by Kei Miller
It is at Tallahassee Airport that you describe the meeting of a woman with her chauffeur—the meeting between a white woman and a black man, and what could pass as friendliness if we did not know any better, if we did not know the codes that allow, and the codes that forbid, and the lines that must never be crossed.
“If she were smiling at me that way,” you write, “I would expect to shake her hand. But if I should put out my hand, panic, bafflement, and horror would then overtake that face, the atmosphere would darken, and danger, even the threat of death, would immediately fill the air.”
James—this is what happened: on my first day in my present job I arrived early, in the dark, before the bird had sung its first song. I was now a full-fledged professor, which seemed to me a spectacular thing, being some years shy of forty, and being, of course, black. And so I was there in my office, but it was so very early, and it was my first day. It took me by surprise when the door began to jiggle, though it seemed to take the cleaning lady by much greater surprise to find someone present after she entered. She took one look at me, screamed and ran away. And James, I didn’t even think much of that—I shrugged, and thought in time we would meet officially and laugh at this first bizarre interaction—but soon there was a loud rapping on the door. I opened it to campus security, burly men talking brusquely into their walkie-talkies—We have arrived at the scene, they reported to some disembodied voice of authority on the other end. I had to present IDs and photographs to explain the spectacle of my body in this space, to prove that I had every right to be there. And how our titles meant nothing in that moment. I was no longer a professor and the woman a cleaning lady—I was just a black man, and she a white woman, and my presence had terrified her. These were the same old Black Codes being enforced, in which black people had to produce ID papers to explain themselves, our spectacular presences in places we are not easily imagined. But I had no way to say any of this, James—to talk about this history that had become so painfully present, and how we all played our roles so brutally, so perfectly. I could not tell them how you had already imagined this moment at an airport in Tallahassee, the panic, the bafflement, the horror—the sense of danger that can suddenly fill the air.
Dear James,
I have grown so weary of intentions—the claiming of them, and the denial of them. I did not intend to be racist, they say to me all the time. He did not intend to be racist. If there is no intention, how can it be racist? They ask me again and again. They mean it to be rhetorical. They think the logic is so devastatingly simple and clear that it cannot be answered, but it is only that I have grown weary. As if one could say, It was an accident! I did not intend to push you to the floor, and so the pain that you claim to feel shooting up your back cannot be real. It cannot be real because I did not intend it. And I wonder especially when white women proffer such logic or ask such questions—when they say how can it be racist if there was no intention. Because I imagine these same women would flinch if a strange man were to call them honey, and ask them what they were doing out without their husbands. I imagine these women would rightly call such a man out on his sexism and would sneer if he said, But I did not intend to be sexist! I love women! How can I be sexist?
James, this is what happened: An old woman was outside my flat. She looked disoriented and an overwhelming feeling of helplessness emanated from her. She was babbling to herself and looking hopefully into the faces of many passers-by. They did not see her, or if they did, they ignored her. I suspected she had dementia or Alzheimer’s. I could not know for sure, but I thought of my own grandfather in the midst of one of his episodes, how he had walked away from the house in Red Hills, Jamaica, and then miles and miles through Kingston. For days we could not find him. I considered the old woman, and though she was white and though she was a woman, she reminded me now of my grandfather lost in his own city and in his own mind. I knew there was little I could do for her, but I could not walk away. I touched her gently on the shoulder. “Do you need any help?”
She looked up then and when her eyes found my face she gasped and clutched her heart. “Oh my god!” she exclaimed, reminding me of my body and what my body meant in a city like London. Suddenly it seemed the passers-by, who had been ignoring the old woman before, were not ignoring her any more. I stood there, feeling accused by them all, as if I was harassing her. I walked away quickly. I left her to be lost in her own city and in her own mind.
I go to the computer and write all of this in a post. Messages start pouring in. There is a throng of responses and it is almost frightening the way these are neatly divided. My black friends respond with an all-too-knowing, yeah, we’ve been there. My white friends are both defensive and accusatory.
. . . But was she being racist? How do you know she was being racist?
. . . Racist? But I didn’t even use that word. I’ve just described a thing that happened to me.
. . . Yes, but you’re clearly implying that she is racist, and you don’t know! You are a writer! You must be careful with your words. You don’t know anything about her! Maybe she had a horrible experience before with a black man.
Their sympathies seem to lie very clearly with the old woman, and so I turn off the computer. I turn it off so that once again I won’t feel as if I were back out there on the streets, the passers-by all looking at me again, accusing me of my frightening height, my frightening maleness, my frightening blackness. The next morning, I see that more has been written on the thread but interestingly, not by my black friends. My black friends have become silent. Theirs is not the silence of acceptance, but it is a silence we are used to. It is the silence in which we have learned to keep our hurt because so often we are told we have no right to it, or that to even describe the hurt is irresponsible. It is the silence in which so many important things are kept.
