When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost

by Joan Morgan

  In all fairness, this seems to be a problem not limited to black women. Once, when trying to come up with a speaker in the entertainment business who seemed to master the art of “having it all”—successful career, kids, hubby, health, wealth, etc.—I suggested actress, singer, ex–Miss America Vanessa Williams. At the time, she not only possessed all of the above but managed to rise to the top despite a scandal which would have ruined a lesser soul. She was quickly dismissed as an inappropriate candidate. “Too beautiful, too perfect,” said the multiracial group. “Not enough women would be able to identify with her.” Her life, it seemed, was simply going too well.

  Ironically enough, acknowledging my own addiction jones came at a time when my life was uncharacteristically free of drama. Once my peeps noticed the way the Stinson Beach sunsets, the Mission’s perfect burritos, or the night air perfumed with eucalyptus and jasmine could make me skip—unencumbered—like a child, they wasted no time. Northern Cali’s many treasures were laid out like jewels at my feet. And with a good six-hour drive between me and L.A’s entertainment scene, even work was surprisingly refreshing. But for every magical moment I experienced, there were frightening lapses in identity. As an SBW I was well versed in the art of survival. I knew how to do “tired,” “stressed,” “hanging in there,” but “easy?”—I didn’t have the foggiest.

  I actually had to learn how to put my needs first. Giving both Guilt and Struggle the finger, I confessed to the universe I wanted more out of life than simply being a STRONGBLACKWOMAN. In fact, I wanted every delicious morsel she had to offer me. More important, I wanted to know how to receive it. I wanted what men call “having it all.”

  But before I could officially become a SBW in recovery, I also had to admit that tenuous grip on sanity I was feeling in New York was not caused by the demands of the industry, a bananas schedule, or wack relationships. A great deal of the stress in my life was because I subconsciously chose to do shit the hard way. As much as I complained about it, the props I received for “keeping my head up” not only validated my sense of identity, they assuaged the very real wounds that racism and sexism had inflicted on my ego. So instead of acknowledging my mortality—exercising my God-given right to say, “Hold up, enough is enough,” I arrogantly said, “Bring it on.” And the universe gave me exactly what I asked for.

  As racist and sexist in origin as it may be, contemporary black women perpetuate the myth of the SBW for reasons very similar to our antebellum counterparts: It boosts our fractured self-esteems. As the granddaughters of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Feminist movements, this is a difficult thing to admit. Most of us want to believe that we’re finally over some shit—that our egos are finally immune to daily assaults of racism and sexism—but that’s far from the case. We’ve just learned to suffer on the hush-hush.

  So we find ways to battle those oh-so-retro but devilishly persistent voices—the ones that say Fuck it, I just can’t find a way to love my complexion, features, body, hair today, okay, ’cuz society’s letting me know by way of callous invisibility that my kinda black beauty just ain’t in vogue— and yes, I am attracted to him but threatened by her because of that light skin and good hair. . . . Look at all this fucking garbage/noise/violence in my neighborhood, maybe what the white folks say is true, niggas don’t have better ’cuz they don’t want better. . . . Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about all the statistics but yo endangered black ass ain’t smelling the pussy unless you gotta job, degree, and a plan. . . . Well, there’s a new sista in the immediate proximity—betta watch my job or my man. . . .

  And on the days these voices start gaining ground, STRONG is a helluva consolation prize.

  Perhaps one of the most loving things sistas can do for themselves is to erase this tired obligation of super-strength. Instead, let’s claim our God/dess-given right to imperfections and vulnerability. As black women it’s time to grant ourselves our humanity. My girl Ambersunshower, singer, songwriter, self-described post-feminist states it eloquently: “Black women deserve to be loved and feel the fulfillment of life on all levels. I am a woman and black, but I’m human first. I am just as loving as my Asian, white, or Latina sisters and need to be treated with just as much sensitivity. My strength is that of all women—to love unconditionally, to bear children, to be connected to the spiritual universe by that divine order.”

  strong black women-n-endangered black men . . . this is not a love story

  All the good black men are not gay, on drugs, or chasing the skirt tails of white women. Many of them line Brooklyn streets where dreadlocked dons can be found flexing dance hall vibes and Hilfiger-wearing Casanovas kick hip-hop-laced seductions.

