Damian and Clive came from a family of seven children whose parents immigrated to the States from the West Indies when they were kids. Damian was not the oldest, but was by far the most charismatic and ambitious, and he knew it. He and Clive were both obsessed with style and luxury goods—both drove BMWs and collected antique Bulova watches. They smoked expensive cigars and shopped at high-end fashion boutiques like Alan Bilzerian and the now closed Louis of Boston.
When I met him, I was heavier than I’d been in a long time, and my hair was in between lengths. I hated what I saw when I looked in the mirror. But even if I wasn’t feeling confident about my appearance, I felt an absolute, undeniable sense of urgency to pursue Damian aggressively.
I asked him out several times, just as friends, I said, because I knew he was with Meg, and he finally agreed to see a play with me in the South End of Boston, not far from the Blackside offices, that was written and directed by a young black woman playwright.
As soon as the theater went dark and the stage lights went up, we inched closer toward each other, and it felt less like we were watching a play and more as if we had settled into the bucket seat of a Ferris wheel just before it started to rise and swing. He put his arm around me and kissed me behind my ear, while I pretended to watch the play. We left at intermission and ran through the streets holding hands, looking for a place to get something to eat, but mostly flying high in this sudden, preternatural fantasy-like feeling between us.
Damian loved a fancy restaurant, and we landed at a newly opened spot on Newbury Street, where he ordered a Bombay Sapphire on the rocks, and I had a glass of chardonnay, and then another, and another. We weren’t stumbling drunk when we left the restaurant—we were already love-drunk, and the alcohol was just trying to catch up.
It was well past eleven when we got back to my apartment. Monique and Marco were asleep. In the spare bedroom of Monique’s basement apartment that I’d made my own, Damian ran his hands over my body and murmured words that sounded like testimonial. “This is what I want,” he whispered. “It’s like a Spike Lee movie.”
Things got very intense, very quickly between me and Damian. It was love at first sight for me, and while Damian told me he’d broken things off with Meg and that it was just me now, I knew that likely wasn’t the entire truth. He also worked constantly. The restaurant was new, and he was the chef and co-owner, which meant long hours into the night and few days off. Most of the time I would meet him at the bar of a swanky restaurant in the Back Bay or South End of Boston at about nine or ten o’clock, after he’d fired his last oven-roasted, gourmet pizza with arugula and Asiago cheese.
Our go-to spot was the Cottonwood Cafe, an upscale Southwestern restaurant, now defunct, known for its enchiladas and margaritas. It had a long, roomy cottonwood bar where you could drink and eat. Damian never wanted to sit at an actual table when we went out; he liked both the exposure and intimacy of a bar.
Before Damian and I started seeing each other, I was never much of a drinker. The first time I got drunk was in high school, like it is for most people, when I drank three beers at a party and the room began to spin. I hated the feeling, and though I continued to occasionally drink socially throughout high school and college, it wasn’t a regular thing for me. When I was with Damian, drinking intensified my already frighteningly ardent and intoxicating feelings for him, and whatever I could do to hold onto them longer, or to feel them in a bigger way, I gave in to. Damian was also in the restaurant business, where drinking comes with the territory, and it became part of our culture as a couple.
My drink was chardonnay—I couldn’t handle hard liquor, and my palate was not yet sophisticated enough for red wine. The sugary taste of it appealed to my childlike sweet tooth, although it wasn’t really about the taste so much as the high that two glasses would give me, when I would imagine the faces of our brown babies in Damian’s mahogany-brown face.
We had been formally together for less than a month when the pregnancy test came back positive—again. I’d gotten pregnant that first night we were together, after we left the play at intermission.
Wyatt and I had been diligent about birth control, or rather I had been diligent about birth control. After the diaphragm that Tess took me to get, which felt messy and inconvenient when I started having regular sex, I went on two different prescriptions of the Pill, both of which had horrible side effects, and tried the sponge, also terrible. Michael and I weren’t consistent, clearly, although Jaden and I were, but with Damian, not at all. In fact, we never once even had a conversation about birth control.
I’d been chain-smoking all day before Damian arrived, and hadn’t eaten for hours. We barely knew each other, but I couldn’t imagine my life without him. I felt weak and vulnerable in his arms as he rocked me and gingerly questioned my choice.
“You could give the baby up for adoption,” he said obtusely. I didn’t tell Damian that I could not possibly give a child up for adoption after what I’d gone through with my own, or that I’d had one abortion already. “Or you could keep it.” He never said “we.” I laid my head on Damian’s shoulder, and remembered the night we were first together, when he whispered in my ear, “Imagine this is ten years from now,” his voice low and liquid, dripping down the back of my neck. “We’d be making love to make a baby.”
But I wasn’t ready. I wanted to have a baby, and I wanted to have a baby with Damian, but I knew in my gut, as with my first pregnancy, that I wasn’t ready. Because what if I didn’t have the courage after the baby was born to keep it?
