by Glory Edim
I was a brown skin girl who loved to jump double dutch. I had thick kinky hair that wouldn’t stay straightened no matter how many chemicals the hairdresser applied. Black had been beautiful in the 1960s, but this was the late 1970s and early 1980s; it was a time of Jheri curls and colored contacts. I didn’t feel beautiful, but I loved to read and I loved to jump rope, and I thought if I could lay all the books and all the double dutch ropes out in a line, it might help me create a map, a place where a girl like me could survive and thrive.
It was a surprise to see that right around the same time that I came to this country with my mother, who expected me to understand the ways of the old country and to have those ways embroidered on my head and my heart, Jamaica Kincaid had published this piece in The New Yorker. On June 26, 1978, when The New Yorker published “Girl,” I am fairly certain that I was walking down Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. My mother was buying coconut and wondering out loud why I didn’t like to drink coconut water and what that said about my character. She was standing next to a bamboo forest of sugarcane, sniffing the stalks, wondering how I had the audacity to ask for a quarter to eat stale candy in a wrapper when here was sugarcane, delicious sugarcane, that I could sit and suck on all day long.
I can say with a fair amount of certainty that sometime in June 1978, my mother asked me to pick the best mango from the pile and I picked one that was inferior. It was not that I was handed one by the shopkeeper that was inferior. But that I, a child with more luck than sense, picked the worst mango willingly. I can still hear my mother on the telephone, shaking her head with disappointment as she recounted the tale.
I did not discover “Girl” until I was in college in the early 1990s. But when I saw the date that it was published, when I knew that I was a young girl when Jamaica Kincaid wrote “Girl,” I almost felt as if she might have been walking behind me and had merely transcribed the whole conversation between my mother and me. Or that she had written the piece for me, to let me know that I had been seen and understood. This is, of course, what great writers do. They make you feel as if they are spies; as if they have somehow crept into your room at night and stolen your dreams or your nightmares.
The instructions go on in “Girl”: about how to smile at someone that you like, how to smile at someone that you don’t like, how to bully a man, and what to do if a man bullies you. At the very end, the girl dares to ask one question in the middle of her mother’s soliloquy. She asks, “But what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?” And you can feel the surprise and frustration in the mother’s voice when she answers: “You mean to say that after all you’re really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?”
I learned from reading Jamaica Kincaid that simple words could be torpedoes. That while I wanted to write with the narrative bravado of a Toni Morrison, it might be okay if I started with something less ambitious than a book like Beloved. I started writing a memoir before there was a genre called memoir. I wrote, for whoever would publish me, stories about the people who I had known and the place where I had grown up.
I sat in my little Brooklyn apartment and I tried to listen: listen for the voice of my mother, listen for the singsong voices of my grandmothers, both passed away. Jamaica Kincaid taught me that the women I loved might not have been known to many people in the world but they were opera singers. They had beauty in their voices; great dramas were at the cruxes of their lives. And if I could catch their voices—the way they loved, the way they taught, the way they turned their faces away in pain, and how they stood in their own power—then their words on the page might become a song worth singing.
Jamaica Kincaid taught me that to be a girl from a small Caribbean country did not mean that I had no place, which is how I felt those many summers when my friends all went “down south.” The me that I saw in her stories was so beautiful and so familiar that if the books had been lakes, I would have most certainly fallen in and never been able to find the will to spire my way to the surface.
As I tried to become a writer, when the rejections were stacked high and the bills were stacked higher, I thought of Jamaica Kincaid. I knew somehow, from the moment I read her, that I would spend my life writing, regardless of whether or not anyone paid me to do it. In no small way, I think that Jamaica Kincaid gave me my Plan A, my Plan B, and my Plan C. I wanted to live in New York and be a published writer. I wanted to walk into the library on Fifth Avenue with the lions sitting outside and be able to look up my name in the card catalog. I wanted those walls to have just one book with my name on it. But I was also entirely willing to move to some warm place where I could smell the sea, to a little clapboard cottage where I could make rice and peas. I imagined that wherever this island home was, it would be a place where I could buy mangoes in an open market and the baker never thought twice about letting me touch the bread.
If it had come to it, I imagined, I would change my name to Nevis or Dominica. I would take lovers and drink sweet rum out of wide barrel bottle green glasses. I would write short stories in homage to “Girl” for the rest of my days and be happy. This is not how my story turned out. But when the days were dark and New York was cold, it was a dream that sustained me. For the dream, for a path, for an awe-inspiring sense of completeness, and for a cable-jump boost of confidence and possibility when I needed it most, I remain eternally grateful to Ms. Jamaica Kincaid.
