This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  My own response to Lemonade was powerful and positive, but it was not met with universal acclaim within the black community. Arguably more so than any other black star, Beyoncé is a divisive figure. A few days after Lemonade was released, bell hooks declared in an essay titled “Moving Beyond Pain” that Beyoncé’s “construction of feminism cannot be trusted . . . In the world of fantasy feminism, there are no class, sex, and race hierarchies that break down simplified categories of women and men, no call to challenge and change systems of domination, no emphasis on intersectionality. In such a simplified worldview, women gaining the freedom to be like men can be seen as powerful. But it is a false construction of power.” This was not the first time bell hooks had criticized Beyoncé. In 2014, during a New School discussion called “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body,” hooks called Beyoncé a terrorist for appearing on the cover of Time magazine in scanty attire. hooks was hardly the only critic. Rapper Azealia Banks believed that Lemonade peddled the “heartbroken black female narrative” that was the antithesis of feminism, labeling its theme “stupidity,” not strength. Ashleigh Shackelford of Wear Your Voice Mag argued that Lemonade is not for fat black women or femmes because there were none in the special. At the end of her essay, bell hooks concludes that Lemonade does not resolve anything, and that healthy self-love can only emerge if black women resist patriarchal romanticization of domination in relationships and refuse to be victims. Once I finished the last line, I felt like a deflated whoopee cushion. Victim? Victim? Is what I’d just watched for a full hour, a portrait of a victim? Lemonade was the first time I had seen Beyoncé in an incredibly vulnerable state, and I know her vulnerability was real because I felt it. She is not a fighter against patriarchal domination, but this does not mean she is a victim. She is a feeling black woman, and I realized simply from the criticism of Lemonade that as a black woman, if you are not always fighting for something larger than yourself, then you are somehow the enemy, not performing the “correct” form of black womanhood in contemporary America. We should not have to choose between being black, being a woman, and being human in our own story.

  When slavery is discussed, especially in the context of black female slaves, much of the weight is placed upon what was taken from us: our freedom, our language, our bodies. Women were beaten and also raped, and there is nothing that we could do about it. In grade school, there might be mention of how slaves resisted, either through overt rebellion or more subtle methods such as messing with the master’s food, working slowly, or faking illness, but these acts are drowned out by the vast, detailed history of how dehumanized we were.

  I first learned that I was the descendant of black people who were enslaved when I was around eight or nine years old. My mother and I were sitting in my room when she told me that our ancestors were white people’s property and that they were endlessly beaten regardless of whether they performed their duties. We had been brought over here from Africa and forced to work on plantations. Boom. That was it. The common narrative of slavery, the practice of oral storytelling in black households, revolves around two actions: the beatings and the rapes. I cannot count how many times I’ve heard from my family and school teachers about slaves having their bodies torn apart by paddy rollers’ dogs, or being stripped and staked to the ground so that they could be beaten within an inch of their lives, or having screws jammed into their skin as torture. When my mother told me about slavery, she said, “The masters raped the black women and that’s why you’re so light now. It’s in our blood.” As my eyes gazed over my light skin and then the rich brown skin of my mother and sister, I began to look at myself as a mistake. Although my parents loved each other when they’d conceived me, at the base level, I existed because of a violation that took place hundreds of years ago. I wasn’t only a product of love but also rape, and as such, I imagined myself as a mutation, an embodiment of corruption.

  I understand why this particular approach to black American history is prevalent. Those rapes, that kind of oppressive violence, have warped society. What better way to make clear to another black female about what racism can do to her on an individual level than by telling her that not even her body is her own? Forget about the macrolevel injustices like the school-to-prison pipeline and job discrimination. The rapes get the point across quicker and cleaner, like a blade slicing through a sheet of paper. The whitewashing of atrocities suffered by black people in this country is a regular pastime. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a revised social studies curriculum, treating slavery as a “side issue” of the Civil War, omitting mention of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws.3 That same year Virginia governor Robert McDonnell declared April Confederate History Month; within the proclamation, he did not cite slavery, saying that he wanted to focus on issues that were more significant.4 Many historians believe that most slave narratives about life before emancipation focused on victimization because the abolitionist movement demanded the horrors of slavery be emphasized.5 If you examine movies about slavery, like 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, or Amistad, very rarely—if at all—will you see slaves laughing with one another.

