This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  Caterine didn’t ask me about where I’d moved from, how many siblings I had, or what music I liked. Instead, she would pass notes in class, asking me if I had a boyfriend or whether I was a virgin. When we went to gym, she gossiped with the black girls about who slept with whom over the summer and whose pussy smelled like tuna. I was both revolted and intrigued. Who knew that thirteen-year-old girls could talk like such grown women? One time during lunch, I was teased for not knowing what an orgasm was, as though that were something I should’ve known at that age—like knowing how babies are made. In Williamstown, sex was more palpable, and I could feel its presence like a gnat buzzing near my eardrums. A girl outright told me, “Dick is like food. Once you have it, it’s a must,” and this was before she accused me of wanting the guy who’d taken her virginity the summer before, influencing her friends to ostracize me. But this paled in comparison to the harassment I’d experience from a new student the following year.

  Jamirah moved to Williamstown from Virginia the summer before our freshman year of high school, and at first she seemed just as mild-mannered and meek as I was. The most popular girl in our year was Tiana, who was two years older than everyone else, and one of the most unapologetically black girls I’d ever met. During our industrial science class, she would often go to the nearest mirror, take out a toothbrush from her purse, scrape gel onto it, and smooth down her edges. Her laugh could be heard from one end of the room to the other, and she expressed her excitement by clapping her hands. On the flip side, whenever she was disgusted, she pursed her lips, rolled her eyes, and jerked her neck. I was always nice to Tiana because that was my natural disposition and also because I was afraid of her. Everyone was—hence her popularity.

  Although Jamirah and I were both soft-spoken, Tiana must have recognized something in Jamirah that she didn’t see in me. Maybe it was because Jamirah immediately started following Tiana around, and consequently Tiana swept her up quickly. Soon, Jamirah became just as boisterous and brash as Tiana and her crew. It didn’t bother me much in the beginning because I wasn’t black like them. They were the kind of “black” that I was not supposed to be, a.k.a. those black people, the ghetto ones, the ones who made the rest of “us” look bad. My mother taught me to suppress those habits that Tiana was known for. As opposed to the other black girls, who wore graphic design T-shirts and hip-hugger jeans, my mother dressed me in cardigans, argyle socks, and plaid skirts so that I would “look the part” at all times.

  Tiana and most of her group were in remedial and college-prep classes, and I was on the honors and advanced placement track, working in courses where I was one out of only a handful of black kids, and that is a generous estimate. The worst times for me were the periods when I wasn’t distanced from those who were not on the same academic trajectories: lunch and gym. I hated these egalitarian periods most because they were when I received the most abuse from Jamirah and, to lesser extents, from her friends.

  At lunch, she’d yell at Tiana to draw attention to my neck or lack thereof while I was literally sitting right across from her at the same table. She made fun of my wardrobe, my intelligence, my speech, my looks—any and everything that made me a person: “Look at her. She ain’t got no neck. What the fuck you got on? The fuck is that shit?” I was always afraid that at gym, she would push me face-first into one of the lockers and start a fight out of boredom. Both she and Tiana frequently made idle threats about wanting to jump somebody while we changed, our half-naked bodies further emphasizing just how susceptible we all were to an ambush.

  It was a kind of meanness that I have never seen matched. I did not know why Jamirah hated me so much. We didn’t like the same guys, didn’t frequent the same places after school, and didn’t speak much to each other. But perhaps this in itself was the reason. I did not want to be boisterous and brash and assert myself in the throes of the black community at high school. I maintained my timidity, preferring to be invisible so that I could commit to my studies and escape from Williamstown in four years. I confided in a few friends about Jamirah’s relentless bullying, and they urged me to retaliate, but I was too afraid of the consequences. If I swung on her—even though I’d never fought before—I’d get suspended, and that would mean that I’d get a bad reputation with teachers. I wouldn’t get those stellar recommendations I needed for college. I dreamed of getting an MD from Columbia and someday taking over my father’s medical practice. I feared I would be categorized as “one of them”: those black girls who were on the bad path in life and would end up pregnant before graduating high school, the black girls who would probably go as far as community college before settling for a waitressing job at a nearby Applebee’s.

  Even in middle school, the black female body was always a target for destruction. Violence was a legitimate way to resolve arguments. Talking was not a conclusion but rather a trigger. You fought someone who talked badly about you or someone who wanted your man. In other words, you fought to maintain your space in an environment where your place was already on the margins. For what black girl wants to be even more invisible than she thinks she already is? Fighting was a way to assert that you were present and in motion. Fighting brought you respect that institutions refused to give you. I thought I wanted to be invisible. I wanted those institutions to respect me, and I believed I could earn it through silence, through assimilation. But my path of nonviolence only led to a cascade of madness.

  I didn’t need to lie in bed with my curtains closed because whatever light permeated my windows could do nothing to dilute the darkness welling in my spirit. I spent many nights hidden underneath my covers, hot tears streaming down my puffy cheeks, unable to voice my pain even in private. In my head, I replayed my daily humiliation in front of all my classmates, and there was no sign of it letting up. I thought of no other escape than to commit suicide, but despite having called the local suicide hotline, I had no concrete plans for flinging myself out of this world. I just hoped that I would one day disappear and find myself on a transcendental plane where there was no more pain and humiliation. Secretly, I envisioned that all the tears I cried would drain my body and my mom would eventually find my desiccated corpse in my bed. I prayed to God to take my misery away from me, and my prayers became more impassioned the longer the harassment continued.