I wouldn’t say that I discovered myself in books when I was a student at Spelman College. All my life I had been surrounded by images of myself. My first doll was a brown girl named Tamu who announced “I’m black and I’m proud” when I pulled the string in the center of her back. As a baby, I teethed on board books featuring children explaining how much they loved eating vegetables and being black. As a grade-schooler, I sat at my teacher’s feet as she gave us a dramatic reading of Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe. I had no idea that there were black children out in the world deprived of images of themselves. Keep in mind that this was Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1970s and 1980s. This was Chocolate City just after the civil rights movement. We had our black mayor, black school board president, black police chief. As my father would say with satisfaction, “We have black everything down here!” We were segregated, but prosperous. I understood that the United States was majority white in the same way that I understood that the Earth was seventy percent water. I knew it, but standing on dry land, I couldn’t quite believe it.
So, for me, it wasn’t so much a question of seeing myself in a book that changed me as a person. Yes, representation matters, but there is more to transformation than looking into a book the way you would look into a mirror. Instead, at Spelman College I learned to understand literature as a means of unraveling the thorny questions of my life as a black woman. Literature wasn’t just about inclusion, it was the springboard to intense questioning. I have written and spoken extensively about the various moments of great awakenings that I experienced courtesy of the novels of Alice Walker, Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, and the great titan of the black female canon, Toni Morrison. At Spelman we did more than read the novels, we took them apart and shuffled the components. We talked about the plots, and we fought among ourselves about our interpretations of the themes. Inevitably, we would veer from the page and discuss the implications for our own young lives.
As everyone who knows me even casually knows, I am a great admirer of Toni Morrison. I speak often of Song of Solomon, Sula, and Beloved, but the novel that I return to most of all is Tar Baby, her fourth novel, slipped in between her most celebrated works, Song of Solomon and Beloved.
When I first encountered Tar Baby, I was a junior in college, and I didn’t like it much. My classmates were not overly fond of it, either, though our professor clearly felt there was much in the story for us to learn. She insisted that we read it closely, and we did. She encouraged us to love it, and we refused.
Why didn’t I like it?
For one, I didn’t care much for the lyrical opening, situating the characters within the history of slavery in the Caribbean. Further, I was not intrigued by the description of the natural world. I was a city girl and a teenager. I wanted to get on with the story. But once it got cooking, it really got cooking. And it quickly went from boring to disturbing. Some really rich white people live on a beautiful island where they are waited on hand and foot by a pair of black American servants. The maid and butler have a beautiful niece, Jadine, who is more like a daughter. The white folks are dysfunctional as hell. The wife is an ex beauty queen, who is too young for that old man. They bicker constantly, and lovely Jadine tries to make the peace. Meanwhile, an extremely fine black man is a deserter from a military ship, and he washes ashore and takes shelter in the white lady’s closet. His name is Son. (How could I not fall in love with a black man so snugly situated in The Culture. His name is Son!) The white lady finds him and starts hollering and screaming, talking about he was trying to attack her—and you know good and well he wasn’t. The white man invites Son to dinner just to chap his wife’s hide. And then the fine black man from the closet falls in love with the beautiful Jadine—who is so beautiful that she is an actual model—and they embark upon a hot and heavy love affair. It’s all very romantic until it isn’t.
As you can imagine, this part of the story grabbed my attention. We had just read Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Nikki-Rosa,” where she declares that “Black love is black wealth.” Sure, Giovanni was speaking of love in the broadest sense, but I was ready for Black Love of the boyfriend/girlfriend variety. My heart was a purse, and I was ready to fill it with gold coins. For about a hundred pages, I warmed to the story, looking to Toni Morrison to give me a road map to romance and pleasure, the way she taught me about friendship in Sula.
However, Mother Morrison threw me a curveball. Jadine ultimately rejects Son. Now I was reading through narrowed eyes. Pretty Jadine was as siditty as Maureen Peal, the light-skinned mean girl I hated in The Bluest Eye. How could she walk away from someone so fine, someone so complicated, someone so black? Maybe the relationship was a tiny bit violent. And perhaps he was just slightly jealous of her career and success. But, I reasoned, it was difficult to be a black man. And besides, in Jadine’s own words, he “fucked like a star.” How often does that happen?
It was really the first time I could remember being mad at a book, being mad at my favorite author. I felt that Morrison was rattling my cage, giving a victory to Jadine, whom I read as shallow and selfish. Toward the end of the novel, Jadine’s selfless aunt lectures her on the way to properly be a daughter. (Spoiler: The key is sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice.) When Jadine fails to be swayed by this incredibly eloquent guilt trip, or the lure of sexual connection, the ending left me dumbfounded. What was Morrison trying to say? The image of Jadine clutching a fur coat purchased for her by a white suitor and heading for Europe unencumbered by the demands of family and romantic entanglement didn’t fit my understanding of a happy ending.
If I may back up, I would like to talk a little bit about another text that shaped my young mind, the Diana Ross movie Mahogany. In this film, Ross is also a black American woman who finds success as a model in Europe. The plot also involves white lovers bearing fur coats. Billy Dee Williams plays her True Love who warns her that “success is nothing without someone to share it with.” (The someone in question is himself, obviously.) This movie had a happy ending I could get behind. Diana Ross gives up the glitz and debauchery to return to Chicago and support Billy Dee in his run for some local office. Dressed like an ordinary working woman at a campaign rally, she declares, “I want my old man back.” Billy Dee is the one wearing a good coat as he descends from the stage to kiss her, and all is well in the (black) universe. Black love is black wealth, not fur coats, passport stamps, or glamorous careers.
