* * *
The danger of all stereotypes, of course, is that they prevent us from seeing people for who they are, in their fullness and roundness. Instead, a stereotype flattens, limits, makes the expansive small. This is part of why Jill and I have deliberately chosen to post images of Shiv on Facebook, and not just to a small, select group. Shiv clacking around in his new tap shoes on the kitchen tile; Shiv in sparkly glitter shoes; Shiv rock climbing; Shiv zooming down the Slip ’N Slide; Shiv wearing his hair and dancing to Beyoncé—all these images challenge the default assumptions about what his childhood might, or should, look like.
Because he is black, male, and big for his age, it seems our collective imagination can imagine only one thing for him: sports. And very specific kinds of sports at that. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked or implied that my son was going to play football, we could forgo the college scholarship that everyone assumes he is headed for:
Future linebacker, right here!
I’d bet you’d be great at football, buddy.
You got him in any sports yet?
We have long vowed that we would allow him to pursue his own interests, instead of “planting” or disproportionately encouraging the ones we wanted him to have. So Jill and I have made an effort to expose Shiv to a variety of activities, including sports. She and my father-in-law both watch professional sports on television; thanks to my job as a high school teacher, he’s been to games of all kinds: volleyball, girls’ and boys’ basketball, baseball, girls’ and boys’ soccer, football, lacrosse. And up to this point, he has not shown any interest. He’s much more interested in playing with other kids his age who happen to be in the stands, or sitting with “Mommy’s students,” or trying to convince me to buy him something sugary and full of artificial food coloring from the concessions stand. When we watched the Super Bowl this year at my in-laws’ house, he was far more transfixed by Beyoncé’s halftime show than anything else.
Conversely, Shiv’s response when I’ve taken him to school to see various theatrical productions and performances has been exponentially more enthusiastic. He was not yet three when we went to see his babysitter Rachel in Seussical; I wasn’t sure how he would handle a darkened theater and a prolonged period of sitting still, so we arrived after intermission to catch the second act. But as he sat enthralled, I realized that I could have easily brought him for the entire show. At three years old, he made it through the full production of The Little Mermaid, in which another one of his babysitters, Bram, was playing the lead role of Prince Eric. Shiv had been anxiously awaiting “the mermaid show” for weeks; months later, he still talks about it, dropping characters’ names in his play-pretend, asking clarifying questions about the plot, requesting that I sing him songs from the show. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that I still know every word to “Part of Your World,” but I certainly never would have thought that knowledge would come in handy when putting my four-year-old son to bed.
Shiv has likewise made it easy to follow his cues when it comes to one activity in particular: dance. Our child has been a dancer since he could walk. He has rhythm, that elusive quality easier to define by pointing out its absence. His auntie Coco, our dear friend who danced for years in her youth and is a certified dance instructor now, knew early on. “He’s walking on his toes, just like I did. That’s a dancer’s walk.”
We have video after video of Shiv dancing to every kind of music, in every kind of way, well before he could talk: high stepping, Riverdance-esque jig, hip-shaking belly dance, fluid ballerina twirls. We used our family Sabbath, which we observe on Friday nights, as an opportunity to have “music education nights,” selecting an artist or genre to play for him. Jill handled funk and disco nights; I made sure that Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin were represented.
One night in November, we took our dancing outside after dinner, swirling around the backyard firepit like a trio of witches in the fall darkness. One of us, I’m not sure who or why, began to sing in a fake opera voice, which two-year-old Shiv thought was delightful. “More ooo-ooo music!” he demanded. We went inside and I grabbed my phone—we normally turn electronics off as part of our Sabbath observance, using them only for recipes or to play music, but this felt like a reason worth breaking our tradition. For his first exposure to true opera, only the best would do, so I pulled up video of Luciano Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma” with the New York Philharmonic. Shiv sat in my lap, so unusually still, quiet except for his breathing, which I could hear quicken. When the aria was over, he reached down to push the play button again, and again, and again. He watched it half a dozen times.
We tried to follow his lead; I pulled up videos on YouTube that I thought he would like, regardless of whether they seemed like “kid stuff.” He had the same response to the overture from the 1961 film version of West Side Story. He is a big fan of Broadway tap numbers; he once sat entranced before a twelve-minute video of Savion Glover improvising on a stage the size of a coffee table. When he was three, we asked him if he wanted to go to a dance class, “like Nate,” referring to the book we had (blessedly!) found at our wonderful local library that tells the story of a boy (he’s actually a dog—all of the characters in the book are) who loves to dance but whose brother tries to convince him that dancing is gross and only for girls. Luckily, Nate’s parents are supportive and enroll him in dance class, where he loves the class but is discouraged to be the only boy; then his mom takes him to see a professional ballet in a big, fancy theater and he is so entranced by the lights and the movement that it takes him a few moments to realize that half the dancers are men. (I may or may not tear up every time I read this book aloud.) So when we asked him if he wanted to go to a dance class like Nate, Shiv said enthusiastically, “Yay-hoo!”
