by Glory Edim
It is spring now, and the Jehovah’s Witness women are in light jackets and canvas shoes. When the students are completely gone for the summer, there will be little foot traffic at this corner. I know these women standing in front of that Wendy’s have heard the same secrets and revelations that I heard years ago. I know they see the same lonely people, the same people desperate for something that looks like caring. Their conversations with these folks are shorter out on the street than door-to-door, I’m sure, but no less intimate.
I don’t go door-to-door anymore, but I hope I can communicate with people nonetheless. My writing is an attempt to join an ongoing human conversation that starts with the questions: Why are we here? What do we want? And how can we contribute? I hope that by writing some of the stories I know, people will hear some of their own voices in my characters. In any case, soon the women will move on from the street adjacent to the emptying college campus. I’m not sure where they will set up next, but come fall these women or others like them will be back with their stand of Watchtower magazines, peddling hope in a five-color brochure, offering a moment of connection to any passerby.
In primary school, I had a principal, Sister Francis, who enjoyed beating us. Every morning we had devotion in the school yard, singing for Jesus to come into our hearts and make us pure. I closed my eyes, believing and wishing, aware of being stared at by the doe-eyed white man to whom I pleaded acceptance. I was spoon-fed the verses of the Bible, swallowing each commandment, though they went down with great force. Sister Francis was aware of our struggle, standing in the hot sun that bore down on our backs for two hours. It felt like more. Some of us fainted. Others vomited. Our devotion to Jesus wasn’t strong enough to fight our reaction to the searing rays that ate through our British-styled school uniforms, complete with ties around our perspiring necks and knee-length tunics, starched to perfection, mocked by the inflamed tropical sun, which was at its highest by seven o’clock in the morning. Sister Francis stood like an army general above our bowed heads, her lips downturned in a meanness reserved for us—the sons and daughters of street hagglers, secretaries, groundskeepers, dressmakers, schoolteachers, mechanics, helpers. In retrospect, I realized that Sister Francis never liked any of us. I hated her, too. Was absolutely terrified of her. She beat us with a rubber switch when we complained. She beat us if we were late. She beat us if we disobeyed. She beat us if we wore our natural hair in braids. She beat us if we stuttered, trying to find the right words from our vocabulary to plead our innocence without speaking patois, disgust evident in her flushed pale face as welts rose on our brown bodies. We were dark. We were evil.
I grew up in a country full of black people. Our last few prime ministers were black. Our doctors were black. Our journalists on television were black. Our policemen were black. Our garbage collectors were black. Our teachers were black. And there are not many places you can go in the world where Jamaica isn’t known, put on the map by a guitar-strumming Rasta man with rope-thick dreadlocks, a black man. Yet, all the books we read were by white British authors. I never questioned what was fed to me, nor found it strange that I was erased; that in my invisibility, I sought my identity through the gaze of white authors and the deep frown of a headmistress who never saw me as human. This didn’t occur to me until long after, when I left the country and, through writing, realized that I was holding a grudge.
At the age of fifteen, I started to write. Crouched in the corner of my verandah near potted ferns and red hibiscuses—my recently washed hair coiled in bantu-knots and my loose cotton housedress with holes warding off the sweltering heat—I wrote. I was deaf to my siblings and other neighborhood children playing in the yard, kicking up dust with their bare feet; and blind to my great-grandmother sitting still in her favorite chair, watching the strips of blue sky between the mango tree branches, and the yawning mongrels swatting flies with their tails or chickens high-stepping all around them. I would fill up my ruled notebooks, front to back, with stories set in a foreign country with snow—snow so white, it could be pure. All the books I read were set in places that had snow. Some had marshes, others had farms, and most had something called a suburb. One could never imagine the smell of overripe mangoes or rotted fruits heated by the hot breath of the sun in places like that; nor the smells of dead mongrels on the side of the road and steamed callaloo and salt-fish permeating walls and clothes. The pristine white pages were my redemption, my idea of a better life. I lived with my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and two siblings in a two-bedroom house in Vineyard Town, Kingston—a close-knit community made up of working-class families. My great-grandmother used to tell me to keep writing, that one day my books would be read. However, I never saw the details of my own life as worth writing about; I never thought anyone would care. Our narratives were never spoken, never written, except in the deep melanin on our skin.
