by Ian Williams
In high school, the only way I could get to Blackness and beauty was through whiteness. Our art class took a big-deal, cross-border field trip to the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. There I stood before a painting, The Servant Girl, by my favourite artist in my teens and twenties, Amedeo Modigliani, who himself owed a lot to African art. The servant girl is a white girl in a black dress who stands with her hands clasped in front of her. Her face and neck are elongated in typical Modigliani style. The only warm colour comes from her face, her hands, and her eyes. Her eyes are blued out—the entire eyeball, not just the iris, is painted blue. If you asked me why that painting resonates with me so much, back then I would have answered somewhat narcissistically: the elongation of the servant’s face resembles mine; the colour of her skin looks tropical; I recognize that posture of servitude. But now, I am moved primarily by those eyes, the naive and sickly blindness of them. I am looking at a girl whose eyes have yielded to the beauty of colour rather than the usefulness of purpose. She can’t look outward from them. She can’t even see herself.
In studio, I patterned my work on Modigliani’s. For my final self-portrait (every year we had to produce one), I drew myself embracing myself. Both Ians look alien and androgynous. My skin is orange. The entire portrait is stippled with pastel, a technique borrowed from the Impressionists. I used no black; instead, I mixed colours with their complementary colours to give the illusion of black, another technique borrowed from the Impressionists. Up close, the stippling makes me look as if I were made of rain. Took forever. And in the portrait, my eyes, all four of them, are shades of blue. Odd. I had seen Toni Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye on a storage cart in English class. The title stuck with me, as did the cover of the Plume edition, with Pecola sitting hunched in a red sweater. The book wasn’t assigned to my class and I didn’t read it until years later, so I didn’t know anything beyond the jacket copy. Nevertheless, I gave myself the bluest eyes out of a kind of fascination with Modigliani’s blighted portraits and solidarity with Pecola and Morrison, whose novel was the only Black book that crossed my path—and accidentally at that—in high school.
As I was working on the eyes of the self-portrait, classmates came by and asked, Why are your eyes blue? I said something about contrast with orange, something about transparency.
There were many important questions beneath that question. Do you know what you look like? You know your eyes can’t and won’t ever be blue, right? And the biggie: Are you self-loathing?
Self-loathing, no. I can’t say I wanted to be white. I was lonely and insecure socially, sure. I was the only Black kid in my class, throughout high school, so I drew two of me, for company. And I was acknowledging in that self-portrait that there was something wrong with my vision, much like the blindness—or the inward gaze?—of Modigliani’s The Servant Girl. I couldn’t tell you what exactly at the time, but it was akin to seeing too much of one colour, then closing one’s eyes and seeing its opposite. Something in me was resisting the normalization of being the only Black person in a sea of white people.
My art career ended after high school. The self-portrait is hanging in a bathroom in my mother’s house, over the toilet, next to the mirror. I see it whenever I step out of the shower.
* * *
—
How do you get blue eyes? For a child to have blue eyes requires that both parents carry the recessive gene, meaning that there’s likely someone white on each side of the family. When Black people have children with blue eyes—you can do the historical math.
But there’s another way. Tameka Harris, a.k.a. Tiny, a singer better known for her reality show with her husband, the rapper T.I., had surgery to make her eyes blue. She says they’re ice grey. Fine. To change her eyes, she flew to Africa, where a doctor slit her eyes and inserted a coloured implant.
The procedure is not legal in North America, though I suspect not simply for medical reasons.
Uncle Larry
My white uncle by marriage made a joke. It was his first trip to Trinidad, part of a tour to charm our family, and by all reviews he was succeeding. Such a nice English man. Affable. Very friendly. Not like most white people. Also: muscular. His joke:
What do you call a Rasta who prescribes glasses and a Rasta who wears glasses?
A Rasta for eyes and a Rasta four eyes.
Sorry. It was the eighties. Jokes weren’t as funny then.
Neither my brother nor I got it. Nobody in the family wore glasses or knew the expression four eyes. We were stuck on the Rasta part. What did being a Rasta have to do with anything? He was trying to make the joke relevant to us. But perhaps he didn’t realize that Rastas were more Jamaican than Trinidadian and, even so, the Trini Rastafarians belonged to another class of society, which as children we were warned about. The joke fell flat because he was eliding Black people, Jamaicans and Trinidadians, eliding various classes. Could he not see differences?