* * *
Throngs of picketers held signs with pictures of dead babies and shouted “Murderer!” outside the Planned Parenthood in Boston, and my friend Monique sheltered me with her body as she pushed our way through to the clinic entrance, then sat in the waiting room until it was over. I remembered how much I loved her as I cried in her arms, comforted by the honey smell of her hair and the soothing, melodic sound of her voice. “It’s OK,” she whispered. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
Forty-Three
My college thesis project was a collection of narrative interviews with four black women writers, three of whom were also professors in the Pioneer Valley, where Hampshire was located, and whom I chose largely out of convenience. But the best interview was with a woman I met in Paris, at the conference Michael and I went to in the winter of my last semester. Her name was Davida, and she was funny and electric, self-possessed and brilliant. I thought I’d be able to sell a book about what it meant to be a black woman writer on her interview alone.
The genre of interviewing I developed in college was part Studs Terkel, the white Chicago-based oral historian whose 1992 book, Race, had been a major influence for me when I was researching my thesis, and part oral tradition of both African and black American cultures, much of which was inspired by Michael. After I interviewed a subject, I edited out my voice and wove the answers together to create a seamless, single-voice narrative. For my thesis, I introduced the collection by explaining its connection to Audre Lorde and her essay “Uses of the Erotic,” in which she describes the erotic as a resource, the sense of balance between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Dad had a literary agent in New York named Lila, who had sold his trilogy of natural history books. Her client list wasn’t an exact fit for me, but Dad encouraged me to send her my idea for a book I wanted to write. In my query letter to Lila, I included my college thesis, which was to celebrate the unique culture made by black women who work with words, use them as a resource, and weave their womanness, their blackness, in and out and around those words. Lila called the day she received my package, and offered to represent me on the spot. A few weeks later, she sold the proposal to Random House, a major publishing house, for $20,000, which felt like winning the lottery to me.
That year, three books by black women writers were all on the New York Times best sellers list at the same time, for the first time in history—Jazz, by Toni Morri
son; Waiting to Exhale, by Terry McMillan; and Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker. It was a good time to be a black woman writer, and I was glad to have had the foresight to see it coming.
I wanted to have similar success, and I threw myself into interviews for the book, which was due to my publisher in a year. I scheduled my interviews on days off from the restaurant if I needed to travel, but also did a handful of interviews over the phone. The book included writers who were well-known, like Rita Dove, June Jordan, and Gloria Naylor, and others who were just starting out, like Davida.
The first batch of letters I sent out were to Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan, and Alice Walker, none of whom responded. I reached out to other high-profile writers, too, among them Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, and, of course, my original inspiration, Audre Lorde, who was gravely ill at the time and died of breast cancer that November.
“When I write essays I always try to keep in mind a hypothetical adversary I am trying to convert into an ally or a comrade,” June Jordan told me, at her home in Berkeley, California. Jordan, who attributed her emergence as a poet and activist to the lack of black writers and voices presented to her at a private high school and college she attended, may have been the interview that stayed with me the most, after Davida’s.
“I write essays to galvanize my folks, whoever they are, to go and kill somebody, you know, something like that.” She was rousing and unfaltering, vulnerable and stoic, with a short graying afro, perfectly straight teeth, and cinnamon skin.
I titled the book I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, as a nod to the red clay in Georgia, widely regarded in America for its richness in color and texture, which is how I felt about black women writers, and after delivering the final manuscript in the summer, I applied for a job as a front desk receptionist at Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies. The Afro-Am department’s burgeoning “dream team” was making national headlines, and led by professor and public intellectual Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., whom I’d seen speaking at the same conference in Paris where I’d met Davida.
I started in August, a few months after I turned twenty-five, finished my first book, and was newly contracted to write a companion volume to Red Clay, with black men writers. I was the first person to greet anyone who came into the department, my desk front and center as soon as you walked in the door, and it was a busy, popular department. Students and teachers came in and out all day long, journalists and filmmakers would come to interview Skip, and various speakers came to give lectures as part of the colloquium series Skip had established and named after W. E. B. Du Bois.
The department also served as the office for Transition magazine, the celebrated journal covering arts, politics, and culture from the African Diaspora and, at the time, edited by Henry Finder, who was the first editor to read my personal writing before getting the call of a lifetime to become an editor at The New Yorker.
“Of course it’s good,” Henry said when I showed him the start of a short essay called “Soul Notes,” riffing loosely on Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. I was trying to understand my identity through Baldwin’s lens, and it felt like I didn’t know what I was doing.
“It would be better to start with your own story, not Baldwin’s,” Henry said.
“But is it any good?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t be giving you feedback if it wasn’t.”
I answered the phones and sorted the mail, but I made the position at the Department of Afro-American Studies into something that was less customer service and more master of ceremonies. Whatever drama there was going on with Damian, I loved going to my job every day. Then, early in September, a senior student named Caryn came in for her first class of the semester.
