Guidebook to Relative Strangers Read online

  When you belong, you can overlook the totality of otherness, the way that being other pervades every aspect of a person’s life. That night in the New York artists’ retreat, I wasn’t yet worried about how all this willful ignorance and erasure would affect my little black girl, as yet unconceived. I was only concerned with myself. I was thinking about how race directs the course of all my actions. My taste in films, who I befriend, the things I choose to write about, all are influenced by the particular position (or number of positions) I occupy in American culture. My otherness manifests itself in what I eat, what I watch, what I read, what lipstick I can wear, where I can walk unmolested.

  Our conversation happened to take place in a privileged space—where the work requested of me was to think and to write—but I have had similar conversations at the office, the grocery store, at church, the nail salon, while washing dishes (my own and other peoples’), at the gas station, the dentist’s, a Super Bowl party, in restaurants and bars, with my daughter’s child-care providers, with supervisors who would oversee the advancement of my career, with roommates or lovers with whom I was expected to share my nights and days, during long walks on the beach, and in heated interactions over the copy machine. This is a set of exchanges you can’t get away from if you live in America in a body that looks like mine.

  “Look,” I said. I was in the conversation now. I might as well try to help Seattle prove her point. “I am the only black person at this table, which means that I have become the representative of blackness here.”

  “I don’t see you as a black woman. You’re just who you are.” Long Island’s nod of support suggested that Pacific Palisades had taken the words from between her pink-glossed lips.

  I’ve made the readjustment almost completely now, I wrote a friend after I’d been back from Ghana awhile. I am feeling very American again. Being home means being able to predict the direction an argument will take.

  I am certainly who I am (an ornery individual at the moment), though I take umbrage at the idea of limiting my scope with a word like just when it is used to suggest I am a simple person. If I may borrow a phrase from the great poet of our early democracy, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Just in this context erases various complexities and dimensions of my being. There is a danger in refusing to, or tacitly agreeing not to, recognize my black womanness. Black womanness is part of what makes me the unique individual I am. To claim you do not recognize that aspect of my personhood and insist, instead, that you see me as a “regular” person suggests that in order to see me as regular some parts of my individual identity must be nullified. Namely, the parts that aren’t like you. This argument has been made before. I made it again.

  “The fact of the matter is that I am the only person of color at this table. The fewer people there are to represent a particular segment of a population, the less likely it is that accurate, or diverse, perceptions will be drawn about that population.” And the more likely, I thought but did not say, that one individual will be asked to speak for the lot. I was in this odd position of both defending and shaking my claim as spokeswoman for the race because someone singled me out. This happened, in turn, because another outsider felt compelled to justify her (hitherto private) decision not to see a film at which she took offense. Seattle was lesbian spokeswoman for the night, and as resident black girl, mouthpiece for the disenchanted masses, I was called upon to back her up.

  When you are a conscientious outsider, dinner can be a dangerous and tiring affair.

  When I first got back from Ghana, I was ready to turn around and go right back. I had felt a sense of comfort and freedom there that surpassed any happiness I’d known before. There is something undeniably relaxing about being phenotypically one of many (or most) rather than one of few (if any). Perhaps it would be a more stable world if everyone could experience both the sensation of oneness and that of otherness a few times in life. A person who isn’t reminded several times a day about the implications of the color of her skin has time to consider the implications of other things. Having lived a life where my outsider status is called to my attention on a regular basis, it was a noted pleasure to blend into the crowd. In Ghana, I was left free to discover the possibilities of so much unmolested psychic space.

  The artists’ colony is constructed to serve a similar goal: to provide a space in which the creative mind can roam unfettered. But considering the conversations that implicated me at dinner, over ping-pong, while walking up the stairs to my bedroom, or while waiting for my breakfast egg, it was difficult to let my mind feel at ease.

  There were two sources of experience for the poems I found myself writing at the colony. One set of poems was based on narratives of black people held in or self-emancipated from slavery. The other poems were about visiting the giant fortresses on the coast of Ghana, from whence slave ships left for the Americas. This work was a startling reminder of the many implications and tolls of otherness and erasure.

  At breakfast one morning, several of the guests waxed delighted about how their rooms were cleaned regularly, “as if by fairies.” We were living in a mansion. So as to allow us time to create, our meals were cooked for us, our bathrooms scrubbed. We were invited, for the duration of our stay, to behave as if the mansion and its amenities were our own.

  There is something about privilege that can place one in a position to erase the realities of others. Those weren’t fairies pushing the vacuum cleaner and cleaning my tub. They were women with lives and flesh and families and histories. My life and flesh and family and history demand that I recognize them where and how I can.

  MANIFEST

  I can say: That is a hawk. But not: red-tailed, red-shouldered. I can say: deer. But not: white-tailed. I can say robin. I can say raven. I can say bird, but not: bunting, wren, warbler. Sometimes: gerbera daisy. Sometimes: crimson glory rose. But not the name of the creeper that edges my neighbor’s lawn or the flowering stands near the car park.

