Well-Read Black Girl

by Glory Edim

  Let’s get back to Boy. After relocating to the United Kingdom, Papa Harald’s wife dies after giving birth to their second child. He returns to Norway to remarry and brings his new wife to Wales, where they have four children, including our Roald. You can see how this all sounded very familiar to me. In quick succession, Dahl then shares a series of additional tragedies. His older sister dies from appendicitis at the age of seven, and his father, too grief-stricken to fight, succumbs to pneumonia. (Penicillin had not yet been discovered.) Dahl then mentions, almost as an aside, that his own daughter died from measles at the same age his sister did. He offers no other information about this terrible coincidence and makes no effort to describe his grief. Just as if I were talking to my family, I hoped that later, when he’s in the mood perhaps, Dahl would give me more. He doesn’t, and I learned that some pain is so obvious that it doesn’t have to be articulated. Two months after Dahl’s father’s death, his mother gives birth to the last child. Like my maternal grandmother, she never remarries.

  With five children, two of which she didn’t birth, it would have been easier for Dahl’s mother to return to Norway. But to honor her husband’s wish that his children be educated in English schools, she downsizes and enrolls Dahl in a boarding school in England. On the first day, nine-year-old Dahl stands next to his trunk and tuck box, items I very much wanted, as the headmaster, flashing a gold-rimmed front tooth and shellacked hair, advances. He is curt with Mama Sophie, wishing her off without even offering a hello. She understands that her services are no longer needed and leaves quickly. Poor Dahl starts to cry. The scene fills in the details of my mother’s send-off—not physically, as Somerset couldn’t be any more different from Segeneyti—but emotionally. I imagine Mama Sophie is my own grandmother, suppressing her heartache to do what’s best for her child. In the end, it pays off for Dahl and my parents, but here I get to see the cost. Dahl, miserably homesick, stares out of his dormitory window onto the Bristol Channel, trying to make out his home. He sleeps facing the window every night, never turning his back to his family. I, of course, imagined my parents doing the same.

  Dahl adjusts and survives the tyranny of prefects and headmasters. My parents’ experiences were less dramatic, although my mother witnessed a different hazard at her girls’ school in Addis Ababa. One day, Emperor Haile Selassie’s son made an official visit. The students lined up, facing each other in two long rows, and instead of walking in the space between them, the prince inspected them from behind. A beautiful high-schooler caught his eye, and he told the headmistress to introduce them when he returned. On his next visit, the headmistress hid the girl, making up an excuse for her absence. My mother only recounted the incident as an afterthought, joking that she was too young and skinny to be worried.

  We missed a lot being in the diaspora. Babies were born, and we phoned in our congratulations. Loved ones died, and we mourned in cramped living rooms and basements thousands of miles away. I had only seen burial services in movies or on television; it seemed unlikely, until I got older, that you could actually say goodbye. When Dahl is in his forties, he undergoes a serious operation on his spine. His mother is unable to visit him because she is dying, a secret she keeps so as not to impede his recovery. She calls him one last time to send her love and passes away the next day. When he finally returns home, he discovers that his mother had saved every letter he had written her over thirty-two years. In one sentence, he shares how lucky he is to have those letters in his old age. For Dahl, those sixteen words might as well have been an entire chapter. I fantasized, irrationally, that we too would find letters, recordings, or any sort of family archive to fill in the gaps and hold on just a bit tighter. I harbored this fantasy until I realized that I could be doing that work. Finally, I started to write.

  My mama left my daddy in a two-story apartment complex somewhere in Berkeley, California. He was abusive, a victim of the mass incarceration system, and still the love of her life. She called me her love child. And as the youngest of her three, my mother made sure I knew I was loved.

  We spun through the world, my siblings and I, orbiting one another, like the product of any good single black mother household. When my siblings visited their father’s home, I remained in our mother’s duplex, remaking the choreography from the feature-length musical Annie. Annie, an orphaned redhead who found a father in a tyrant, spoke to me. Even though the black man played an East Asian butler, and the women shivered in fear when Daddy Warbucks stormed into view. I didn’t realize it then, but this was when I began learning to hate my black girl self.

  In Sacramento, California, I was invisible everywhere I went. Brown skin. Gap-toothed smile. Un-petite. Nappy hair. Not funny or smart or enough of any one thing to fuss about. And so I found books. First in my grandmother’s personal library on Thirty-Second and Helen Streets, tucked in the small entry of the three-story white house, was a burgundy credenza and the bounties of her monthly subscription to Harlequin Romance. I read them cover to cover. First from boredom. Then to my tingling delight. I understood at the age of twelve (after reading three books in one week) the reason my grandmother read constantly. I felt euphoric. Never understanding the throbbing sensation before now, I devoured those novellas like a hungry fiend. I’d finish the story, saunter onto the rickety red porch, and wait for someone to notice me, the way the narrator spoke about the noticeable maiden, or the office clerk, or the girl next door. I would sit in the sun. Back arched like the cover of the romance book, just waiting to be seen, until my grandmother demanded from the open living room window, “Get out the sun before you burn.”

  You learn real quick as a brown skinned black girl the rules of running for safety:

  Coffee will make you black.

