When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost

by Joan Morgan

  But I was also a twenty-four-year-old who’d begun writing highly volatile articles on black male sexism and the conspiracy of protective silence that surrounds it. If I wasn’t going to call myself a feminist, I’d better come up with something. Folks like to know what to call you when they’re cussing you out.

  Thanks to Marc ChristianII I found this out with a quickness.

  Marc Christian was a sorcerer with a loft on the borderline of black Harlem and El Barrio. A photographer by trade, he was haunted by visions of unearthed black beauty, so he made a business outta making black folks beautiful. He called it “reminding them who they are.” In his unspectacular loft, with its dingy white walls and worn wood floors, Marc Christian worked magic on the regular. Boxers with badly bludgeoned faces were given the regality of Zulu warriors; nude brown girls with Hottentot asses made love to his lenses like they grew up finding themselves in Vogue; ciphers of old drunk men recovered bits of spirits long ago sent swimming in Wild Irish Rose bottles. All he asked in return was for a little bit of their souls. He usually got it. Marc Christian was highly skilled in the art of seduction and a very pretty nigga. So when he called talkin’ ’bout, “Yeah, baby, I read the article, your stunning debut. Now come bring your fine ass over here so I can talk to you ’bout this heavy shit you gettin’ into,” I dropped everything and jumped in a cab. Like most folks, I was defenseless against his juju.

  Truth be told I couldn’t wait to step into Marc Christian’s loft with some semblance of a creative identity. I remembered the many times I sat awestruck and envious while he and my lover parleyed with various members of New York’s Niggerati. I was hardly a member of that illustrious set, but for once “the work” was mine. I wanted to kick it with Marc up on his roof where the world was spread out like a humongous smorgasbord that extended as far as spirit, will, and appetite would take you. Of course, getting him to stop working would probably require some brujeria of my own but I was determined to have his undivided attention. As soon as I walked in the front door I knew this would not be the case. Marc Christian had company. Three men. Strangers who were expecting me.

  Foolishly, I’d forgotten Marc Christian occasionally satiated his hunger for drama by mixing highly incendiary elements. At his prompting, each one of the men had read the article and was prepared to do battle. I had no choice but to go for mine.

  “So you’re the sista who wrote the article?” asked the first, in a tone less curious than caustic. He was young. A Latino homeboy with ghetto allegiances and bohemian aspirations. He and his compadre—a Queens cutie with Trini roots—were Marc Christian’s newest apprentices. As fellow creative spirits they gave me my props for “getting the work out there.” They were upset, however, that my article didn’t emphasize the impact of the rape on their lives.

  It was a valid point. The city’s current climate was undeniably ill. The rape became a self-righteous hook that racists conveniently hung their prejudices on. Brothers all over were forced to watch powerless as the media reduced them to savages and white women gripped their pocketbooks even harder in fear. Faced with these brothers’ pain, it was easy to see why a critical article written by a black woman for a predominantly white paper felt not only traitorous but hurtful. Despite my convictions my Black Male Empathy Reflex was kickin’ like a motherfucka.

  Just as I began to question my ability to deal with such obviously divided loyalties Stranger #3 took center stage. He was in his early forties, some kinda horn player and bedecked in sixties attire, down to his illfitting high-waters. “Alla this was bullshit!” he declared ceremoniously and advised the young ones to step aside so he could “set the record straight.”

  Pausing only to hear the leftover conga beats that still played in his head, Money black-power-pimp strolled across the floor and kicked it faux Last Poets.

  My siss-tah, don’t you seee?

  You are be-ing yoused.

  Thisss is how the cracker da-feets

  the BLACK man every-time.

  He captures the minds

  of our women

  and uses them

  to speak out a-gainst us.

  Don’t you seeee.

  My siss-tah

  You are a tool of the white man . . .

  It’s been said Marc Christian could sometimes read minds so I offered him a piece of my own. Alright, you’ve had your fun. Now why don’t you reel your boy back in before he plays himself. You know damn well those wanna-be revolutionary theatrics are wasted on folks who were only around for five years of the sixties . . . His only reply was the hint of a grin.

  Unchecked, the asshole who considered himself the heavy artillery continued.

  My siss-tah my siss-tah my siss-tah

  Do ya even like men?

  ’cuz ya could be one a dem

  funny girls

  (UH-HUH, UH-HUH)

  then in that case you’d need something else to save ya

  (ha-ha)

  He said this of course, this little bit of a man (with feet and hands smaller than nobody’s business), as if I’d consider being mistaken for a lesbian an insult instead of an inaccuracy. For a second I couldn’t tell what pissed me off more, the assumption that any woman who is willing to call a black man out on his shit must be eating pussy or his depiction of me as a brainwashed Sappho, waving the American flag in one hand and a castrated black male penis in the other. As it turns out, there wasn’t time to decide; he finished his malediction by throwing down the gauntlet.

  Ya know Marc Christian?

  Ya know what we got here?

  my brotha

  We got us one dem

  FEM-in-ists.

  Are you a feminist

  my siss-tah? . . .

