This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  And to that I say this one-sided feminism is dead. This book is not about all women, but it is meant for all women, and men, and those who do not adhere to the gender binary. It is for you. You. Our blackness doesn’t distance us from other women; however, it does distinguish us, and this requires further understanding. At the same time, my story is not a one-size-fits-all tale about black womanhood. This book is not your resolution but the continuation of your education, or maybe the beginning. We deserve to be the center; our expansive stories are worthy of being magnified for all their ugliness, beauty, mundaneness, and grandeur. I will not baby you. Instead, I will force you to keep your eyes on me and, in turn, us, and see the seams of everyday life that you have been privileged to ignore but that have wrecked us. Some of us are still wrecked. I am admittedly so in some ways, which you will know about soon enough. But in many other ways, our community has been strengthened and that’s why I am here and you are continuing to read my words.

  And to that I say, welcome.

  Let us begin.

  2

  How to Be Docile

  When your black girl child exits the womb and you hear her loud wailing, savor and remember it for as long as you can. That’s the loudest the world will ever allow her to be in a room where multiple people are present.

  If she’s ugly, hide her face with a lace-trimmed handkerchief and tell passersby that she’s sleeping. If she’s beautiful, hand her off to strangers so that they can talk about how pretty her skin is or how many curls they can count on top of her small head.

  When she’s approaching six or seven months, where it’s time for her to start speaking, teach her “Dada” first so that she knows that whatever comes out of her mouth is a symbol with a point of reference and that reference always returns to man. Man is the establishment and system, and don’t ever let her forget it.

  When that black girl child can learn to form full sentences, teach her early on never to ask questions, especially if the interlocutor is a man. She must learn submission early if she is to succeed in life. Don’t allow her eyebrows to raise when she sees the women in her community laugh and call the boys “fresh” when they question things. Smack her face if you must. An emotionally inexpressive black girl child is one who keeps herself alive.

  If she relaxes her posture and her legs begin to spread, hit both kneecaps with an open palm or the back of a pan so that she associates opening herself up with pain.

  If she spends too much time running after the boys or allowing them to chase after her, call her a fast-tailed girl even if she won’t know what that means. Remember: she’s not allowed to ask questions. And frankly, she’s better off that way. Ambiguity will undo her sooner rather than later.

  When she bleeds for the first time, tell her how inherently dirty she is and that what she is down there is nothing but a cesspool of stench and waste rather than a channel that brings forth life and takes in pleasure. Tell her that she’s a woman even if she has no hair besides that on her scalp and arms or no sprouting breasts because the weight of that word “woman” makes her feel as if she can tip the scales. It’s not about what she feels but what she is made to think that will do her in.

  You can pinpoint the exact moment when she begins harboring sexual feelings for the opposite sex: her stare lingers a little longer than normal; her voice tapers off while she shakes her head and tucks her bottom lip into her mouth; her blushing, her lack of eye contact. Tell her what happens to black girls who want to be “fast.” Tell her that they will get pregnant and never achieve anything. Tell her that the boy will leave her and that he won’t give her the respect of his pants hitting the floor when it’s time to do what grown folks do. Tell her, tell her, tell her. And before you know it, the next time she so much as lays eyes on another man, her vaginal muscles will tighten. Her opening will produce an extra layer of skin as a fortress so that no man can get in, and if he does, that in and of itself is her punishment for not keeping it tight.

  Instruct her that being complimented on her looks is much better than being complimented on her brains. Everyone wants a black woman who makes him or her feel at ease. Her face is the easiest way to comfort people, and if she isn’t pretty, then her silence is even more necessary, for it is better to be present in the room than never in it to begin with, and she must get in, even if she cannot participate. She must access whatever it is that they have by any means necessary.

