I want to do more than imagine what it felt like to read those letters. When I ask Leslie if I can see them, she puts them in a manila folder and gives them to me on a dingy spring afternoon.
It is midsummer by the time I read them. I choose to do so on a day when John and the girls are out of town. I park at the library, one of my favorite places in the city, and where I saw the poster for the Boogie Benefit. I walk down to Battery Park, another favorite place. I like this park because it is popular with the local community of New Americans. There are always children here from different countries and of different races. It is late afternoon. The setting sun fills me with dread. I sit on a bench and listen to faint strains of a clarinet playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” somewhere down the hill that leads to the lake. The plain, stiff folder sits beside me like an impassive stranger.
The language in each letter is chaotic, with ramblings about Jews, gays, and immigrants. One letter contains a newspaper clipping about Kake Walk with a photograph of Larry as well as a copy of a photograph of Adolf Hitler. “This a white state and the majority of the people want to keep it that way,” reads one letter. “People like you will never be welcome outside of the South Bronx and Harlem.”
The first worst thing about the letters is how recently they were composed, the latest in 2002. The second worst thing about the letters is how little their content surprises me.
I fold the letters up carefully and put them back in the folder. Everything is the same, I tell myself. It’s the same Vermont as it was when I sat down on this bench. It’s the same lake, which, in fact, belongs to me as much as it belonged to Larry, or anyone else.
* * *
—
A few years ago, I went to a discussion at the library about the concept of home. It was an installment of “Bridging Cultures,” a series sponsored by the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, which was established to assist refugees and immigrants in becoming full participants in all aspects of American life.
What is home? I found the range of responses to the question intriguing. A young woman from Kenya described home as an imaginative space, a geographical container of memories. A man from Iraq reminded the group that for those citizens of the world who lack the safety of a physical structure, home is composed of the people with whom one shares one’s life. For others, home was simply the place in which you were born. A man born in Nigeria described home as a sensory experience. A woman from the Caribbean described home as a place where one feels free to be oneself. “Home is the place where you feel safe,” said a young woman from Somalia. Vermont was home to her, she said, just as much as it was home to a fourth-generation Vermonter who grew up on a farm in a rural town two hours from Burlington.
Once I reach the library parking lot, I tuck the letters under the debris of my daughters’ old schoolwork and wadded-up snow pants in the backseat. Maybe we’re safe here, or maybe we’re not, I think. Maybe it’s just a matter of time.
* * *
—
The view on the way to the Boogie Benefit is iconic. From our car windows, the Vermont of postcards and picture books stuns John, the girls, and me into silence. The beauty is relentless: grand, sturdy trees against dark, muscular mountains, and a boundless carpet of emerald-green grass. As we near Lincoln, a bright natural spring appears and accompanies us into the town. I always feel safe when John is at the wheel, but today I feel secured by this place—not the state or the town but the earth itself.
In Lincoln, Main Street takes us to Burnham Hall, where the Boogie Benefit is being held. Only as I stand at the threshold of the building do I consider the improbability of scores of brown bodies in this place. Only then does it occur to me that the advertisement, like most advertisements, probably will not live up to its promises.
So I am not surprised when I cross the threshold of the building and discover not a single Ethiopian in sight. I am not surprised, but I can barely suppress a giggle that rumbles up from my diaphragm and into my throat. John and I exchange sly glances over our daughters’ heads.
I make a show of hustling my daughters into the room as a way to suppress the laughter. The hall is cavernous and comforting; its design is both pristine and primitive. The room is filled with people whom, after having lived here for seventeen years, I can describe with confidence as authentic Vermonters. They wear a state uniform: worn jeans, sandals or otherwise sensible shoes, and unassuming spectacles. Some of the men wear ponytails and faded patterned shirts. They are graying and middle-aged, gentle-looking and slender, with bright cheerful eyes. Young people chat in small groups throughout the building. One woman dressed like a flamenco dancer walks slowly through the center of the room.
Two brown children, a boy and a girl, enter the hall. They are as distinctly Ethiopian as the other guests are identifiably Vermonters. Like my daughters, the kids have round brown eyes, heavy, dark eyebrows, and cherubic lips. Their father wears a blue flowered shirt and a straw hat with a black band. He is white. I recognize him from the university. We give each other a shy wave. Giulia and his daughter approach each other and then disappear into another room.
Isabella is tired, too tired to eat, even though the four of us had been looking forward to the feast all day. A buffet table is surrounded by people holding paper plates sagging with savory stews and glistening sautéed vegetables. I try to convince Isabella to investigate the table with me, but instead she spreads her body across John’s lap. She dismisses everything I bring her to eat but perks up when I present her with toasted seeds, an Ethiopian snack known as Kolo. “They taste normal,” she says. John and I laugh. “I knew you would laugh,” she murmurs, too sleepy to take offense, and begins a dreamy monologue about McDonald’s.
The entertainment arrives. An Ethiopian singer wades through the audience, shaking hands with the men and women who gather around him. Isabella sits up to watch him and does not complain when I lead her by the hand to the stage.
“She was born in Ethiopia,” I tell the singer when he leans down to greet us.