Dear James,
In your essay, “The White Man’s Guilt”—this is how you begin: “I have often wondered, and it is not a pleasant wonder, just what white Americans talk about with one another.”
Haven’t we all, James! Aren’t we always suspicious of the conversations that our bodies prevent, that stop when we enter a room or that never get started because we are there—and how hard it is to live in this world feeling the weight of words—of ghost words that we almost never hear aloud, but are only ever suspicious of—because they exist on the edge of the other things that our friends say?
James, this is what happened: in the Caribbean, a woman from England, a friend of sorts, who is really very clever and has championed the books of many writers of colour is on a stage talking. Her interlocutor is a mutual friend. They talk about writing and life and advocacy in the way old friends do. The woman from England then says she is about to share a story, and at first she was a little worried because it is a little risqué, but then hell! It’s the Caribbean. So who cares? And there was a moment, James, when everyone in the audience sighed collectively, even if not audibly. And we turned to look at each other as if to confirm—did she really just say that? She did, didn’t she? Of course, we didn’t care that the story was risqué, but we cared about this imagining of our home as a place without morals or values, and where anything is allowed. But we would have let it pass the way we always do—the way we have learned to brush such careless statements aside. But there was a pause on stage, and the pause was so terrifying for all of us, because we understood it and what was being contemplated. The interlocutor was biting her lip, and looking at her hands and the pause stretched and I think, in the audience—I do not know why—we were all willing her to just let it go, and we were all willing her to go there. She looked up from her hands and said, “But what exactly do you mean by that?”
We held our breaths then. We were so stunned. And I think maybe the English woman had had one too many glasses of rum punch, or maybe she was just nervous, but her words are pouring out now, and they are so careless and they are so clumsy and they do not help. And th
en comes another question about something else, and another question, and every question is devastating, and every answer is awful. And I find myself wondering about the quality of light that shines in the Caribbean and if it was helping me then to see things more clearly—helping me to see what had always been problematic and patronising in my friend’s politics and in her advocacy. It was such a small throwaway comment she had made. It’s the Caribbean, so who cares? But it was like a loose thread that unravelled the entire cardigan of her thoughts.
The conversation unspools. The questions dig deeper, they are sharper, more penetrating, as if these are questions the interlocutor had always wanted to ask but hadn’t because she had been afraid, or because she thought they could only ever be asked at the cost of friendship, or because she knew they could never be answered. The woman’s face is now red. Though she is trying to smile and to be composed, her eyes are trying not to water, her lips not to tremble at what I think must feel like a betrayal, like ungratefulness—these truths that people of colour almost never say, these things which her very advocacy makes possible, but which she didn’t want to hear after all.
Finally, it is over. Finally, she walks off the stage and comes directly to me. “Can you believe that?” she says, in a voice both hushed and urgent, almost a hiss, but I do not know how to respond. I do not know how to offer comfort.
The next day arrives as all days arrive in the Caribbean, with boats of fishermen silent across the waters, and with parrots loud in the sky. It is another day and over breakfast the woman from England is speaking to another friend, another white woman. Her eyes dart about the room and she speaks in a conspiratorial voice. “Can we go shopping together?” she says. “I just want to be able to talk without being so goddamn careful!” And I’m not sure why, months later, the confidante tells me about this breakfast conversation, except maybe she no longer wants to be complicit in this thing, this thing that you wondered about, James, this thing that we know, that our bodies prevent conversations that hurt us even when we are not around to hear them.
Dear James,
It is always the body that I return to, our bodies and their various meanings, even though we would like to be just human—just that and nothing more, but we aren’t there yet. I think about the little boy—I imagine him as three years old—who balls up his fists and ineffectively hits his father; this little boy who, in this moment, in his tiny rage, is just human, unsure of how to contain his anger at the world in his small body. And I think about his father who balls up his fists and hits his three-year-old son—and how it is the same emotion, but because his body is different it means differently. The child is not an abuser, but the father is, because his body is different—and I think about these things every day when a man says, “But why is that sexist? A woman would do it too!” Or when a white friend says, “But why is that racist? My black friends say the same things!” Or when my American friends say, “But why is that exceptionalist or fascist? People from every country feel the same way about their countries!”
And I say it is because of our bodies; it is because there are histories that haunt our bodies.
Dear James,
I think I am writing these letters to say that I resent your dying—I resent the absence of your shoulders and your hands in this world. I resent the absence of your body, even though I am grateful for the body of work. It is just that I cannot say things any better than you have, I cannot think more graciously than you have, but the world and the circumstances that you wrote to, they are still here—obstinate world that we have—as if your words did not unravel the things they should have, did not bring down the walls of Jericho, which means we who are left behind must try to write with as much grace and as much love and as much truthfulness as you taught us. But some days I resent this—I resent what you require from us, which is nothing less than what you required from yourself. My dear James, I need your help.
