Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves
Page 6
But my life wasn’t only in North East Portland. Every time I stepped outside of my neighborhood, I felt how different I was, how not white I was. At my predominately white middle school on the other side of town, the teachers assigned books featuring thin white girls; the posters in the hallways, thin white girls.
Outside of North East Portland, white and skinny were the default, the norm.
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Portland is the City of Roses.
Every June the city is immersed in the Portland Rose Festival, a five-week celebration that has been a city-wide tradition since 1907. In elementary school, the Rose Festival was a chance to eat cotton candy at the carnival. I loved getting the colored sugar-web tangled and stuck on my fingers, my tongue. Every year I was determined to win a stuffed animal at the roller ball or ping-pong toss games. The highlight of the Rose Festival for me was attending the Grand Floral Parade. More than five hundred thousand spectators lined the parade route to see marching bands from local schools, drill teams, and elaborate floats. The float we all were waiting for was the rose-studded one that carried the Rose Festival Princesses. The Rose Festival Court was made up of fourteen senior girls from Portland metro-area high schools. They waved from the float and blew kisses to their loved ones and friends in the crowd. They weren’t princesses in a superficial way—they were celebrated for being at the top of their classes, for being leaders in the community.
I wanted to be a princess.
When I said this to one of my teachers, he replied, “You are definitely a leader, Renée. And you have more than enough volunteer hours, but you’re not going to win. You aren’t the princess type.” Then he looked at the girl sitting next to me and said, “You should run. You’d make a great princess.”
The girl he was talking to was white. And thin.
But I ran anyway. And my school voted for me. I was Princess Renée representing my high school. All fourteen of us girls toured the state of Oregon. We talked with school officials about what was important to youth, what we needed in our schools. We visited nursing homes and children’s hospitals, making art alongside the residents and patients. We met the mayor and other distinguished leaders of our city and state. One of the perks was getting a brand-new wardrobe. Everywhere we went, we dressed alike from head to toe.
Nothing ever fit me.
No one had considered a big girl might be chosen to be a Rose Festival Princess, and so all of the clothing stores that sponsored the program were ones that only carried “normal” sizes. Alterations were made, but I spent the whole two months feeling suffocated in clothes that weren’t made with bodies like mine in mind. I got used to squeezing in and out of spaces, holding in my stomach, sucking in my breath.
This, while explaining to the white girls why my pressed hair could not get wet in Portland’s rain, while debunking the stereotypes some of them had about people who lived there, the place that was my home, was emotionally exhausting.
I spent my adolescence feeling free, loved, and beautiful at home and suffocated, interrogated, and abnormal with these girls. I learned how to contort myself—physically and emotionally—in order to fit into the confined spaces available for me. Black girls could not be too confident, too loud, too smart. Fat girls could be cute but not beautiful, could be the funny sidekick or wise truth-teller in school plays, never the leading role or love interest.
There was an internal tug-of-war with my self-esteem. There were many times when my hands slipped, when I felt my soul being pulled into self-doubt. As a child, I tried so hard to pull the rope closer to what my mom had told me, tried to hold on to the legacy left behind by all the ancestors I learned about, tried to stand firm and not waver.
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Senior year, I attended a weeklong poetry intensive at Portland State University. One of my teachers nominated me to be in the program because she knew I loved to write. The cohort was a mix of twenty teens from different schools in Portland, both private and public. The three of us black kids sat together on the first day, and when our white teacher tried to get us to separate, we quickly pointed out to him that the other kids were sitting together and he wasn’t telling them to mingle. He left us alone.
I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t come back the next day, but then he introduced me to Lucille Clifton. He passed out two of her poems on a worksheet: “homage to my hair” and “homage to my hips.” I had loved poetry since elementary school and had notebooks full of my own verses. But I had never seen poems like these. Poems about being big and black and beautiful and woman.
Lucille wrote that her hips needed “space to / move around in.” They did not “fit in little / petty places.” In her poem, she bragged, “these hips have never been enslaved, / they go where they want to go / they do what they want to do.” She compared her “nappy hair” to good greens.
Lucille’s words were oxygen.
These poems healed every aching part of the seven-year-old girl in me. They were confirmation that my mother and all those women who ever told me I was worth something were right.
Her words revived me. Because of her I let out all I was holding in.
It wasn’t just her words that affirmed me. At the bottom, right-hand corner of the handout there was a photo of Lucille Clifton. Her short, natural hair; her round, full face; brown skin. In Lucille I saw those women in my neighborhood, at my church. In Lucille, I saw me.
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What does it mean to celebrate the parts of you that others demean, disregard, disapprove of? How does a woman hold on to her self-worth when so many forces want to disvalue her? How does a black woman make space for her truth, her body?