  Being in the sun will make you black.

  Loud friends will make you black.

  Short skirts will make you fast-tailed (and don’t nobody got time or love for a black fast-tailed girl).

  And so I moved like a black bird afraid of her own shadow. Finding solace in dank rooms with mounds and mounds of books.

  Some days into my fourteenth summer, I tired of the stories that only articulated lust for petite white girls with silky tresses and tits pointing to the sky. I was back in Sacramento, after a Bay Area weekend, and lost in the stacks of the Meadowview library. I want to believe the title didn’t bring me to hold the book like a holy text, but it did. I read the back cover flap and scooted butt first to the far end nearest the dark. I read until the librarian, Mrs. Barbara, asked me if I wanted to check the book out because the library would be closing soon.

  I couldn’t hear her because of all the tears in my eyes.

  I’m used to black girls going missing.

  In the story of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was the first time I ever saw myself. Black girls go missing all the time. And missing doesn’t always mean disappeared, never to be seen again. It can also signal the loss of one’s self. Morrison wrote about Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda, and it felt like a mirror was thrust in front of me for the first time in my life. But that is a cliché. Really. It only felt like home. Like shared bathtubs with same-aged cousins to preserve the hot water boiled on the stove. It felt like handmade tacos and tortillas burned on the hot iron, small hands gratefully grabbing shredded strands from a block of government cheese. It felt like the ice cream man playing Pied Piper and the popsicles shared between empty-handed friends. It felt like the summer heat and the park were breathless and alive together.

  I pulled apart the pages, sometimes seeing myself, sometimes seeing my cousins, but always witnessing my kin and the negotiation of here and gone; ghost and girl.

  In Pecola, I saw a body plummeting in a swarm of sadness; yearning to be considered pretty amidst physical assault. Assault can weaponize our daydreams.

  Reading about Pecola gave me the language to understand what happened between my school yard friend Ramsie a
nd our summer league softball coach, Mr. Andre. I didn’t know how to put into words that we were all having fun. Then we weren’t. I didn’t have the language to speak about the week Ramsie went missing. How Mr. Andre asked us to check on her. I didn’t have the language to ask “are you okay?” when Ramsie returned. Her walk slow and measured. Her eyes down, down, down. She sat the bench for another week with Mr. Andre circling her so slow, it reminded me of Venus.

  When reading Claudia’s outrage, the swarm focused its attention on Shirley Temple, the little white girl famous for perfect hair curls (this was a crystallizing clarity of whiteness and black excellence beneath the white gaze). Claudia’s steady observation of the white gaze and her surroundings, as she watched her elder move with rage guised as silence; sadness guised as contentment. These passages became the Rosetta Stone for my understanding of my grandfather’s delight when watching Richard Pryor or my grandmother’s glee when holding a newborn. They both squealed in the face of hope and the audacity for a black body to exist despite the system designed to dismember it.

  In Frieda, I saw a light flickering stubbornly despite the sky. Frieda’s ability to be brave was a trait I recognized in my cousin Tiffany. Tiffany, also a light and the youngest of her siblings, taught me many counts of bravery. She often joked about the way I read more than I played with others, but she never let the kids make fun of me for my search of self in solitude and even asked me to read to her from time to time. One afternoon at Sierra’s house, the neighborhood girls were exceptionally mean. Sierra, a biracial redhead, had a special place of anger for me, deciding her mother doted on me more than her. But she was everything I wasn’t, and because of that, I was enamored. So enamored, I allowed her to mistreat me for the better half of the summer. I had already told Tiffany of the pranks and the jokes I became the butt of. Sierra joked about everything with a laser eye, a girl’s “high water” pants, another girl’s busted shoes, and then there was me and the damn books! Tiffany interrupted “let’s play a game” and the girls shrieked with delight at someone new in charge. “Let’s turn off the lights, and whoever gets to an empty corner of the room first, they are safe from your wack jokes, Sierra!” Tiffany clicked off the lights before anyone could respond. All I heard was tussling and then a whimper.

  Morrison’s The Bluest Eye talked about the young girls I went to school with. Some pregnant with the trauma induced by their fathers’, uncles’, and cousins’ hands; others afflicted with effects of the cognitive dissonance of growing up black and woman in America. Morrison introduced me to Alice Walker and Pearl Cleage and Sapphire and Bernice McFadden and this catalog of women writers readied me in the art of the black woman’s clapback. I learned to unwrap the body of its articulation and speak the language plain. There are moments, even now, where the actions and circumstances equate simply: read or get read.

  The young black and brown women of The Bluest Eye spun me into myself, until I understood our interactions are all an ecosystem of trust and love and remorse and praise and shade and compliments and to be seen—my goodness, we all just want to be seen. Morrison allowed me to speak what it means to be witness and witnessed. What it means to be a house and a door. What it means to be your own self and still a part of the entire conversation. To be a black woman and more than a shadow smudging. To be a complex citizen. To be a spectacular consideration. To be honored with space for flawed growth. And like a good West Coast tradition, I learned to be fearful enough to swing on anything that dared to darken my own ideas of myself.

