentences that traveled up into question marks at the end, just like a Valley Girl. It didn’t take long for Isabella herself to become bored of these routines. She asked to get her hair braided again.

  Tamara and I scheduled an appointment just before my daughters and I made a trip to Nashville to visit my father. When I called to firm up plans, I told him about our adventures in hair flattening. Instead of making his usual inquiry into the length and style of Giulia’s hair, he asked me if I’d watched the Oscars. In particular he wanted to know if I had seen Lupita Nyong’o onstage after winning Best Supporting Actress for her role in the 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave. I knew immediately that what he really wanted to talk about was Nyong’o’s short hair.

  “She’s a beautiful woman,” my father said. “Her hairstyle reminds me of Giulia.”

  Giulia reminds me of my grandmother. Because at the age of eighty-nine, my grandmother, then a widow for four decades, had her hair cut all the way up to her chin. She just got tired of messing with it, she said.

  Motherland

  “We’ve got a pair of twins. You want ’em?” Helen barks into the phone at two a.m. She is loud, as usual. I can hear her through the pillow I’m pressing against my ears. John whispers firmly that we will call her in the morning. It is August. We are at a hotel in Quebec City, on a vacation to celebrate my birthday. I sit up and lean back against the headboard. It is strange, terrifying, and simple: life, as we have been living it, is over.

  Helen is our American adoption liaison. We met her a year before under a pavilion in a tiny town in Vermont. The occasion was a reunion, of sorts, a gathering of families that Helen had created. She wore a long, vibrant, shapeless dress patterned with flowers in purple, pink, and blue. She tipped her head back and laughed at something. Her body jiggled when she laughed; the folding chair in which she sat wobbled and struggled to keep her in place. Next to her, two obese white women fussed over a toddler with skin the color of caramel.

  I approached Helen slowly, my pace disproportionate to the rapid thrumming of my heart. I did not want to appear too eager. I had given careful thought to how I should present myself at this moment, from the speed of my gait to my wardrobe. I chose a layered silk dress in avocado green, a friendly color, I thought. I wore a small straw hat that I thought made me look playful, and dainty gold sandals that I hoped projected the aura of fairy tales.

  “Are you Helen Franklin?” I asked her, knowing very well that she was. Anyone who was interested in adopting children from Ethiopia did so through Helen. Breathless stories about her charisma and savvy circulated among people who were friends of friends of friends with Ethiopian children whose adoptions were made possible by Helen.

  Like all entrepreneurs, pioneers, and megalomaniacs, Helen liked to tell stories of her success. Her mission began when an Ethiopian friend explained the difficulty of finding homes for children who had bee
n orphaned in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Helen took on the cause. Local agencies told her she would fail, that white families in Vermont would not adopt black children.

  “I put an ad in the paper and I had a hundred calls by morning,” she told me as we sat next to each other at a picnic table. I had no way of knowing if this was true, but I liked what it said about Vermont, and about Helen. I sat with my back straight and hands folded. I was trying to think of something clever to say when Helen was called away to meet other prospective parents.

  I stood up to find John, who was talking to a white man and a black woman, husband and wife. Their two teenage Ethiopian daughters wore bathing suits under their sundresses. They looked hopefully at the lake where children much younger than they were swam and played. Their father was bespectacled and balding, well into middle age. I was drawn to his soft, kind air. His wife, tall, stately, and American, wandered off to examine the potluck offerings. The man’s daughters made their boredom plain; one of them leaned her forehead on his shoulder and sighed loudly as John and her father laughed and traded Vermont stories. Teenagers, I thought, and sighed a little myself. The father looked at me and mouthed slowly, “This is great.” I wasn’t sure if he meant being the father of this bored, beautiful teenager, being an adoptive father, or being a father at all. But it didn’t matter. The joy on his face was pure, as if he himself were a child and experiencing for the first time one of the world’s elemental delights: love.

  * * *

  —

  It had felt like an audition but it wasn’t. Helen had decided to help us before she even met us. She had heard about us through friends of friends, the same way we had learned of her. She kept us in thrall for long months with stories of how she had turned hopeful couples into parents. She was working overtime for us, she insisted. But then weeks would pass without a word from her.