And It Begins Like This. LaTanya McQueen
“Yes.”
“I want to ask—” and here it comes. I know the question before he even finishes, but he is looking at me and whatever expression on my face makes him stop. Instead, he tries a different tactic and softly mutters Spanish.
“What?”
“Oh,” he says, realizing his mistake, but the question is there and he still must know the answer. “I thought you were maybe one of my Dominican sisters? I’ve been hoping to find some of my people here in this town.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, then pick up another paper.
“So you’re not?” he continues, not taking the hint. “I mean, you’re not?”
“I’m black.”
“Really?” He draws the word out so it sounds more like an accusation than a question.
“Yes.”
This is the part where I’m supposed to offer up evidence. I’m supposed to explain how both of my parents were light-skinned, or mention how I have my mother's curls. I’ll explain how I have great aunts and uncles who passed, and the colorism issues most of us face, but by then I'll have gone on too long. I’ll have said too much. What will be wanted is an explanation, not an indictment or a history lesson on racial constructions.
This time though I say nothing. I reach for my wallet and take out a twenty, placing it on the counter. I grab my stack of papers and stand, leaving the bar and the man with just my simple answer, my affirmation—yes.
This time it is enough.
I spend my time now going through the Civil Action Court Records of North Carolina. They are searchable online. In this collection, spanning from 1709 to 1970, are records consisting of civil disputes pertaining to land ownership, unpaid debts, slave manumissions, divorces, and the legitimization of children born out of wedlock.
Somewhere buried in these pages of pages of documents I feel as if I’ll find my answer. If ever there was a place to look this is it—the answer to the name and how it came to be in my family.
Because I do not have a specific date to go by there are thousands of pages I must search. There are so many names. Some of the documents are faded and it’s difficult to see. My eyes squint trying to make out the cursive.
There is a chance I will go through all these and find nothing. Perhaps there was never anything to find.
Yet, I am here. At night when the world has quieted, I sit at my desk, coffee in hand. Each scan takes a few seconds to load and I wait and sip. Names flash across my screen—names of strangers, of brothers and sisters bonded together, of mothers and daughters, of fathers and sons, names of the searching, names of the lost, names waiting for someone who will one day find and claim them.
Before You Throw Her Body Down
In the bar’s bathroom I stand in front of the mirror and rub my lips together, pressing hard, smearing the color I’ve just applied. The color is a blueish red, a date-night color, from a tube of lipstick I’ve bought but never worn.
Tonight, I am here to meet a man. Some of his friends and some of my friends who know each other have suggested we meet. Partly, I suspect, because we are both black, and we are both single, and for them that is enough of a reason for why we should be together.
He is out there somewhere now, possibly already at the bar, possibly already searching among the other patrons for who I might be. Or he is standing outside waiting in the cold, the puffs of his breath dissipating as he looks up and down the streets watching to see who else comes to the door. He is out there and I am in this bathroom fooling with a color, and as I look at my reflection it is the only color I see.
Another woman comes inside and the disruption makes me blush. Quickly, I take a tissue from my bag, wet it, and wipe the lipstick off, the smear on the tissue a reminder. I wipe until there is nothing but the blank canvas of my mouth and then I leave to find the man I’m supposed to meet.
There is a story I must tell you and it begins like this—once, a woman once had a relationship with a man. Her name was a Leanna Brown and she was a slave to Bedford Brown and his family. Bedford Brown was Senator of North Carolina during the 1830s. Next to Brown’s plantation lived a man by the name of William Siddle. The two of them, Leanna and William, sometimes called Willie, had a relationship that resulted in at least two, possibly three children, and one of those children was my great-grandfather.
When I look at history, at the ways in which black women’s bodies have been treated and are continually treated, it is easy for me to look on this past and believe she was raped—that her children and their children and ultimately my own reason for existence, is because of this. It is easier to simplify their history, to make black and white a situation I don’t understand, but there is a fact that keeps me questioning, one I come back to time and time again. At least two of the children, born during Reconstruction, took his surname.
This fact leads me to believe that there is perhaps a different story than the one I’d originally believed.
“Even still,” my godmother says on the phone. I have called her again, as I periodically do when I need to ask another question about our past, or when in my scattered research stumble across another detail, another piece. She is a history professor and in my family is the only one I know left who can offer any clues or advice. “Even still, she was a woman and she was black. How much power could she have had, really?”
We are the only two black people in this bar. Typically, this is something I try not to pay attention to. In college I was the only black female in all of my classes and during graduate school I was the only black person until the last class before I graduated. In my doctorate program, I am one of five other black students—two I rarely ever see on campus, me, and two new students, one of which is the man I am now meeting. With him though I am made aware. Experience has taught me that when you are the anomaly in your life’s surroundings you teach yourself to ignore it. With him though, I begin questioning the side glances of the others around us as we settle into our seats. The smirk of the bartender after I try to get his attention—or was it just my imagination? There is a heightened awareness to every interaction, and yet still I fear misjudging the situation. When the bartender fails to bring back my tequila, when after taking my card he goes to make several other drinks from the people sitting near me, I remind myself that my annoyance is an overreaction, and even if it was justified, I should hold my tongue. Every action, every moment is an opportunity to prove that I am something more than the possible assumptions and beliefs of my race, and so I am patient and I smile and eventually my drink does come.
The prevalent “darky” icon, popular in 19th-century post-Civil War comic strips, ads, cartoons, books, and toys, was depicted with skin the color of ink, had bright white teeth, wide open eyes, and deep red lips. The darky was nostalgic for the old South, before war had destroyed his plantation home.
Blackface minstrelsy used the image of the “happy-go-lucky darky” in their caricatured portrayals of African Americans. Blackface helped propagate other stereotypes that have been long-lasting in our culture—the buck, the Uncle Tom, the Zip Coon, the pickaninny, and for women, the tragic mulatta, the mammy, and the wench/jezebel.
In blackface minstrelsy, the jezebel was promiscuous and immoral. She was a temptress, a counter depiction to the pure, modest, and self-controlled white woman. “Black women are jezebels,” was the excuse slave owners gave when they raped them.
The jezebel archetype far precedes its 19th-century application to black women. In the Bible, Jezebel was the wife of King Ahab of Israel. She was a Phoenician who worshipped gods other than Yahweh. She used her influence on her husband to spread idol worship of her gods Baal and Asherah in Israel. Jezebel was murdered by the general Jehu, who after overtaking their land and the anointed king ordered her eunuchs to throw her out the palace window. Because she was an idolater and a temptress, she was killed, her body consumed by dogs.
Of course, there is another