Uncle Larry’s eyes were very blue and his skin was very red and he had packed exercise springs and a resistant grip strengthener to work his chest and forearms. My aunt seemed happy with him but not in awe. I couldn’t imagine having to look into his blue eyes every day or hold his red, hairy hand or kiss him. And that was as much as I knew married people did. Intimacy seemed impossible.
Why was he so comfortable? Why did he brush away formality so quickly? We expected a more uptight British man. His personality was incongruous with our expectations of his brand of whiteness. We expected this kind of joking from Americans, like the white boy in my class whose nose was always running and who licked up his snot. The Trinidadian kids carried embroidered handkerchiefs.
The white boy
In Trinidad, we had two white students in our school, a girl and her younger brother who were in the same grade as my brother and me. They had blue eyes. The snot-eating boy, Jeremy, was best friends with the guy I wanted to be best friends with, and this conferred on him a kind of rarefied status. In the socio-economics of childhood, I had status too, as one of the smart kids (kids weren’t bullied in Trini culture for that), but I was younger than both of them, having skipped grade three, and therefore risky best-friend material.
Jeremy bore the unreasonable responsibility of embodying all the bits of information I had picked up about white people, and his behaviour, in turn, was taken as representative of all white people. He had an accent, like all white people. I found his eye contact excessive. Every sentence, every conversation, every day.
His physical presence attuned me, even at that age, to my expectations of whiteness. I expected him to be the smartest, the cleanest, but not the kindest. He had an aura, not of his own making, but of ours. Colonized people who live at a distance from white people nevertheless have strong myths that govern our expectations of and interactions with them. The myth, which they themselves are responsible for, says that they are all intelligent, but we discover that they are only articulate. And the more we listen, the more we realize that they are not articulate, but confident, self-advocating, garrulous, and accented.
Niece, nephew
When people look at my biracial niece and nephew, they will find themselves smiling involuntarily.
My niece has curly dark-brown hair and large brown Disney eyes. She will be enviably thin in her teen years. Her skin is what white folks call olive or Mediterranean. Black folks call it light. My nephew also has curly hair, down to his chin, but blond. His eyes are blue. He’s about the same complexion as his sister.
When the kids are alone with my brother, their race gets interpreted through him. The term is cladisticizing: “racially perceiving someone by inquiring into their family history.” My brother tells me about going to restaurants and having people approach to say, What beautiful children you have! What they really mean, what makes the children beautiful, are those white elements—the blond hair, the pale skin, the blue eyes—Photoshopped onto their otherwise Black bodies. It has not
been my experience that people are going up to Black kids or their parents to tell them they’re beautiful.
My niece and nephew will occasionally be misapprehended as white. Neither of them is trying to pass. There is no deception on their part. People will project whatever they want to see onto their bodies. Their shares in whiteness will give them advantages that non-biracial Black kids will not have. In those little graces within a conversation, those areas where physical presence sways the outcome, they will fare better than Black kids. And between the two of them, forgive me for this indelicacy, my nephew, being male and blue-eyed and fair-haired, will find an even more receptive world.
Or, who knows, the world could be radically different and this prophecy will prove anachronistic. I’ll try to explain the surface-level judgments of the past to my nephew and he’ll say, Oh no, Uncle, that’s impossible. That must have been all in your head.
LIFE CERTIFICATE
My mother needs to prove that she is alive.
I don’t understand why you have to do this, I say.
For my benefit, she says.
It’s not for your benefit.
For my pension.
She tells me that the pension office requires a life certificate to protect itself against fraud from identity theft. There are people who profit from impersonating dead people. I try to imagine what kind of person could convincingly pretend to be my mother.
The life certificate form requires a witness.
I’d ask you to be my witness, she says. But you’re not free.
So she drives to a friend’s house. He signs the form. She scans it and e-mails it to the pension office and forgets about it. Her life returns to its cycle of supplements and twenty-four-hour news stations.
A few days later, she receives a response. Her life certificate has been rejected.
I say, A form can’t be the only way to prove you’re alive.
Look, she says, the form is not the problem. I just need to get it notarized.
* * *
—
Later that week, my mother messages me. She found a judge.
I send a thumbs-up emoji.
She messages, He’s a Justice of the Peace.
I send another thumb. I don’t know the difference between Judge and Justice. I message, Is this man qualified to tell you whether you’re alive?
She doesn’t reply. A few minutes pass.
Are you there? I ask.
She does not reappear.
* * *
—
To prove her identity, she takes government photo ID to the Justice, even though she doesn’t think the photo on her licence captures her likeness. The resemblance is good enough for him. He notarizes the form. My mother scans it, e-mails it, forgets about it. She takes her calcium. She watches shootings.