  And there it was, the f-word all up in my face daring me to blanket myself in the yarns I’d spun to justify my rejection. Go on, girl. Deny me and tell this fool about cha lover and the butch-cut white girls and see if he gives a fuck. Searching for a viable, less volatile alternative I did a quick mental check of the popular epithets. Strong Black Woman. Womanist. Warrior Woman. Nubian Queen. Bitch. Gangsta Bitch. Bitches With Problems. Hos With Attitude. None of them offered even the hint of protection.

  Finally, I realized that in the face of sexism it didn’t matter what I called myself. Semantics would not save me from the jerks I was bound to run into if I continued to do this for a living nor would it save women from the violence of teenage boys who suffered from their own misconceptions of power and manhood. If I truly believed that the empowerment of the black community had to include its women, or that sexism stood stubbornly in the way of black men and women loving each other or sistas loving themselves, if I acknowledged this both in print and in person then in any sexist’s eyes I was a feminist. Once I recognized these manifestations of black-on-black love as the dual heartbeats of black feminism, I was purged of doubt. I accepted his challenge with confidence.

  Since my sexual preference could not be of any relevance to you, whatcha really wanna know is how I feel about brothas. It’s simple. I love black men like I love no other. And I’m not talking sex or aesthetics, I’m talking about loving y’all enough to be down for the drama—stomping anything that threatens your existence. Now only a fool loves that hard without asking the same in return. So yeah, I demand that black men fight sexism with the same passion they battle racism. I want you to annihilate anything that endangers sistas’ welfare—including violence against women—because my survival walks hand in hand with yours. So, my brotha, if loving y’all fiercely and wanting it back makes me a feminist then I’m a feminist. So be it.

  As our cab made its way through the Harlem night, I’d asked Marc Christian if luring unsuspecting friends into the dens of wolves was a regular practice. He replied with a severity I’d never seen from him. “The article was damn good, but you are better. Your work comes from your heart and the truth is some powerful shit. That’s black magic. When people find out you got that they gonna keep trying to tear you apart. Yo
u already know you got skills. Tonight was about getting your cojónes.”

  The moment catapulted me across time and the bridge, back to my family’s small South Bronx apartment. I’d run upstairs one day to tell my mother about a bigger, older girl who kept threatening to kick my ass becuz our family dressed in clean clothes, spoke decent English, and dared not to be on welfare. My attempts to ignore her only infuriated her more and that day she pushed the issue by shoving me. I told my mother in the hopes she would go downstairs and hit her (and if need be her mother) or tell her to leave me alone. Instead, she said, “If she hits you again, fight her—pick up something if you have to—but if I hear you stood there and let her beat your ass I’m gonna come downstairs and beat yours.” And she went back to whatever she was doing. Minutes later, my nemesis hit me again, and I beat the child bloody.

  “So how did I do, Marc?” I asked in a voice that belonged more to the ten-year-old girl telling her mom the details of her battle than the young woman sitting next to him. “You mean the cojónes?” he said and let out a sorcerer’s laugh that charmed even the gypsy cab driver who’d been impatiently waiting for my departure. “Baby, you gonna be just fine. You got a bigger dick than most niggas I know.” And with that I said good night and tucked my friend’s departing words safely away in my treasure chest of talismans.

  * * *

  I. Not her real name.

  II. Not her real name.

  hip-hop

  feminist

  Much had changed in my life by the time a million black men marched in Washington. I no longer live in Harlem. The decision had less to do with gunshot lullabies, dead bodies ’round the corner, or the pre-adolescents safe-sexing it in my stairwells—running consensual trains on a twelve-year-old girl whose titties and ass grew faster than her self-esteem—and more to do with my growing desensitization to it all. As evidenced by the zombie-like stare in my neighbors’ eyes, the ghetto’s dues for emotional immunity is high. And I knew better than to test its capacity for contagion.

  So I broke out. Did a Bronx girl’s unthinkable and moved to Brooklyn—where people had kids and dogs and gardens and shit. And a park called Prospect contained ol’ West Indian men who reminded me of yet another home and everything good about my father.

  It is the Bronx that haunts me, though. There a self, long deaded, roams the Concourse, dressed in big bamboo earrings and flare-legged Lees, guarding whatever is left of her memories. I murdered her. Slowly. By sipping miasmic cocktails of non-ghetto dreams laced with raw ambition. I had to. She would have clung so tightly to recollections of monkey bars, sour pickles, and BBQ Bontons, slow dances to “Always and Forever,” and tongue kisses coquito sweet— love that existed despite the insanities and rising body counts—that escape would have been impossible.

  It is the Bronx, not Harlem that calls me back. Sometimes she is the singsong cadences of my family’s West Indian voices. Or the childhood memories of girls I once called friends. Sistas who refused the cocktail and had too many babies way too young. Sistas who saw welfare, bloodshed, dust, then crack steal away any traces of youth from their smiles.

  Theirs are the spirits I see darting between the traffic and the La Marqueta vibes of Fordham Road. Their visitations dog my equanimity, demanding I explain why this “feminism thing” is relevant to any of their lives. There are days I cannot. I’m too busy wondering what relevance it has in my own.