  If she tells you that a man calls her pretty, pour yourself a glass of Merlot because men don’t give compliments easily, and then figure out a way to get her vaginal muscles to unwind themselves. The only thing worse than being a black woman is being a single black woman, and it’s time to reel a man in. Black is ideal, but whoever will have her works, especially if she’s doing well professionally. Ain’t too much of her kind up at the top, and love is love anyway. The only thing worse than a successful black woman is a single and successful black woman.

  Tell her to let the man be the man. Don’t argue with him. Don’t share an opinion unless he asks her to. Let him be right even when he’s wrong. If she takes care of him in this way, he will take care of her.

  Tell her that when he’s ready to make love, she should lie on her back and spread her legs as far as they can go. She’ll remember you beating her kneecaps with open palms and backs of pans, but at least this will distract him, breaking through her skin to find a home inside of her. If she screams out in pain or cries, he’ll probably ask her if she wants him to stop, although this is not what he actually wants. Urge her to not make him stop or slow down. Instead, tell her to focus her attention someplace else, even if that place is unreal. Let her think of Elysian fields where black girls receive more mercy. She can stay there until he comes. Then after that, she should either rub his chest, watch him as he rests, or bring him some food from the kitchen, before he wants to do it all over again.

  Once he decides that she doesn’t excite him anymore but is too comfortable to officially break up with her, he’ll cheat on her and you must blame it all on her. There must’ve been something that she was doing wrong to not keep him around, and she better make things right so that she won’t embarrass you.

  If they do decide to get back together, she’ll shrink even further. The next time you see her, you’ll mistake her for your own shadow for her light will be gone.

  When she finally enters those prized spaces that you told her about as a child, she’ll have everything she’ll need to succeed: looks, deference to man, suppressed sexuality, silence. A good ol’ twenty-first-century mammy, ready to give, ready to serve. She will be the talk of the town, the new Negro socialite, the one whom countless black girls must emulate if they want to get anywhere and have a man on their arm while doing it.

  After a few years, you will notice some other things about her: she’s getting physically smaller until she needs a booster seat to sit at the table. Her man can’t enjoy fucking her because he feels like a pedophile, but he feels too comfortable to leave her so he cheats on her again and with more than one woman this time around.

  Her voice gets higher- and higher-pitched until the register she reaches is so high that no human ear can detect what she’s saying, not even her own.

  Without her body ever reaching orgasm, without ever housing a penis that recognized that her vagina was not a ground for domination, the only hole that hasn’t closed up down there is the one through which she urinates. Neglect will do that to the body.

  Soon, she won’t be able to move. Doctors cannot diagnose her as comatose simply because she can’t speak when spoken to. They believe she can still feel; she simply cannot move. Perfect, you think. The less she moves, the more mobile she can be. People will remember just how comfortable she made them feel, and they will take pity on her.

  But they don’t. Her name rings a bell, they snap their fingers to try to conjure the letters of her name, but they ultimately give up and return to eating their watercress sandwiches or cheese and charcuterie. They do not re
member her name or how she made them feel. They blame it on her not speaking up enough when she was around. Her body collects dust. She stops menstruating. She stops urinating. She does not speak. She cannot eat. You are waiting for her to die, but not sorrowfully because this was the plan all along. Black girl children aren’t supposed to live; they’re supposed to exist. When she dies, you know you should not mourn for her because now that she’s dead, she lives more expansively than ever before. Where there is no man, there is no world that can make her feel less-than. Yet you do mourn for her because maybe it was not her time to go. Maybe there was something else that you could’ve done to make her shrink but not die, as if one can happen without the other.

  Nevertheless, you fold back into the community, where you teach other black girls the same ritual but with more fine-tuning. You’re sure that you’ll get it right this time. The world forgets the former black girl child when they accept another token who whets their palate like a new flavor of the month. The man finds another woman, and he makes love to her with all his clothes off, pants and boxers hitting the ground, watch on the nightstand, and that woman comes over and over again. When he closes his eyes the moment after orgasming, he sees your child’s face and silently thanks her for preparing him to be the man that he is today.

  This is how a black girl becomes docile.