  I can say blackberry in every season: fruit, flower, and vine. I can say poison oak. I can say: Watch out for the thistle. But not what the berries are that grow at the base of the park’s redwood trees. (I can say redwood. I can say Sequoia sempervirens.)

  I can say: California poppy, nasturtium, tiger lily. Eastern fox squirrel (like me, not native). I know so much about this part of California, but if I had to make my way to you by naming everything that I encountered, I’d never make it home.

  I want to say border collie, not just dog. I want to say king snake, not just snake. I want to say aloe and agave, not just cactus, which would, anyway, be imprecise. I notice, now more than ever, what I don’t know, and what I want to know, and what I want to share with you, Callie Violet. I want to name the world correctly. One day this will be your language, and I will have been the first to present it to you.

  •

  THERE IS A STORY I HEARD, when you were the tiniest baby, about a waiting room in someplace close to Heaven. After death, that is where people go to wait to be forgotten. A place where people would want to stay for a while. No one wants to be immediately forgotten. Family might reunite in the room, if I remember the story correctly. I imagine enemies would confront each other there, too.

  When we mourn, we give memory a name, and in this room those memories were corporeal. It feels like a long time ago, when you were the tiniest baby and I listened to the story while we drove from one place to another.

  For a while, the bodies thought it was nice to be in the waiting room. It was nice to be remembered. But after a while, names lose meaning. Living speakers stop associating some real body with the body’s name. In the waiting room in the place close to what we might call Heaven, a man who drowned in a New England well waits to be forgotten, while every day a tour guide on some idyllic college campus walks by the well and repeats, with less tenderness than she bestows upon the well stones, the still-not-completely-forgotten man’s name.

  Naming is a kind of claiming. In the Judeo-Christian tradition that i
s your inheritance, Adam named all the birds and beasts of the world, including Eve. Even after his exclusion from the Garden, even after the all-consuming loss he suffered when he acquired the deeper knowledge that brought on his expulsion from Eden—and hardship and death—Adam possessed the names of everything with which he’d once shared uncomplicated communion. The ability to name even a lost world keeps that world alive. I imagine this was both painful and potent for Adam, who, like the drowned man in the story I only half recall, must have wanted some days to return completely to the world he remembered. That world was gone, though. In reality, if not in memory, his past was irrevocably erased.

  •

  YOU ARE NAMED CALLIE VIOLET after my grandmother, Callie Madge, and your father’s grandmother, Violet. You are my grandmother’s first great-grandchild, and there was no question that you would be Callie. My grandmother’s grandmother was also a Callie, and now our family spans three centuries through one name.

  It was the continuity I wanted. Persistence personified.

  Some people are surprised I named you after someone who was still alive. What if the angel of death came for the old one, got confused, and took you instead? I want to say this never occurred to me. But sometimes I worry that I left no room for you, my daughter, in this old woman’s name.

  When you came to be outside my body, the name we bound you to seemed limiting.

  I call you Abena because you were born on a Tuesday. I call you Abeni because the name means we asked for her and she has arrived. These are Fante and Yoruba names, for these, too, might have been your people.

  The next time I hold you, I call you Butter Bean because, when you were a newborn package of squirm and gas smiles—my stinky little Cochina—you, like three of your great-grandmothers before you, were the color of a butter bean.

  There is no escaping history.

  Your aunt calls you Minukee, a Louisiana Creole endearment with Afro-indigenous roots. She calls you mon petite chou, my little cabbage, my precious little girl.

  Because you coo-coo-coo in the morning, you are my Mourning Dove. Not just any old bird.

  Your godmother calls you the Boo Boo, because that is what her father called her and so that is how she knows to show you love. Your grandfather, using all your initials, calls you CVDB. I call you CV.

  I call you Argentina, because I do not want you to cry. Your father calls you Little Bit.

  The act of naming who you are to us may never end.

  •

  I WALK WITH YOU DAILY because the confines of our apartment are too small.

  I point out the trees we walk beneath: plum, crab apple, lemon, mulberry. Eat this, not that, eat this not that, I tell you, as if it is never too early to teach you what might cause you the most harm.

  I want you to know a violet when you see one, Callie Violet, and though they are lovely, just as you are lovely, I want you to know the calla lilies growing in every other Bay Area garden have nothing to do with your name.

  Rhododendron, rose, I say, daisy, daisy, chrysanthemum.

  White flower, purple flower, pretty yellow flowers, because I cannot name them all. The walk is long, the hill is steep, and I am often out of breath.

  •

  MA MA MA MA MA MA MAMA is your latest sound, and I’ve known better than to think that when you made that sound you made it for me. But today you looked at me when you said, Ma Ma Mama, and when I came toward you and lifted you up off your play mat, you giggled and repeated the words that had brought me to you: Ma Ma Mama. And just that quickly, I had a name.