This is not the discussion we had in class. I don’t know that my white male teacher understood the depth of Clifton’s work. He used the poems as examples of ode poems. But the literal and the metaphorical meaning of “homage to my hips” and “homage to my hair” were anthems of freedom to me. They intersected blackness and womanness, and though they sounded lighthearted and simple when read aloud, for my seventeen-year-old self they were just as much protest poems as they were odes. They stood up to conventional beauty standards.
They stood up for me.
My teacher was focused on the obvious. “Choose a body part you love or hate and write a tribute poem to it.”
I wrote about my dimples. How everyone called them beautiful, saying, “You have such a pretty face,” never complimenting the rest of me.
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I teach poetry to teens, and I always include a photo of the poet on the handout. I want my readers to see Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni. I want them to know what Sandra Cisneros, Natalie Diaz, and Patricia Smith look like. Some will see their reflections looking back at them, others won’t. Both are important. Who makes the work is just as important as the work made. It meant something to see this black woman looking at me, controlling her own narrative. There was no apology in her poetry. She was black and beautiful and sure of that.
When I teach Lucille Clifton in the classroom, I end the unit with students writing their own poems of celebration, of overcoming. But before any writing, I ask my students the questions my teacher didn’t ask. We talk about beauty standards; we talk about what it means for a woman—a black woman—to write about her body.
I have these conversations with all of my students, not just the girls, not just black students. I have meaningful discussions with my white students as well. They are asked—some of them for the first time—to think about blackness, about black women. We read “won’t you celebrate with me” and talk about all the things that have tried and still try to kill black women and have failed.
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On the eve of Election Day 2008, I took my students to hear Lucille Clifton read at the 92nd Street
Y in New York City. We were able to go backstage and spend time with her before the event started. We were all aglow at the hope of electing the first black president of the United States. She talked about that hope and encouraged the young people in the room to keep hoping, and dreaming, and telling their stories. One of my students cried. The others, who were never, ever speechless, couldn’t raise their hands to ask the questions that were already written down in their writing notebooks. I basked in her glory, too. There was no moment for me to tell her what her words had done for me, no chance to thank her.
She read “listen children” to close out our time before the main event began. I know she was talking to everyone in the room, but I like to think she was especially talking to me.
listen children
…we have never hated black
listen
we have been ashamed
hopeless tired mad
but always
all ways
we loved us
we have always loved each other
children all ways
pass it on
I started reading at a really young age. I have this very vivid memory of being in preschool and freaking out that my class assignment was to write the alphabet. I kept saying, “There’s so many letters! Too many letters!” I just wanted to be left alone so that I could go read quietly in the corner of the classroom by myself. Asking me to write twenty-six whole-ass letters just seemed impossible, even though I knew and could read those letters. I was a dramatic baby, and I’m an even more dramatic adult. Insert shrugging emoji.
I loved being left alone to read. Even in preschool, I wanted private time with the Berenstain Bears or Dr. Seuss or any of those Little Golden Books that filled my preschool’s library. Even though I loved those stories at school, my real love affair was with the books in my little library at home. Caps for Sale, The Seven Chinese Brothers, and my favorite of all, The People Could Fly. This book actually still sits on my coffee table at home. I cherish this book because it was the first time I got to read about people who could’ve been in my family. Fairy tales and fables that represented what I saw in the mirror, the way Cinderella or Snow White never would.
My mother is a huge reason why I was such a ferocious reader. (Another huge reason was my extreme lack of friends, but that’s not what this piece is about!) Mom always had a novel or a crossword puzzle in her hand. She always seemed so smart. Brilliant. She knew so much about the world and everything in it, and like most little girls, I wanted to be just like my mother. She used to tell my brother and me these outrageous bedtime stories that she would make up on the fly, but they always seemed like the gospel truth coming from her. Rehearsed even! Of course they were all just her remixed versions of classic fairy tales. Sleeping Ugly. CinderFella. Snow Black. Little Purple Riding Hood. Every now and then, she’d tell us a story from one of her favorite soap operas or a movie she watched on TV. She once told us the story of Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews. I became obsessed with those poor children locked away in their evil grandmother’s attic. Wisely, Mom omitted the part of the story involving incest between the older brother and sister, and that was probably for the best because I would ask more and more about this story and demand to be told it again and again, every day. Finally Mom told me that it was actually from a book she was reading and that when she was done, she’d let me read it, too. Even though I couldn’t have been older than six or seven years old at the time, Flowers in the Attic became the first of many books I would share with my mom.
If you’re thinking, “Damn. Seven is too young to read Flowers in the Attic,” you would be correct! I was too young for a lot of things my mom let me do. My Muslim dad was much more careful and thoughtful with us kids, but Mom raised us more like cactuses, rather than orchids. If you’ve ever tried to keep an orchid alive for more than twelve hours, then you’ll understand that my brother and I were rarely supervised. My mom and I shared romance novels when I was in the second grade. Together we read Beauty and the Beast, before we saw the Disney film. We shared the biography of Tina Turner and then The Color Purple. The most important book she shared with me was the autobiography Gal: A True Life, by Ruthie Bolton.