“I can tell,” he says, and touches her cheek.
Before the music begins, the singer introduces himself and his band “for the newcomers.” As I look around it becomes clear to me quickly that I am among the minority of people who have never seen him perform. The singer nods at the band behind him, and Ethiopian music quickly saturates the room. The stage is lit up with the energy of the performers. The space, which had seemed cavernous when I entered, is now tight with sound and bodies moving in concert. John bobs his legs, drums on his knees, and then gets up to dance. I ache to join him, but my desire is outweighed by my fear of becoming a spectacle: the only black woman on the dance floor. The days of watching myself sweat and shake to my favorite music in the mirror with my best friend are long gone. I haven’t danced that freely in years, and certainly never in Vermont.
As I sit and feel sorry for myself, the woman in the flamenco costume finds a space in the center of the floor and reaches her hands up high, her eyes closed as she waves her arms slowly to a beat beneath the one that the rest of us can hear. She stretches one arm at a time, her hands spread and reaching up toward the light. She slips in and out of view as bodies bop and jerk around her. I watch her for a while and then close my eyes, too, and let the clap of music and the lingering smell of the food penetrate me and crowd out my memories and fears. Before the scene drowns out all thought, two sentences flash in my mind, their letters towering and spectacular: I am alive. I am safe. I close my eyes and give myself over to the small, full world that surrounds me, sure for once that in this night and this place, I have found, if not a home, at least a place to be.
Epilogue: My Turn
A few years after my mother died, I discovered a cache of papers she left in my childhood bedroom closet. She buried them, in an act of elegant and amusing symbolism, underneath a pile of my father’s long-forgotten wrinkled shirts. The papers con
sisted mainly of poems, drafts and drafts of them, but there were a few essays. I hadn’t known she wrote essays. One of them is an autobiographical narrative about her life as a child in the Jim Crow South. It’s called “My Turn.”
When my mother was a child she often accompanied her beloved grandmother, Mama Tempie, to a local grocery store. In order to get to the store, they had to walk past rental houses owned by a lumber company. One day, some white boys threw rocks at the two of them. A pleasant stroll turned into a “nightmare,” my mother wrote.
Mama Tempie, who practiced the kind of black stoicism that has served as a guiding principle for African Americans since the inception of African presence in this country, walked on without evincing any emotion while the white boys jeered and pelted them with stones. When my mother asked Mama Tempie why they were being treated that way, her grandmother told her that the boys didn’t know any better, and should be pitied instead of hated.
My mother idolized Mama Tempie. She accepted her grandmother’s reasoning, and as an adult went on to practice the same kind of forbearance that made Mama Tempie the embodiment of strength and moral fortitude in the poetry my mother wrote. But the rocks still wounded; she wrestled with the wounds in “My Turn.” Her grandmother’s keen analysis of the nature of racism, that it was the consequence of ignorance, did not stem the flow of blood that ran down her leg.
After reading the story, I knelt on the floor, my heart racing. I reached the final lines and then started all over again. I was looking frantically for something. What was it? I didn’t know, but I kept scanning the lines over and over, my throat tight and my breath short. There was something I needed that I didn’t see. What is it? I kept asking myself as I read the paragraphs again and again, and then searched through her other papers, looking and looking. For what? Some words to correct the abomination of the rocks and my mother’s bloody leg. And then I realized that what I was looking for was the salve, an answer, the end.
“For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness,” James Baldwin explains. It took me a while, it took the journey of this entire book, but I realized that there was a lesson, which was, in every scar there is a story. The salve is the telling itself.
* * *
—
“What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time?” asks Alice Walker. “It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.” But eventually the blood must resume its flow. We are helpless to stop it.
The hunger to tell is a drive I inherited from my maternal line. My mother’s skill as a poet was something she inherited from her mother, who probably inherited it from another female ancestor, and back, and back, all the way to Africa. Unlike my mother and grandmother, I have been lucky to find interlocutors, hungry listeners, to borrow a phrase from Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book that looks like a novel about romance but is really a story about women, mothers and daughters, the primacy of intimacy and conversation, and a woman’s fundamental hunger to tell. The body of the black woman at the center of the tale is the situation; the story is about how this black woman learns to become a storyteller. In order to narrate her own life, she needs another person to listen, to aid in the tending of her interior.
My mother never saw her work in print, but her stories course through me, just like what those stories represent, which is the vital importance of intimate connection across time and circumstance, which is why, I believe, she left her papers in my closet in the first place.
* * *
—
I found “My Turn” just as I was nearing the end of this book, and I kept it close as I composed these lines. It did not soothe me to have my mother’s words beside me. Instead, it unsettled me. Even after I understood the subtle and complex lesson of her story, the need persisted in me for something easy: a happy ending.
