by Amy Reed
“I think it’s really . . . cool,” she said thoughtfully. Brittany was so kind that when her tone went from overly positive to neutral, as it had just then, you knew she must have been thinking something less than kind but was too polite to say so.
She withdrew her hand and wiped her fingers on her pants. The white girls who touched my hair and its oils without asking always wiped their hands on their pants afterward. Like what I had, what my hair had, like my Blackness was contagious. I know now that they had been rude to touch me and comment on me without invitation, but that knowledge could never work itself past my shame.
By high school my hair had been straightened for so long that I didn’t really know what my natural hair looked like. I just knew that the curls, like weeds, needed to be caught early and fought back. My mother drove me once a month for this gardening. At sixteen I could go to the salon by myself, and so I sat one Saturday, watching in the mirror as Pam, my stylist, processed my naturally curly hair so that it was straight. She pointed to the way that my hairline drew down into a point high on my forehead and said, “You have a widow’s peak.”
“Oh, yeah,” I replied. “We learned about these in science class. They’re genetic.” I smiled, proud that I’d retained that knowledge and could share it.
Pam smile-grimaced back at me in the mirror and tut-tutted. “They mean you have some white people in you.”
I’m ashamed that it felt like a compliment as much as an insult. I think she meant it both ways. It didn’t matter what her intentions were, though, because it was a reminder of what I already knew. Had already learned. My body’s Blackness needed to be controlled or converted to whiteness as much as possible, but I also needed to be Black enough, which I wasn’t. I didn’t really know which ways of being were most important, but I knew that sitting in that chair was my race ritual. When she was done with my hair and I stood up to leave, Pam always beamed at me as though I’d been cured.
* * *
I had my pick of the universities I applied to, thanks to great grades, a fantastic high school education, and superb letters of recommendation. My teachers loved me, even if they sometimes pointed out that I was “quiet” in their classrooms. Their semi-frequent encouragements to “speak up more in class” couldn’t compete with the years of social silencing I’d experienced, or the internal voice that policed my body, words, and interests. A “drop in the bucket” would be an exaggeration of the impact of their suggestions.
I went to college with my omnipresent diagnosis of racial unwellness and conflict of womanhood, just as I went to college with AP credits and a new set of Bed Bath & Beyond twin long bedsheets. I went to college smart and quiet.
But school brought me new language. New language brought new ideas. And new ideas led me to new people. I gravitated toward artists and creatives because they celebrated the unknown and the surprising. They spent hours trying to capture the misunderstood. And they encouraged me to make art.
The thing about making art, and writing in particular, is that it demands honesty. Art doesn’t want your lies or your armor. Art wants your bloody truths. A blank page wants to be filled. It doesn’t judge what you write down. And so I started to write down my identity confusion. I wrote down my frustrations. I wrote down my dis-ease. I wrote my longing. Poems are especially welcoming to the small experiences that feel like violence.
It just so happened that my artistic community included spoken word poets and performers. I’d written poetry and even read it out loud, but never thought of myself as a performer. I knew nothing of “slams.” I eventually ventured onto the stage with other people’s words, and that felt exciting and bold. It felt like I was spinning. Like the merry-go-round again. Except this community, this group, these audiences, they wanted my secrets. Their kindness was more than the simple absence of cruelty.
I took classes on cultural studies and poetry by women of color. I devoured Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back, because the women in that anthology spoke of living in “the borderlands.” Living in the in-between and the fuzzy cracks within feminism and racism and oppression and spiritual survival. They lived in the racial nowhere that I grew up in and somehow, miraculously, spoke from that space. The space that had taken so many words from me.
I wondered if I could write from the in-between too, and, ever the good student, I asked my mentors for advice. Some of my professors urged me to write about the Black Diaspora, but the old specter of Black History Month rose inside my chest. (Am I this? Is there room for me here? This isn’t me.) Others suggested that I refer back to key sources and figures in the canon. I looked there to see if I could fit, but I didn’t see anyone who wrote about what I knew of performing race poorly. I didn’t see anyone writing about the particular type of social shrinking and cultural bending that I’d experienced growing up. About how being brown is not enough to be Black. I found amazing essays by critical race theorists, post-colonialists, and gender theorists, but while our symptoms were similar, our conditions were not. The more I looked for a lineage, the more I felt like a faulty clone. I felt lost again. No one seemed to have the same identity illness diagnosis that I did.
Eventually, I went back to the page that didn’t judge and wrote about the quiet intersectionality that lives within my body. You see, because I am a woman of color, I walk around holding conflicts of desire and belonging. I attempt to squash my given self and the things that grow out of my control, like love and curly hair, before they betray me. Sometimes, inadvertently, I nurture those wildlings within. But I cannot eliminate them, either through constraints or encouragement.
* * *
I was twenty-one and a graduate student at the end of a weeklong intensive performance workshop when I found my freedom and birthed my own Black womanhood. Ten students, including myself, had signed up to form an ensemble who would write and produce original work in a culminating performance for the university community at the end of the week. We endured hours-long writing exercises each night and produced short performed pieces each day. We got little sleep. It was artistic boot camp and it was brutal; the pace didn’t allow for reflection and so, inevitably, truest selves rose to the surface. By the fifth day, both my writerly voice and my physical voice were raw, and so was my work. I was tired, but my work felt electric.
