In your head. You thought it normal. When boys disappeared, were shot, killed, cuffed, or thrown onto a black and white hood for simply walking down the sidewalk. Or asking merely: What have I done? Normal. As expected as the orange poppies, your quiet state flower, blossoming on the side of the streets year-round.
-Robin Coste Lewis, Math
I don’t know where fear originates, but I know that it always makes its way into the body, and that a body always begins with a mother. My mother taught us that we had to look carefully for the ways our bodies would betray us. We were her only children, my sister and me, born native into foreign America, a land she was still trying to understand.
Let me tell you: we used to believe her. After all, wasn’t it the flesh that dragged Adam and Eve out of the Garden and away from God? We read our illustrated Bible at night as little girls, and wondered what we would have done, if it was us in Eden, standing before the serpent, the man we were torn from, and the fruit of the tree.
We were ashamed to be descendants of Eve’s. It hurt sometimes, to imagine how perfect the world would have been without her misguided desire. It hurt sometimes to live it; our legacy as woman, the desirable one, the devious one, the one who shouldered the first blame, and many blames to come.
My mother’s reassuring way was to promise us that most bad things that happened to us were in some way our fault. What did you do to provoke them? Why did you talk back? Perhaps she thought that this would keep the unfairness of the world from corroding us before we had a chance to live.
Her most ferocious warning of all happened, improbably, in the middle of a Target. I was thirteen when she told me, without hesitation, that switching from tampons from pads meant I’d no longer be a virgin. I laughed – how could I be deflowered by a piece of cotton? But she was serious.
I knew what she meant – about the hymen, and all that. I knew it wasn’t true. She’d given me a series of extraordinarily graphic books about womanhood for my birthday that said just as much, and I realized then that she’d never read them – that, as often happened, someone else had told her this was the American thing to do, and so she’d done it. We stood facing each other in the feminine care aisle, several feet of distance between us, and I felt that surge of Eve – that desire to do what I wanted, no matter the cost. I placed a box of Tampax Pearls in the cart and promised her that my virginity would remain intact. She remained quiet for the rest of the trip, and shook her head as the cashier rang us up.
Back then, I thought that she was crazy. Now, I understand that she was teaching us that no matter what we did, or what our truths were, that our bodies could be used as evidence against us, that they could tell stories that had nothing to do with our lives. That people would believe our skin and our scars over whatever we had to say.
I’m thinking about fear, and how one might translate that cascade of hormones, surging through the bloodstream, into the right to defend your life, which in America has come to mean the right to take someone else’s. It seems to require such unnatural confidence in the body; perhaps a confidence I haven’t yet learned to locate.
But in my neighborhood Facebook group, everything is a threat, from the person whose bike rack is blocking an alleyway, to the dark-skinned teenage boy walking home from school at 3 PM. Every day, there is a reason to call the cops on a stranger-neighbor, usually black. Every day, there is something to look out for. It’s a cracked window into white racialized anxiety, heightened and sustained in St. Louis over the three years since Michael Brown’s body laid on sun-warmed asphalt for hours, while the Ferguson police donned SWAT gear, and the medical examiner took his time, waited to make sure it was safe, before pronouncing the boy’s body dead.
I’m away that year – 2014 – newly-graduated from college, and working thousands of miles across the Atlantic. Though geographically distant, I remain virtually close to all the friends and adopted family I made while in St. Louis, close enough to wake up to social media threads bearing eyewitness accounts of the killing and subsequent protesting, in the early morning, under the same sun.
Later that day, while St. Louis rages all night, I look blankly into the eyes of my white American colleagues, marveling at their ability to remain intact, seemingly untouched. I click through news reports of the city, burning, and let rage surge through me, sit lonely in a pain with endless points of origin. Soon enough, the news media sets up cameras on the scene, anchormen and women begin their work, and hours later, the protests are rebranded as riots, activists become looters and thugs. The lineage traces itself – back towards post-Katrina New Orleans, LA after Rodney King – invisible lines redrawn thick and heavy, in black Sharpie, ink that bleeds onto the city’s concrete for the nation and the world to see. I don’t realize that I am thousands of miles away and crying until a young Black poetess from the Bronx, who I barely know, emerges from nowhere and wraps me into a hug.
Coincidentally, I’m also away from America in 2012, the year that Trayvon Martin is killed in Florida by George Zimmerman, while I am in Ghana, alone in my parents’ homeland. The internet there isn’t very good, and so I stay up late at night, free from unfolding facts and fictions, and let my mind wander in the dark and fertile playspace between What? and Why? and Why, God?, discovering nothing. The week after, in the middle of the night, I can’t breathe and can’t sleep and am fumbling around for a switch on a wall when I touch a live wire with wet hands, in a house where the power was often but not always out, and feel current sizzle through my entire body. I scream, and then wonder – who screamed?
