Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  I went to the gym five days a week. I did this for two reasons: I was forty-nine and wanted to be fit and not look fifty, and I was trying to keep those endorphins up—keep that creeping depression away. Not in that order. I looked like I had it together. I managed to keep it together enough to shower, cook a meal or two, and spend lots of time searching for just the right remedy to make myself feel better. One day I had downed some kind açaí berry health drink, which tasted like dirt, that my trainer gave me promising all around well-being. Maybe it gave other people a sense of sublimity, but me, I couldn’t stop scratching. The only thing that came out of drinking the açaí berry was hives, which kept me from the yoga class that I love.

  Maybe, I thought for the umpteenth time, I just needed to hire help—someone to shop, cook, pick up the kids, help with the homework so that I could be in my office from the time I dropped them at school until shortly before dinner and I could write another book. I wanted that helper to be loving, smart, and know how to take charge without being told what to do, and I wanted my kids to really like her, but not too much. I felt guilty for wanting this, for not being able to survive on four hours’ sleep, for not being able to “do it all” like my mother.

  I remembered a day, years before, when my mom was leaving for the evening after babysitting Baldwin so I could finish the edits on my first book, Good Hair. I was incredibly grateful then, and now I know for sure that finishing my first novel, indeed my first two books, would’ve been a lot more difficult without her help. Cliff and I didn’t have enough money to hire anyone, and I was way too nervous to leave my child in the hands of a stranger. On this day, I’d walked my mother out the back door to the deck. Mom was standing on the top step on her way out. I was holding Baldwin, gently nudging my nose against her chubby cheek, feeling that warm, emotional bubble rise inside me.

  “I just love her so much,” I said.

  My mother looked at me and said, “The way you feel about her is how I feel about you.”

  I can still see her, holding on to the banister, walking down the stairs of the weather-beaten wooden deck. I can still feel how her comment stopped my heart.

  12

  Daddy

  Mom and Dad with one of his shipmates (center), 1989.

  SEVERAL YEARS after I married Cliff, my dad gave a speech at Mount Teman A.M.E. Church after being named Father of the Church. The title was an acknowledgment of his service. I can’t recall ever seeing my dad give a speech. It was always my mother. But on this Sunday, Matthew Little walked up to the altar and began with the words:

  “I am a survivor.”

  The church became hushed as my dad, in a strong, confident voice, went on to tell what it was like growing up in segregated Anderson, South Carolina, and of the horrors to which he had been a witness. “Black people were still being lynched as a regular occurrence,” he told the congregation, “and after a hanging, White people would sell off pieces of that rope as souvenirs.” There were also the daily insults like White men referring to grown Black men as “boy.”

  “That’s probably why I don’t talk much today, ’cause I just didn’t want to hear that kind of talk. I just keep my mouth shut.”

  While my dad was describing things that had happened to him more than fifty years ago, his tone of voice and the expression on his face let us know that the memories were as fresh for him as if they had been yesterday. His anger was contained yet palpable. My brothers and I looked at each other. I was in my late thirties; they were in their midforties. We were all stunned by these stories that we were hearing for the first time. After the speech we asked Daddy why he’d never told us about his childhood. He said, “Because I didn’t want to teach you all to hate.”

  Even before the dementia took hold of his mind, Daddy didn’t say much unless he was talking about being in the war. We’d heard him tell about the USS Franklin, the aircraft carrier he was stationed on, which had been attacked by Japanese warplanes; how the hull had been filled with fire and black smoke, and he’d made his way up the stairs from the lower level, where the Blacks were posted, to the deck, grabbed a mounted heavy machine gun, and started shooting enemy planes. He would talk about how many men were killed that day: twenty-three hundred men. The seven hundred who survived called themselves the 700 Club long before Pat Robertson took the name for his Christian television show. Daddy recalled how he got a basic accommodation medal and the captain, who had stood right next my dad as they fired into enemy airspace, got a Purple Heart. He never used the word “unfair,” but it was certainly implied; the sense of that particular injustice was always on his face whenever he spoke of it.

  In the town where my dad grew up, Starr County, now incorporated into the city of Anderson, South Carolina, my father’s family was among the lucky ones. They owned twenty-five acres of land, which had been inherited by my great-grandmother. Her daughter, my paternal grandmother, Elease Vandiver, and each of her four siblings had five acres, where they lived with their families. My paternal grandfather, Hallie Little, was a farmer who had a taxi business and other entrepreneurial ventures. Like many Black folks at the time, the Vandivers lived off their land. Back then, Black people literally built their own schools, churches, businesses, and hospitals and staffed them with Black doctors and nurses, teachers, ministers, and shopkeepers. They were self-sufficient. But none of that shielded them from the virulent racism at the time.

