This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  I scurried home. Once I made it to my room, I dropped my purse on the floor and sat at my desk in silence, staring mindlessly at my computer screen. I wanted to grip onto the sides of my desk, fearing that I would lose balance and crash onto the ground. But at least that would have confirmed that I was still on this earth. I was on the verge of tears and I was angry with myself for it. He did not spit at me. He did not call me a bitch or a ho. He did not put his hands on me. He did not rape me. I did not deserve to cry. I had to earn the right to let my tears fall, and when I looked at my unscarred body, I knew that I was unworthy. I repeatedly told myself that it could’ve been worse and that emotional distress is less significant than physical distress. If I didn’t have any scars, then my turmoil should have been something that I could easily get over. It was all internal and should be kept private. I’ve always been the kind of person who mitigates negative experiences, particularly with men, by telling myself that they were never “that bad.”

  I texted my male friend with whom I’d gone to the jazz concert; I secretly wanted him to fall in love with me. I told him what happened, and he replied with a sad-face emoji. I was dissatisfied with his response, but what was he supposed to do? Take the subway up to where I lived, which would take two hours at that time of night, so we could go searching for Charlie? And besides, it wasn’t like we were dating. So what could I have done? How could I have better defended myself?

  My friend is six feet tall and black. If he had been beside me when I went to that deli for those Mentos, I would not have been bothered. I hated myself for yearning for a man to be my shield. And I hated myself for wishing that I had told the police, because they would have tackled Charlie to the ground, and this was Harlem, and we were still black, and I could not have lived with myself had I done that.

  White people do not have to reckon with the horror that black people carry in their hearts on a daily basis. I am living in a time when I ache for the son I have yet to conceive. I fear for the day he leaves my arms for the first time to play outside with friends, or to catch a school bus; for any time when he is out of my sight, when I cannot protect him. Whenever he leaves our home, he will be subjected to a law that was never constructed to protect him. Each time I see a black boy or black man, I do not know if that meeting might be our last. Each day that a black person lives is a prayer answered. We mourn continuously with no reprieve.

  The summer has never been kind to black people. The Charleston massacre happened in June; George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin in July; Michael Brown was murdered in August. And now, that summer, the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

  I could not have lived with myself if I had reported Charlie to the police because who knows what they would have done? He could have gotten a simple warning, but they could also have tackled him and taken him into custody and done God knows what else. I would subject myself to a black man’s harassment a thousand times over rather than watch his face hit the pavement with a police officer’s weight on his back. That’s not justice. That is a betrayal.

  Streets are democratic spaces—you cross paths with homeless people and blue bloods. In most of New York City’s streets it is easy to maintain your anonymity if you want. You can choose to ignore a homeless person asking for some spare change. Someone can choose to ignore you if you ask for directions. In Harlem, however, not so much. Black people are communal. If your braids or twists are looking fresh, someone will tell you so. If you are dressed well, someone, either a man or woman, will let you know. On the streets up here there are block parties, psychics offering readings, Cub Scout meetings, voter-recruitment tables, incense vendors, aunties selling sweet potato pies, uncles selling CDs and VHS cassettes, and children selling lemonade and water bottles. Harlem is a constant interaction. You won’t see that on the Upper West Side. White people are more protective of their spaces.

  The street is also the place where most sexual harassment transpires. Once a woman steps out onto the street, someone can sexually assault her just as easily as someone can try to sell her shea butter. When I first moved to Harlem, it was hard for me to ascertain whether a man was being nice to me because we shared a background and a neighborhood, or because he wanted something from me. One morning while I was waiting on the subway platform, a man walking by told me that one of my earrings had fallen out and dropped onto my chest. I thanked him and assumed that would be the end of it. But as I was putting in my earring again, he stopped walking and told me how beautiful I looked, and asked if he could take me out sometime. I smiled and lied by telling him that I had a boyfriend.

  He cocked his head to the left, obscuring the side of his face that presumably bore his disappointment, and said, “Well, he better be treating you right.”

  In other words, He better be treating you right or else you gon’ be mine.

  Another time I was standing on the train while reading a book and could feel a man’s presence hovering over me.

  I looked up, and a guy said in a long, drawn-out manner, “Your height is sexy. How tall are you?”

  When I told him, he boasted that he was six feet, five inches and then asked if he could take me out on a date.

  “I got a boyfriend.”

  “How long y’all been together?”

  “Eight months.” I should’ve said eight years.

  “Eight months? That’s it?”

  “It’s very serious, trust me.”

  That wasn’t enough, for he proceeded to offer me money to go out with him. At the next stop, more people flooded the subway car and so I moved to the middle and found a seat where I could read in peace.

  In October of 2014, as twenty-four-year-old Shoshana Roberts walked around various New York City neighborhoods in jeans and a black crewneck shirt, she was catcalled and harassed by 108 men. The experience was recorded by Hollaback!, a photoblog and grassroots initiative to raise awareness about street harassment. The video went viral, and by 2016 it was reported that the less-than-two-minute video had received 40 million views on YouTube.

