FROM ISSUE #55: MEMOIR
EMILY BERNARD is the author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine. Her work has appeared in the TLS, the American Scholar, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Yale Review, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essays have been reprinted in the Best American Essays and Best African American Essays series, as well as The Best Creative Nonfiction: Volume 2. She teaches at the University of Vermont.
BLACK HISTORY
One day, two years ago, when my twin daughters were six, they were watching television. It was February, Black History Month. A commercial came on. It was more like a thirty-second history lesson, the commemoration of a pilot, a poet, or a politician—a First Black, as a writer I know used to call them. Them being the racial pioneers, the inaugural Negroes, the foremost African Americans to break through racial barriers in their chosen fields. By break through, of course, I mean secure the regard of white people.
“See, we’re black,” Giulia said to Isabella.
“No, we’re brown,” Isabella responded.
“Yeah, but they call it black,” Giulia explained.
Despite my efforts to shield them, it seemed, my daughters had somehow gotten wise to the absurd and illogical nature of American racial identity. Blackness, Giulia had figured out, had nothing to do with actual skin color. Blackness, she had come to understand, was an external identity, external to her anyway. Race was something other people identified, something they said but didn’t necessarily see. Blackness, she had intuited, was a social category—not a color, but a condition. And like it or not, she was informing her sister, it was time to get with the proverbial program. In spite of me, but also because of me, my brown daughters were becoming black.
My heart sank.
It was not blackness per se that caused my heart to sink. I am black. I enjoy being black. But it took me a long time to get here, to this place of racial pleasure. My earliest experiences of blackness were defined by an unpleasant and uncomfortable hyper-vigilance. Being black meant you had to be constantly aware; you could never really be at ease. Being black in a white place was
