Baldwin’s letter says, “There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously . . . They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.”
The first Sims I can find is Cary Sims, born enslaved in Grenada, Mississippi; his son was Stanford Sims, born free, also in Grenada; Stanford’s son was General I, born free in Grenada and died in Tulsa, Oklahoma; General II’s son is General III, and you are the sixth generation. You are a Sims man. Inferior to no one.
Your father, your uncles, don’t write you letters, but they tell you, in the driveway and on the porch, what you have to know. Two of you can ride in the car. Three is a gang. One of y’all has to get in another car. Don’t fool around. No standing out in the yard at a party. Don’t be getting gas late at night. Don’t be speeding drinking laughing singing rapping walking. Don’t.
You’ve heard Dwayne and me tell our daughters the same things. We partied in front yards and backyards and orange groves and fields of wild oats—No, you can’t go to that party, we don’t care if you get mad, we don’t care that other girls can go, we can’t take that chance with you. You’re all we have.
The countless times your father and uncles and you were stopped while driving. Hands out the window. No hands. No moving. No. No. No.
We women never tell you this part—that we think we will have heart attacks when we see the sirens, see you sitting so still, standing with hands up—I have seen that, the muscle inside my chest hurting so bad that I imagined the small red heart I saw once when I was a child, excised from a bird by a cat on the sidewalk in front of my house, the muscle leaping four more times on the cement, but not bursting.
It is 153 years since the Emancipation Proclamation. You are free. You are free to skate down the street, to ride in a car, to walk down the sidewalk toward the taco place two blocks from here, where everyone knows your name. You wear a hood when it is cold. Your dreads are legendary. You wear an old Hawaiian shirt with two buttons missing because your grandfather General II left it behind when he died, and you miss him. You wear a sharktooth necklace. The tattoo you got in his honor reads SIMS. You do not fit the description.
Some things were easy when you lived here—the taco, taquito, enchilada part, when I made hundreds of them and you lined them up on your plate with unabashed glee; the part where you and your cousins watched Dazed and Confused and Fired Up, which contributed mightily to our weird family language. “All right, all right, all right,” we would all say in our best Matthew McConaughey. And “unless you’re an old lady gardening or a baby on the beach, you shouldn’t be wearing Crocs.” The part where the dog loved you best. The part where we had really good shampoo and lotion.
Some things were not easy—the part where you had to go to college classes and actually do homework; the part where everyone else in the house was female (my three daughters, and sometimes three of your sisters, their innumerable friends, all the chattering and laughter and gossip like sparrows in the wisteria vines), and when you brought home laconic tattooed skaters of all races and sizes who tried to watch endless skate videos and the single television in the house was clearly not enough for you all, and I got tired of making taquitos and went on strike; the part where we put a timer in the shower because you used all the hot water and we screamed at you because we were freezing.
We fought briefly over curfew and the absolutely required phone call every midnight to let me know you were alive. This is part of life when people have children, but it’s different when the children are brown-skinned with dreadlocks. I achieved victory with you by shamelessly using the heart—I told you that if you didn’t come home one night I might have a heart attack and your uncle Dwayne would have to raise you, which entailed the end of taquitos, nice shampoo, and everything else you loved. You did not come home late after that.
In March 2012 you put on your grandfather’s shirt and I drove you and two other nephews to the funeral of your cousin Lareanz Simmons. He was fourteen years old.
He is the great-grandson of Arthur Ford, Daisy Carter’s brother. He was being raised by his grandmother Bernice Hobdy, Arthur’s daughter. You are the great-grandson of Daisy Carter. Lareanz was shot on Georgia Street, near Twelfth Street. A few blocks from Daisy Carter’s house.
Lareanz was halfway through his freshman year of high school, and Rosette was a junior, both at the same school where Daisy Carter’s daughters went. He was in ROTC and the band; he wore skinny jeans and a blond-streaked Mohawk. He lived as far from gang life as possible. He had gone to a neighbor’s house to borrow a DVD, and he was at the edge of his grandmother’s driveway when a car pulled up, and a young Latino man shot him. He was hunted, in the driveway. He was shot six times at close range. His grandmother Bernice kept him alive long enough to donate his organs, and his heart went to a young white man.
You and your cousins joined more than four hundred people lined up outside the church on Kansas Avenue, within sight of the street where Lareanz died: the military-uniformed ROTC members in formation, white and Latino and Asian and black kids from the band who loved him, crying and holding hands.
I took enchiladas and money to the church hall for the repast. I had to work. Then I drove two blocks to Pennsylvania Street and sat shaking for ten minutes in my car. You and Delphine and Rosette were here, two streets away from Georgia Street, at the exact time Lareanz was shot. You had talked them into driving to another cousin’s house to visit—my two girls in the red Honda, putting up an umbrella through the open sunroof for a joke while you and your cousin stood in the driveway talking, and fifteen minutes later, a car turned down Georgia Street and someone saw Lareanz walking.