  3

  The Stranger at the Carnival

  I loved amusement parks as a kid. For native New Jerseyans, it’s basically a tradition to go to Morey’s Piers and Raging Waters Water Park in Wildwood as soon as the weather is sunny. Until I was about eleven years old, I was too afraid to ride the roller coasters. I’d choose to go inside the fun houses instead. The large distorted mirrors would make me feel like I was an exaggerated version of myself, or even someone altogether different. The first things to grow enormously larger were my breasts; then it would be my hips and finally my butt. I was already a well-endowed kid, so there wasn’t much make-believe there. The fantasy came from watching little white girls giggle and whisper in each other’s ears as they posed in front of these mirrors, puckering their lips, leaning forward and placing their hands on their knees so that their butts pushed out. Their curvy reflections resembled my female relatives, and these girls loved it. They would laugh at how ridiculous they looked.

  And as soon as they walked past the mirrors, they would go back to being stick thin and tall.

  The face cutouts were another form of entertainment. I’d see kids, both black and white, whose parents had coaxed them into sticking their heads through the holes so that they could take pictures above the painted bodies on the board. These cutouts were always on top of white bodies. I never participated. Frankly, I thought it looked ridiculous: my black head on top of a white body. It was a deformity that I could not forget about in the land of make-believe. Since my mind couldn’t fantasize about this possibility, there was no way I was going to make my body reach a state of being, that being whiteness, if my mind wasn’t already there. After the cheerleader incident, that “state” had been marked off with barricade tape. Besides, if I wanted to transform, I was going to do so entirely. Anything less than that was not worth the trouble.

  One of my fondest childhood memories is from when I was three years old. It was evening. A group of black women, including my mother, either stood or sat at the table in our kitchen. There was an almost mystical glow emanating from the overhead light. One of my mother’s longtime friends put me in a booster seat and, with a thin comb, began to divide my thick hair into sections and slather a white substance on it from the roots to the tips. When I was little, aside from my nose, my hair was the only evidence of my race. I barely had any melanin, and I burned in the sun; I was so much lighter than everyone else in my family and church community that people joked that I was the milkman’s baby or the daughter of a white man. But my hair was black, obsidian like ink, and grew into a massive afro.

  At first, this application of what I later found out was a perm seemed okay.1 The product was cool upon my scalp, but then I began to twist and turn in my seat because that coolness turned into tingling and that tingling became a burn. I started to cry. I was immediately taken to the sink, my head placed underneath the faucet. Once the water hit my head, my afro flattened into loose strands that I could see rotating around one other in the stream. My mother’s friend ran her fingers through my hair and I hissed, noting how sensitive my scalp had become. What happened next is hazy, but it doesn’t really matter because that night began a tradition of more than a decade.

  I grew up learning about “good” and “bad” hair. Natural hair was not a style that I saw as a child, unless you count the biracial, light-skinned black girls whose midback- to waist-length curly hair turned bone straight in the pool. I was told that I had “good” hair even though my hair was just as thick, if not thicker, than that of other girls, maybe because I am light-skinned and my complexion somehow mitigated the thickness of my afro.

  That white beauty was the ideal was never formally taught to me. I learned it through warnings and observation. I noticed my white female classmates seemed more invested in the latest lip gloss colors than in their hair. Meanwhile, my eyes and those of my black female classmates surveilled whose hair might be fake, whose hair might be real. If a black girl’s hair didn’t touch her shoulders, someone might have easily called her “bald-headed” as an insult. If I impulsively wanted to jump in the pool, my mother would tell me, “You’re not a white girl, Morgan. You can’t just jump in the pool without letting me know.” So I began to pay more attention to the white girls I knew who could just jump into the pool and reemerge looking like bathing suit models or extras on Baywatch. They didn’t have to sleep with bonnets or scarves. They rolled their head around on pillows and allowed anyone to play with their tresses.

