The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 35

“I feel guilty maybe. Ungrateful, that I became so sad after the breakup. Because I think I was lucky. My father protected us from understanding what it was that was going on. The intensity of it all.”

“I see,” she said. And then there was that familiar silence. “Yet you understood, you mentioned. You did know.”

“Kind of,” I murmured. “Eventually. Yes.”

She wrote something down. She waited for me to continue.

“I think, as women of color, especially women of color who come from some means, any means really, we tend to play down the unpleasant things we’ve experienced. To bury them,” she said finally.

“Maybe,” I responded.

“Perfection or the desire for it, it becomes a mask … a uniform. But there is something underneath. What’s underneath makes us real.”

I thought of Mam in that moment. She had taught me many things, and at times, especially during those teenage years of promising her I would move far away to New York as soon as I got my diploma, she was more than I deserved. She taught me how to cook, how to write, my posture, how to care for a home, how to love God, how to read. She taught me politeness, creativity, how to write a letter, especially to those who had offended me. How to pray, how to fold clothes, how to love my sisters, how to love my brothers, how to love myself. She taught me about women—how to be one, how to know them, how to befriend them, how to give advice and love them, and how some would betray me because they saw kindness as weakness, and at the first sign of such brutality I should walk away, for such women did not even love themselves. That not all who chose to be around me liked me. That some knew too well how to pretend, and they would raise daughters with these doctrines, so I should remember her words and the words of my Ol’ Mas to raise mine. And some would raise sons they did not want to let go of, and would handle them like marionettes, and I should be careful never to sit in the audience of such a show for too long.

But there were things I went into the world not knowing. We did not talk about what to do when a boy was unkind, in words or actions, breaking my heart. I was lousy in the ways of healing. Mam had one true love and she married him. She had one true love in a country of women like her, whose sun took turns resting on their deep, dark skin. My true loves in our new country, by either inheritance or indoctrination, were taught that black women were the least among them. Loving me was an act of resistance, though many did not know it. And Mam could not understand this feeling, the heaviness of it, to be loved as resistance, as an exception to a rule. To fight to be seen in love, to stay in love throughout the resistance. This was my new country.

In middle school most of the faces around me were white. There was one black boy I thought I would marry, before I knew the meaning. He wrote me a letter, folded at both ends. He told me I was beautiful, but that my skin was too dark and he couldn’t date a dark-skinned woman. In high school after I became homecoming queen, after being crowned under those Friday-night lights, a single black feminine body in the middle of that green turf, overlooking a sea of American dreaming, that same boy came up to me at the edge of the field and whispered, “I told you that you were beautiful.” And if my childhood dragons wanted me to believe that I had no home, no country, no place in this world, the monsters in my new home, in that statement, consented, complied: I could be beautiful in a place and still not enough, not because of who I was or anything I had done, but because of something as simple, and somehow as grand in this new place, as the color of my skin.

In college I dated black men who previously only dated white women, although they were certain they did not have a type. In my twenties, in Harlem, I occasionally found myself in the arms of men who admitted I was the first dark-skinned woman they had ever been in a serious relationship with—the others were black women who were light, fair, racially ambiguous. “But you’re better looking than all of my exes, to be honest. Even being dark-skinned,” they would say, as if giving me a compliment. In my thirties, a man I loved told me I was beautiful in the same breath that he admitted he did not believe I was physically enchanting enough for mainstream American audiences, the first to throw a stone at my dreams of Hollywood. Mam did not know the ways of this—the indoctrination of a black woman socialized here. I found I loved her more for that. That she never told me to stay out of the sun when it was highest. Never obsessed over my edges being straight enough that maybe the boys would forget my blackness when they looked at my hair. I enjoyed the sun like any child should, while many of my friends hid in the shade. Mam never feared her blackness. So I never feared my blackness, until the men.

How does it feel to be an exception? They taught me. Then they led me to that conversation. To the purring woman casually mentioning my traumas. Love gives us the coordinates to these rooms.

I may have shrugged.

“What you and your family have been able to do in this country … it’s something. But that doesn’t erase those months during your childhood, and the attention it all deserves.”

“Honestly, I had an experience in Texas that was more