  When my dad went back home after WWII, he found out his mother had died. He wasn’t notified while he was in the service. His father died the year after. Both were in their early forties. Like most Black men who served, my dad believed being a soldier in his country’s war would gain him a degree of respect and freedom, but he was consistently turned down for jobs when he went back to Anderson. Black men, some in their uniforms, were still being lynched and sometimes castrated. They were still being passed over, still not being treated like American citizens. After the war my dad went back to finish high school—he’d had to leave school when he was drafted to join the navy. He wanted to go to college and play football at Clemson. He applied and was accepted, but upon their learning that he was a “Negra,” he was told he wouldn’t be able to go to school there. He’d have to attend one of the “colored colleges.”

  I never got to ask my dad why he didn’t do that. What I did learn was that he had wanted to stay in Anderson, even with all degradation; he was a son of the South. Eventually it became clear that he’d have to leave home to find a job with decent pay. I assume that, unlike my mother’s family, he would not do field work. He moved north, to Newark, where his aunts Lisher and Doll and his uncle TB had already moved. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 90 percent of all African Americans were living in the South. Between 1915 and 1970, six million Black Americans were part of the Great Migration out of there to the North, Midwest, and West Coast.

  After working as a truck driver delivering liquor and fruit, and assorted other jobs, my father got hired at General Motors, a premium job in those days. He began his twenty-five years there on the assembly line at the GM plant in Linden, New Jersey. Eventually he was promoted to materials coordinator. Over his years there, the company often offered to promote him to foreman, but Daddy turned them down each time. Our parents never talked to us about their actual work. We’d hear things about the people they worked with, but that was about it.

  I went to Howard with a lot of kids from Detroit whose fathers also worked in the car factories, and a lot of them had been foremen. Once a friend from Detroit who was in law school, and whose father was a lawyer, asked me what my dad did for a living. I told him he worked at GM. He assumed Dad was a foreman. I let the assumption stand. I was trying to impress this guy, even though I never could decide whether I actually liked him, or liked that he was a popular guy and he liked me. The next time I was home from college, I asked my dad why he never accepted a promotion to foreman. He told me that he was a proud member of the UAW (United Auto Workers) union and that being a foreman would
have required that he leave the union. Even worse, he said, it was like being an overseer: “I didn’t want any part of that.”

  Like my dad, I didn’t want to burden my kids with any feeling of what they couldn’t do or be because of racism. What I wanted most for my children was what I felt I got from my parents and from my Black neighborhood: to be free to love and accept all of my Black self. Being surrounded by people who looked like me gave me a solidity that I used to take for granted. I never had my nose pressed against the glass of the house of White folks, believing that “the White man’s ice is colder.” In my formerly all-Jewish Weequahic neighborhood, everybody was Black except some of my teachers. Most of them were Jewish, and in those days they considered themselves Jews first, Whites second. There was still an allegiance over our shared history of persecution. Toward the end of the Civil Rights movement and with United Nations ambassador Andrew Young’s support of the Palestinian cause, the once symbiotic relationship between Blacks and Jews was fractured, but when I was growing up, that hadn’t happened yet.

  Ford and Baldwin watching Black Santa dance.

  My kids weren’t growing up in a segregated neighborhood like mine; rather, we moved to our town because it had a healthy mix of all kinds of people. But it quickly became clear that while there was a rainbow of colors, sexual orientations, and economics, the area was still primarily affluent and White, and there was still a subtle (and sometimes not so) “ice is colder” vibe. Cliff and I fought against that vigorously. But rather than doing a lot of talking to our kids, we showed. We always took them to Black pediatricians and dentists. Baldwin was allowed only Black or Brown dolls, as well as a few Asian-looking ones.

  The year after Baldwin was born, the beautifully rendered American Girl dolls were created. Each doll represented a part of American history and was sold with a book chronicling that doll’s story. There were dolls that represented the Colonial and Revolutionary periods, slavery, the Depression, WWII, women’s rights, and so on. Baldwin got Addy, whose story was that she was born into slavery but escaped with her mother and moved to Philadelphia, where she lived as a free person. The doll was a gift for her first birthday from my college friend Lynne Scott Jackson. When Kaya, the American Indian, came out, we bought her that one and later added on Josefina, who was Mexican but living in New Mexico. When Baldwin was in the third grade, a new doll was introduced, a blonde surfer name Kailey. The introduction of a new American Girl was a very big deal to this demographic of eight-year-old girl.

  Because Baldwin and her friends were so into American Girl dolls, Baldwin and I decided to host a doll tea party and each of her friends would bring their American Girl doll. We did it on a Friday after school. They all got dressed up, and we had tea and sandwiches and juice and cupcakes. Even Ford was there, dressed in a sports jacket. A discussion of who was going get Kailey followed. Two of the girls, Allie and Nora, who were White, were definitely getting Kailey. Two who were Black, Daria and Indu, weren’t sure, and Baldwin was sure she was not getting her.

  “My mom doesn’t let me play with White dolls,” Baldwin said.

  “Why not?” Allie asked, innocently brushing her doll’s hair.

  Baldwin said, “ ’Cuz my mom won’t let me. She wants me to play with dolls that look like me.”

  “Well, your dad is White,” Allie said.