Because of the unbearable heat and humidity on the island, without the yawn of the sea breeze every so often, my face would quickly get slicked with the oil from the hair grease that my mother had taken great care to rub between each part on my scalp as she braided my hair. The stubborn melanin and pimples seemed more pronounced with the shine on my face. That summer, Roots aired on local television. My siblings and I developed a new insult, calling one another black slaves. Or Kunta Kinte if we really wanted to be brutal. When I looked in the mirror with my braids and oil-slicked dark face, I hated myself. It was then that I began to experiment with point of view, like I did with bleaching creams on my skin. The first-person “I” became third-person “she.” Brown became beige. I realized early that I could transform myself in writing, that I could become the girl with good hair and fair skin—like the ones I read about in the Sweet Valley High series, The Baby-Sitters Club, and Mills & Boon, whose glamorous storylines I devoured along with Beverly Hills, 90210 on cable TV. I knew so much about white characters, since I was taught, through the books I read, to empathize with them.
During lunchtime one day I was hiding from the sun inside the school library, devouring yet another Sweet Valley High novel, when I discovered a lone book on the oak table next to mine. It was resting facedown, almost to the edge of the table, as though whoever left it there had left it in a hurry. I picked up the book and read the description, immediately intrigued by the photo of a black woman smiling at me from the back. It gave me pause. Prior to this moment—in my fifteen years of life—I had never read a book by a black person, much less a black woman. A black woman who looked like me. She beckoned me into her world with a simple term of endearment—Beloved. I opened the book and began to read.
Before Toni Morrison, no one had described in great depth the gruesome shadow slavery left behind. Yes, I knew about the revolts on the plantations throughout our island and how Nanny of the Maroons caught a bullet with her teeth and Paul Bogle was hanged, but I never registered the pain my great-grandmother still hummed. Toni Morrison wrote about a different plantation in a different country from ours, but the impact of her words was felt. I kept the book, which touched me in a way I didn’t understand. Not then.
My great-grandmother used to tell us duppy stories. How when she lived in the country, she would say something and duppy would answer back; how at nights when there was a full moon, rolling calves would be spotted between the trees like children in a game of hide-and-seek; how one possessed Ras Greaves’s cow and sent the animal running down the road; how duppy transform into rat-bats, thriving in the dark, always in the dark. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is about a duppy, a ghost. I closed the book several times to look around the quiet library. “Who left it there? Could Mrs. Freeda, with all her meanness, leave it there for me? Was she hoping I would find it? Was she watching me through the stacked shelves to see what I’d do with it?” I continued to read, my fears parting like curtains. I could see the reflection of the midday sunlight on the oak table. It had the quality of an expectation about to be fulfilled, as if at any moment diamonds would appear. “Tell
me your diamonds,” Beloved says to Sethe.
And I did.
Toni Morrison showed me that I could write people like me on the page. She assured me that black women write stories, too, and that these stories ought to preserve the voices, the dialects, the way of life, our truths. That it’s up to us to own our narratives that could someday counter the imaginations of those like Sister Francis, who cage us inside their ignorance. Toni Morrison used her characters Sethe and Paul D to show not only the depths of human bonding after the traumatic experience of slavery, but the will to love ourselves. I felt she was talking to me, telling me over and over again as a young black girl that I am my own best thing.
Not long after, when I migrated to America to live with my father, I realized the message was meant for me. Whoever left the book in the library must have known I would discover it, treasure it, pack it inside my suitcase where it would one day rest on the bookshelf inside my study. Maybe it was a duppy, after all, I thought, remembering my great-grandmother’s outstretched arms beckoning me to her deathbed, “Jus’ believe.”
Long ago, in the time before now, black people were all kings and queens.
This is not true.
* * *
—
There is a strange emptiness to life without myths.
I am African American—by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just…stops. As if there was nothing there.
I could do what others have done and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian,” most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore.
These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.
* * *
—
Not so long ago, at the dawn of the New World, black people were saved from ignorance in darkest Africa by being brought into the light of the West.
This is bullshit.
* * *
—
When I was a child, my parents tried hard to give me a mythology.
I read every book they gave me. Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears by Verna Aardema was a favorite. I voluntarily devoured volumes of Egyptian myths alongside the Greek and Roman mythology I was being shovel-fed in school. I eventually looked up the origins of my middle name—Keita—and discovered the half-mythic, half-real tale of Sundiata Keita, who might well have been counted among my ancestors.
