This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  In the months leading up to my move to New York, I was beginning to be followed on Twitter by a Who’s Who of New York media, and it felt damn good. People were noticing me, those who I had only dreamed would less than a year earlier, and now I felt like I was moving closer and closer to the elusive “popular table” in this behemoth of a city. But I didn’t have many friends in these circles, especially not black women. I hoped that those whom I connected with online would reach out to me once I moved (and I made it known through multiple tweets that I had arrived), but nothing really stuck. Each time I saw photos of brunches with black female writers or long chains that I was not included on that discussed the day’s topics, I felt like I had missed my chance. I was too afraid to ask if I could join their hangouts since they were more powerful and successful than I was. Why didn’t they reach out? Nevertheless, I made friends and gained mentors, those significantly older than me and people of color, but the vast majority of them were nonblack. I figured that I should give myself time and that many of these people must have known one another for years. I needed to work my way up to become friends with people who held so much clout. It wasn’t so much that I wanted contacts but rather a unit of black women who worked in the same industry where we could express our frustration about its blinding whiteness, share our successes, and, of course, help one another through listening or networking.

  One day, however, I summoned up the courage to ask another black female writer for a contact at The New Yorker. I don’t know where I found the confidence to go for such an elite publication, but my mind was turning into somewhat of a boiling pot and I was bubbling over. I needed to move over to larger pots, and my drivenness was igniting the fire that pushed me to go for places within which I had rarely heard of those my age or complexion published. This black female writer was someone who was in the circles that I could only bounce around but never infiltrate. This woman had commissioned an essay from me before, even writing me an extremely adulatory email that I have retained to this day, so I assumed that since she knew my work and her spheres were vast, maybe she could help me get more work. But when I asked her for a contact, she told me that it is better if they—meaning the editors—reach out to me, and I was gob-smacked. Why would The New Yorker, of all places, come after me when they could get literally anyone they wanted to grace their publication? I was a twenty-three-year-old writer without a staff position or a book deal. Yes, I was growing in my career, but what the hell would they want with me? How else could there be a space for me there if it were not through some kind of pushing? I believed this pushing could best be done with help, and especially from a black woman at that. I expected this because I had been helped many times before.

  At Princeton, I wanted a space to call my own. I had access to every book I wanted, every professor; my mental appetite was always sated. Socially, however, I was struggling, and even this is an understatement. I expended much emotional and psychological labor getting dressed up for parties at eating clubs, another campus bastion of exclusivity, and obsessively looked over my shoulder to see if any guy was watching me. I hoped that any guy who talked to me for more than three minutes was interested in me more as a potential girlfriend and less as a potential study partner. And when neither of these aspirations manifested, at least, I thought, I had my writing. In my narrow room, I spent hours creating worlds over which I had more control and power. But soon, wanting to be superior got the best of me and I sought to transport my writing to bigger platforms.

  Princeton’s Creative Writing Program included big names such as Paul Muldoon, Chang-rae Lee, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tracy K. Smith, Colson Whitehead, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Initially, I wasn’t interested in the program because I was very protective of my work and prized self-taught refinement over anything else. But after attending an orientation event with my freshman roommate, Ayesha, a Pakistani woman who would become one of my dearest friends, I thought, Why not? Ayesha and I had already established a rapport with each other over our love of literature, our closeness to our mothers, and our inability to find boyfriends. It seemed as if we were destined to partake in this new adventure together. So, I ended up applying for an introductory fiction class and she did as well. When the day came for us to check our emails about our candidate status for the program, I watched Ayesha go first. I kept my distance away from her desk so that she could retain a little bit of privacy while reading the email, but judging by her face, I knew exactly what happened. We had exchanged writing samples with each other weeks before we moved into our dorm and I knew how talented she was. She had found a place where she not only was going to fit, but was also destined to excel. When I opened up my in-box and clicked on the email from the Creative Writing Program, I was rejected outright.

  Tears spiraled from my eyes before I could gather myself and cry someplace else, away from Ayesha. Being the warmhearted young woman that she was, Ayesha quickly placed a hand on my back and encouraged me to feel that this was not demonstrative of my lack of talent. But being in an institution where status and prestige meant so much, I felt that it was a clear sign that I should give up writing. The following fall, I applied again with an entirely new writing sample and I was outright rejected once more. That was when I realized that enough was enough, and that I would have to lay my Creative Writing Program dreams to the side. Most of the students in the creative writing classes were white, as were those who comprised the most acclaimed and financially strong theater organizations on campus. Basically, I felt like I was out of my league. But I knew I had a voice.