2
MR BROWN, MRS WHITE AND MS BLACK
Mr Brown
And because high school boys had learned the habit of addressing each other and identifying themselves by their surnames, he has carried this into adulthood. He will often introduce himself simply as “Brown”. “Good evening,” he might say, “I am Brown.” And this has become a sort of unwitting joke—for the word “brown” on the island signified something more than just a name, but a sort of ethnicity, a mulatto-ness if you will. “Brown by name and nature, I see!” is a rejoinder with which Sebastian Brown has become all too familiar. These days he even anticipates it, but is generous enough to smile each time, as if he is hearing the witticism for the first time.
When he is alone, as he is now, Mr Brown likes to think about his “brownness” though he does not share these thoughts with anyone. He learned a long time ago—from his days in college—that to share one’s thoughts can be dangerous. And in any case he is not an argumentative man, nor the kind who takes much pleasure in bringing people around to his way of seeing things. It is satisfaction enough for him to live with a thought, even for years, slowly peeling away at its levels of complexity. Many evenings you will find him here—silent on the verandah that overlooks the city of Kingston, sitting with a bottle of Red Stripe, and with his thoughts.
Having travelled around the world, Mr Brown has come to the conclusion that he is a man of indeterminable race. He has seen the look of confusion on people’s faces—a confusion that gives way even to an annoyance. It is as if people believe it is his own duplicitousness, his own guile and cunning that make him not reveal his true racial self to them. He wonders if such people believe that if they only knew what exactly he was, that they would then know everything about him? He knows too well the furrowed brow and how the lips of a person will part slowly, carefully, before asking him the same old question: What exactly are you?
When he travels through Miami he has learned to say very quickly, “No entiendo español.” before they take him as Latino. In Spain he is taken as Spanish, and in Trinidad as well, though “Spanish” in Trinidad means something else. In Greece he is taken as Greek, and in Egypt and Morocco and Algeria he is taken as Arab. It is impossible for him to learn how to say “I do not understand” in every language, or “I am not this thing you think I am.” In Jamaica, however, he is simply “brown” and it is a strange comfort to Sebastian, to be so placed and in a category that he knows, and understands, and accepts.
It is true, though, that some days Mr Brown thinks he may as well be Arab, or Latino, or Spanish or whatever the hell it is people think he might be. For what is race anyway but a decision that other people make about you—an assignment that has been given to you? Race, it seems to Mr Brown, is not so much what you are, as it is what people have decided that you are—what it is they see in you, how they make sense of you. Race and ethnicity are not the same things. Ethnicity is what is in your actual DNA, your genes, your ancestry and all of that. Race, on the other hand, is how society constructs you—and it does not matter whether they see wrongly or not. What they see does not need your approval, or to be corroborated by facts. For most people in the world, their ethnicity and their racial assignments are one and the same thing, so it is easy to confuse the two. For people like Mr Brown, however, things are more complicated. As Mr Brown has travelled around the world he has also travelled in and out of races.
Sebastian Brown is not always a fan of academic language, though he was once a member of the academe. He left that life many years ago and has not looked back. But sometimes, he must confess, that oh-so-turgid language actually gets things right. He is therefore a fan of the word “racialised”. He believes it is altogether more accurate to say that “So-and-So is racialised as black”, than to say “So-and-So is black”. Or it is better to say, “So-and-So is racialised as white”, than to say, “So and So is white”. Sebastian Brown’s mother, for instance, had always been racialised as black, though this was not the entire truth of her ethnicity, of her very mixed
heritage. Her physiognomy and complexion showed little evidence of the Lebanese/Chinese/Scottish mix that was also part of her family’s story and which her siblings (to her great resentment) showed off generously in the olive colour of their skin and the curly bounce of their hair. In the presence of her siblings people would ask incredulously, “Then you really have the same mother and father?” and then to themselves exclaim, “Then is how she come out so black?” In vain, Sebastian’s mother had lived her life trying to insist she was more than what her skin suggested. “I’m not really black you know! On my mother’s side, my grandfather did come to Jamaica straight from Lebanon—set up shop right there on King’s Street, and my father’s mother was a woman who did mix with Chinese and white—no nayga was in her at all!” It didn’t matter—this useless insisting on genealogy. She came out looking the way she did and was always racialised as black.
All that complicated genealogy was only stored up inside her to be passed down to her children—her children whose brownness she would revel in, taking it as new evidence of her own superior pedigree. Over and over, his mother had said to her two children, “Look at your clear skin, and your good hair. We are people of a higher calibre. Remember that!” And these were things said so matter-of-factly, and corroborated by everyone—by teachers, by friends, by security guards who dutifully opened every gate wide for them—that it was difficult for Sebastian Brown to unlearn these things. How does one unlearn privilege, especially the kind that is given to you daily and without question, so it does not seem like privilege at all but simply the everyday-ness of life?