  Blackness is poetry. Nikki Giovanni’s lyrical writing taught me this lesson when I was learning how to spell my name. Although it was annoyingly commonplace for me to experience mostly white teachers mispronouncing my name, its sonic relationship to other “unusual” black girl names made me feel like I was a part of something harmonious and beautiful. To me, the weird responses to my name made me feel memorable. It was as if I was a part of a cocoa-butter-scented, coiled-curled, sidesplitting-laughter-infused club with a secret password. Through Nikki’s world of poetry about and for black girls with names like Ntombe Iayo and Mattie Lou, I quickly came to regard people who didn’t get it as if they were singing out of tune.

  When I was about five years old, I wanted to emulate my mom, from her graceful grit to her measured but unapologetic outspokenness. She also possessed a black girl name like mine and the women’s and girls’ in Nikki’s books. Though my gap-toothed, dimpled smile and stature belonged to my father’s family, my gait, playfulness, and desire to sit at the adult table to debate politics, books, and music came from hers.

  Although I discovered early on that some of her most elegant traits eluded me, I attempted to mirror her studiously chic style, always carrying a book in one of her hand-me-down vintage handbags. When she wasn’t looking, I often played dress-up with her Chloé perfume and Fashion Fair lipstick. Impersonating a sophisticated professor I called Mommy, I practiced prancing around with a fancy hardcover book like the scholarly supermodel I imagined her to be.

  That’s how I ended up asking her to buy me a copy of Spin a Soft Black Song, Nikki’s illustrated book of poems for kids, at our local university bookstore. Always my mother’s copycat, I wanted a text that matched my parents’ well-loved and dog-eared copy of Nikki’s book of poems for adults, My House. When I noticed a childlike version of a book like my mother’s on the dusty bookstore shelf, I pointed to the cover and squeezed my mother’s hand with delight. Words didn’t need to be exchanged because she knew immediately what I wanted, as she always did. She smiled and reminded me that she was always delighted when I was curious or interested in learning something new—which was almost all of the time.

  I didn’t know much about who Nikki was yet, but the illustration on the cover featuring two cherubic, wide-eyed, smiling black children begged me to bring the book home. Although I thought at the time that Spin a Soft Black Song’s magnetism was rooted in its colorful and attractive exterior and cute little trim size, I would soon discover that the book was about a sense of home that lives in your heart and not at a particular address, zip code, or country code.

  For me, Spin a Soft Black Song was a master class on what it meant to be an African American child in the eighties, no matter where in the world you lived. Lacking the condescension I heard in most adult conversation toward children, Nikki’s gentle yet pithy, no-nonsense, joyful truth-telling made me feel seen, affirmed, and cared for.

  Despite my youth, when my professor parents decided to move our entire family to Saudi Arabia, I understood that my idyllic bubble of a close-knit HBCU (Historically Black College and University) community was about to burst. While I couldn’t fully articulate my impulse to stay grounded near my ancestral roots in South Carolina, I was able to grasp that I needed mementos that reminded me of who I was, where I came from, and what I could be, as I contemplated living thousands of miles beyond the realm of my imagination. As we moved across oceans, deserts, and borders I didn’t yet comprehend, one constant was my cherished book of poems that traveled with me.

  One of my earliest memories in Riyadh is watching my mother etch my name on the inside cover of the purple text with a lilac-colored pencil when we arrived in our new apartment. My face lit up with pride as she wrote my name, which was often egregiously mispronounced by white authority figures even when I corrected them over and over again. When Mommy wrote my name on paper with the diligence an engraver would use to carve a winner’s name into a golden trophy, I felt a sense of worthiness that will never leave me. Her affirmation was especially important to me, having just left the cocoon of my birthplace, soon to begin developing my earliest sense of identity as an expat in one of the most beautifully mysterious but closed societies in the world.

  In Nikki’s world, my name fit in with the vibrant characters. From twelve-year-old pigtailed Mattie Lou to five-week-old baby Ntombe Iayo, I found my place in the community she created. Like them, I had a beautiful “black
girl” name, and I was brown-skinned, joyful, resilient, and supported by my multidimensional parents in a world that pathologized black parenthood.

  Like the pop feminist readers and anthologies that later gave my teenage and college life a sense of meaning, Spin a Soft Black Song defined my experiences from my earliest decade of life. Nikki normalized the most mundane activities, like going to get snow cones and learning how to pee, while also making them profound and exciting. She offered a sense of sacred affirmation to everyday black girl experiences, with mommies who

  make you brush your teeth

  and put your clothes on

  and clean the room

  and call you from the playground

  and fuss at daddies and uncles

  and tuck you in at night

  and kiss you

  and daddies who

  throw you in the air

  let you blow out matches

  tell you GET OUT THERE AND FIGHT AND DON’T COME BACK TILL YOU WIN

  Through her searing but straightforward words, Nikki’s poetic protagonists showed me that it was okay to be me, no matter where I was or who told me I was “not enough,’’ “too much,” or “too loud.” Her poems were unapologetically black lullabies that helped me sleep when I was afraid to return to class after my white classmate left me off her birthday party list because of her mother’s bigotry. I was the only child who wasn’t invited.