Relatedly, I wanted, as I began to write these final pages, to compose a particular kind of narrative, a neat trajectory from her turn to mine, the past to the present, despair to hope. But there is no simple path forward, and maybe the hope embedded in the stories I have told in this book is insubstantial and misguided, just as misguided as the racism that spurred white boys to hurl rocks at my maternal ancestors. But the need to believe thunders through my body and muscles out despair. “I can’t afford despair,” James Baldwin once said. “You can’t tell the children there’s no hope.” But the beauty of the condition of blackness is that it is capacious enough to carry both despair and hope, rage and delight, ambivalence and fortitude, which are all as intertwined as my intestines and scar tissue, which seem driven to entangle themselves periodically, and form adhesions that serve as a regular reminder that the scar and the story are eternally connected. It is a process I am helpless to stop, just like the blood that courses through the interior of my black body.
Acknowledgments
I am pleased to have the opportunity to thank the people who helped usher this book into being. First and foremost, I owe a tremendous debt to everyone who allowed me to incorporate our shared experiences into these essays. In the instances in which I have received permission, I have used real names. In other cases, I have changed names and other identifying details in order to preserve privacy.
My heartiest appreciation goes to three people whose private lives intersect most deeply with my own. Thank you to my dear husband, John Gennari, and our daughters, Isabella and Giulia Gennari, for permission to share with readers stories from the lives we are living together. I am grateful to the three of you for putting up with my probing and musing. I apologize for the intrusion, but it’s your own fault for being so interesting in the first place. Thank you, John, for your remarkable memory, stunning insights, and for reading, listening, and talking through everything. I know it isn’t always comfortable to be written about. Trust me, I got the hint when you expressed much more enthusiasm for the pages in which you did not appear than for those in which you did. Still, you always encouraged me and never complained. I owe you, and I owe our daughters who, when once questioned about what it’s like to be the subject of their mother’s writing, sighed and said, “We’re used to it.”
I am privileged to be a member of big and loving families. I am grateful to my parents who are no longer alive but whose instruction guides me every day. My brothers, James and Warren, are my champions and friends. My aunt Julia shared family stories and supported my intention to take them to the page. Margarita Bernard and Joan Gennari Tyer have always been sources of unwavering support. Doreen Odom, your sororal support extends to your enthusiasm for my work; I appreciate your incisive feedback. A special thank-you to my cousin Renee Baron for your example and camaraderie along our similar journeys. I am extremely lucky to belong to a family in Ethiopia to whom I feel a gratitude I will spend a lifetime trying to come up with enough words to capture.
I am thankful for those people to whom I am connected beyond blood, family, and marriage. For early support, I am indebted to Faith Childs, Miranda Massie, Sandhya Shukla, and Heidi Tinsman. My confidante Davida Pines has always believed in every word. I am lucky to have enjoyed more than three decades of kinship with Ellie Des Prez. Thank you to my beloveds Hilary Neroni, Todd McGowan, and godsons Dashiell and Theo Neroni. Thank you to the Hurley family for always making space at your table for me and mine. Alexis Hurley, your generous and enthusiastic consideration of the essays in this book made it possible for me to clear many difficult hurdles along the journey.
Thank you to the many people over the years who listened to or read all or portions of this book and gave me crucial feedback. Greg Bottoms, you are a model as a writer and a teacher, and I am grateful for your consistent support over many years. I could not have had a finer writing partner than the precise and eloquent Lee Ann Cox. Thank you for openin
g my eyes to parts of the world I don’t typically see. Anne Fadiman, I aspire to what you do on the page and behind a podium. Thank you for your critical insights and creative vivacity. Edi Giunta, your fine sense of what words can do inspires me. David Huddle, thank you for your patient nurturance, stellar example, and for believing in me always. I am fortunate to have the creative and intellectual support of Ethan Iverson. For many years, I have valued the keen mind and vision of Nancy Kuhl. Kathy Pfeiffer has always been a treasured friend and literary conspirator. Ken Schneider, I am grateful for your friendship and for the time and care you took with these stories. As a reader, writer, and human being, Lisa Schnell is scrupulous, dazzling, and fearless. Thank you, Bob Wilson, for making space in the pages of The American Scholar for my work, and for making me a better writer. Thank you, Louise DeSalvo, for the model of excellence you set in every aspect of your life.
When it comes to Elizabeth Alexander, I will have to let a few words count for many; otherwise, the particulars of my debt to her would take up an entire essay. I will say this: Elizabeth, thank you for your breathtaking example as a mother, speaker, and writer, and for opening doors, both real and imaginary. I falter, too, when it comes to adequate words of thanks for Major Jackson. I’ve got this: brother, thank you for telling me when I got it right and when I got it wrong. I owe a special debt to Kevin Quashie, whose gracious eleventh-hour literary heroics made me know that I was not alone. I asked so much of you, Kevin; thank you for saying yes. Fortune shined on me the day we met. How lucky I am to know you, Alice Quinn, and to benefit from your immense generosity of mind and spirit. Thank you for believing, and for making it possible for me to believe. When it comes to championship, no editor surpasses Vicky Wilson. Thank you, Vicky. It has been my privilege to work with you. And thank you, Marc Jaffee, for tending so thoughtfully to all of the details. I am grateful to the very patient and skilled Nora Reichard, senior production editor at Knopf Doubleday. I thank my agent Gail Hochman for consistent support and enthusiasm.
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