People | Bodies

I Wasn’t Supposed to Love Me

Nothing has gotten better—not the pandemic, not racism—but I know, and the Black women in my life tell me so, that everything will be alright.

I was born twelve pounds, ten ounces. A head full of thick black hair, already fro and fight the power. The doctor told my mother, This baby is going to kill you, and performed an emergency C-section, plucked me from her womb because I was too big for her to push out on her own. She lived. I lived. The doctor gave her the scissors she used in surgery, said, Show these to your daughter whenever she talks back or is not listening. Remind her how much you suffered to bring her into this world.

I was so big I almost killed my mother.

I grew up knowing this, which is to say, I grew up feeling like I was too much, too big. That I took up too much space. But I grew up knowing I had a mama who loved me so much, she would die for me.

*

I am in my Harlem apartment quarantining during the pandemic when news breaks about the murder of Breonna Taylor. Already, I have been feeling extra Black and extra vulnerable. People who are Black like me are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus. I am worried about family members, friends. Myself.

Take care of yourself. Be safe, we tell each other, stay in.

But now, I am reminded that staying in doesn’t guarantee safety. Not for Black women. We were always taught to be careful out there, but what do we do when out there barges in our homes and snatches our lives while we are sleeping?

I’m afraid to leave my home.

I am afraid to stay in my home.

I play Mahalia Jackson on repeat for the rest of the day, music I first heard on the vinyl spinning, spinning on those long-ago Saturday mornings doing chores with my family. My mother loves Aretha and Mahalia, blasted their music any chance she could get. In real life, through music, or through books, my mother made sure I had a community of women speaking into my life, guiding me. So I drown out the fear, listen to the guide.

*

My family is a rainbow of browns. My mother, the lightest, has green eyes. My father was a dark brown man from Jamaica. I look like him. When I was a baby, my sister Cheryl called me her chocolate baby doll, said I was sweet and brown. I remember dressing up in my mother’s high heels, decorating my face with the lipstick she didn’t use anymore. She called me beautiful and I owned the word.

I owned it until I was seven years old. I was shopping with my mother at the mall, and our day had been spent trying on too-small clothes at JCPenny and Montgomery Ward. The white store clerk helping us wasn’t good at hiding her pity and disdain. Even at seven, I could detect the judgmental tone in her voice when she told my mother, We don’t carry many hard-to-fit sizes here.

Hard-to-fit. The words stung. Bodies like mine didn’t belong here. I tried to hold on to the words my sister and mother told me, but I felt them slipping away.

We found something, finally, and took our items to the counter. The woman ringing us up looked at my light-skinned, green-eyed mother and said, You are so beautiful. Then, she looked down at me and said, Hmph. You look nothing like her . . . are you adopted?

The way she emphasized the words beautiful and nothing like her made me think that maybe my sister was wrong. Maybe my mother was wrong too. Maybe dark-skinned girls with brown eyes and plump bodies were not beautiful. This is when I learned that what was true at home was not true everywhere. This is when whiteness taught me to question.

My mother gave her Black-Mother-Stare-Down. The only words spoken were to me, in front of the woman, as we held up the line. I love your dark skin, my mother told me. She said more, I’m sure, but I don’t remember. What I remember is that she immediately affirmed me, trying to uproot the words the white clerk had spoken, like she knew new words needed to be planted.

*

All week long, my day begins and ends with the news. The pandemic’s death toll is rising; another Black man is dead at the hands of the police. No one has been arrested for Breonna Taylor’s murder. Outside my window, sirens wail, coming and going, coming and going. I need to drown them out. I need to clean. And since it is Saturday, I do what I used to do on Saturday mornings when I was a little girl living in Oregon.

I put on Aretha, who tells me love is the only thing. And in another, she sings of knowing what it’s like to laugh on the outside, cry on the inside. Aretha sings about taking what she wants, wails about being young, gifted, and Black, and tells a lover, you’re all I need to get by. Aretha is joy and resistance all at once. I listen and listen as she tells me, sometimes you’ve got to wait and wait for the good times to come. Sometimes you’ve got to wait and wait.