Probably not. But my parents wanted me to be able to dream, and they knew that myths matter.
They knew this because they had been raised in the days when people like us were assumed to have no mythology and no history worth knowing. Instead they were fed a new, carefully constructed mythology: Our ancestors were supposedly semi-animal creatures that spent all their time swinging around in the jungle until they were captured and humanized by lash and firebrand and rape. This shamed my parents—as such myths are meant to do. Generations before and including them wondered: If they truly came from such crude origins, did they have any right to want something more for themselves than powerlessness and marginalization? My parents’ generation was the first to really confront the lies in these myths, so I don’t blame them for trying to give me something better.
But as I grew older, I began to realize: The stories my parents had given me weren’t my myths, either. Not wholly, not specifically. My father has spent the past few years researching our genealogy. As far as he has been able to determine, I am many parts African, most of it probably from the western coast of the continent, though in truth we’ll probably never know. But I am also several parts American Indian—Muscogee (Creek) that we know, some others that we don’t—and at least one part European. That component is probably Scots-Irish; we don’t know for sure because nobody talks about it. But that’s just the genetics. The culture in which I was reared, along the Gulf Coast of the United States, added components of Spanish and French to the mix. And the culture I’ve since adopted—New York, New York, big city of dreams—is such a stew of components that there’s no point in trying to extricate any one thing from the mass.
And no point in trying to apply any single mythology. I have nothing. I have everything. I am whatever I wish to be.
* * *
—
Very long ago, in the ancient days of the world, black people were created when Noah was sodomized by Ham, his son. In retaliation, Noah cursed all Ham’s descendants to be servants of servants for all eternity.
This is…I don’t even know what the hell this is.
* * *
—
J.R.R. Tolkien, the near universally hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I’ve heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures’ myths, and maybe that was true. I don’t know. What I see when I read his work is a man trying desperately to dream.
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch on to those of others—even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast or crushingly tight.
Throughout my life as I’ve sought to become a published writer of speculative fiction, my strongest detractors and discouragers have been other African Americans. These were people who had, like generations before them, bought into the mythology of racism: Black people don’t read. Black people can’t write. Black people have no talents other than singing and dancing and sports and crime. No one wants to read about black people, so don’t write about them. No one wants to write about black people, which is why you never see a black protagonist. Even if you self-publish, black people won’t support you. And if you aim for traditional publication, no one who matters—that is, white people—will buy your work.
(A corollary of all this: There is only black and white. Nothing else matters.)
Having swallowed these ideas, people regurgitated them at me at nearly every turn. And for a time, I swallowed them, too. As a black woman, I believed I wasn’t supposed to be a writer. Simultaneously I believed I was supposed to write about black people—and only black people. And only within a strictly limited set of topics deemed relevant to black people, because only black people would ever read anything I’d written. Took me years after I started writing to create a protagonist who looked like me. And then once I started doing so, it took me years to write a protagonist who was something different.
Myths tell us what those like us have done, can do, should do. Without myths to lead the way, we hesitate to leap forward. Listen to the wrong myths, and we might even go back a few steps.
* * *
—
Throughout history, all over this world, black people have been sch
olars and inventors, hard workers on whose backs more than one nation was built.
This is true, but not the whole truth.
* * *
—
After my parents divorced, I spent every summer visiting my father in New York. We spent every night of those summers watching Star Trek (the original series) and The Twilight Zone, which came on back-to-back in syndication on Channel Eleven. It was father-daughter bonding over geekery. It was also, for me, a lesson in how hard it was to dream of the future when every depiction of it said you don’t have one.
Because Star Trek takes place five hundred years from now, supposedly long after humanity has transcended racism, sexism, etc., but there’s still only one black person on the crew, and she’s the receptionist.
This is disingenuous. I know now what I did not understand then: that most science fiction doesn’t realistically depict the future; it reflects the present in which it is written. So for the 1960s, Uhura’s presence was groundbreaking—and her marginalization was to be expected. But I wasn’t watching the show in the 1960s. I was watching it in the 1980s, amid the destitute, gritty New York of Tawana Brawley and Double Dutch and Public Enemy. I was watching it as one of five billion members of the human species—nearly eighty percent of whom were people of color even then. I was watching it as a tween/teen girl who’d grown up being told that she could do anything if she only put her mind to it, and I looked to science fiction to provide me with useful myths about my future: who I might become, what was possible, how far I and my descendants might go.