  After realizing that my despondent behavior was not symptomatic of PMS—since it dragged on for weeks—my mother ultimately found out what ailed me. She spoke to the Williamstown High School administration about my problems and they did nothing, chalking up the bullying as a rite of passage. She then suggested that I transfer to a private school but I was too afraid to start over again. Since I could not be protected by the higher powers, one of my sisters offered to come to the school in sneakers, ready to fight Jamirah. I rejected both suggestions because I wasn’t entirely lonely. I had a few friends, one of them a boy named Dennis, who told me that Jamirah’s envy was the reason she bullied me. Dennis was one of my closest friends; he had moved to Williamstown the same year as I did. We lived only five minutes from each other and spoke for hours through the telephone on the weekends, talking about anything and watching shows together. He was my saving grace, and I figured it was better to suffer in high school with him by my side than to transfer to another school and start all over again. Not to mention I thought the change in schools, along with classes and extracurriculars, would make it difficult for me to get into a top college.

  I had moved to another lunch table to sit with upperclassmen to avoid Jamirah at all costs. One of my friends called me back over, and Jamirah eviscerated me with such panache. She smiled, flicked her hand at me, and asked, “Why you talkin’ ’bout me? What’s good?” I stuttered through it all, explaining how I had other friends and that she was mean to me, which led me to leave the table. Finally, Jamirah stood up from the table and ended with, “I don’t give a fuck about you. So you can kiss my ass,” and protruded her ass before sashaying to another side of the room.

  The friend who be
trayed my trust smiled and sucked her tongue. She said, “You betta’ say something back! Don’t let her get away with it!” I assumed my friend must’ve told Jamirah why I moved, for how else could she have known? I left quietly, on the verge of a breakdown. I spent the next period silently crying while taking a test, the social studies teacher hovering over me but never asking if I was okay.

  A sick game was played: I was tested on whether I could assert myself. I was not only supposed to “buck up,” or be aggressive, but also prepare to fight. Jamirah pushed me to leave that lunch table. She pushed me out of that space. Although I found another one, the underlying point was that I needed to reclaim my original space even if I had no intention to return. Instead, I cried and fled to another table with a shattered sense of self. I hated Jamirah, I hated my friend, and I hated every single black girl who laughed at me that day.

  I blamed myself for not saying what I’d really wanted to say to Jamirah. I’d wanted to narrow my eyes at her, smirk, and say, No, I don’t give a fuck about you. I’m prettier than you, I have longer hair than you, I’m smarter than you, and I’m going to be more successful than you. You know it. I know it. Teachers know it, and there is nothing that you can do to change what’s already been set up for your life. You’ll hit me because you already know you failed and every time you see me, you see the reflection of your failure. That’s why you’re mad, and frankly, I would be, too, if I were you. But thankfully, I’m not.

  I considered myself to be the bigger person because my passiveness had afforded Jamirah power that she would never have outside of Williamstown High School. I thought that because of the tone of her voice, the profaneness of her mouth, and her lackadaisical attitude towards school, she was going to end up a statistic, whereas I—if I remained respectable with my honors and advanced placement courses, preppy clothes, and clean hair—was set to bypass all of that. But I also regretted not doing more to defend myself. I entertained the thought of calling the police on Jamirah, perhaps even lying and claiming that she had put her hands on me or she was a threat to my safety. The officer would take one look at me and then at her and tackle her. I would watch with glee as her body was pinned to the ground by an officer two to three times her size. It would not have mattered to me that this officer was protecting me not because I was afraid, but rather because, out of the two of us, I was the closest approximation to whiteness and its rules. I wanted her to be humiliated as she had humiliated me, and if I could not do it myself, I would rely on the institutions to do the job for me.

  It was a violent anti-black-girl fantasy of which I am, almost a decade later, beyond ashamed. We were two kinds of black girls raging for dominance and assertion. I wanted us to get along, and I thought that such harmony was contingent upon white acceptance. I hated black girls like Jamirah who did not conform to respectability politics; I hated their loud voices, their cadences, how they gelled their baby hairs with toothbrushes, their eye rolls, their neck rolls, the way they clapped their hands in exhortation, their tongue-sucking in disgust. They didn’t like me because I did conform. Jamirah relied on that validation from within, and I from without.

  A few months later, I lost my Dooney & Bourke wristlet, which was a status symbol for white girls back in the mid-aughts, and I panicked. The wristlet contained both my wallet and cell phone, and I was sure that I would never see either one again. I checked in every single one of my classes, spoke to teachers, scanned every hallway, but nothing. When I finally went down to the main office to call my mother to pick me up from school since I had missed the buses, I found my wristlet—with my wallet and cell phone still inside—behind the receptionist’s desk. Someone was kind enough to bring it there, and I soon found out that that someone was Jamirah and Tiana. Blindsided is an understatement. I felt as small as the wristlet itself. Why would the two girls who’d made my freshman year a living hell be so kind as to return my valuables? Perhaps because, regardless of what they felt towards me, those valuables were mine. I imagined all the people who might have passed by my belongings, all of those who left them there. But neither Tiana nor Jamirah was going to allow anyone, not even themselves, to take from another black girl. In a strange twist of events, they looked out for me. I thanked them, but I wished that I could’ve done more.

