And It Begins Like This. LaTanya McQueen
like to have spent a month living in a body that didn’t feel like her own, but how much of her body was ever her own? Considering the time, and the place, her life, how much agency could she have ever had?
This, I wonder.
Leanna lived for a month suffering from her burns before dying. She is buried in Rose Hill off of Highway 58. She has no tombstone.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I ignore it the first time and the second, but the third time I know it’ll continue unless I answer.
“I’m sorry,” I say, quickly taking my phone out to check the messages.
“You’re popular.”
“Not really.”
As I thought, it’s my best friend messaging me about tonight. He is wanting to know how it’s going, if it will continue. If I don’t respond he’ll assume this has led to sex, and later, tomorrow morning, he’ll message asking me to talk about it.
“You’re such a prude,” he will say when I don’t answer, and when I chastise him for it he’ll stop, but hanging in the air of our conversations will be this absence of the things I won’t say and the misunderstanding as to why.
There is a saying that a woman decides within the first few minutes of meeting a man if she wants to sleep with him, and even though I have decided there is a difference between desire and action, between what one wants and what one is willing to do, I know that no matter how the night swings I will go home alone.
As I sit across from this man though I wonder if maybe it is really the expectation of desire, that because we are here and we are the same race, these factors alone should be enough to warrant it, and just as quickly as I have made my decision I am now beginning to question the motivation behind my want.
When I look at my skin and remember the history, it goes down easier to believe that maybe Leanna’s relationship with this man was consensual because otherwise how do you make peace with such a past? How does one move on when the legacy is evident from a simple glance in the mirror?
I’m afraid that if the relationship was not consensual that her life becomes reduced to an archetype, but I must remember she was more than just an archetype. She was a woman who lived her life the best she could. She was a woman who managed to provide her children with the name of their father, so they would always know some semblance of their history. She was a woman who died a tragic death but not before fighting for her life all the way until the end.
Consider the woman known as Saartjie Baartman, or “little Sara” in Dutch. Saartjie Baartman’s birth name is unknown. The world knows her as Saartjie, or “little Sara,” the diminutive name establishing her status and her difference. Born on the southernmost tip of South Africa, known in the 18th and early 19th centuries as the Cape of Good Hope. She belonged to the heterogeneous indigenous group, the Khoikhoi. Dubbed the Hottentot Venus, her body was put on exhibition in London, displayed as a sexual curiosity, a freak of nature due to her size.
At No. 225 Piccadilly, members of the public could pay two shillings to view the “Hottentot Venus.” Up on a stage Baartman was made to walk, stand, or sit as she was led around by her keeper. She wore a skintight “dress resembling her complexion” to give the appearance of being undressed.
Four years after arriving in London, she was indentured to the animal trainer S. Réaux. S. Réaux displayed Baartman in Paris, drawing the attention of Parisian scientists, most specifically that of Georges Cuvier, who requested S. Réaux give a private showing. For three days Cuvier, along with an assortment of anatomists, zoologists, and physiologists, examined Baartman’s anatomy.
After she died, an artist was commissioned to make a plaster molding of her body, considered to be of “special scientific interest”. Baartman was dissected at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in front of an audience of scientists. Her skeleton was removed. Her brain and genitals extracted and pickled in jars. Her organs were submitted to the French Academy of Sciences. She was put on display at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle up until 1937 when Paris’s Musée de l’Homme was founded. Her remains and the plaster molding were displayed there up until the late 1970s.
Gold inscriptions of the French poet, Paul Valery, adorn the upper facade of the Musée de l'Homme. “Rare or beautiful things are wisely gathered here,” the English translation of one of the inscriptions begins, “teach the eye to see all things in the world as if never seen before.”
“I’m going to go back there,” I tell my godmother one night. “I’m going to go back and see if I can find the records, but also to see the land—the plantation Leanna lived on. I need to see it.”
“I don’t know why I’ve never tried. I’ve thought about doing it, not just trying to figure that out but really sitting down and outlining the whole line but—”
“But what?”
“Life, I think,” she says. “Plus there’s just too much trauma in that story I couldn’t bring myself to deal with it. Who knows anyway, maybe this task was always meant for you.”
If I’m honest with myself, this is not a task I want. I am not a historian. I know very little about archival research, and the idea of driving back to that area worries me, especially going alone. I also do not want to dwell in this past. It is too much to think about the injustices of my ancestors, but I find that despite my protests certain questions continue to infiltrate my life. I find myself circling back, and I know that the only way to get some sense of peace is to go.
“If you do end up going there you should also look into what your Uncle Pete said happened with the land. I’ve always wondered if what he said was true even though now I’m starting to believe that he was right.”
My godmother has brought this up a few times before. Her father, my great-uncle, had always argued that some of their land was stolen. After the death of his father, a couple of men came to the house asking his mother to see the deed. At the time she was a woman living alone with eight children in an area heavily dominated by the Klan, and out of fear she relented and gave them the deed. The men took it and when it was given back it was altered, changed to reflect less than half their number of acres.
I tell her about Ta-Nehisi Coates and his essay “The Case for Reparations.” “Yes, I want reparations,” she says, light-heartedly, although deep down I know she’s serious. “Yes, reparations for everything. All we lost. Someone should give him my number because I even know how it could be done.”
I do not need to tell you of all the ways in which black women’s bodies have been violated. From the auction block as women were stripped down, their bodies laid bare for the world to see and consume. The skin oiled so that it gleamed underneath the sun. The body was poked and prodded under the guise of an examination. Slave owners would knead women’s stomachs in an attempt to determine how many children they’d have. Some were subjected to experimental gynecological exams. They were sold and bought for breeding purposes, and those who couldn’t were beaten. The body classified and categorized.
Or the decades of rape. We remember Betty Jean Owens, Recy Taylor, and we say never again.
I do not need to explain about the more than 64,000 missing black women and children that have disappeared and the lack of investigations and the lack of outrage.
Or the decades of state-sponsored sterilizations of black and other women of color. A woman named Elaine Riddick was raped when she was thirteen. She was sterilized without her consent after the child was born. In the state eugenics board’s records she is described as “promiscuous,” using that as the basis for why she should be sterilized.
Perhaps you too are tired of seeing the images, of listening to these stories, and don’t need to hear me tell you about Daniel Holtzclaw, about his serial raping of at least thirteen black women. He preyed on them because they were poor and because they were black, because he had power and they had none, and because he knew, and what he convinced them to also believe, was that the world would not care.
I do not need to