  In the beginning, I was an online news writer for the Daily Princetonian, but I was hanging on by a thread, both socially and in terms of importance. My assignments were very quick one-off pieces that barely anyone read, and I chose not to attend many of the staff parties because they were nothing but heavy drinking and award giving, but to whom and for what, it was too loud to hear among all the bros. One day, one of the editors asked me if I would be interested in applying to become an opinion writer. I had nothing to lose and all to gain. If I couldn’t get into the Creative Writing Program, then surely I could make myself known elsewhere. This time around, I thought I was successful in two ways: one for making the cut and two for being the only black person on staff. I could be special there. I didn’t have much time to celebrate because I had to turn around an original piece in a matter of days. My subject? Why the Creative Writing Program was too restrictive. Since it was my first article, I didn’t think anyone would pay attention to it. It didn’t matter. As long as I saw my name in print, I would at least feel validated that I could keep going with writing. The morning that the article went live, I checked it out on my cell phone and scrolled immediately to the comments section. The first anonymous comment was something like this: “She gets into Princeton because of Affirmative Action and then cries because she’s not good enough. It’s people like you who should’ve been rejected. The university doesn’t need any more whiny black girls.” At first, I was too shocked to be offended. How did the commenter know that I was a woman? My name is unisex. How did the commenter know that I was black? My picture was nowhere in the article. That was when I realized that I was being watched from some imperceptible spot.

  Thanks to Facebook and to the many black women whom I considered friends and mentors, word quickly spread throughout the Princeton black community of the vitriolic remarks, and many left comments on my article under their real names in support of what I wrote. There were some, including black graduate students, who emailed the moderator to question why the original anonymous comment was still left up hours after it had been flagged so many times. The outrage led to a forum attended by many Princeton black students. To this day, it warms my heart to think of how many of them, even those with whom I had only shared a few words, were in support of my work. This forum led to the Daily Princetonian board releasing a full-length article explaining that anonymous comments need to exist because of free speech, so on and so forth. I wasn’t upset
because I expected that I would not be protected and I didn’t want to be. What no one realized was that when I read that comment, shortly after I processed the gravity of such a remark, I grinned. I don’t know if this strength came entirely from myself or because the black women who catalyzed us all gave me what I needed to stand tall.

  I pored over The New Yorker interaction for weeks, trying to assess whether I was overreacting. Would I have given a contact to another young black female writer whose work I had commissioned? Yes. Would I have given a contact to another young black female writer who had many bylines to her name? Yes. Why? Because she deserved it. Nepotism has been reserved for the white and wealthy for too long. Given that mainstream media feeds off black people and their ideas yet hires them at disproportionately lower rates, I do not consider this kind of assistance mere generosity and amiability but a cultural duty for those like me. It would be cruel for me to climb up a ladder and pull that ladder up as I go. This black female writer I had contacted already had enormous influence and a career that many toiled to have. I thought that if she didn’t feel comfortable sharing contacts, then she could have let me know and I would have understood. But then again, what would it benefit her to withhold contacts from me?

  The act of withholding is a part of the crabs-in-a-barrel theory that stymies black people in general and, in this case, black women specifically. Our race and gender disenfranchises us; our art often leads to swift rebuke, even from other black people. History has shown us this before: both Alain Locke and Richard Wright blasted Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, calling it “oversimplification” and exploitation of “Negro life” for white audiences, respectively. How do we hold on to our individuality and freedom of expression if we are always held to account to the overarching, ever-elusive black community? There is this constant desire to take for ourselves because only a few of us are ever going to succeed. We have been taught that anyone who tries to grab on to our coattails needs to be pushed back down into the abyss where they belong. I’ve heard of this crabs-in-a-barrel concept since I was a child, and it’s so pervasive that I don’t know where or by whom exactly I was first informed of its poison. Never did I or anyone else in my community take into consideration that some crabs are at higher positions than others. Is it their fault that the lower crabs want to climb and see the light by any means necessary? Why haven’t we taken into consideration that all of us are warring within a contained space before someone outside of our group decides to lift the lid of that barrel?

  Perhaps there cannot be too many of us because then we won’t be special anymore. It feels good to be special because you’re seen as the beacon set upon a hill, a lighthouse illuminating the dark sea. Everyone else within that sea knows and sees you, but you don’t necessarily have to see them. Until you finally wake up and realize that it was all an illusion. You are not special; you are tokenized, thrust out into the open to perpetuate the lie that America is the land of equal opportunity. You are expected to be yourself, but not so much that you forget which spaces you occupy, those in which you are the only one or one of very few. You are outnumbered, and you can either fight to change the game or be so broken by playing the game that you fall in line. At least the latter promises that you’ll be safe, although by how much and how long, no one else is to say.

  Black women, especially those who are writers, exist in a continuum of attacks on all sides. It is natural to want to focus on individual survival because no one else will look out for us. Mainstream feminism won’t. Nonblack women won’t. Black men won’t. White men certainly won’t. We are both precious and precarious. But if we don’t value and support our individual, disparate experiences, who will?