When his first pair of ballet shoes arrived, he twirled around, humming to himself. We did not have to explain to him what they were for or how to use them; he went up on his toes, put his arms above his head. Tap shoes were an even easier sell; they make noise. “We might regret this,” I raised my eyebrows and said to Jill. “At his age, I was taking out pots and pans to bang on in order to convince my parents to sign me up for drum lessons,” she replied. My mom used to pick me up from piano lessons with my dinner in the car. While I ate, she drove me to my private ice-skating lesson. It was our turn.
Finding a dance studio came with some of the same challenges as finding a school. We wanted a match in terms of ethos and approach—real teaching, not just play, but also a sense of fun and joy, not shame and competitiveness. We wanted diversity in terms of the bodies that Shiv would be surrounded by. We wanted a place that wouldn’t be offended by a two-mom household. And we wanted a place that would enthusiastically welcome our dancing boy.
We feel lucky to have found Shiv’s dance company; it’s a wonderful community of people who are serious, but not too serious, about dance, who have been welcoming and friendly, quirky and warm. Each year, at the final recital, dancers of all colors, shapes, and sizes performed pieces ranging from ballet to tap to jazz to modern to hip-hop. There are easily a hundred kids who perform, and we’ve only ever seen one other boy. It’s not that the studio doesn’t want boys in their program; in fact, they offer a discount for male students, to encourage them to attend. But according to dance teachers I’ve spoken with, it is still rare to see boys at a dance studio unless they’re waiting for their sister to finish a class. Little boys, of course, are often signed up for T-ball or soccer as a matter of default, because that’s what it seems like they should do, or would want to do, or will enjoy. Likewise, girls are signed up for ballet or gymnastics, motivated by the same set of assumptions. And probably most of these kids are fine with what they are slotted into, either because they genuinely enjoy it or because they are expected to join it or because they are afraid to express an interest in something else. Or because nothing else has been presented to them.
When I first signed Shiv up, our studio director told me that most bo
ys don’t come to dance until they are older—until they have convinced their parents that they really don’t want to play a sport with a ball or a bat, that they really want to dance. “And then, of course, it is harder to keep the boys around, because the older they are, the more self-conscious they tend to get, the more teasing they may receive.”
* * *
Clothing is always an issue in social situations, since it serves as shorthand for specialness and belonging. For his weekly dance class, Shiv wears leggings and snug athletic T-shirts that I find in the girls’ section (good luck finding dance clothes cut for boys who occupy the ninety-ninth percentiles for height and weight), plus his black ballet shoes or tap shoes. The girls in his class wear exactly what you’d expect little girls in a ballet class to wear—pink or black leotards with tutus, plus tights. Same shoes as Shiv, except their ballet slippers are pink. It never seems to bother him.
Preparations for his first recital began a full five months before the actual performance, because we’re talking about teaching two- and three-year-olds a three-minute dance routine. As the only boy, Shiv was slotted into a special piece of choreography: the routine began with him leaping across a line of pliéing girls, handing a flower to each one before joining them at the end of the line. From there, all of the kids did the same moves, some cute pantomiming and lots of twirling. It was totally adorable, and totally gendered, but we didn’t want to pick a fight about it.
Then the costumes arrived. All of the kids had been measured during class a few weeks prior, but we weren’t told what the outfits would look like. On the day the kids were trying their outfits on, I was rushing to meet up with Jill at the dance studio for a child handoff when I received a series of text messages from her:
He’s upset that he doesn’t have a tutu like the girls. He won’t do the routine. :(
Ok. We’re going to have to talk to him. He is steadfastly refusing to dance and he looks so sad. He feels left out because he didn’t get a dress like the girls. He got a lace-up tunic.
This dance costume snafu was easily solved by a quick conversation with his teachers; they were happy for us to take Shiv’s costume and “bling it up,” in the words of one of our fellow dance moms—all of whom were, to their credit, completely sympathetic with his desire for a fancy outfit. As she often does, Auntie Coco came to the rescue, sewing gold rickrack around the shirt’s collar, adding two spectacular gold-sequined ruffles to the bottom, and affixing gold sequins to the sleeves with hot glue. The boy was thrilled.
* * *
A few months prior, Shiv had worn a tutu in public for the first time: to see The Nutcracker, also for the first time. As I helped him get dressed for the evening, he asked if he could wear his tutu over his pants, and I said, “Of course.” He got a few shy compliments and lots of smiles. It was mostly, though not all, a white audience, and I thought a lot about the importance of people seeing my black son in a tutu, of what his presence creates and makes possible. Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, argues that, as a society, “we’ve forgotten how to imagine black life.… That’s our collective imagination. Someone imagined handcuffs; someone imagined guns; someone imagined a jail cell. Well, how do we imagine something different that actually centers black people, that sees them in the future? Let’s imagine something different.”