We were writers and directors of our own pieces, and could recruit other performers as supporting cast members when needed. When I told my friend Josie, who was white, what I wanted her to do to me, she balked.
“Um. I mean . . . I don’t know if I can do this. I feel really uncomfortable,” she said. My art was frightening her.
I asked her again, pleading. “It’s important to me,” I said. She relented. She’d seen my process all week. She knew where I was going. And she knew why.
The theater was standing-room only the night of the final performance. I’d never seen our space so packed. People were on the floor in rows, cramped into chairs two-on-one, creating heat and buzzing energy by their presence. I’m pretty sure it was very against fire code. We each performed in turns, and then my piece was up. I had gained new words, as I’ve said, and so my poetry was both academic and anecdotal. It was personal and it was critical. I spoke about being far too white to be Black while being far too brown to be white. I talked about the panopticon of race—walking with my white friends past groups of Black students gathered together on the university commons and feeling them eye me. I talked about being squeezed by expectation until I was folded in. I talked about listening to and loving Huey Lewis and the News and not knowing much about rap (that got lots of laughs). I talked about being called an Oreo. Dealing with my hair. My white-people widow’s peak. At the end of my poem, I dropped to my knees, held my hands behind my back, and installed a blank stare on my face. The rest of the piece would take place in complete silence.
Josie appeared then, circled me, and pulled back on my hair. She pointed at it and then gestured to the audience to invite them to in
spect the strands. She pulled back on my lips to show them my teeth. Yanked my arms up high, jabbed at me to make a muscle so they could see my strength. She pranced happily from one side of me to the other, grinning as she showed off my features for the audience’s consumption. Showing them the violence of accumulated microaggressions. Of the constant Otherings and Not Enoughs. Of the Why Do You Like Thats. Of white hands in my hair and on my face and Black bodies pointing and laughing.
I heard gasps in the darkness as my imagery hit home. Two hundred people in stunned silence. I was shaking.
Afterward, the audience approached us hands-first. Artists and teachers and fellow students reached for my arms and face. Reached for me. Some people had tears in their eyes. I don’t remember the words they said, but I remember the hugs. The warmth of a palm on my back. Someone clasped my hands in both of theirs, but they weren’t there to inspect. They just held on. Held me. They didn’t have the words for feedback and didn’t offer any. Every look, every smile, every hug spoke of gratitude. So many people thanking me. People saying and whispering, “yes.” I didn’t realize that I’d asked a question, but the faces were nodding in answer, “yes.”
I’ve been in dozens of productions since then and seen multitudes more, but I’ll never forget what art gave me that night. I’ll never forget that art allowed me to redefine the terms of engagement and to fill in the gaps where other people’s words and actions had left me without anchor. I may not belong everywhere, but art, and artists, had said yes to my anger and to my fear and to my resistance. Art had made room for me.
Growing up, my identity existed outside of the borders of expectation and so it was me who was diagnosed as unwell. I know now that I am not responsible for living within the limited imaginations of others, nor am I insufficient because they cannot fully conceive of me. I know this because art once whispered, then yelled, then roared through me that it is the world that might be ill and that I am becoming whole.
RESOURCES
Register to vote: www.vote.org
Find your Representative in Congress: www.house.gov/representatives/find/
Find your State Senators: www.senate.gov/senators/contact
RESOURCES FOR ACTIVISM:
Database of Student & Youth Activist Organizations:
https://www.speakoutnow.org/resource/links-youth-and-student-organizations
SpeakOut—The Institute for Democratic Education and Culture:
Dedicated to the advancement of education, racial and social justice, cultural literacy, leadership development, and activism.
The Youth Activism Project:
youthactivismproject.org
Download the free “Youth 26% Solution” guide to youthactivism: http://youthactivismproject.org/youth-strategies/
Amplify Your Voice (A Project of Advocates for Youth):
www.amplifyyourvoice.org
A website by and for youth and youth activists, focusing primarily on reproductive and sexual health and rights of young people.
RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network):
https://www.rainn.org/student-activism
Resources for activism around sexual assault prevention and education, from the nation’s largest anti–sexual violence organization.
5calls: 5calls.org
Website and phone app to make calling your representatives about the issues you care about easier.
Daily Action: dailyaction.org
Sign up for daily action alerts.
Indivisible: www.indivisibleguide.com
A practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda. Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
“NOT LIKE THE OTHER GIRLS” by Martha Brockenbrough
Martha Brockenbrough is a Kirkus Prize finalist for her young adult novel The Game of Love and Death. She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Seattle.