My body settles, and I come to know, through some awareness surpassing memory, that the scream came from me. I began to understand that the electricity released something primal from within me, from beyond my consciousness. I began to feel the remnants of my own pain, and to believe that I deserved it.
I decide to come back to St. Louis in 2016, after visiting in the late spring, when the rain sweeps through in heavy waves, and even the alleyways grow lush and green. In summer, when all the patios are open and the flowers are in fullest bloom, I find a full-time job by a stroke of luck, and move soon after into a beautiful apartment, in a neighborhood named after a garden, into a brick building with a small stoop and a big backyard.
My new job involves an extensive amount of travel in the fall, to the coasts and to the mid-South. My main task when I am away is to promote the university where I work, in the city where I live, as a good place for affluent white families to send their children off to get a very expensive education. During Q&A, I am often asked by white parents if I am afraid to live in such a dangerous city. I always say no, and then tell them between smiles what they want to hear about campus police presence and blue light systems and when one father in Nashville says Well, how far is the campus from Ferguson? I say quite a-ways away.
I’m a black woman in a dark black body, and so I tell them what they want to hear about safety necessitates, lying about what makes me feel safe. But it’s true, what I tell them about fear – that I don’t feel it very often, in day or in night, while just walking around, or on the Metrolink, or going from a cab to a door. It’s true, that I have never been physically hurt here, but the complexity of that truth cracks open on the few occasions when I am asked about safety by black families. They never want to know if I have been hurt, because they know that I have, they just want to understand how badly, and if it was worth it.
I know that they are asking about the kind of violence that I feel from men like the father in Nashville, or from women like the mother who asks the 19-year old student co-presenter all her admissions questions, while I stand by, smiling and demurely correcting the students’ wrong answers. They are asking about the kind of white violence that will befall their black children no matter where they go, violence that doesn’t touch a purse or leave a mark.
The fear I feel isn’t the cascading sort. There is no rush of norepinephrine, no dilation of the arteries, no quickening of the heart. The fear when your job is to smile and look violence in the eye can be consumed, but never fully digested – it hardens the jaw, coagulates into anxiety and settles softly in the stomach. An inconceivably dense weight that lingers, no matter how many times it’s swept in waves by acid, attempting to burn it away.
I move back, and begin to bear witness to a metropolis still raw with grief and anger. By autumn, I fall prey to the city’s gaping fissures of race and class and lost progress – localized versions of the perennial questions about what we can really know, believe, and understand about the other. These widening gaps of understanding between communities, and the pain hidden within their dark recesses, foretell the political events that transpire later that year. As November opens up into the barrenness of the Midwestern winter, half the country cheers while half the country weeps. The winter runs long, and I learn, in intimate ways, that all my deepest fears are etched onto the fleshy underbellies of strangers – strangers, who are also neighbors, fellow citizens whose deepest fears were branded, several centuries back, onto the relatives of my ancestors, and by proxy, onto me.
I learn there is no weapon, nor any physical distance, that can separate a black body from the kind of pain that besieges all black bodies, that low-humming current, carefully encased in black rubber, designed to hide lethal potential from sight. These two cruel killings, of these two black boys, become enmeshed in my psyche with all the lost lives that precede and follow theirs, become embedded into the dark continuum of American racialized violence.
There are so many disparate vocabularies for violence; but, as Sharpe theorizes, violence is the grammar of black life. It is the invisible structure that makes a black body legible in America.
Violence is the grammar, and a grammar makes a language readable. Without grammar, without a structure that facilitates understanding, language floats, untethered from meaning and sense.
As a girl, I learned to read violence through brutality. I read about the chattel slave trade and came to understand white violence against the black body, whipped backs. I learned about battered women and began to read gendered violence through bruises and blood-stained cheeks.
But my skin is skin that will never bruise, and so – sometimes violence against a body isn’t legible, even to a self. They say one in three women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime; I have been assaulted three times, in three illegible ways. The only type of sexual assault I learned about in my adolescence was rape, perhaps in ninth grade health class. It wasn’t until much later that I found a list of other violations – a list I scrolled through for hours, enraptured. The longness of it comforted me, like a tiny ball of yarn unraveled and stretched around the entire globe, touching everything.
About me, the victim:
I’ll tell you before I tell you; I wasn’t raped, but something other happened to me, and even now, I am still learning the grammar.
When I was seventeen and in the basement of my parents’ home. I invited two boys I knew in because they asked to come in; I wanted to be polite. They’d said they wanted to watch movies, but when we went into the basement, they laughed when I’d tried to turn on the TV. Let’s play truth or dare instead, they said, as a bottle made its way out of a backpack.
Let me tell you: There was no gun to grasp. They were local boys, and I had no idea that they had come only to take. You can’t choose truth, you have to choose dare, they decided. There was only one sort of dare, which involved removing clothes I had just put on after showering while they waited down there for me. Shower while we pick which movie we’re going to watch. I realized only later that they thought my clean body belonged to them.