Nothing has gotten better—not the pandemic, not racism—but I know, and the Black women in my life tell me so, that everything will be alright.

*

My mother would drop me off at Ms. Tiny’s to get my hair done, a sacred process for every Black girl. Every moment planned, from the washing, to the combing out, to braiding it in plaits so it could dry overnight.

Nothing was tiny about Ms. Tiny. She had a big heart, a big voice, and always big opinions. Her pressing comb rested on a towel by the stove, a dollop of Royal Crown hair grease on the top of her hand ready to oil my scalp, anoint it. Every time, we’d have the same conversation:

All this thick hair, she’d say. You taking care of it?

Yes, ma’am.

Tying it up at night?

Yes, ma’am.

Keeping it covered when you’re in the rain?

Yes, ma’am.

Ms. Tiny taught me how to take care of my hair, how to take care of me. She’d jump from topic to topic, pouring out wisdom without prompting. Some of what she said was what my mother and sisters had already told me, but the words sounded different coming from her. She wasn’t family, she didn’t have to affirm me, guide me. I don’t know how she always knew what to say, when to say it.

Maybe Black women just know what little Black girls need to hear. Maybe she was telling me what she wished someone had told her.

Now that I am an aunt, a godmother, I know the secret conversations mothers have with their village, filling their loved ones in on what’s going on, asking for support. Maybe my mom nudged Ms. Tiny, maybe not. Maybe Black women just know what little Black girls need to hear. Maybe she was telling me what she wished someone had told her: You’re at that age where you might make some mistakes but nothing is unforgivable. You know that, right? You can always tell someone if you need help getting out of a bad situation.

She’d say, You are perfect just the way you are because God made you, and who are we to question God’s creation?

*

I’ve stopped starting my day with the news. Now, I read scriptures, poems, or quotes as a way to anchor the day in inspiration, guidance. Fall has come and I am feeling untethered. At random moments, images of Ahmaud Arbery running down the street flash through my mind, I hear George Floyd’s voice calling out for his mother. I have stopped counting how many people I personally know who have died recently.

I call my mom to talk about it, but instead of telling her how I am having trouble sleeping, how the other day, I started crying while washing the dishes for no apparent reason, we exchange remember whens and she reminds me of the time I recited two of Maya Angelou’s poems at a school assembly. My mother helped me memorize the lines, reading along as I practiced in the living room. I had discovered the poems on a trip to the library and owned the words as if they were my own, owned them like I once owned beautiful. I gravitated to the poetry of Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Lucille Clifton. They sounded like my aunties and the women at my church. They said what my mother said.

Do you still know them? she asks. I tell her I can’t recite them anymore, but I know them.

*

Clothes for big girls were either too expensive, too adult looking, or not truly made for a big body. My mother asked Mrs. Collins to make my Easter dress. Mrs. Collins was a seamstress who went to our church and was known for her extravagant dresses and Sunday hats. She did it all, from making wedding dresses to hemming choir robes. The basement was her sewing factory, and every time I went over for a fitting, I was in awe at the power in her hands to make something out of nothing. To me, she was magic.

The first Easter dress she made me was purple with ruffles that cascaded down from the waist. The print had tiny flowers all over. No one else would have this exact dress. I loved knowing that it was one of a kind, just for me, just like me. I asked if she could make me more dresses. I was proud to wear something handmade with love, something that fit my body just right.

The older I got, the more their affirmations drowned out the voices that whispered to me from the covers of magazines, from commercials.

When I’d go for the final fitting, with each dress, Mrs. Collins would stand me in front of a full-length mirror and fuss over me, turning me round and round. I remember her saying more than once, You sure are so beautiful, Renée. But I don’t want you to just look beautiful; I want you to be beautiful.

Mrs. Collins joined the chorus of women who were building me up. The older I got, the more their affirmations drowned out the voices that whispered to me from the covers of magazines, from commercials. Their voices became louder and louder. And I listened, and I believed them.