The geography made me cry. Five generations raised in these six blocks. The fallen. Our fallen. America’s fallen. The heart of Lareanz beating in another human.
My dungeon shook. My ribs shook. My eyelids shook. You were all on my couch that night, lined up like panelists on a dating show, when the phone call came about the shooting. You were all sitting up straight: Delphine, Rosette, you, your brother Evan, his girlfriend Stephanie, who is Mexican-American, all trying to talk me into letting the five of you go out, and me shaking and saying, No. Dwayne and Uncle Trent calling and saying, Hell, no, everyone stays in for three days. Like always.
What people from elsewhere have always said to me, when I write about these deaths: But it can’t be that bad out there in California! The sun is out. You have palm trees. Everybody has a yard. The cute little bungalows. That’s not the ghetto. That’s not the projects. You have all that sunshine.
Bullets fly through sunshine as well as snow. In the shadow of palm trees the same as elms and ginkgo. Blood soaks into grass differently. We feel the same, except that we are not national news, because it’s different out here.
Is our fear different because our forebears went west?
Your son, Dustin Ozzy, is six years old now. At our most recent Memorial Day gathering, there were about forty children under the age of twelve, and about forty young people in their teens and twenties. In 2018, the “American birthrate” was reported as the lowest in history. We laughed.
James Baldwin’s letter says: “Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” Barack Obama, the president your grandfather wanted to vote for, if General II hadn’t died
twenty-one days before the election, the president whose face your uncles wore on T-shirts for years, was a moveable star that rose. His forebears went west, all the way to Hawaii.
The dungeons shake.
You named your son Dustin Ozzy. Yes, for Mr. Osbourne. Your half-grin, your dreads tied back with one of Delphine’s basketball shoelaces, your foot iced again with my last bag of frozen corn because you skated off the rails. Now you’ve stopped skating full-time and started working as a bar bouncer and at the skateshop. For Dustin.
You have to stay alive. You often skate at the park directly across the street from Daisy Carter’s burned house. From those concrete ramps, you can see the foxtail weeds growing tall against the chain-link fence around the empty piece of land.
“You come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, ‘The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.’”
I read my teacher’s words again, again.
Your dungeon shakes differently—it trembles, it is iCloud and permeable and Twitter and purposeful, intended to demonize you again. It is not the bars of the slave jail, the barracoon; it is not the metal bars around which civil rights activists wrapped their fingers while James Baldwin wrote to his nephew. You have a son. This is my letter to say we love you, and we want to see you walking up our cracked sidewalk, holding your son’s hand when he looks for the dog and the chickens in my yard, every year until there is silver hair in your dreads tied back with a shoelace.
Love,
Auntie
36
American Human Not Interested
I looked up and Gaila was gone to Ohio, Delphine was gone to Los Angeles, and Rosette’s eyes shimmered with held-in tears.
It wasn’t the actual day Dwayne, Rosette, and I dropped off Delphine at USC that broke my youngest daughter’s heart. It was the morning of Rosette’s first day of high school, and she was abandoned. Disconsolate.
“I’m Beth,” she said, her voice shivery and then given over to crying. “I mean, I’m not dying.”
She meant that of the sisters in Little Women, she was the one left home. Alone. With me. “All your laserlike intensity can be focused on me now. Great.”
I spent years defending their choices to leave—Rosette as well when she went to USC, too. I raised them as Alberta had whispered: to run the world. I told them not “I want you to be happy,” but “I want you to make a difference.” Cheesy, but spoken as the child of immigrants, married to the child of people once enslaved. Their father and I left, and then we came back home.
We knew our girls might never come back.
I looked up and they had been gone for two years. Speaking to groups of women in Miami or San Francisco, in Austria or Turkey, I said I had never met another mother who had three daughters all working in museums. Gaila was an education specialist at the Carver African-American Museum in Austin, Texas, running programs on black history, art, and culture for children and visitors. Delphine was a curatorial assistant at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, preparing shows featuring Latin-American Women Photographers and exhibits about nature and image—writing text about cicadas, France, and the intersection of science and art. Rosette was working at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, giving tours, while majoring in Classics.
Of course, our family and friends said, “But how are they gonna meet any men at museums?”
I rolled my eyes.
They moved through the world as women most men could not classify. We did not do castas.
My daughters told me stories about people who approached them and asked, “So what are you?” or declared, “I can guess what you are.” Delphine told us about a young black man at a bar who said to her and three girlfriends, “I can tell each one of you exactly what you are. You—you’re Puerto Rican. You—Dominican and Cuban.” To Delphine he said, “You? You’re straight Latina. You don’t have any black in you.” He was wrong for each girl.