  When aspiring black female writers email me to ask questions, I respond promptly. When I am asked for contacts, I give them. I do not want to leave this earth knowing that I had a sumptuous feast while other black women had a pittance. But I am not immune to tokenism and crab survival. I do wonder if I’m being too nice to complete strangers, those whose works I haven’t commissioned, and they need to struggle a little bit more. Be more proactive in their approach. My heart used to palpitate whenever I saw another black girl get published somewhere great, even if I’d written for that publication months prior. I grew anxious if I wasn’t included in lists of black writers to follow on Twitter or link roundups of pieces by black women—it was as if when the other black girl had her shine, somehow that robbed me of mine.

  One of the greatest mistakes for black women is believing that solidarity ruins their individual trajectories and that in order to protect themselves, they must repel those most like them in shared oppression. I do not agree that every black woman has to be friends with every other black woman whom she meets. We all have different value systems that will logically make us incompatible to some or many. However, we must criticize when those who have become more successful and white-adjacent than others have not made an effort to lift another up in order to dilute that blinding whiteness. We have the responsibility to bring other black women to the forefront of the culture we’ve helped to create and sustain.

  I think back to when I was ten years old, a little black girl who thought that making an all-white cheerleading squad would make her more acceptable and beautiful. I think of that ten-year-old black girl who was sycophantic to the white girls trying out in hopes that she would be liked. I think of that ten-year-old black girl who manipulated her smile and body to appease the all-white judging panel for a spot on the team. I think of that same ten-year-old black girl whose white so-called friends got in, barely looking her in the face once they passed through those doors to celebrate with the rest of their squad. And I think of who I was at Princeton: a nineteen-year-old black woman who angered some anonymous person by being in an elite space. I had to be reminded of my blackness and womanhood because those two identity markers were supposedly the things that put me in a bind.

  Back then, I wasn’t opinionated; I was whiny. I wasn’t smart; I was foolish. I wasn’t accepted; I was taken in out of pity. I grinned. I grinned and I grinned and I grinned some more. What the experience taught me was that I had, in a sense, made it to a place where I was never supposed to be. Someone tried to put me in my place, but it was too late. I was already all up in the space, reading the same books, taking the same classes, studying with the same professors, and eating alongside them at the same dining halls. For every hint of brown that they saw, their minds went haywire. Every black girl present caused a disruption. It was not only our presence that made them mad, but our excellence. They might have had the privilege not to conceptualize black women in their spaces, but now they saw them in the flesh, moving and navigating just like them. This was their nightmare and my joy.

  Surprise.

  You should’ve known I was coming.

  Acknowledgments

  Dear Mom and Dad, I know some parts of this book may have made you gasp or clutch your chest but I love you dearly and I am blessed to be called your daughter. Thank you for believing in me even though I cast that former dream of being a doctor aside. Everything I write is in honor of you.

  To my four beautiful sisters and my eight nieces and nephews, I love you all. No matter how much we get wrapped in our own respective lives, I can still feel your love and support no matter where I am. I hope you can feel mine as well. To the rest of my family—-stepmother, uncles, brothers-in-law, aunts, nieces, nephews, grandparents, cousins—I love you.

  To my late stepfather, I hope you’re entertaining all the angels up there with your stories. I also hope you’re proud of me.

  I would like to thank Monica Odom, my wonderful literary agent, who took a chance on a small-town New Jerseyan writer when no one else would.

  To the Harper Perennial team—Sofia Groopman, Amy Baker, Danny Vasquez, Megan Looney, Mary Sasso, Amanda Pelletier, Kim Racon, Tina Andreadis—thank you for your immense support and the ability to respond to emails very, very quickly.

  Hannah Wood, thank
you for acquiring this book. I never would’ve imagined that a chance dinner over Ethiopian food in Harlem would lead us to be a part of each other’s lives in this way. I am indebted to you.

  Thank you to Alex Chee, Porochista Khakpour, Ashley Ford, and Alana Massey for being my early readers and for bestowing upon me compliments that I will carry with me for as long as I keep writing.

  Thank you to Jade, Dion, Liz, Maraiya, Safy, Suleika, Aric, Angela, Alli, Stephanie, Brandon, Sarah, and Suzan for reminding me that although writing is what I do, that’s not all that I am. If I missed your name and you’ve known me for a while, my apologies. This is a lot of pressure to remember all at once! Your laughs and your open ears and hearts have carried me tremendously throughout this journey.

  Thank you to Princeton and the Bennington MFA program for shaping this once insecure girl into a fearless woman who questions and listens but also resists and challenges when necessary.

  Thank you to Catapult, particularly Andy, Yuka, and Mensah, for pushing my writing to another stratosphere of artistry.

  Thank you to you, reader, for trusting me enough along this journey full of my darkest moments and most triumphant strides. We made it together.

  Thank you, God, for never leaving me when I was too afraid to write my honesty, giving me peace that surpasses understanding when an assignment is complete, and endowing me with grace to pick up and start again the next day.