Don't Let It Get You Down

‘In these thrilling essays, built with one blazing, breathtaking sentence after another, Savala Nolan takes us from the personal to the political and back again as she explores her fascinating range of experiences as a Black American woman. Authoritative, honest, and often bitingly humorous, Don’t Let It Get You Down is a book for our time and every time. It is not a book to read; it is a book to savour.’

Emily Bernard

, author of Black is the Body

‘It takes temerity to tell this kind of truth, to be unbowed by one’s own trepidation. Savala Nolan does so boldly, and this book will help so many Black women to get free.’

Brittney Cooper

, New York Times

bestselling author of Eloquent Rage

‘I like the voice and intelligence with which these essays come together … this is a vibrant and thoughtful collection of essays.’

Roxane Gay

, author of New York Times

best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist

‘In gorgeous prose and with profound clarity, Savala Nolan reckons with the interconnected oppressions, external and internalized, that have burdened her body: anti-blackness, fat phobia, colonialism, and patriarchy. Don’t Let it Get You Down is vital reading for all of us working to bust out of boxes, binaries, silences, and shame.’

Nadia Owusu

, author of Aftershocks

‘In this woven tapestry of stories and histories of race, gender, class, and the body, Savala Nolan gives readers a deeply personal insight into what it feels like to hold identities that are seen as other in dominant culture. For those of us who feel like in-betweeners this powerful collection of poetic essays offers a place to be seen and to be heard in the fullness of our beautiful complexities. In reading Savala’s words as she travels to understand her experiences, and free herself from the parts that oppress, I found myself saying, Wow. Yes. Me too.’

Layla F. Saad

, author of New York Times

bestseller Me and White Supremacy

‘Savala Nolan deals a blow to the hollow—and very white—rhetoric of the body positivity movement with her essay collection, offering up her own stories of living in a body that are nuanced and warm, funny and painful.’

Marisa Meltzer

, author of This is Big

‘[A] standout collection … Nolan is writing into a long tradition, and its contemporary renaissance … This embrace of the heterogeneity of Black womanhood is part of this book’s charm. Another part is the author’s voice—vulnerable, but rarely veering into self-indulgence.’

The New York Times

‘A deeply personal debut collection … the mix of cultural criticism and thoughtful personal writing will be just right for fans of Roxane Gay.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Savala Nolan explores her intersectionality of race, gender and body awareness with an unflinching honesty that is both revelatory and unsettling. The essays are personal and confessional but informed by an awareness of larger historical narratives rooted in American culture.’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘It is a heavy book that takes aim at many of the issues facing so many people (and, in particular, Black women) today, but it is also a book that contains moments of pure joy, laughter, and insight. Not only is Don’t Let It Get You Down an important read, but it is also a delightful one that shows just how multitalented and impressive the author is when taking on subjects that resonate inside of her but also in the bodies and minds of her readers as well.’

Shondaland.com

THE INDIGO PRESS

50 Albemarle Street

London

W1S 4BD

www.theindigopress.com

The Indigo Press Publishing Limited Reg. No. 10995574

Registered Office: Wellesley House, Duke of Wellington Avenue

Royal Arsenal, London SE18 6SS

COPYRIGHT © SAVALA NOLAN 2021

This edition published in Great Britain in 2022 by The Indigo Press

Savala Nolan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in the United States in 2021 by Simon & Schuster

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Names and identifying characteristics of some individuals have been changed.

Previous versions of ‘Dear White Sister’ and ‘Fat in Ways White Girls Don’t Understand’ ran in Bust Magazine

Excerpts from SHADES OF BLACK by Sandra L. Pinkney. Text copyright © 2000 by Sandra L. Pinkney. Reprinted by permission of Scholastic Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-911648-43-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-911648-44-4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Cover design © Luke Bird