Gal is the story of Ruthie, a little black girl growing up in South Carolina. Her mother had given birth to her as a teenager and was put out of the house by her stepfather, so Ruthie, nicknamed Gal, was brought up by her grandmother and the same stepfather who put her mother out. She was raised as a littler sister to her two aunts, who were just a few years older than her. Her stepgrandfather was an abusive alcoholic who would often beat her grandmother mercilessly, while simultaneously getting her pregnant over and over again. Eventually he beats her to death, and the younger children, all girls, are sent to live with other family members, while Gal and her older sisters/aunts are forced to stay behind and do the work of a housewife. Though they are all just children, they are made to hold down jobs and dodge the abuse of the only father they know. Eventually, Gal runs away from home as a teenager to start her life, and after losing her first child in a failed and abusive marriage of her own, she marries the love of her life as her stepgrandfather is getting older and sicker. None of his actual children want to take care of the man who killed their mother and abused them, so Gal, her husband, and their children move in with the sick old man, and Ruthie nurses her abuser until he dies. In his will, he leaves her nothing because she was never his child to begin with.
Gal, much like The People Could Fly, was the first time I read about a character that I could recognize from my life. That character was me.
I don’t have any kids. I’ve never been pregnant, and I’m told that the cat I adopted doesn’t count. That’s fine. I don’t know what it is to be a mother and what it is to have a tiny little sponge who looks to me for everything it needs to know about the world. I can’t say that my parents were bad to me. What I do know is that my parents, mainly my mom, taught me some useful lessons on purpose, but also some really fucked-up lessons by accident.
Ahmed is my older brother. Not by much. He is eleven months and three weeks older than me. There are so many pictures of him as a baby. There are even more pictures of him as a toddler, at the ages of one and two, and even though I certainly was in existence when those photos were taken, I’m not in them. There are almost no pictures of me. In fact, there are only two photos of me as a newborn and maybe three more from when I’m around three or four and old enough to run and bombard my way into any photo that my mom was taking of her favorite child, Ahmed. I’m not being dramatic when I say he is her favorite. He is. I actually was unwanted. Very unwanted. I was a phone call and an appointment away from not existing and…I get it. Mom had just given birth to her son, and three months later she’s gotta do that bullshit again? I mean, thank God Dad snitched on my mom by calling my aunt, who snitched even harder and called my grandmother, who reached out to Mom and forbade her from aborting me.
So she had me, but I never really felt welcomed or wanted in my family. Even as a toddler. I was maybe four years old when I asked some question about my birth, and my mom, with true and genuine mom-love in her voice, told me, “Oh, I didn’t want more than one kid. I wanted just one, and I wanted a boy. I never wanted to have a daughter. I’m glad you’re here, but I only wanted a son.” Girl! She threw in the “I’m glad you’re here” like that would soften the blow but, bitch, the damage was done! I asked why she didn’t want a daughter, and she said, “Because girls have a harder life. It’s dangerous to be a girl. Girls get into trouble. They’re weaker and they can’t protect themselves the same way a boy can. And girls can be raped or molested, and when you get older, you’ll bleed between your legs every month. But you’re here, and I love you anyway.”
If this sounds like a lot to tell a four-year-old, imagine what it might be like to be that four-year-old. This was a lot to take in. The danger. The sexual assaul
t. The bleeding. What the hell?! I learned so much in that moment, but what affected me the most was realizing that there was a difference between me and my brother. That he would not have to worry about any of the things I was to worry about (though of course we know now that both girls and boys, as well as grown women and grown men, can fall victim to sexual assault). More than that, I learned that my existence was less valued than his and would always be, because I was never going to become a boy. I was stuck being a girl, and I was less valid a person than my brother. As I got older, I started to notice that Ahmed and I lived under the same roof, yet in two separate households. I wasn’t allowed to go play in dresses because of what men could do to me. I wasn’t allowed to go outside by myself, be in my building’s staircase by myself, ride a bike, sit in the front passenger seat of a car, go to a public pool with my friends, go to the store by myself, all because of what a man might do to me. I was, however, allowed to cook.
My daddy made me stand on a chair in the kitchen while he cooked, so that he could teach me to be a good Muslim wife. I was allowed to learn to wash the dishes and clothes, clean the bathtub and toilets, sew, make a bed, clean the house, and take care of babies. It wasn’t just my dad insisting I learn these things. It was also my Southern Baptist mom, who told me I needed to learn how to take care of a family the way she’d had to learn at my age. If I ever balked and asked why Ahmed didn’t have to do any of the things I had to do, she’d say, “He’s going to have a wife who will do this stuff for him!” I told her that I personally would never marry a man who didn’t know how to wash a dish or his own drawers but was often told to shut up. As it turns out, I also wasn’t allowed to back talk. Insert eye rolling emoji.