  In early 2016, Scholastic published a children’s book titled A Birthday Cake for George Washington, a story narrated by Delia, the daughter of George Washington’s chef Hercules. The book is accompanied by cartoon-style pictures of slaves laughing and smiling. Of course this led to outrage. Kiera Parrott, reviews director of School Library Journal, called the book “highly problematic,” for the smiling slaves stood in stark contrast to the “reality of slave life.” Besides a Change.org petition, the book received one hundred one-star ratings on Amazon.com. As a result, Scholastic pulled the book from the shelves, less than two weeks after its release. What got lost in the narrative was that the author, Ramin Ganeshram, is Trinidadian and Iranian-American. The illustrator, Vanessa Brantley-Newton, and editor, Andrea Davis Pinkney, are both black women. A Fine Dessert, a book on a similar theme, was written and illustrated by two white women back in 2014, and it was not pulled. I can speak from firsthand experience about the overwhelming whiteness of the publishing industry and how that might have allowed such a book like this to be published, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how complex the issues of authorship surrounding this book are. We mustn’t forget that Phyllis Wheatley, the first published black female poet, wrote an ode to George Washington—a man who declared that all men were created equal, yet began owning slaves at eleven and occupied office while hundreds of enslaved black people cooked his food and worked his fields. If a black woman wrote a poem venerating Washington, or illustrated or edited a book arguing that life as a slave had moments of happiness, does that mean that she is a “race traitor”? A more moderate argument is that since the author, although a woman of color, is not a black woman, the slave narrative was not hers to exploit. But what about the illustrator and editor? Evidently, they saw merit in the project. Perhaps A Birthday Cake was misguided and misleading; perhaps it wasn’t. But what the book did was raise a question as to what constitutes an accurate and honest depiction of slavery. Should we conclude that slaves never laughed? Is it dishonest to say that they never did?

  I’m interested not only in what A Birthday Cake for George Washington was, but also what it could have been. To erase the wit and comedy of slaves, their ability to laugh, is almost as serious a crime as erasing the abuses they suffered: both strip them of their humanity. Laughter has always been a remedy for black people. When he was interviewed for the New York Times by Philip Galanes, alongside Lupita Nyong’o, comedian and Daily Show host Trevor Noah explained that humor is “the reason doctors use laughing gas. It’s your body protecting you. You laugh until you cry. People understand that once you step into a comic space, there is complete honesty—without judgment.” Even enslaved, Africans maintained elements of their folkloric culture, which uses humor as a conduit for anger or rage. It was its own form of violence against the oppressor.

  An entirely
new world is revealed when we consider this other side of our ancestors, a side that black children especially need to see. I never thought that slaves could laugh. How could they muster up a giggle, or cackle from the root of their belly, if they were constantly being whipped? When would they find the time to smile after a long day’s work and perhaps an even longer evening of entertaining masters and their guests?

  Much of black humor is developed around the ridicule of white people. As a response, how do we as black people make white people feel like the Other, the outsiders, or—even better—as nonsensical as their rules enforced upon us? Often, the target of the humor is cruel behavior (racist brutality, white supremacy, and so on), but through humor the power dynamics change. We make fun of white people for not being able to dance as well or as fluidly as we can, for aging more quickly, for not chastising their badass children hard enough, or simply for not understanding us, period. If you watch any vintage clips of Def Comedy Jam or ComicView, you’ll see this kind of mockery throughout the entire program.

  This imbalance—how many of us are still unable to reflect on slavery in a way that foregrounds its horrors while acknowledging slaves’ intelligence and agency in spite of them—intrigues me. Perhaps this is why I am tired with contemporary films and historical photos about slavery. They do not explore the fact that although they were legal property, slaves were also human beings who found creative ways to subvert power and exercise their humanity even after laboring for hours in the blistering southern heat. I would have endorsed A Birthday Cake for George Washington if it had been about slaves’ propensity for making fun of white people right underneath their noses, which would involve a different kind of cake.

  The cakewalk was a dance performed in the late nineteenth century at slave get-togethers. You lean or rear back and kick your feet out left and right or vice versa as you move forward. When I think of the cakewalk, I think of the innumerable times in middle school my black friends and I would impersonate white girls’ attempts to gyrate like us as they danced. They always missed the mark. What came naturally to us did not come naturally to them. They thought about how they danced; they had no sense of natural feeling and their movements were mechanical.

  For black people, bodily expression is spontaneous and passionate. It is true that after a long day’s work the slaves would sometimes have to entertain the master and his guests, mainly so that they’d become too tired to think about rebelling. Even if the master had no guests, slaves would still be dragged into the household to sing, dance, and play music. If slaves couldn’t get a real instrument, such as a violin, they’d make do with other materials. White people would watch them dance, fascinated by the exoticness of it all. These spectacles were purposeful humiliations. But the cakewalk evolved as slaves’ own form of subversion. While serving at large and fancy parties in the early 1800s, they would watch well-to-do white people perform strict and stiff dances, like cotillions and quadrilles, and mimic them, exaggerating the bowing and small skips and hops and adding some high steps and jumps. In diaries kept by white people in the antebellum South, the cakewalk is not depicted as a form of satire. After all, why would a sweet slave mock his benevolent master? To white people’s eyes, this imitation seemed like flattery. They were delighted that the slaves were attempting their civilized dances. In fact, they would hold competitions and the winning slaves would receive a cake, hence the name. Yet they were being mocked, right in front of their faces.