Cover artwork © Diana Ong

Art direction by House of Thought

Author photo © Andria Lo

Interior design by Carly Loman

eBook by Tetragon, London

For Mom

For Dad

Contents

Introduction

On Dating White Guys While Me

Don’t Let It Get You Down

White Doll

Dear White Sister

Bad Education

To Wit, and Also

State

Nearly, Not Quite

On the Sources of Cultural Identity

The Body Endures

Fat in Ways White Girls Don’t Understand

Little Satin Bomber Body

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

‌

Introduction

In 1997, at the age of sixteen, I left my home in California to spend the summer in New York City. I stayed in the luxurious apartments of the prep school kids I’d befriended that spring at the Mountain School, an idyllic, warmhearted, working farm in Vermont where we’d all participated in an elite semester-long program for high school juniors. I wore size 26 pants—that’s a women’s plus-size 26—sported worn-out cornrows and acne, and had divorced parents and no money. Except for my mind—which got me into an exclusive program like the Mountain School—I was nothing like the Manhattan teenagers who hosted me, who lived in apartments with staff entrances and Picassos hung casually in hallways, who carried twenty-dollar lip balm and had faces as clear and cared-for as pearls, who were both profligate and cheap in the unusual way of the wealthy, thinking nothing of three-hundred-dollar dinners yet walking an extra four blocks to buy the cheapest pack of cigarettes.

I think our friendships were real. I think they loved me, and it was mutual. But I can never know how much of their love was tethered to the sheer delight and surprise of meeting a fat brown girl on scholarship who could quote Wordsworth, whose family came to America in the 1600s, who wore preppy clothes, even if big. Whether our friendships were deeply honest or a little bit rotten, when we hung out I always felt I was listening—eavesdropping—from another room, ear pressed to the wall. They were tip-top upper class; I was with them, but not of them. I heard what they said and, like a spy, observed how they moved, their words and actions rich with layers of meaning even they didn’t understand because fish never fully understand the water. That summer’s experience, when I felt my incredible proximity to power but also my irreconcilable distance from it, has stayed with me. It has, in fact, been one of the defining dynamics of my life.

I call myself in-between: I’m a mixed Black woman and what folks have sometimes called a whole lot of yellow wasted, meaning I have light (yellow) skin wasted by Black features (kinky hair, broad nose). I’m Mexican on my dad’s side, but I don’t speak Spanish. I’m descended from enslaved people on my dad’s side, but slaveholders on my mom’s side. Their progeny disowned her and her future kids when she married a Black man. I’m a Daughter of the American Revolution. My mom completed graduate school, as did I; my dad didn’t finish elementary school and spent nearly twenty years incarcerated (a few years here, a few years there). I started my first diet at age three or four, and have been painfully thin and truly fat, multiple times, for thirty years, which is to say I know things about womanhood that you can’t know if your body is normal or your weight hasn’t fluctuated wildly. I’m a lawyer, and in law school I worked for the United States Attorney’s Office and the Obama administration, and as a child I watched my dad deal cocaine to pay child support. I went to tony private schools and grew up in Marin County, which had the world’s highest per capita income in those days; I also sometimes spent weekends with my dad, who was so poor we went to the bathroom in buckets under a ceiling hole repaired with a tarp.

This book began as a way to process my own dislocation, as the kind of cartography we all do to address certain ambiguities in our lives. Ultimately, it is about living between society’s most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces: between Black and white, between rich and poor, between thin and fat (as a woman). It’s about the processes of growing up, dating, working, mothering, and self-discovering while occupying these interstitial identities. I live on the balcony and the dance floor at the same time, and my story is rooted in my body: a brown, female, and currently fat body the world more or less despises, and onto which the culture ascribes a bizarre constellation of faults, sins, fates, and histories; and also a body with light-skin privilege, and access to thin privilege, and which has successfully carried me through elite spaces from the White House to Park Avenue apartments. Through the eyes of my body, I see the world’s dominant cultures and subordinated cultures as an insider and an outsider at once. I wrote this book to illuminate these dominant and subordinated spaces, and the space that both separates and binds them. I wrote it to articulate a space in between.

‌

On Dating White Guys While Me

Holt was a catch and I thought maybe we were heading somewhere, but then I saw his feet, and they were beautiful, unlike mine. Dating requires intimacy: bare feet, side by side, maybe touching at the foot of a bed, in the sand, the grass. I did not want to place my feet next to his.

His feet were smooth and well-shaped as if carved from marble, with neat cuticles and nails filed symmetrically. When I saw them I thought, They’re like David’s right foot! Years before, I’d sketched David’s feet in charcoal, full of hope, the filtered light as gentle as a powder puff in the Florentine museum, a hushed flow of tourists and art students around me. I wish I’d sketched the slaves and their pocked granite confines instead, but back then, in the spring of 2002, it was David who spoke to me. He was being cleaned with water and Q-tips, by erudite Italians kneeling on scaffolding beside his pensive brow; that’s how Holt’s feet seemed to me—like things another person would carefully clean for him.