The morning before Shiv’s dance recital dress rehearsal, he and I set off on an adventure with the dog, tromping around the backyard lake in the mud and muck, him getting wet up to his bottom in lake water, running, carrying sticks, both of us pretending to be superheroes with magic powers. And then the same boy, with the same level of excitement, took a shower, got dressed up in his leggings and ballet shoes, sat perfectly still while I put makeup on him for the first time, smoothing on his foundation and lining his eyes with my black pencil, teaching him to press his lips together in a kiss to blot the lipstick I applied. He took one look in the mirror and told me, “I’m pretty, Mama!”
You are, my boy. You are.
Pretending to Be White
My hometown is a southern city with demographics that reflect generations of gerrymandering, white flight, and other forms of racist violence generated by fears of integration. According to a 2017 study, Memphis is the fourth most segregated city in the nation. Even as a child, it was always clear to me that the city was zoned (both officially and unofficially) into black and white—I was raised with clear knowledge of which neighborhoods were the “bad” ones. Because of Memphis’s high crime rate, conversation was often framed around concerns for “safety,” never directly alluding to race. I internalized directions and landmarks, only later understanding their full significance—we always take a right onto Highland off Park because otherwise you drive into Orange Mound; Mendenhall becomes Mt. Moriah, and once the name changes, it’s no longer a good place to be. These rules were mostly unspoken but effectively conveyed all the same. In my hometown, race is a constant undercurrent.
Growing up in Memphis was a mixed bag when it came to the extent to which any of this was discussed outright. Though the city has a unique role in American history, which we were taught, there was virtually no attempt to connect the happenings in Memphis’s past with any of the race-related issues facing the city or the country in the present day. We all knew what had happened at the Lorraine Motel in 1968, knew that the lyrics in the U2 song were wrong (Dr. King was assassinated in the early evening, not the “early morning”). But at my almost exclusively white private school, we had little idea of just how much we didn’t know. I received what would be considered by nearly every standard an exemplary education, and what I was taught about race in America was slavery and the civil rights movement and that was about it. I remember watching Eyes on the Prize but can’t think of a single book I was assigned to read in twelve years by an author who wasn’t white. The overarching message was that race was an issue of the past, something our society had overcome but that no longer played a part in our everyday lives.
I say “our” because I grew up surrounded by whiteness to such an extent that I would, at times, think of myself as belonging to it. I was afforded a very intimate look at a particular kind of whiteness, wealthy and well established and sanctimonious. The whiteness I came to know surrounded itself like a cloak to keep out the cold or a curtain drawn around a hospital bedside, refusing to look at who or what else shared the room. It often struck me as a kind of fantasyland, this exaggerated white world, with its country clubs and Derby Parties and Cotton Carnival, its fancy neighborhoods and preppy clothes, its monogrammed everything. Even in the case of white families who were somewhat liberal and considered themselves “progressive,” black people entered the equation only if they were useful in some way: nannies, maids, gardeners. It was an entire posture of separateness, a code that could be violated in only one direction. White businessmen could visit soul food restaurants, tucking in their ties and digging into plates of food they could not get from any white cook, but black people only ever showed up in “white” restaurants as employees. White teenagers could joke about “slumming it” when visiting gas stations in black neighborhoods, where they thought the likelihood of being able to buy beer with a fake ID was higher, but anyone black who drove around in my neighborhood of Germantown seemed to invariably get pulled over, often on the falsest of pretenses.
As a brown girl growing up in a black-and-white context, I automatically paid attention to the seemingly contradictory power dynamics that ruled my every day—white people held political and fiscal sway, but black people possessed cultural power that drew white attention. From music to food to the history Memphis is famous for, everything that made the city a draw came either directly or obliquely through black folks: even Elvis, whose figure casts a seemingly interminable shadow over the life of every Memphian, owed his career to the fact that he was a white guy who “dared” to appropriate black sound and style. (One might say the same about the city’s most famous living pop star, Justin T
imberlake.) Even now, the things that white Memphians seem to brag about, everything the city’s tourism bureau develops its ad campaigns around—including the slogan of the city’s NBA team, the Grizzlies’ “Grit & Grind,” and the ubiquitous boast that Memphis has “soul”—has very little to do with the white people who claim or tout it.
For a long time, I had no idea that there was anything particularly unique about growing up in Memphis. But once I got to college and started comparing stories with new friends, I realized that I’d had many idiosyncratic experiences that weren’t shared by others who were raised elsewhere and began to wonder how formative these experiences might have been. The public park closest to my childhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places; it preserves what’s left of a fort built by Union troops during the Civil War. I thought nothing of climbing on the replica cannons when I was a kid or of the reenactors who would show up there in the summers. One of my elementary school friends’ houses was so old there were still quarters in the backyard that had once housed servants. In her dining room, a button on the floor allowed the mistress of the house to ring a bell in the kitchen and summon “the help.” Two miles away from the National Civil Rights Museum, built on the site of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, was a park that featured, until just a few months ago, an enormous statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, early leader of the Ku Klux Klan and prolific slave trader.
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