  The jury is still out on whether your infant brain can consciously drive action in the way that my brain receives the things I see. A jellyfish swimming in my direction is not consciously moving toward me. A mosquito who favors my skin over your father’s may be responding to higher levels of carbon dioxide, not making a statement about my relative sweetness. In both cases, the hard-line objectivist will assure me that what might feel like intentional attention is not. Electrical signals, hormonal imperatives, these drive action. Not emotion or reason or thought.

  These same hard-line objectivists are liable to tell me that animals do not feel in the same way humans feel. Without the capacity for language, a dog or a whale or a stork is incapable of human emotion. To say a stork is sad when it loses its mate is to risk anthropomorphizing, to lose scientific objectivity, and to falsify the intellectual potential of the stork. But I will not make distinctions between emotional capacities based solely upon what we know of language. I know the orphaned elephant wakes with nightmares, knowing what happened to her herd, and mourning that loss. This is why the caregivers of orphaned elephants sleep with the foundlings, so they do not have to wake up afraid and alone. I know that whales express gratitude when released from a bind. I know that captive baboons store anger and express it, intentionally, with the calculated hurling of poop.

  I know that you are only now acquiring English, after hearing us speak it during your six months out of the womb and forty weeks inside. I know that the Ma sounds, like the Da sounds from earlier this month, are merely your way to explore the range of sounds available to you. When the sounds first started, I had no illusions that you meant anything by the expressions. But I know, also, that you are smarter than I have the capacity to understand, and I know that when you look at me and make a sound, and when I recognize the sound and respond, and when you repeat my new name without losing eye contact, this is not an accident. And I am filled with unspeakable gladness.

  •

  ONE OF THE EASIEST WAYS to strip a person of her power is to take away her right to choose her name.

  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, chronicles an eighteenth century man’s journey from an African (Igbo) boyhood through the seas and hands and lands of Europe and its colonies. In the book, the young protagonist is forced to answer to at least four different names. In his own abolitionist autobiography, Frederick Douglass writes about resisting renaming. So do Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs, and characters imagined—with the help of a narrative written by Josiah Henson—by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Abolitionist literature is riddled with stories of people who recognize that freedom is measured, in part, by the freedom to choose one’s own name.

  When we take a man’s name, he disappears. Sleeping car porters in the twentieth century were referred to, by white passengers in the segregated train cars where these porters worked, as “George.” This is if they were referred to by any name at all other than “boy” or “you there” or some more brutally dismissive term. A man in prison is sometimes known only by his number. In many morgues, a body without a history is called John or Jane Doe.

  At some point you will decide what the world should call you. Callie or Callie Violet or some other, as yet undetermined, name. I can’t know what the future will name you, but when I call you Sweet Pea or Turtle Dove, Abena or Pumpkin, Callie Violet or my sweet girl, I do it always in the same tone, so you have learned to turn when I speak. I think you turn not to the names but to the sound of my voice when I speak your many names, the sound I hope you already recognize means you are truly and completely loved.

  •

  I LOVE WHEN YOU NOTICE ME, when you direct a new skill toward me as if to purposefully engage me in your growth. When you learned to kiss me, I felt as if every expression of love I’d ever directed toward you had been returned sevenfold. Now you pull my face toward yours and, with your mouth wide as a whale shark’s, smooch my chin or cheek or forehead, whatever part of my face happens to be near. This must be what my mouth feels like on your face, my lips covering huge portions of your skin. Yesterday, you pulled back and reapplied your smooch several times, as if to duplicate my muah muah muahs. Sevenfold times sevenfold times sevenfold, that blessing.

  When you meet someone new, you meet them as a blind person might meet someone who matters. You lift your little hand to the new face and work it over the eyes and the nose, the mouth, the cheeks. You learn
the contours of the primary points of interaction, and when you are satisfied with what your hands have learned, you smile, maybe even coo. This is how you say hello to strangers and to whatever it is we parents and guardians are to you. Lovers? We kiss you so much, cuddle you and caress you, we love on you. Sometimes your kisses catch me full on the lips, and I wonder when I will need to teach you not to show your affection in this way. I try to turn my face lest my hunger for your displays of affection appear indecent.

  We are not supposed to conflate these two worlds of physical affection: the kisses and intimate touches of the lover of the body and the kisses and intimate touches of the lover of the babe. But it is like that. I take big whiffs off the top of your head, let your hair tickle my chin. I want you close close closer. When I am with you, mon petite chou, I feel good good and close and happy. I’m not talking about a kind of sexual good good feeling, though what I am talking about is mixed up in the same general neighborhood, which is why this feels like such a dangerous thing to be saying, to be feeling, to be acting upon. I’m talking about a good good feeling. A forever kind of good feeling. A whatever you need, whatever you want, take it, I don’t ever intend to be too far from you again good feeling. I’m talking about feeling like you make me feel—you make my brain and my heart feel—better than I’ve ever felt.