  The performance of the cakewalk is profound considering that slaves’ bodies were so subjugated and yet they still found a way to mock their owners, who watched in awe, unaware of their own humiliation through movement and mimicry. In African-American humor, white incomprehension is the basis for many jokes about white people. They cannot understand us and they never will, because they also cannot understand our language.

  African-Americanists and scholars of race in America are well versed in signifying, which is the art of being able to talk around a subject without hitting on the point. Black people play with literal and figurative meanings without even thinking about it. Dr. Henry Louis Gates expounds upon this concept in his book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Our use of our hands and eyes to enhance our stories only opens up more possible interpretations of our words. The dictionary is insufficient for us because oftentimes our words undermine strict definition. It depends on one’s intonation, the situation, and one’s geographical origin. It’s hard for me to think of examples because this reconfiguration of language is innate. It is not something that I believe you can wholly teach. One may be “She ain’t cut me no slack,” and another, “That music was bangin’”: the former representing a burden, and the latter refiguring what sounds like a nuisance into a compliment. In learning standard—i.e., white—English, we are taught to be as direct as possible. African-American English is created around the idea that indirectness is more fun. Similar to the cakewalk, our language had to evolve around and underneath dominant white social norms. It’s the inscrutability of our glances, the click of our tongues, the sucking of our teeth, and our fragmented sentences that communicate our emotions and character. This is a part of the black experience that white people cannot entirely access, and this exclusion gives us fertile ground to ridicule them—our own form of power.

  What does this mean for black female slaves, whose position was unique compared to that of male slaves? In the United States, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, when female comedians first started performing, that critics decided wit and humor were incompatible with femininity. However, historically female humor took place less onstage and more on the page, because in the theater they were relegated to playing masculine women, idiots, or prostitutes. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is perhaps the finest example of satire by a black woman.6 After Nat Turner’s rebellion broke out, slave owners across the South were scared about what might happen on their property. They had to retaliate, proactively treating their slaves with increased violence to invoke more fear. Jacobs goes into great detail about how drunk soldiers searched houses, whipped black people “till the blood stood in puddles at their feet”—some receiving five hundred lashes—and tortured still others with a bucking paddle. She then exclaims, “What a spectacle was that for a civilized country! A rabble, staggering under intoxication, assuming to be the administrators of justice!”

  The humor Jacobs interweaves throughout her elegant prose demonstrates her awareness of the ridiculous society in which she lived. As a writer, she surveys her circumstances, analyzing them bit by bit, to ultimately reveal a different reality: one in which white people, who pride themselves on civilization and respectability, are the real savages. The biting sarcasm of her words allows her to have the upper hand.

  This is what I want to tell my future children: slaves knew what was up. Even if they didn’t kill their masters, run away, or burn down plantations, slaves suffered horribly and knew that this suffering was wrong—and they had the ability to mine their trauma and find some kind of power within it by humorously belittling their oppressors, stripping them down to the bone to show their inhumanity. White people, not Africans, were the real savages. Enslaved black women were victims, but that’s not all that they were.

  In 2013, Beyoncé posed in a sweatshirt that said “Can I Live?” on the front. I am wondering the same for her, and for me, and for all black women. What is our responsibility now? Who will write us? As a black woman, as a descendant of black people who were enslaved—not simply “slaves”—I want to be reminded of our power in spite of our dehumanization. The dominant slave narrative should not be so far removed from that of the human condition. As a black woman, I want to know that despite the cruelty of the slavery, a black man would still have been willing to bear lashes for a black woman; that through the grit of blood between his teeth and the crack of the whip against his back, she was worth loving. As a black woman, I want to know that black people would have ke
pt the wit and spirit needed to spin satire around white slave owners so well that Aristophanes himself would have applauded them. As a black woman, I want to know that white people can never fully know me, break my humanity down to a science, although they have historically tried. I want to know, I want to know, I want to know. I want to know, but not just know. I want to realize that anger metamorphosing into power, that power channeling into humor, that humor gliding past white consciousness, and that white consciousness never being able to fathom what that humor entails. My idea of a black narrative is one that subverts, flips, and undermines rule until that final product cannot be duplicated by anyone other than one with black hands.

  Does this mean that only black women should be allowed to write about black women? I am not sure if I can advocate for such a radical position. I do believe that both white women and other women of color can write about black women, but if they do so at a much higher rate than black women do, that’s an issue. And furthermore, if they are not willing to self-interrogate while they write about black women and to dismiss universality, color blindness, or dilution of any kind, then no, those individuals (not the entire racial group, mind you) should not write about black women.

  The particular experience of the black woman in modern America needs to be addressed. But there isn’t just one; there are many. Millions, to be exact. I can only add one.