  All the good black men are not in jail or taken. Their strong sepia arms can be spotted early in the A.M., picking up our garbage or conducting the rush hour trains. Their ivory smiles illuminate evening skies as they peep us tracing muscle paths from the bottoms of their Nikes well past the thigh lines of their biker shorts; checking them out as they’re shedding their ties and hustling out of office doors. It’s not that I was insensitive to all my McMillan-reading sistas who were trying to exhale.

  I was, in truth, distracted.

  Brooklyn’s spring/summer air seemed pregnant with possibilities. . . .

  I was over Waiting to Exhale shortly after reading the book (tedious) and long before I saw the movie (entertaining). But certain phenomena capture the collective consciousness and render us all accountable. So when folks started touting Exhale as the most realistic portrait of black male/female relationships to appear in print/celluloid, every less than catatonic Nubian from Brooklyn to Bonefuck was expected to comment. Even mainstream media wanted to know if it was true. Have black women really given up on black men? Have they really lost the love?

  The questions at first seemed somewhat preposterous. This type of cluelessness was to be expected from the mainstream, but black folks? I mean, really. The brothers accusing Exhale of “dogging the black male image” were bad enough. (And where were they during the onslaught of the urban black male pathology genre? Or is it okay to make movies where niggas can’t do shit besides kill, slang dope, get high, and die as long as they’re written and directed by brothers?) But questioning the love?

  Please. When it comes to brothers, sistas got love wells that spring eternal. Did they really have to look any further than their own lives to be reminded that no matter how mean, raggedy, funky, or lame a brother gets there’ll be some sista out there claiming she’s got enough love to fix him? Couldn’t they tell from the rallying cries of support we gave Mike Tyson and O. J. Simpson (instead of the women they wounded)? Hadn’t they witnessed the dance some of us would gladly do on the next heifer’s grave just to keep a man—or steal him? There are clearly times we love them more than each other. Couldn’t they see that a sista’s “Niggas ain’t shit” mentality is usually the scar left to remind her of the time she loved some brother more than herself?

  Contrary to the beliefs of many, the phenomenal success of Exhale did not demonstrate that black women en masse are acting like racist white folks—too blinded by our prejudices to see black men’s intrinsic beauty and worth. Rather it was a clear indication of sistas’ justifiable pre-occupation with the rather sorry state of black love in the nineties. It demonstrated that black women are painfully aware of our increasing inability to form lasting healthy, loving relationships and families. Our willingness to look to simplistic theories depicting every brother as a dog and every sista as a biological time bomb waiting to explode for answers, however, reveals that we are absolutely confounded by the causes.

  As for the black women who really believe Waiting to Exhale was a testimony to the paucity of not only black men, but their overall capacity for goodness (instead of a story about four otherwise intelligent black women, who, when it came to relationships, made some less than wise choices), their response unmasks a well-hidden truth. The men we attract/allow in our lives are reflections of not only who but where we are. Spirit
ually and emotionally. They’re bottom-line reminders of how we feel about ourselves.

  In light of this, it’s not at all surprising that the sista who swears “all the good black men are taken, gay, on drugs, or in prison” usually kicks off her tirade by affirming her status as a STRONGBLACKWOMAN. SBWs have a tendency to fall hard for their mythological counterparts—ENDANGEREDBLACKMEN.