“ROAR” by Jaye Robin Brown
Jaye Robin Brown has been many things in her life—jeweler, mediator, high school art teacher—but recently she’s taken the plunge into full-time writer life. She’s a Southerner at heart, by way of Alabama, then Atlanta, and for many years just outside of Asheville, but now she’s moved north to the great state of Massachusetts. Her debut novel, No Place to Fall, was released in 2014, followed by a companion novella, Will’s Story Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit, released in 2016, was named a 2016 Kirkus Best Book and a 2017 ALA Rainbow List Book. www.jayerobinbrown.com
“CHILLED MONKEY BRAINS” by Sona Charaipotra
Sona Charaipotra is a journalist and author who’s written for everyone from the New York Times to Teen Vogue. She’s the co-author of the dance drama Tiny Pretty Things and its sequel, Shiny Broken Pieces, as well as the forthcoming The Rumor Game. The co-founder of CAKE Literary, a boutique book packager with a decidedly diverse bent, she spends much of her time poking plot holes in TV shows like Riverdale—for work, of course. She’s a proud We Need Diverse Books team member. Find her on Twitter @sona_c, or on the web at www.sonacharaipotra.com.
“EASTER OFFERING” by Brandy Colbert
Brandy Colbert is the author of the young adult novels Pointe, Little & Lion, and Finding Yvonne, as well as short stories and personal essays published in various anthologies. She lives and writes in Los Angeles. Visit her at brandycolbert.com.
“MYTH MAKING: IN THE WAKE OF HARDSHIP” by Somaiya Daud
Somaiya Daud was born in a Midwestern city and spent a large part of her childhood and adolescence moving around. Like most writers, she started writing when she was young and never really stopped. Her love of all things books propelled her to get a degree in English literature (specializing in the medieval and early modern), and while she worked on her master’s degree, she doubled as a bookseller in the children’s department at Politics and Prose. Determined to remain in school for as long as possible, she packed her bags in 2014 and moved to the West Coast to pursue a doctoral degree in English literature. Now she’s preparing to write a dissertation on Victorians, rocks, race, and the environment. Mirage is her debut, and is due from Flatiron Books and Hodder & Stoughton in spring 2018.
“UNEXPECTED PURSUITS: EMBRACING MY INDIGENEITY & CREATIVITY” by Christine Day
Christine Day (Upper Skagit) is a writer and filmmaker. She earned her master’s degree at the University of Washington, with a thesis on extinct dog breeds, ancient weaving technologies, and the resilience of Native culture bearers. Her debut middle-grade novel—the manuscript she refused to give up on—is due from HarperCollins in 2020. Christine lives in the Coast Salish region.
“TRUMPS AND TRUNCHBULLS” by Alexandra Duncan
Alexandra Duncan is an author and librarian. Her YA sci-fi novels Salvage (2014), Sound (2015), and Blight (2017) are available from Greenwillow Books. Her short fiction has appeared in several Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy anthologies and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She loves learning new things, from pie-baking and leatherworking to gardening and rolling sushi. She lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina with her husband and two monstrous cats. www.alexandra-duncan.com
“TINY BATTLES” by Maurene Goo
Maurene Goo grew up in a Los Angeles suburb surrounded by floral wallpaper and piles of books. She is the author of the YA novels Since You Asked, I Believe in a Thing Called Love, and The Way You Make Me Feel. She also has very strong feelings about tacos and houseplants. You can find her in Los Angeles with her husband and two cats—one weird, one even more weird. maurenegoo.com
“DREAMS DEFERRED AND OTHER EXPLOSIONS”by Ilene (I.W.) Gregorio
Ilene Wong (I.W.) Gregorio is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above (Balzer & Bray/HarperCollins), which was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, a Publishers Weekly Flying Start, and optioned for a TV series by
Lifetime. She is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books. Find her online at www.iwgregorio.com, and on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram at @iwgregorio.
“AN ACCIDENTAL ACTIVIST” by Ellen Hopkins
Ellen Hopkins is a poet and the award-winning author of twenty nonfiction books for children, thirteen bestselling young adult novels, and three novels for adult readers, with more on the way. She lives near Carson City, Nevada, with her extended family, two dogs, one rescue cat, four aquariums, and two ponds (not pounds!) of fish.
“THESE WORDS ARE MINE” by Stephanie Kuehnert
Stephanie Kuehnert is the author of the young adult novels I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone and Ballads of Suburbia. She has been a contributing writer to Rookie magazine since its launch in 2011. Her essays for Rookie and her teenage years making punk-rock, feminist zines inspired her next project: a zine-style YA memoir that will be published by Dutton Young Readers. She lives in Seattle, Washington, and can be found online at stephaniekuehnert.com.
“CHANGING CONSTELLATIONS” by Nina LaCour
Nina LaCour is the nationally bestselling and award-winning author of five young adult novels: Hold Still, The Disenchantments, Everything Leads to You, You Know Me Well (cowritten with David Levithan), and, most recently, We Are Okay. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and daughter.
“HER HAIR WAS NOT OF GOLD” by Anna-Marie McLemore
Anna-Marie McLemore was born in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and taught by her family to hear la llorona in the Santa Ana winds. She is the author of The Weight of Feathers, a finalist for the 2016 William C. Morris YA Debut Award, and 2017 Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours, which was long-listed for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. Her latest is Wild Beauty, and Blanca & Roja is forthcoming in fall of 2018.