The pension office responds. Rejected.
It’s like a Kafka story, I say.
They don’t accept scans, she says.
I groan into the phone. What if you went to the pension office in person?
They need the original, notarized form.
You are the original, though.
* * *
—
This time, the mailed, notarized, original form causes a pension to trickle into her account. But the funds stop after six months. She needs a new life certificate, the pension office informs her.
Every six months, my mother needs to prove that she is alive. She would go back to the Justice who previously notarized her to prove it. But he has died. Now she has to find someone else.
NOTES
More Than Half of Americans Can’t Swim
“I have come to believe.” Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press, 2007), 40.
at least two million Black people died. Estimates vary. This one is from digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3034 [inactive]
Instagram post that a friend forwarded to me. Here’s some more context from the original poster, trying to explain what they intended:
“ghostdumps: Hello. A lot is going on, and I felt the need to say something. Again I wish to reiterate, people aren’t obligated to post on their social media what they’re doing to help the cause—but i know a lot of people who hide behind their excuses because they are uncomfortable. You’re not a bad person for not sharing these things but now more than ever, if you are in a place of privilege, please reconsider using your voice and platform, however small it may be, to help. Spread donation and petition links. Educate. Have these uncomfortable conversations with the people around you. Teach yourself to erase the racism that is built deep inside of you, inside of everyone. Do not be ashamed. Black people are dying. And their lives matter. #BLM #justiceforgeorgefloyd I have tagged some great people on Instagram that have done a really good job at educating and showing us what’s going on. There’s no excuse! LAST SLIDE IS A QUOTE FROM ANGELA DAVIS HERSELF. READ ABOUT HER.
EDUCATE YOURSELF. She has an insane amount of helpful books that will completely change your outlook on this situation rn. (EDIT: link in my bio with a full list of resources to educate yourself on how to be a white or non-black ally, and how to actively be non racist, among other helpful readings) // Title page illustrated by the lovely Emmy Hamilton of @cowpetter and @momzines.”
The full post can be found at instagram.com/p/CA0zhFzFjLf.
Consider David Foster Wallace. All quotations in this section are from “Authority and American Usage,” Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005), 108–9.
“The master’s tools.” Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press, 2007), 112.
“Survival is not an academic skill” and “Difference must not be merely tolerated.” Ibid., 112, 111.
“little, fat, black man.” Marcus Garvey is quoting Du Bois’s insult in “W.E.B. Du Bois as a Hater of Dark People” (1923), in Call and Response: Key Debates in African American Studies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jennifer Burton (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 262.
“It is no wonder.” Ibid., 263.
“the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race.” W.E.B. Du Bois, “Marcus Garvey: A Lunatic or a Traitor?” (1924), in Call and Response, 266.
“War, horrible as it is, might be preferable.” Martin Luther King, “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” (1958), in Call and Response, 560.
“nonviolence offers the only road to freedom.” Here’s a fuller statement of King’s reasoning for non-violence:
“Anyone leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment [as the Vietnam War] regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black population and which would not hesitate such an attempt if the survival of white Western materialism were at stake.”
Martin Luther King, “Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom” (1966), in Call and Response, 579.
“Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi” and “half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.” King, “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” 561.
Disorientation
“So you’re waiting.” The quotation continues: “The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment.” Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Toronto: Vintage, 2010), 36.
“violent blow on the head.” Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, but Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself (1798), Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org/1/0/0/7/10075.
“motionless on the deck.” Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,
or Gustavus Vassa, the African Written by Himself (1789), Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org/1/5/3/9/15399.
“Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness.” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org/4/0/408.
“the flag to which you have pledged allegiance.” “James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley: A Legendary Debate from 1965,” YouTube video posted August 13, 2019, youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ.
“I felt, but did not yet understand.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 21.
“I needed some time to think.” Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 45, 47. To Kendi’s disorienting experience, I would add that injustice or unfairness is not, in fact, arbitrary. The concept of fairness assumes a system that is predictable and transparent. The issue is that we’ve been linking punishment to why rather than who. If instead of asking why Ted is being punished, one notes who is being punished, one will discover that who gets punished is extremely predictable even though the why might be arbitrary. Racial discrimination is both predictable (Black folks will be treated worse) and unpredictable (but not all the time, not explicitly, because we’re not supposed to be treated unfairly).
“maybe being black could suck a little bit.” Quoted in Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 29.