  Baldwin looked at her and thought for a moment and laughed.

  “No, he’s not.”

  At that, as children do, Allie said, “Oh,” and the playdate continued.

  In trying to give our kids a strong sense of their identity, we have often taken stances that might seem harsh. The culture shows them in too many ways that they don’t count as much, that they don’t matter as much, that there’s something aberrant about being Black. My choices were designed to fight against that, to build them up, to help them see themselves positively, more accurately. Baldwin didn’t ever voice anything about Cliff’s light skin color, or her own, because we didn’t discuss it. We didn’t discuss it because I believe when you do, you give those distinctions power, and I didn’t want that to be a part of their thinking. That was then. Now, with the rap culture, and all culture, references such as light-skinned, big lips, good hair are everywhere, and my kids throw around that stuff, much to my dismay.

  I’ve also gone against common wisdom in the Black world: I don’t believe in teaching our kids that they have to be twice as good to get half the credit that White people do, although, too often, it’s true. I’ve always thought that passing on that thinking could create another form of mental slavery. One that says, the world is hostile and stacked against you and you better be a Super Nig to survive. Instead, I focused on my kids’ emotional lives, believing, as my mother did, that loving them hard and accepting who they were would shore them up. I tried to teach them about the roots of their people, stolen from Africa, and about being enslaved, not “slaves.” I learned early in my mothering journey that I have to teach them these things in a way that’s accessible and interesting, such as pointing out our people’s contribution to the larger contemporary culture.

  Whenever “Respect” would come on the radio, I’d ask them, “Who is the Queen of Soul?” From their car seats they’d recite, “Aretha Franklin.” Without this, they’d think the answer was Adele. I let them see her and all the other British and American singers give all praise to Aretha. I did the same thing with the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. And when Ford was little, I found a book in our wonderful local bookstore about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and how they acknowledged that they came to America to meet their idols, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Chuck Berry, whose music they readily admit that they copied. Cliff always pointed out Black inventors: Garrett Morgan, who invented the traffic light; Benjamin Banneker, who took over the architectural design of Washington, DC; and Lewis Howard Latimer, who improved the lightbulb. I didn’t stress, or even say, “White” or “Black” as an identifier around my children when they were young. I’m not sure why I did this, but I knew they’d get acquainted with this country’s race obsession soon enough. As it happened, Ford found out about it with much more force than Baldwin did.

  13

  Betrayed

  WHEN FORD was in preschool, his closest friend was an alpha male we’ll just call J. Once there was some discussion about who the leader of his preschool group would be. According to one of his teachers, Ford was the class favorite.

  “It’s as if they can’t start until Ford gets here in the morning,” she had said.

  I’d witnessed the elated cheers myself when dropping him off.

  “Ford’s here! Ford’s here!”

  I remember him in his little navy-blue quilted jacket, his little face showing no emotion. Just being his cool, slightly introverted self, which at fourteen, he still is. During the group discussion, J told Ford that he couldn’t be the leader because he didn’t have flat hair. Ford came home and told me this, and while he wasn’t upset, I could tell it was something he didn’t understand. I explained what J had meant by flat hair, and assured him that his classmate was completely mistaken. Two years later, when Barack Obama was elected president, my son said to me: “He’s the leader of the country and he doesn’t have flat hair.”

  “Yup, he has hair just like yours.”

  Ford in his lion costume, with Cliff.

  I assumed that by then he knew that Black people come with all kinds of hair textures and in all skin shades. Cliff and Baldwin are lighter-skinned, while Ford and I are darker-skinned, but I had never seen the purpose of introducing a discussion about our family’s range of complexions. Colorism is a poison that continues to hold Black folks shackled. If there were a reason it came up, we’d discuss it, although the first time I heard sixth grader Baldwin saying something about being light-skinned, as if it advantaged her in some way, I went ballistic. Her godmother, Joni, who was visiting from California at the time, had the same reaction but was able to explain calmly to Baldwin the history o
f such delineation and how that kind of thinking was designed to divide and conquer.

  Skin color hadn’t been discussed in my family of origin, either. I didn’t really notice difference in complexion until I was almost out of high school.

  The kids knew that Cliff was Black; at least Baldwin knew that.

  Ford . . . ?

  He was now in the fourth grade and they were learning about slavery. We keep a wall of pictures of ancestors in our family room. The pictures have been there as long as we’ve been in our house, fifteen years. Ford, who was nine at the time, had never seemed to notice the pictures, much less ask questions about them. One day I found him kneeling on the couch, which sits below the area where the photos hang, to get a closer look. He started asking questions about his grandparents, wanting to know if Grandma, my deep pecan–colored mother, had been a slave.

  “No, sweetie, Grandma wasn’t enslaved, she’s not that old. When did President Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation?”

  He hunched and then beamed.

  “1865.”

  “So let’s do the math.”

  We wrote it down and subtracted the year my mother was born, 1925, from 1865. “So how long had slavery been over when she was born?”