Eve’s panic befell me again – I never thought to fight back, only to cover myself where I was now naked. To be covered meant that I was safe. There was a violence happening against my body, but it was a violence I had never anticipated, a language I didn’t yet know how to read. I didn’t know how to say no, full stop; I knew only to fear being raped.
Just let me put my fingers inside, the older one pleaded, while pinning me down by the ankles. I wouldn’t move my hand, but he plunged his digits between mine and found his way there anyway. This was not rape; it was something bad, but something other. I didn’t know that a body was an endlessly permeable thing.
This is what my mother told me about violence:
if you control your body, you won’t have anything to worry about.
In the darkness after they left, my journey down the trail of self-blame began in earnest. I shouldn’t have showered. I should have worn sweatpants. I should have said no more loudly. I should have just turned on the TV. I was preparing not to forgive but to repent; for my part in what I initially believed to be the natural outcome of a terrible series of mistakes my mother told me never to make.
Once one accepts that violence exceeds and precedes the Black, cultural studies scholar Christina Sharpe says, in conversation with critical theorist Selamawit Terefe, then one has to take up the question of what it means to suffer.
Or – I’m not afraid of violence itself, but that violence precedes me; I fear, more simply, that when I’m walking, I’ll look less human than threat. It’s so easy, with a change of hair, or the absence of sunlight, to become a dark orb shaped like the enemy the white folks in the suburban krav maga class I try out are training to destroy. Most days, I want to walk up to the woman behaving uncomfortably on the other side of the sidewalk and say Do you know I am afraid of you too? To say: Please don’t imagine anything about me. Please don’t think of me at all, and hope that is enough to keep her fears at bay.
I stay silent, I remove myself from the neighborhood Facebook group, and I learn, as my mother taught me, to elegantly suffer. I contort my body, try to make myself small, to control the only thing I can control. I keep to myself, and when I must, smile weakly at every moving thing.
This contortion is a kind of suffering, and yet, I will always feel freest in the city, with all the imperfections, the tensions, the lethal cracks in the sidewalks that keep you on your toes. One Sunday, two black boys are smoking weed on the patio, unafraid, waving at me from over there. I smile, wave back. I ride my bike past a meadow on a block I’ve driven before many times, but never seen. In the middle of everything, a patch of orange flowers, stalks craning eastward, towards the sun.
This is what my body told me about pain:
that it would hurt, and then it wouldn’t.
The body remembers; the body forgets. That night, I thought – if only I had another hand, for protection. Not to strike, but to cover – one for my vagina, one for my mouth, and one larger one, for both of my breasts. But I only had two, and even so, between those boys there were four and they kept finding new ways to uncover me. I knew that somehow, it would end, and I would have myself again, and they would be gone and I would still be there.
There are words for it all; for the things my body has experienced (the second time: groping, frottage, sexual battery; the third time: stealthing, sexual sabotage), and more words for all the things that I hope my body will not.
The language varies from place to place; I read about Eve teasing in South Asia, where males harass and grope working women in public, often on trains, and chikan in Japan, men who squeeze and molest girls on crowded metros, because they can. I learn the difference between battery and assault, and all the types of rape – stranger, date, gang, genocidal, by deception, in war, statutory, martial, prison). I do not know what I am looking for, but I burrow into the lengthy, detailed descriptions, the legalese, the ever-expanding web of ways to hurt that never contracts.
Violence is the grammar, and grammar is the way we apply a pattern. Some patterns we recognize, and some we know too intimately to see. Sometimes a grammar is a set of rules that we intuit, but can’t teach. Without a grammar, you can’t understand a language. Violence is our grammar, and yet, black female sexual violence is almost always rendered unreadable.
There’s a criss-crossing that happens when black women are violated; a troubling set of contradictions; we are what theorist Imani Perry terms a vexy thing.
Vexing, and very sexy, and difficult to know. Like when Chris Brown beats Rihanna in the back of a car, and she stays with him, for reasons women know but refuse to know, and as punishment, her battered face becomes a meme.
Vexing, like Tina Turner, who becomes the black female poster woman for intra-racial violence, a violence that began in St. Louis, where both she and Ike have a star, a violence she endured behind stages for decades that was commemorated in a biopic that became a ripe source for parody. Became a Jay-Z line in a Beyonce song: Eat the cake, Anna Mae!
About him, the accused:
I won’t tell you what he looked like, because he will always fit the description.
About me, the accuser:
You can read me my rights, but I know I will never fit the description.
Yasmin Boakye is a Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist and fiction writer raised in the Maryland suburbs of DC. Her prose has appeared in Columbia Journal, Puerto del Sol‘s Black Voices series, and Bird’s Thumb, among other publications. A recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Baltimore Youth Film Arts, and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Yasmin is currently based in Baltimore, where she works for an educational non-profit during the day, teaches for Writers in Baltimore Schools in the afternoons, and sings sad songs to her dog at night.