  This video sparked many discussions, but the one that most struck my attention was that the majority of the men who catcalled Shoshana were black and Latino. Although I am not sure what Shoshana’s racial background is, she physically presents as white, and I am concerned with how easy it is to paint men of color as ruthless aggressors against an innocent white woman. Some of the instances in which a black man told her to have a nice day or called her beautiful did not seem like harassment to me. Sure, their intentions were probably underscored by their attraction to her, but is that harassment?

  I watched that video while I still lived in New Jersey and so I kept all these questions to myself. But now that I live in Harlem, I question if the black men here would have relentlessly catcalled a woman who looked like Shoshana. I’m sure that white women do get harassed in Harlem, but not with the same amount of vigor and aggression as black women. Because unlike white women, black women exist outside the law. Historically, if a black man so much as whistled at a white woman, he could be lynched. If a black man whistled at a black woman, that was chivalry. If I had gone to the police on the night that Charlie harassed me, would they have thought that I was overreacting, or worse, would they not have believed me? Because I was not physically harmed, would they have told me that I was being oversensitive because Charlie was most likely just being nice?

  In 2014, Feminista Jones, a blogger, author, and creator of the #YouOKSis campaign, told an Atlantic reporter that despite the positive intent of initiatives to stop street harassment, such as Stop Street Harassment (SSH), these movements still place white women at the center of their advocacy. The police are not exactly our allies either. They can abuse and rape us with impunity. It is a strange position that black women occupy, and it results in a difficult question: How do we protect ourselves if that means chastising black men, whom we have always been culturally conditioned to protect? What does this dual protection look like, and is it attainab
le in a society that sanctions violence against black bodies?

  When I think about how Harlem’s streets are a place of conversation, economy, and community, I start to second-guess myself. Maybe the only goods that Charlie was trying to sell were tickets to a DMX concert. Maybe what he wanted was only money, not to climb on top of me. Maybe I misjudged his calling me “sweetheart” as patronizing when he really was just trying to be nice because he did not know my name. Maybe I was being conceited. Maybe I cried because I was still getting used to the city environment, not because I thought he was going to hurt me. The more excuses I made for him, the less trusting I became of my body and my own instincts.

  And that sniper tower. It is still there. I do not acknowledge it now when I walk by. I keep my head low and my headphones nestled against my ears. I walk in a fashion similar to that of all the other black women with whom I cross paths every night as I return to my apartment. I wonder what kind of secrets they are holding in their bodies, what kind of experiences they have buried to protect someone else at their own expense. Whom they could run to for help.

  As I write this, I’ve just passed my one-year anniversary of living in New York. I have only been on two dates in the past eight months, out of circumstance and choice. Fear encapsulates both of these experiences. My heart palpitated at the thought of what these men could do to me, how they could tremendously hurt me, paralyze me, even though all they did was ask what drink I wanted, or if I was having a good time. Both situations ended with the guy not being interested, and making this clear either through silence or long text messages. Each time, I thought back to my college years and wondered if there was something inherently wrong with me. I wondered if I was too much of everything, leaving no room for a man to find his place beside me. I wondered if my desperation reeked so badly that the stench made men stay far away from me. I wondered if, with each byline that I snagged, I was becoming less and less of a woman, unlovable just as David had said. I wondered if writing this essay would be the last nail in the proverbial coffin of my romantic life.

  I haven’t heard “fast-tailed girl” spoken as much as I have before, but that could be because I don’t hang out around any black female teenagers. But that doesn’t make me worry less for them, wherever they are. I am still concerned about myself, a grown woman who desires to be a wife and mother. I am concerned about the women who are already mothers, the mothers in progress, the daughters, and the daughters who have yet to be born.

  But I have not given up hope yet. I am learning to love myself. I took a solo vacation, satiated by my own presence. I came back to Harlem feeling refreshed, ready to transform my energy so that I could take the risk of falling in love. But that deep-seated fear still lingers in the pit of my chest, even if it does not pulsate as it did before. I am trying to shed the fear that maybe I am diseased as a black woman, chalking up these experiences to growing pains on the road to true love. I just wish that these pains didn’t hurt so badly.