*

On Sundays, I go on a two-hour walk and talk on the phone or listen to an audiobook. My mother calls, and hearing New York City’s symphony of horns and sirens, she lectures me about being careful. I tell her I am walking alone, definitely wearing my mask.

We talk about a dear family friend who has just died. She was the kind of friend who was like family, and her daughter is one of my close friends. My mother brings up the time I snuck my friend in the house on a day there was no school. The plan was for her to leave before my mother got home from work, but we fell asleep watching a movie. So when my mother arrived, there we were. We laugh at how my friend tried to lie, tried to find a way to make it look like something other than what it was. We laugh at how I knew better, so I just sat there. And then we get so tickled about how I wasn’t that good at breaking the rules. My mother tells me all the things she knows that, to this day, I thought I got away with.

The laughter is hurting now. My belly, my cheeks. I sometimes marvel at how my mother still has a laugh at all. She has survived a painful divorce, cancer, and so much loss. Maybe this is why when even the tiniest fragment of happiness comes, she holds on to it. Her laugh is intense and loud. A joy she has earned. A joy that is rarely an indicator of happiness but a measure of faith, strength, peace of mind, and resolve. A joy that she has passed on to me.

I want to take off my mask. It is hard to laugh and walk and talk with a mask on. I stop walking, stand under a tree, listen to my mother reminisce, and together we laugh and laugh.

*

My senior year of high school I ran for Rose Festival Princess, where each Portland public high school chose a girl to represent their school in a citywide program for teen girls. Part pageant, part leadership program, all fourteen of us toured the state of Oregon to talk about what young people cared about, what we wanted to see in our schools. Traveling together every day, in matching outfits, for two months made us fast friends. Once we knew each other, we confessed secrets, admitted our wildest dreams.

One day, in the dressing room, we all got to talking about how it felt to win the coronation at our schools. How much it meant that our classmates voted for us. I didn’t tell them how a teacher discouraged me from running, how he told me I had the leadership skills and would definitely make a good speech, but I didn’t have a princess body.

He called me brave, confirming that a girl like me was not supposed to see herself as beautiful. His matter-of-fact assertion that the only thing that makes a person beautiful is the shape of their body, not the essence of who they are, knocked the wind out of me, made my emotions dizzy. He kept talking, but I was stuck, trying to hold on to what I knew to be true, all the lessons about beauty and self-love the beloved women in my life had taught me.

And here the truth was again: I wasn’t supposed to love me.

According to my teacher, I wasn’t supposed to love the curly kink of my hair, the width of my hips. I should be ashamed of my shell and not go after what I wanted, what I deserved.

Instead of telling them, I listened until they started talking about the day they went to lunch with the program coordinators. After being crowned Rose Festival Princess, we were each taken to lunch, and we all talked about how nervous we were that day, how long it took us to decide what to order off the menu.

I assumed all the girls went to a neighborhood restaurant. The first princess who spoke said they took her to a restaurant on the waterfront, which made sense because her high school was downtown. But as each girl shared, I realized I was the only one who was taken somewhere different. I was taken to a local soul food restaurant, not too far away from my high school.

When I told my mother, she not-so-gently encouraged me to say something. There are times you need to hold your peace; there are times you need to speak up.

I asked the directors of the program, one of them a Black man, why all the other girls got to go to the fancy restaurant on the waterfront and the girl from the “hood” school went to a soul food joint.

We wanted you to be comfortable, they said.

I didn’t know it then, but this would be the never-ending cycle: enter the world feeling capable and worthy of good things, feeling intact, feeling whole, only to have my spirit damaged, my psyche bruised. The constant chipping away of my self-esteem and the work to put myself back together became exhausting.

But always there was someone—my mother, my sisters, a friend, a mentor—to help me heal, to listen to me vent, to remind me of who I am. One of my teachers found out how I had been treated and decided to take me herself. We sat at a table with a view of the water. The city lights shimmered across the waves. She told me, Order whatever you want.