  In the evenings, during Nick at Nite, I watched Marcia Brady of The Brady Brunch excessively brushing in front of the vanity mirror in the bedroom she shared with Jan and Cindy. Every day, on my TV, Marcia would wake up, but Carol Brady would never yell from downstairs that she was coming up so that she could do Marcia’s hair. That practice was strangely missing, planting one of the first seeds of difference in my head. My hair care regime was much more strenuous, and demanded more of my time, than Marcia’s.

  The painstaking effort directed towards one’s hair is taught incredibly early, and it never lets up. Many mothers choose to plait their daughters’ hair to make it grow quicker and then, around grade school age or so, perm it to see its true length. From the age of three to around fifteen, I received a perm every four to six weeks. I started to go to a salon when I was around eight or nine years old. The hairdresser would apply the perm to my head, and within a matter of minutes, I would complain that it was burning.

  “That’s okay, it’s working,” she would always say, and leave the room to take a phone call or eat Chinese or soul food in the sitting area of the salon.

  I would clench the handles of my seat and tighten my entire body. My eyes would turn bloodshot, and I could think about nothing else but the pain, which was of a degree that I, to this day, have never experienced in any other situation. I silently repeated to myself, It’s working. It’s working. The burning means that it’s working.

  That burning didn’t just affect my scalp. My skull could feel it, too. Every time I was sure that I was going to be injured, but I tried to soothe myself by imagining how pretty I would be once my hair swished and swayed whenever I walked. As soon as the hairdresser returned, I dashed to the sink and rolled my butt around on the cushion in order to get comfortable. When the water hit my scalp, it stung. Each time the hairdresser worked her fingertips through the back of my head, a new scab would appear, and she would admonish me not to scratch my scalp so much in between sessions; then, she said, it wouldn’t burn as much, and new scabs wouldn’t appear on my scalp. I took her advice and patted my head whenever I had an itch, but the scabs still appeared. All of the pain disappeared, though, when my hair
was finally dried, trimmed, and flat-ironed. I would stand in front of the large mirror wall in the salon sitting area and twirl around and around, beaming at how my strands flew in the current created by my outstretched arms. This, I thought, was how I was supposed to be. Nothing else would do.

  I was obsessed not only with my hair’s straightness, but also with its length. I thought that if I had long hair, not only would I fulfill my beauty’s ultimate potential but I would also elude the restraints of my blackness. I was already mistaken for Dominican and Puerto Rican by Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Besides the white girls, the Latinas were the most sought after in my school. They were often called sexy or hot, and I began to think that these attributes were inherent to their ethnicity. I watched rap video after rap video of black and Latina women dancing and swimming in pools with their hair flowing past their shoulders (not realizing that many of these styles were lace front wigs and weaves). Long hair would seal the deal for me.

  Each time I got my hair permed or braided, I asked the hairdresser to show me the length of my hair before she started. One birthday, my eleventh or twelfth, I wished for hair that stopped underneath my breasts before I blew out the candles on my cake. If straightness would draw me closer to purity, length would draw me closer to sexiness, and stretching between these two poles would make me perfect. At the age of eleven or twelve, I stretched only to undo myself.

  Now that I have been natural for almost the same amount of time as I was permed, I can better understand the tremendous amount of duress that both black girls and women put themselves under in order to look “good,” whatever that means. The perm is sometimes called “creamy crack,” which is quite charged given the racial and socioeconomic context of America’s crack epidemic and the War on Drugs. It is a widespread misconception that Madam C. J. Walker, the first female self-made millionaire in America, created the perm. She did build an incredibly successful business around a system of scalp cleansers, massaging methods, and petroleum-based ointment applications that black women could use to combat hair loss due to a previously nonexistent black hair care industry, infrequent bathing, and poor diet, but it was actually Garrett Augustus Morgan, an African-American inventor, who accidentally discovered that the solution he used to ease the friction of sewing machines in his tailor shop also smoothed the nap on fabric and straightened hair. He patented G. A. Morgan Hair Refining Cream and also sold pressing combs and skin bleach.