There were many things about Holt that I liked. I liked how his biceps emerged from T-shirt sleeves. I liked how he stood next to me at that Christmas party on Benvenue Ave., brushed up and emitting a gently possessive warmth that made me giddy. I liked getting breakfast with him early in the morning at the coffee shop that served so-so coffee, and I liked how it looked to anyone walking by: me, with him. I liked how he lingered when I drove him home that brisk autumn night, leaning back into the car, suggesting we get together soon to study—we were in law school—his big-nosed face and impish smile illuminated by porchlight. I liked that he was from New York, that he was smart, that his dad was an iffy presence in his life, like mine. That his sneakers were always clean, that he drank gobs of whiskey and beer and never seemed drunk, that his East Coast self-possession shone brightly against the floppy California exuberance in which we lived.

And I liked that he was white. I liked his whiteness in an uncomfortable, subterranean way. I’d long sensed that the most succinct, irrefutable way to move up in the world was to be loved by a prototypical white man—i.e., someone at the top. There’s a cultural magic in their approval, a kind of magnetizing glitter that surrounds the approved-of object. So, I pursued them. I had relationships with men of color, too; but a certain type of white guy had a particular hold on my psyche. I hoped, in landing one, to earn a medal. To sling it around my neck and prove that I wasn’t too low on the ladder for blessings. Adjacent to them, accepted by them, I’d undo the injuries of not belonging I’d endured. I’d become the girl I’d ached and tried my whole childhood and adolescence to be: a version of that fairylike, Nordic blonde in a Timotei shampoo commercial, over whom I obsessed as a child, floating on my back in the bath and imagining my brown, cotton-candy hair was a white silk ribbon, like hers.

Holt had potential. He could be my world of oysters. We clicked; he seemed to see that I was bright, credentialed, special. He, with his jocular, confident whiteness, could slay my otherness, rescue me from the ogre of myself. I’d grieve, yes, but then watch my life bloom, unfettered by bigness, by brownness. I really believed this—until I saw his feet, which were so handsome—sophisticated, even—compared to mine.

I saw them on a cool November night. We were in his kitchen drinking Two Buck Chuck as he fried salmon burgers and his roommates watched television. His long torso in a white T-shirt was so satisfying there, spatula in hand, rough whoosh of thick, sandy-blond hair on his head and gumdroppy lips saying something or other, basketball shorts low on his hips, when I looked down—how had I never seen them before?—to his feet on the terra-cotta kitchen tile. They were lovely. I almost blurted it out. Fizzy heat needled up my spine and sloshed down the front of my head as I thought how my own feet, shoved suddenly deeper into my shoes, were a particular kind of not beautiful, a big that attached to and amplified my blackness, my poorness, my body-bigness.

Laila Ali says she gets pedicures because her feet are a women’s size twelve and (she laughs) nobody wants to see them big old thangs looking more mannish than they already do. Her words, uttered in a husky voice with a toss of her straightened hair, have memed in my head for years. There’s no hiding big feet (like hers, mine are twelves or thirteens), even in hyper-feminine ballet flats, or carefree Havaianas, or high heels. And my feet are often dry because I never apply the shea butter I buy. And I rarely get pedicures because they’re expensive and exploitative and don’t actually change the size and shape of your feet.

My feet have always struck me as my tell of otherness, even more than my nose, or hair, or weight. No matter the private schools, the white-sounding voice, the white-sounding name, or how I put white people at ease, especially rich white people, my feet seemed to cast me out of belonging, if only in my mind, which is enough. Years ago, my uncle saw me barefoot and said, I’d love to have those big wide bear paws! He said it admiringly but looking down at my bear paws pressing heavily into the wood kitchen floor, I flushed. I was maybe ten when I couldn’t play-wear my mom’s shoes anymore, and somehow that day encapsulated something horribly wrong about me to myself. I was just a child, but I had outgrown my own mother.

A handsome military doctor once held my feet in the White House infirmary. I was spending a semester of law school as a clerk in Obama’s Office of White House Counsel. That day, in keeping with the rest of the internship, should have felt rare and exciting. But anxiety about my feet dragged me out of the moment’s headiness—what it was like to get up from my White House desk, get a bottle of White House–branded ibuprofen from the first-aid kit, then get permission to leave my memo on presidential power unfinished and visit the doctor’s office down the wide, curving wood steps. The doctor came in the room, realized he forgot his pen, and left to get it. I almost left, too, despite the ripping pain in my ankle, because