  During slavery, the myth of the STRONGBLACKWOMAN could only be sustained if brothers were depicted as inherently weaker than not only white men, but also black women. When contemporary black women erroneously internalize these myths we do ourselves and our relationships a grave injustice. ’Cuz it’s impossible to embrace even one of racism’s lies without becoming hopelessly entangled in a web of others. While black women don’t buy into racism’s categorical depictions of our men as lazy, stupid, unreliable, or criminally devoid of values, many believe, on some level or another, that the men we love are less capable of surviving the afflictions of life than we are. We sympathetically believe they are not necessarily weak, but ENDANGERED.

  Then, armed with beauty shop conspiracy theories grounded in varying degrees of truth, we attribute our pain and loneliness to some cruel numbers game. Well, you know girl, they’re more brothers in jail than in college. Our frustrations are somewhat justified. There are more of us than them (100 to 85 in the 25–44 age group).1 We are more likely to get college degrees, and they are more likely to marry outside the race. However, when you compare the fates that both black men and women suffer at the hands of racism, brothers are really no more of an “endangered species” than we are. Black men suffer (and often die) from violence, imprisonment, drug abuse, and unemployment at rates that are disproportionately higher than their white counterparts, but black women suffer a similar fate when it comes to disease, drug abuse, and domestic violence. Our suffering is just less well documented.

  While doing the research for this book (not to mention trying to gain some insight on the less than perfect state of my own relationships), I frequently asked women to share their feelings about black men. The overwhelming consensus of the 100 or so sistas I kicked it with was: Black men have their faults and sistas have their frustrations but the defining emotion is Love. Always Love. The frequency and ease of their answers made me a little suspect. Our relationships with black men seemed far too complex for such a limited emotional repertoire.

  So I started to ask about other things. I asked them to talk about respect. Invariably sistas would talk at length about black men’s disrespect for us, specifically the myriad ways their sexism has been injurious to our bodies, spirits, and minds. And while the hurt inflicted by sexism is powerful and real, disrespect is not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about black men and Respect—specifically the brothers who lived lives they wanted to emulate, challenged them to become better people, or were instrumental in their growth. Then I asked them to count the black men in their lives they respected. The answers were disturbing. A handful of sisters could recall more than five, but the average hovered around one or two. And when I asked them to name the number they’d been intimate with, the numbers often shot down to zero.

  Love without respect is a lethal thing. It is at the heart of any dysfunctional, abusive relationship. All the unconditional love in the world does not negate the truth. The ENDANGEREDBLACKMAN is a creature black women have learned to love, but he is not one we respect.

  And our relationships are suffering from a lack of respect that’s as virulent as it is mutual.

  For so many black women the process starts with an early heartbreak. We cannot respect what we do not know.

  Black America is quickly becoming a nation of fatherless daughters. The hip-hop generation is the product of that one-out-of-two divorce rate.2 We comprise the two-thirds of black children who are born to single parents. The statistics do not begin to tell our stories —the daughters who’ve had violence, imprisonment, illness, addiction, depression, or abandonment rob them of fathers—both physically and emotionally.

  Is it any wonder, in light of these facts, that so many of us grow up loving but not respecting black men? For most of our lives the folks who put food on the table, clothes on our backs, roofs over our heads, and educated our minds were black women doing it all alone. We were raised to believe that it was the women, not the men, who were the stronger, capable, more responsible ones. They were the ones we could trust and rely on. The men, we learned, were apt to drop the ball.

  On our community’s crusades to save the “endangered black male” much emphasis has been placed on the necessary role black men play in the rearing of their sons. Black educators advocated nationwide rallies for the development of all-black-male schools in order to provide black boys with appropriate, hands-on role models. Much erroneous ado has been made about single black women’s alleged “innate inability” to successfully rear male children. The rearing of girl-children in our community, however, is frequently dismissed as “women’s work.” Precious little attention is paid to the significant role black men play in shaping their daughters’ ideas about themselves and love.

  For many black women, the realization only comes in the wake of serial unsuccessful relationships.