  5

  A Lotus for Michelle

  Dear Michelle,

  In July 2008, approximately six months before your husband assumed office, The New Yorker published a cartoon by Barry Blitt that featured the both of you as terrorists. The theme was “The Politics of Fear,” and it was the front cover image. Barack is in Muslim clothing and you are in military garb and have an AK-47 strapped to your back. You are fist-bumping in what seems to be the Oval Office while the American flag burns in the fireplace. Many called the image offensive and disgusting, but nevertheless the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, deemed it satirical, for it held up a mirror to the stereotypes swirling around about Barack’s faith. But for me, the more problematic issue was how you were portrayed. Unlike Barack Obama, whose seemingly smooth hair was underneath a taqiyah, your hair was transformed from your usual permed shoulder-length hair to a large afro—the cartoonist accentuated the countless coils. They resembled barbed wire. Your lips are pursed, almost identical to the kind of gesture that many black women make when they are perturbed or in the midst of saying something witty. Your eyebrows are raised and your head is cocked to the side. Your lips, unlike Barack’s, are colored red, perhaps to accentuate their fullness. Your eyes, unlike Barack’s, are open and spilling over with intent. The AK-47 strapped to your back is the least terroristic element of this image. Contrary to popular belief, you, not Barack, are its true focal point. You are the one whose body is most exaggerated. You do not incite terrorism with bone-straight hair and good posture. No, your body is forced to reflect what America must imagine in order to strip away your exceptionalism: a large afro, gestures normally ascribed to the sassy black woman stereotype, and a gun for good measure. If this image was supposed to satirize “Politics of Fear” surrounding you and your family, then it succeeded because that image was exactly how many in white America could only see you, Michelle: through double vision. They rejected what their actual eyes perceived: an extremely accomplished woman whose career many of them would have been lucky to emulate. Instead they replaced you with an aggressive and violent woman. As long as their imagination is entertained, their belief in their inherent superiority as white people could be sustained.

  I was too young to really engage with this image. I was only sixteen years old and I wasn’t raised in a particularly political home. I did know, however, that we were Democrats and that in my community, the Easter bunny was more believable than a black Republican. I had heard of the possibility of a potential black president but only within the realms of comedy, such as Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, Dave Chappelle’s “Black Bush” skit on his Comedy Central show, and Richard Pryor’s “Black President” skit on his show back in 1977. It seemed like only through black comedy could I, and many others, consume the idea of a black president. Perhaps this was the only space where we could delight ourselves with the idea, through laughter, because if we seriously considered it, we would have worried that he would be assassinated as soon as he was sworn into office. But when you, Barack, and your daughters, Malia and Sasha, walked across the stage after it became official that he would become president, I went into my mother’s bedroom where my stepfather, Z, was peacefully lying on his side of the bed. He smiled at me, but we did not say a word to each other because something in our cores was shifting and we needed time to ourselves in the midst of being close to each other. I will be honest and say that I do not remember President Obama’s full speech, but what I can vividly recount is the single tear that fell down my left cheek. It was the first time I had cried from someone’s oration, but it was more than that. I had an actual image of black ascendancy. It was not a two-dimensional portrait, a subject of a comedy skit, or an idea casually thrown around among ourselves, but a physical reality. But I did not dream of becoming president like Barack. You were the one who enraptured me. Barack’s voice was merely the background noise to the relationship that I, and millions of black women around the world, would have with you.

  Your story reads almost like a myth. Your great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson, the first documented member of your family tree, was born on Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina, which is over 450 miles away from the White House. Slaves lived in tiny whitewashed slacks that lined the dirt road en route to this rice plantation, and it was there that Jim, after emancipation, worked as a sharecropper, toiling in the rice fields along the Sampit River, and lived with his wife, Louiser, and their children. We don’t know how Jim died, but local historians believe that his body is located in an unmarked grave that commands a view of old rice fields on the outer limits of White Creek.1 Robinson, his wife, and his children comprised the last illiterate branch; each descending branch of the family was more educated than its predecessor.

  Born on the South Side of Chicago, you showed your intellect quite early on, skipping second grade before entering a gifted program in sixth grade. After graduating as salutatorian from your magnet high school, you went on to Princeton University, a place where your teachers told you that you would
never be accepted. I know what that’s like, too. My white female guidance counselor suggested that I go to community college when I was in the top 5 percent of my class and assumed that my parents weren’t wealthy enough to afford a place like Princeton. When you read your acceptance letter, did you grip the edges of the paper out of fear that it would disappear? Did you cry?

  When you were making your way to campus, were you afraid? Back in 1981, Princeton was considered the most conservative of the Ivies; it still is. But I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that your experiences with racism were more overt. Your classmates asked to touch your hair like you were an object that could be crushed down to the small size they needed you to be in order to make themselves feel great. When the mother of your freshman roommate, Catherine Donnelly, discovered that you were black, she called her alumni friends to object, even going so far as to visit the student housing office to get Catherine’s room changed. Her grandmother begged Catherine’s mother to take her out of school entirely. Catherine Donnelly’s grandmother wanted Catherine out of the school immediately and to be brought home. How did you feel then? Did you ever walk down Prospect Avenue—“The Street,” as we call it—and marvel at the eating clubs, some of them eerily similar to plantation houses? If you dared to walk down The Street, were you afraid that some drunk white jock or the son of some finance tycoon or a scion of some political dynasty would yell “nigger” as you passed or throw things at you? Where did you find your place of refuge during your four years there, and how can many other black women, who are still fighting for recognition and respect, find theirs?