Tar Baby is the anti-Mahogany, and I didn’t appreciate Toni Morrison disrupting my paradigm.
Flash forward about fifteen years or so. By this time, I was a professor myself and an author. I volunteered to teach an entire class on the work of Toni Morrison. I would have skipped Tar Baby had it been up to me, but I am nothing if not thorough. When I revisited the novel, I read my marked-up copy from college. The book was marred by annoyed underlining and margin notes that registered self-righteous teenaged displeasure. However, Morrison’s words on the page were like a master class in grown womanhood.
At the age of forty, I thought I was too old to be gobsmacked by any novel, let alone one I had already read. But there I was turning the pages, rapt. And with literature being magical in the way it is, I was in the middle of a rather tumultuous relationship myself, and I was sort of living my life by the Diana Ross–Billy Dee playbook. I was confusing crazy with passion. I mistook cruelty for honesty. My lover, like Son, had a complicated past and had made terrible decisions, but he presented his flaws wrapped in shiny sexual chemistry and tied with a ribbon of passive-aggressiveness and guilt. Just that day, a friend had warned, “Girl, that man is going to eat your career.” But I dismissed my friend because I didn’t believe that she understood that love is hard and love seldom follows the rule book. More than one person had tried to get me to look in one metaphoric mirror or another and see the damage I was doing to myself in the name of the wealth I thought I had in this relationship. But like I said earlier, the glory in literature is that it asks you to do more than just see.
Sitting at my desk preparing for class, I found myself in literature, but not in the way that most people mean when they use that phrase. This was not a matter of celebrating my experience, of understanding that I was not alone. Morrison snatched me up like a loving but stern auntie. I felt exposed, judged, but also set back on track. I took stock of myself in all my needy ridiculousness. But in addition to telling me about myself, Tar Baby demonstrated the possibility of self-love and renewal. I wasn’t a model like Jadine. No one has ever accused me of being gorgeous. My life didn’t involve fur coats or European suitors. But these were just symbols and flourishes.
Later, in Beloved, Morrison would be more explicit in her messages about love. “Thin love” she calls it when the relationship isn’t enough. In Tar Baby, she doesn’t call a thing a thing, nor does she give us a soaring example of its opposite—love so thick you can stand a spoon in it. Instead, she lets Jadine walk away from this thin love with a man who manages to love her without really liking her. Yes, there is Europe and the giver of fur coats, but this isn’t a matter of running from the arms of one man to another. You get the feeling that Jadine is flying toward the possibility of something better—a whole world full of adventures, admirers, and uncharted experiences. Jadine sets forth knowing that she will likely be judged unkindly because she is not the daughter she was raised to be or the lover she is expected to be. Still, she chooses herself. Six years before Beloved, she didn’t need Paul D to tell her that she was her own best thing.
WELL-READ BLACK GIRL RECOMMENDS:
CLASSIC NOVELS BY BLACK WOMEN
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Quicksand by Nella Larsen
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
The Street by Ann Petry
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Jubilee by Margaret Walker
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson
The first thing to understand is the fifties. What it was like to be a Black girl (in truth a “Negro” girl) in the 1950s. A Black girl who loved to read. There was nothing for me, nothing to tell me who I was, nothing to tell me what was possible, no place in print where I could glimpse the slightest reflection. The world of books was a blizzard of white, but I still visited th
at world every chance I got.
Long before we learned how, my sister, Beverly, and I loved to “read” with our mother. Many nights when she came home from work we would sit beside her as she read her magazines, Parents, Highlights, Woman’s Day, McCall’s. This was a special time, since we only got to see her for about an hour every night during the week. Despite the fact that she had a bachelor’s degree in education from Fort Valley State College, my mother worked as a nurse’s aide and then as a supermarket cashier. Like many well-educated Black people at the time, she was not able to find employment that allowed her to put her education to use. We especially liked McCall’s because each issue had paper dolls in the back with outfits to cut out. Of course the doll, Betsy McCall, was white.
My sister and I had a lot of books. Our grandmother, who took care of us while our mother was at work, read us nursery rhymes and taught us to recite them. I remember poems like “The Swing” and “The Land of Counterpane” that she read from A Child’s Garden of Verses, which had beautiful pictures. I also remember loving to hear her read from Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha. One day when I was six, my mother took us to the Quincy Branch of the Cleveland Public Library to get library cards. That day was magic. Having my own library card made me feel grown up, and being with my mother in the daytime during the week was special.
When I started learning to read in school, I was catapulted into the world of Alice, Jerry, and their dog, Jip. The pictures looked old-fashioned, but more significantly, all the children and adults were white. It was the same with Dick and Jane. I am not sure if I read The Story of Little Black Sambo in school, a popular book that featured stereotypical depictions of Black characters. I must have, because I cannot think of it without feeling shame.