  Unfortunately, Olufemi’sI story is all too common. She is the child of a beautiful, charming woman and an incredibly charismatic and talented man. Since she walks through the world in full possession of both her parents’ gifts, her friends are often confused by her perpetual relationship dramas. It confuses Olufemi most of all. When the twenty-two-year-old actress finally noticed the undeniable similarities between her father, David Everton,II and her boyfriends, she stopped dating for well over a year.

  “My father is a renowned Afri-Caribbean poet and scholar,” she explains. “We were really, really close until I turned seven. Then my parents started having problems. My earliest memories of their relationship are pretty fucked-up. The first time I ever saw my mother cry was during my birthday party one year when the mailman delivered my father’s divorce request.”

  Once her father returned to Trinidad, their relationship took a turn for the worse. Olufemi found she had to share him with his many worlds: academics, an active political/social life, and the arts. In time, he remarried, had a new family, and suffered from severe bouts of alcoholism. Olufemi’s memories of their relationship during this time are marred by frequent, inexplicably long periods of no communication and many broken promises when it came to visits and finances. What should have been the shared responsibility of raising her was often left solely to her mother.

  “He was really spread too thin,” she recalls sadly. “I mean, as an adult I can attribute certain things to my father’s alcoholism, but as a little girl, they were hard to understand.”

  In order to deal with her hurt and anger, Olufemi tried to numb her emotions and “file them.” She dropped out of college, spent a lot of time getting high, and chose men, who, like her father, were charming and talented but troubled, often battling some sort of substance abuse and wholly incapable of commitment. “Totally emotionally abusive,” she says. To maintain the relationships she employed the same negative coping mechanisms she’d developed to deal with her father’s negligence. “I guess I believed loving them enough would help them change. Basically, I’d convinced myself that having 30 percent of someone was the same as having 90 percent.”

  Things finally improved for Olufemi and her father when he checked himself into a rehabilitation program. His recovery did much to cement their relationship as friends, but she still has a great deal of difficulty accepting him as a “father.” “Like most people, I love David Everton—the man. In fact, I adore him. It’s hard not to. He’s beautiful, charismatic, and talented.” She laughs. “But you definitely have to catch my father as he flows. He just can’t be committed to certain things. And I can accept that from David Everton, the man. But dealing with it from David Everton, my father, is too difficult. His inability to handle certain aspects of his life has
caused the people who love him quite a bit of pain.”

  She still has doubts about her ability to sustain a healthy relationship. She’s “come to expect pain from things you love too much.”

  God. How many times have I been there.

  From the ages of four to seven I cried inconsolably each time my father left the house. No one knew quite what to make of this. I was too young to understand the dangers that lurked outside our South Bronx apartment, and because my father did not keep odd, inexplicable hours, my tantrums were dismissed as the unbridled passions of first love. The origins of my separation anxiety remained a mystery to me until years later, when I was twenty-one and trying to deal with my father’s final departure from our home. In many ways my father’s decision to return to his native Jamaica was one that as an adult I both understood and respected.

  My parents’ relationship had fallen upon tempestuous times due to economic hardships, illness, and fundamental differences in how they both viewed the world. Returning to Jamaica was more than my father’s spiritual salvation; it gave my mother the distance necessary to close a painful chasm. But hell hath no fury like a womanchild scorned. The little girl in me was experiencing a deep sense of anger and betrayal toward this man who was supposed to love me unconditionally.

  Ever since I could remember, my parents’ arguments had been punctuated with my father’s threat to leave and “go back home.” I spent my childhood trying to circumvent that by being the quintessential daddy’s girl. I saved all major acts of rebellion and acting out for my mother and continued to worship my father—the elusive, illusory figure I’d created with arduous devotion. I walked away from that experience with a painful lesson. I’d grown up fearing that the man I loved most would one day up and step. As a result, I’d written a protective “I love you but . . .” clause into all my intimate relationships—irrespective of past promises, irrespective of how perfect a man was or tried to be, because the men who are supposed to love you most are capable of jumping ship for reasons that have little or nothing to do with you.