And It Begins Like This. LaTanya McQueen
Ahab’s dynasty. She knew that for Jehu to succeed, he would have to murder every member of Ahab’s family, and as Jehu made his way to Jezreel, Jezebel dressed herself in the makeup and head-dress of her gods. Her makeup and adornments were not last-ditch efforts of seduction but an attempt to meet her death with dignity, to die being seen as what she rightfully was—a queen.
The man I have come here to meet is gregarious and warm. At one point during the evening he offers to stand, giving up his seat so another couple can sit together, but when one of them looks and sees me she declines. “You were here already,” she says, despite his protests.
“I’m pretty docile in my personality,” he tells me afterward as a sort of explanation. “You know, black man in a white college town and all. I guess you have to be.”
“I understand,” I say.
He asks me what it’s like living in this town, and I struggle to find an answer. I don’t know him well enough to tell him the truth. I don’t explain about the program, about the casual racism present despite my false assumption our peers should behave better. I also don’t mention the overt racism prevalent not just in the town but in the surrounding areas.
“Where’d you live before here?” I ask instead, changing the subject.
“California,” he says.
“You should have stayed in California.”
“Racism exists there too.”
“Yeah, I know, but better weather.”
“True,” he says, nodding. “You know what? It doesn’t seem that bad here. I mean, I could be wrong, but it seems mostly okay?”
Because I can’t take it anymore, I tell him about the cotton balls. Two students who were arrested for putting cotton balls in front of the Black Culture Center on campus. I tell him about the slurs spray-painted to mock Black History Month. I tell him about the swastika drawn on the wall in one of the dorms. There is a tension on the campus, I say, and it has existed for quite a while, even before I came here, and it is building.
It has not happened yet, but in a few weeks that tension will reach a breaking point with protests that will make national news, heightening the ways in which I perceive myself to be seen.
“It’s not that bad though, or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it all,” I finally answer, and he laughs, seeing immediately through my lie.
For black women, if you’re not the Jezebel then you are the mammy, desexualized but still an object. Always, you are the object, maybe not of sexual desire, but still a reduction of who you are.
Never mind that the idea of the mammy—dark-skinned, overweight, and middle-aged—is a construction having no real basis in history. Female house slaves during slavery were light-skinned, of mixed race, and thin. They weren’t old considering that fewer than ten percent of black women lived beyond fifty years of age. The caricature that’s been so culturally ingrained—from the image of Aunt Jemima popular on pancake mixes for decades, to Hattie McDaniel’s portrayal in Gone With the Wind—were, and have always been, fictions created to soothe.
We are Jezebels or we are mammies, or we are Sapphires or tragic mulattas. We are the gold-digger, the angry black woman, or the welfare queen. Object or abject, we are always one or the other, but always considered an Other.
“So have you dated anyone here?”
“No,” I say, already feeling defensive.
“No one?”
“No.”
He pushes for an answer as to why, an answer I’m unwilling to give. It’s too early in the evening for such a conversation. A few weeks earlier I was at a bar and a man, in his mid-forties, came up to order a drink. He smiled and said hello in my direction and out of politeness I nodded back. This provoked him to conversation and then to offer to buy me another unasked-for drink.
“You know,” he said, leaning closer, “I’ve always liked the coloreds. I’ve always wanted to date one.”
These men aren’t unusual. They aren’t specific to Missouri where I am now, but have been in Massachusetts and North Carolina and Kentucky, all the places I’ve lived. They are sometimes older, men who want to reenact some racial fantasy of their dreams, but sometimes they are younger, curious about what it’s like.
It is tiring, I want to say, all the ways in which you’re seen.
“I guess there aren’t many black people here to date,” he says.
“No, there aren’t.”
Perhaps this is why I have dolled myself up for this. Because for the first time in a long while I’d be on a date where I knew I wouldn’t be made to feel like an object. For an evening I would be with someone who understands our history, who understands what it’s like to navigate this world. Perhaps this is why I had stayed so long in front of the bathroom mirror, and why I had taken out that tube of lipstick, putting it on carefully, wanting for the first time in a long while for my intention to be known.
But in the end I had smeared my lips clean. Too afraid in the end, even to someone who might understand, of how it might appear.
Saturday mornings I get in my car and drive. There’s an antique store just on the outskirts of the Missouri town in which I live, and to kill some of the hours of my day I decide to go.
There in the middle of the store is a doll. Black onyx skin. Wide red lips. Knotted black hair. A pickaninny doll. I’m so taken aback that I stop and stare at it. The doll is predominantly displayed on top of a chest of drawers for sale.
The male clerk at the front of the store catches me staring. “You thinking about buying it?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“It looks pretty taken care of. Good condition.”
This exchange is too much. He is unaware of the symbolism of the doll, of what it signifies, or maybe he is perhaps pretending in an attempt to make a sale.
“I think I’m going to pass,” I tell him.
“You sure? You seem like you want it.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I say, and then head for the door.
The next day I go back and thankfully someone else is working. I pay for the doll quickly, saying as little as possible to the clerk as she places it in a plastic bag.
I bought the doll for the sole purpose of trashing it. I wanted to feel some sort of vindication as I took it apart, disassembled its limbs, cut to shreds the fabric of its clothes, but when I got it home I couldn’t do it. How often our history has been erased, sanitized, perverted and disguised. The ugliness forgotten and what’s left is its echo reverberating in all the ways we are forced to understand ourselves.
I don’t get rid of the doll. Instead, I put it in a box in my closet where it sits now.
I’m not sure I’ll ever have children, but if I do one day when they’re older I’ll take the doll out and say, “Look. This is how they used to see you. This was what they thought of us. Do you understand? So you must always be careful, always be aware of how the world sees you, will continue to see you. It’s not right, but like anything, it is what it is.”
Leanna Brown’s death certificate says she died of “tragic burns to the neck and shoulders.” This detail has kept me awake at night—the grotesque images it conjures because of the description’s simplicity. I’ve spent far too long considering the different possibilities in an attempt to understand, but there is no understanding such a horror, no matter the answer.
“You might never know, and you’re going to have to be okay with that,” my godmother says when I call her to tell her about this new piece of information.
I’m not ready for such a resolution, not of her death nor of the mysteries surrounding her life.