  . . . And then came October 16, the day Louis Farrakhan declared that black men would finally stand up and seize their rightful place as leaders of their communities. . . . It wasn’t banishment from the march that was so offensive—after all, black women have certainly convened at our share of closed-door assemblies. It was being told to stay home and prepare food for our warrior kings. What infuriated progressive black women was that the rhetoric of protection and atonement was just a seductive mask for good old-fashioned sexism. . . .

  Kristal Brent-Zooks, “A Manifesto of Sorts for a New Black Feminist Movement,” The New York Times Magazine1

  The “feminist” reaction to the Million Man March floored me. Like a lot of folks, I stayed home to watch the event. My phone rang off the hook—sista friends as close as round the corner and as far away as Jamaica moved by the awesome sight of so many black men of different hues, classes, and sexual orientations gathered together peacefully for the sole purpose of bettering themselves. The significance of the one group in this country most likely to murder each other—literally take each other out over things as trifling as colors or stepping on somebody’s sneakers—was not lost on us. In fact, it left us all in tears.

  Still, as a feminist, I could hardly ignore that my reaction differed drastically from many of my feminist counterparts. I was not mad. Not mad at all. Perhaps it was because growing up sandwiched between two brothers blessed me with an intrinsic understanding of the sanctity of male and female space. (Maintaining any semblance of harmony in our too-small apartment meant figuring out the times my brothers and I could share space—and the times we could not—with a quickness.)

  Perhaps it was because I’ve learned that loving brothers is a little like parenting—sometimes you gotta get all up in that ass. Sometimes you gotta let them figure it out on their own terms—even if it means they screw up a little. So while the utter idiocy inherent in a nineties black leader suggesting women stay home and make sandwiches for their men didn’t escape me, it did not nullify the march’s positivity either. It’s called being able to see the forest and the trees.

  Besides, I was desperately trying to picture us trying to gather a million or so sistas to march for the development of a new black feminist movement. Highly, highly unlikely. Not that there aren’t black women out there actively seeking agendas of empowerment—be it personal or otherwise—but let’s face it, sistas ain’t exactly checkin’ for the f-word.

  When I told older heads that I was writing a book which explored, among other things, my generation of black women’s precarious relationship with feminism, they looked at me like I was trying to re-invent the wheel. I got lectured ad nauseam about “the racism of the White Feminist Movement,” “the sixties and the seventies,” and “feminism’s historic irrelevance to black folks.” I was reminded of how feminism’s ivory tower elitism excludes the masses. And I was told that black women simply “didn’t have time for all that shit.”

  While there is undeniable truth in all of the above except the latter—the shit black women don’t have time for is dying and suffering from exorbitant rates of solo parenting, domestic violence, drug abuse, incarceration, AIDS, and cancer—none of them really explain why we have no black feminist movement. Lack of college education explains why ’round-the-way girls aren’t reading bell hooks. It does not explain why even the gainfully degreed (self included) would rather trick away our last twenty-five dollars on that new nineties black girl fiction (trife as some of it may be) than some of those good, but let’s face it, laboriously academic black feminist texts.

  White women’s racism and the Feminist Movement may explain the justifiable bad taste the f-word leaves in the mouths of women who are over thirty-five, but for my generation they are abstractions drawn from someone else’s history. And without the power of memories, these phrases mean little to nothing.

  Despite our differences about the March, Brent-Zooks’s article offered some interesting insights.

  . . . Still, for all our double jeopardy about being black and female, progressive black women have yet to galvanize a mass following or to spark a concrete movement for social change. . . . Instead of picking up where Ida B. Wells left off, black women too often allow our efforts to be reduced to the anti-lynching campaigns of the Tupac Shakurs, the Mike Tysons, the O. J. Simpsons and the Clarence Thomases of the world. Instead of struggling with, and against, those who sanction injustice, too often we stoop beneath them, our backs becoming their bridges. . . .

  Why do we remain stuck in the past? The answer has something to do with not just white rac
ism but also our own fear of the possible, our own inability to imagine the divinity within ourselves. . . .2

  I agree. At the heart of our generation’s ambivalence about the f-word is black women’s historic tendency to blindly defend any black man who seems to be under attack from white folks (men, women, media, criminal justice system, etc.). The fact that the brothers may very well be in the wrong and, in some cases, deserve to be buried under the jail is irrelevant—even if the victim is one of us. Centuries of being rendered helpless while racism, crime, drugs, poverty, depression, and violence robbed us of our men has left us misguidedly over-protective, hopelessly male-identified, and all too often self-sacrificing.

  And yes, fear is part of the equation too, but I don’t think it’s a fear of the possible. Rather, it is the justifiable fear of what lies ahead for any black woman boldly proclaiming her commitment to empowerment—her sistas’ or her own. Acknowledging the rampant sexism in our community, for example, means relinquishing the comforting illusion that black men and women are a unified front. Accepting that black men do not always reciprocate our need to love and protect is a terrifying thing, because it means that we are truly out there, assed out in a world rife with sexism and racism. And who the hell wants to deal with that?