My daughters would at times hear Algerian, Samoan, Saudi Arabian, Hawaiian, Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Colombian.
When Rosette played on the high school tennis team, someone said to her, “You’re the only black girl on the team,” and when Rosette replied that there was another black girl, and the white teammate said, “Oh, she’s not black, she’s Egyptian.”
One night, a young man pressed Gaila at a bar in Ohio, “No, really, where are you actually from?” and she said, “California,” then “America,” and he said, “But what are you?” and she said, “American, human,” and he said, “But you know what I mean, what are you really?” and she said, “Not interested in you.”
37
Braid/Züpfe
Los Angeles, California, 2017
Dear Rosette,
You called me after you had your hair braided this fall, by a woman named Ermaline, from Ghana, which took seven hours while you listened to the voices around you. For years I kept a photo on the refrigerator of you with your grandfather General II when you were six, wild-shining curls springing like a headdress around your forehead, like an Egyptian goddess painted on a wall. But in kindergarten boys pulled on the curls, and people only talked to you about your hair, so on regular mornings you always asked me for two braids.
Your hair, so overwhelmingly impressive when you were a college freshman that it rose in a thick corona of spiraled blackness all around your face and down half your spine, so much hair that you finally decided you had to cut some of it off just to be able to breathe and be noticed as a whole human, for your face and brain and your words.
You had asked me and your sisters about where you should part your hair, for the braiding, and I flashed back to the mornings when I’d take the comb through your long wet hair when you were small, making a center part down the middle of your skull all the way to your nape, actually looking at the gradation of thin skin along the crown of your head, the bone casing of your brain, and how the demarcation from skull to spine was a hollow where suddenly the flesh was softer and plush. I would gather all that hair and begin your two thick braids down low, by your ears, when you asked for Pocahontas braids. The single high braid springing from the top of your skull was the Jasmine braid. Oh, the years of Disney. And every now and then, we’d wrap the braids around your head and add flowers—that was Heidi.
But while you sat patiently and I twisted, you asked how much Indian was in you. How much Swiss. How much of your grandmother Alberta. You knew you were the child who had Alberta’s dimple, her eyebrows, and the shape of her smile.
Now you were twenty-two, in your first year at a new job. On that fall Sunday, Ermaline parted your hair on the side, braided tiny sections along your head, and plaited your hair with additional hair from a bag until tiny braids hung down your back. Exactly what you had wanted when you were very small, looking at the hair of your sisters.
The next day, you said on the phone, “I was sitting at my desk today and someone saw my hair and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were black.’”
I said, “What were you before?”
You said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what they thought. I feel like it’s much more apparent to people that I’m black. Like, if I’d been flying under the radar, now I’m not. I feel more like myself than ever.”
That night, I sat on the porch and imagined you, in the salon chair in the living room of the house of Ermaline, who came here from Ghana. You didn’t tell me about you. You told me about her—how she spoke to her children, a twelve-year-old daughter, a ten-year-old son, and triplets(!) who were five. You told me she never sat down, that she stood for the entire seven hours, that her husband and children came and went, that she never took a single break to eat. She was working. You were listening, the way you have always listened.
When
you were two and three, you had no bed and slept mostly with me, because your dad was gone and you were sometimes worried about corraling your world, and you’d heard so many things from your sisters the night before. You’d awaken me with strangely murmured quizzes that you were trying to pass: “Mommy. The white one is salt and the black one is . . .” “Sidewalks are made of . . . cement.” “My new bunny’s name is . . . Blaze.” And if I asked you a question, you’d sigh and say, “I haven’t the famous clue what I want to eat.”
You listened when I was braiding the hair of your older sisters, when your aunts and cousins were braiding hair. I saw strands of long hair divided into three sections, woven thousands of times with thumbs controlling the movement. Over and over, over and over.
Women braid hair no matter the color or texture. Women braid grass into baskets—Gullah women descended from Angola women, in South Carolina and Georgia. Women braid palm and agave fibers into baskets and hats and bowls—Cahuilla women and Kumeyaay women here in Riverside County, and over the artificial border into what is now Mexico but was only home for centuries. Women braid corn husks and palm fronds into sombreros and sleeping mats here, in southern California, because they did so in Oaxaca and Michoacan. Braid jute and string and cotton fibers into rope. Braid dental floss and embroidery thread and plastic wire. We have braided these things into lanyards and necklaces and bracelets and hair ties.
In the 1880s, my great-grandmother braided tiny threads of silk and wool into an edging for a small folder with pages of green handmade felt, to tie closed the little cloth book that holds hundreds of needles, of all sizes. That is the book I untied to retrieve a needle for your entire childhood—the thicker needles to repair holes in your shirts or dresses, the finest needle to tease out the splinters in your fingers. My great-grandmother made this book in rural Switzerland, and gave it to my mother, who gave it to me.
In the Country of Women Page 26