Caryn exuded an indefectible, humor-rich spirit. She wasn’t just funny; she lived inside her laughter, frank and lyrical, and invited everyone else to join her there. While Jazmine, Kevin’s sister, whom I bonded with during our high school trip to Washington, DC, was ultra cool, and Lottie, Deja, and Ruby from Hampshire were excellent girlfriends, Caryn felt like home. Like the feeling that your heart will go on beating, every sound you hear is safe and familiar, and every time you return after you’ve left, you’ll know, proudly and rightly, that you have grown, but that you are always welcome.
“You should really go natural,” I said, looking at her straightened perm one afternoon about two weeks after we’d met, when she’d paused to stop at my desk before class, as she always did.
“I really want to, but I’m not ready,” she said, as if picking up a conversation midway through, even though we’d never talked about hair before. “I’ll tell you what, though, sis. You better put some oil in your hair. All that free, natural hair of yours, all your baby hairs are pleading with you, Rebecca, pleading, ‘Mommy, please give us some oil, please, just a little!’ ”
“I don’t know how to do it myself!” I bemoaned, through laughter.
“I see the hippie white people who raised you didn’t know either,” she said, laughing along,
Caryn was graduating from Harvard in June, and we started talking about where she might move, what kind of job she’d be looking for. We talked about how great it would be if we could move somewhere together—we both thought New York would be a dream.
Forty-Four
Damian lived in a three-story house with his brother Clive not far from the restaurant, where he had a claw-foot tub in his bedroom, and would soak in bath salts and smoke a cigar most nights after work, his arms glistening as he rested them on each side. I’d sit across from him on an expensive divan that he somehow had the money to buy, and try to get him to talk about things like the Rodney King trial or Angela Bassett’s performance as Tina Turner in the film What’s Love Got to Do with It, which we saw together and I loved. Damian seldom expressed a particular political opinion or view, and it seemed as if he’d only just begun to think about race or his own racial identity when he met me.
Damian’s personal aesthetic was largely inspired, he told me, by Sting, whose 1993 album, Ten Summoner’s Tales, could well have been the soundtrack to our relationship it was playing so often in Damian’s car. His style was bohemian chic, more Lenny Kravitz than Will Smith, although he never referenced either of those men, or any black male role models. It felt like I was trying to shed the influence of whiteness, while Damian was trying to build on it, and I wondered if it was possible to reverse engineer your racial identity.
Everything he told me about his life after immigrating to the States as a young boy included the power and influence of a white person.
Damian said that he’d met his ex Rachel when he was nineteen years old and didn’t know anything about anything, much less nice clothes and good food, expensive cars. He said Rachel, who was older and from a wealthy Jewish family, had introduced him to all of that, taught him good taste. Instinctively, I found this disturbing on a number of levels, but it was a dynamic that I also felt some measure of compassion toward. I liked nice things, too, although I’d been drawn to them on my own from a very early age, and had started working so that I could afford to buy them as soon as I was old enough to babysit. Was there something inherently white about having a particular kind of good taste? Did it make Damian and me less black because we liked lattes and scones?
As usual, I tried to work things out through writing, and in my journal wrote:
Damian has a very serious black complex, and I do believe that the part of me he feels attracted to is my whiteness. But see I am really beyond that. I can’t stay with someone who triggers my self-doubt, who doesn’t love his blackness…. Damian doesn’t realize that his white aspirations make him look like a fool—people are laughing at him. Both black folks and white folks. He hates his blackness so much he needs to shop at Barney’s. He needs to eat at fancy restaurants. He needed Rachel’s white money to launch his career. He has to come to terms with his blackness and mine. He needs to like his nappy hair.
One night after work at Harvard, I wal
ked into the restaurant wearing a sweatshirt I’d borrowed from Damian, who was talking with Rachel over the counter. Tall with brown hair and bangs, eyes fragile and protective, Rachel looked at me like I’d stolen something of hers.
“You have to tell me, Damian, I’m serious. Is there still something going on with you two?” I said after Rachel stormed off. It was near closing time and the restaurant was quiet.
“Beck, how many times do we have to have this conversation? How many times do I have to tell you that there is nothing going on between me and Rachel?” Damian turned away. “I have to close up, do you want to wait or not?”
A few days later, I’d been home from work for less than an hour when the doorbell rang. I could look out the window to see who was at the door, and when I made out the silhouette of Rachel standing under the porch light, my stomach sank. How did she know where I lived?
“That sweatshirt you were wearing,” she said, towering over me in the doorway, cool autumn air spilling in from behind her. “It’s mine. That sweatshirt belongs to me.”
“Oh,” I said, confused and offended that she’d felt the need to come to my home uninvited to tell me this. “OK.”
“And also,” she said, rattled, “I don’t know why you’re so rude to me when I’m in the restaurant, especially now, because of the baby.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Rachel had been wearing an oversized jacket at the restaurant that night, but now that she was in a more fitted wool sweater, I could see the bump just starting to show. Rachel was six months pregnant with Damian’s baby. I felt like I was going to throw up, and grabbed onto the door to keep myself steady.
“You didn’t know?”
“Damian and I have been together for ten months! No, I didn’t know!” I shouted, trying not to lose it completely.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 19