  Not too long afterwards, Jamirah stopped me in the hallway at our freshman semiformal, to tell me how beautiful I looked. I thanked her; there was nothing else to say. By this time, I had found my outlet for my anger: writing. The allure of creating a new world in a better and more peaceful universe, where I could have new friends, was unexpected, and powerful.

  Jamirah ended up leaving Williamstown after freshman year. Years later, I found her on Facebook and discovered that she’d moved back to Virginia and had two children. I could still sense her bravado in the way she pursed her lips for mirror selfies, and I smiled. I thought about reaching out to her to say hello, but I never went through with it because I didn’t know what to say. Maybe I could ask her for an apology, but then again, perhaps her returning my Dooney & Bourke purse and complimenting me on my looks was exactly that. Maybe I could apologize for looking down on her—I’d never said I did, but I knew she knew. Maybe I could wish her happiness, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted that for her either. The pain she inflicted on me hasn’t entirely gone away, just as I haven’t entirely forgiven myself for what I felt towards Jamirah and her crew. I’ve never wanted to return to high school, even in my memory. This is the only time I’ve written about it, and I did so because it felt important—this is what black femaleness is, or at least part of it; this is the violence we hurl at one another.

  I didn’t want to be friends with Jamirah, and I’m sure she didn’t want to be friends with me. I suppose all I wanted to do was remind her that she did not break me. And maybe I would wind up thanking her because if she never teased me, then I would never have discovered my true passion for writing. I would also thank her for teaching me how to assert myself more because years later, once I went to college, I became more assertive. My behavior might not have totally matched Jamirah’s, but my passion was just as obvious, if not more so.

  I am terrified by the thought of raising a black daughter who will also have to fend for herself. At times, I wonder how I managed to survive. Something happened to the black girl, the young black woman, that I was. I fell into the chasm between what I thought I was, what I wanted to be, and how others saw me. I still have not been able to reconcile these selves with much clarity, and fueled by the vestiges of this trauma, this poisonous place of insecurity and inflated self-importance, I write for that girl, for that young woman; I write for me now; and I write for you. Because a monkey is what I never was, but a black woman is what I had to become.

  Growing up as a black woman is different. It prepares you to remember that you have to navigate two worlds. In our predominantly white world, you will never be white. I’d assumed that playing by its rules would insulate and distance me from other black girls; I’d depended on white supremacist tricks to make me feel as if I was better than them. Although I never confronted Jamirah with these lies, I feel just as reprehensible for housing them in my heart.

  As an adult woman, I can feel Jamirah in my voice whenever I get mad. That agile cadence, that unparalleled wit, which renders my profanity as poetic as lines from a Shakespearean sonnet, rhythm and all. I know now where that anger, that primal need to make myself known, comes from. Belonging to the world of black women demands strength, on-your-feet wit, and aggression, because space for and by ourselves is small. You either assert yourself or learn to do so through humiliation, exposing who you really are: just another black girl fighting to exist.

  After that lunchtime confrontation with Jamirah, I could never go back to being the black girl I once was. Her words corroded me, and that rust birthed a harder person, one able to see weaknesses in others and strategize about how to keep myself protected by any means necessary. But that corrosion also reminds me to check myself whenever
I feel like my lighter skin color, or education, or behavior gives me some kind of inherent superiority over other black women. Basically, I needed her. I believe we needed each other.

  This book is the balm to my soul and my gift to you. The desire to be the cheerleader while being seen as the monkey, the strain to be passive over the demand to be aggressive, the bullying, the conflict—all of this takes place on the battleground of being born both black and female. We cannot afford to believe that any part of ourselves gives us an edge over another. Ultimately, we are all fighting. I intend to fight those on the outside rather than those on the inside who are just as victimized as I am. I cannot divorce either part of my identity, and I recognize now, as I excavate my most painful memories, that to try to do so would be to understate their impact on my psychology.

  There is equal value in race, gender, and class, for each trait refracts a different light onto another, which is why I write. Someone may have read these two anecdotes from my childhood and believe that this is what happens to all little girls. It’s true that we are all victims within a patriarchal society and we must fight. But the fight to empower all women under the veil of feminism has historically and presently centered white women. The word “all” switches to whiteness as the default—this is also why I write. When black women speak about themselves to those who are not black, somehow our interlocutors get offended that we dare speak about how both race and gender affect us. Somehow, our acknowledgment of our blackness and womanhood causes others’ brains to short-circuit because they have never been encouraged to focus on the type of person who has been dehumanized and neglected for centuries. The only way many can make sense of us is by looping us together with white women because their whiteness, their illumination, provides some kind of intellectual relief that erases black women all over again.