When Black Excellence Isn't Enough
Bare-assed on Ma’s brown suede couch, I spread my salty, dimpled legs in front of the fan. The fan whines and rocks in the window frame, pleading with the Jersey wind on my behalf, but no cool breeze ever passes through its wings. It only throws the musty funk between my inner thighs back into my face. There’s a buzzing swarming around my shower cap, thumping violently against the pollen-dusted windowpane, but, today, the high sun beats the brow harder than any fist so I don’t have the will or the energy to hunt it down. I’m counting through my breaths and tracking the cool spots on the couch.
Ma knows I have a thing for rugged, old couches, which is why, she supposes, I crawled out of her bed late last night and burrowed into the love seat. My toes nestle into the cushions as I teeter my whirring laptop on one thigh and then the other, bouncing its heat. I’m writing a letter to Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. I just got accepted three months ago. First-semester tuition is due in a few months, and I’ve raised nearly $1,000 with a GoFundMe video. For nine whole minutes, the video whines on about the Black ghetto and generational poverty and the longing for communal healing through art. But I’m still $21,079 short. I don’t think it too early to debut my trauma to the program directors for a bid of sympathy.
The least trauma can do is pay me, I think. The least Columbia, white folk, can do is pay me.
I want to say that I don’t yet know $21,079 isn’t enough, that I don’t yet know that all of us are frugal and it’s far too late. But this time, I can’t claim ignorance as a ploy for innocence or authority. In this moment, most like other moments, I care far more about my own upward social mobility than I do the questionable means I think it demands. The least I can do is admit I, too, am playing the game, if only with a different set of pieces. Not now.
Should the program directors refuse my letter, I’ve made contingency plans to borrow $88,300 in federal loans, if need be, to be dubbed a “serious writer.” When I reflect on the conditions of past promissory notes, the conditions of wealthy, white, and educated spaces interrupt. I worry another experience with them will kill me faster than the debt will. After all, me and mines know how to outlive bad credit, high interest rates, collection calls, late fees, car repos, bank account seizures, evictions, IRS garnishments. We share homes, cable lines, our name. We borrow, cosign, trade, gift, carpool, employ. We survive here by way of community. But too often, out there, while it’s expected that one feels far from home, I feel far from Spirit. Without that shared sense of collectivism that is a balm in individual suffering.
Five months later, I’m standing beneath a chandelier, studying the fresh lineup of the woman in front of me. She tells me she’s pursuing her doctorate in Africana literature and performance, among other wealthy, educated, white people farther north. Her kinky, black hair is cut low on the sides like mine, and I wonder if she has a stalky Black barber called Steady like I do. She wears a colorful knit sweater that reminds me of Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable and a wooden, beaded ankh necklace around her neck.
“Considering the ontology of Blackness and those colonial impulses in quotidian Black life that go unnoticed, treating Blackness as a modality that—"
Her words sound familiar. I’ve heard them regurgitated in crowded classrooms and halls, and I’ve circled them in hefty books and articles, but in this moment, they feel too near for comfort, as if they’re coursing through my fingers and spine and eyelids, as if Ma and I have acted them out day after day in her studio apartment, but the fact that I still don’t fully know what they mean sends my eyelids to twitch. I wish she’d read me without all the empty academic jargon or cluttered four-syllable words, narrate my life back to me in memories and scenes, so I can finally understand what’s happening to me.
We’re alone now, I want to say. I know, too well, how Black folks navigating white spaces have had to prove their worth and humanity by flaunting their intellect. But I also know what we risk when we stop stunting, even in the presence of one another. So I dare not call her out. No snitching, not even here.
“Right. Right,” I respond, making sure to nod my head and open my eyes wide. I can’t admit my ignorance to her. The way white classmates and professors casually rattle off book references and theories as if they were as rudimentary as the alphabet puts me in the way of thinking that it’s common practice here to assume everyone within these gates knows everything, at least everything worth knowing.
Actually, I don’t really know what that means, I imagine I’d say.
How on earth did you get here? she’d think.
That damn buzzing, the constant thumping overhead against the windowpane, makes my inner ear itch, but soon the church bell across the street chimes against my typing, and I think maybe He’s trying to tell me something: a warning I’m perhaps too arrogant to heed, or a hope I’m perhaps too cynical to trust. Nevertheless, I’m trying to be still on the couch and listen.
I don’t fully know why I keep putting myself through their fire. I keep reassuring myself that to be where I’m unwanted, or at the very least unexpected, is an act of resistance and self-affirmation, and other self-righteous pandering that feels good in the ear, but I’m becoming annoyed at how often I catch myself leaning so confidently on half-truths. The whole truth is, I still, no matter how hard I resist or deny it, long for their approval. The validation from Ma, Daddy, The Culture, isn’t, by far, enough, even though I want it to be. I want them to want me.
“Who are ‘they’?” My white therapist, white professor, white classmate ask.
C’mon now, you know who they are, I think. The question always feels like a timid admission of guilt, not ignorance.
“White people,” I say.
“Ahh, okay,” they respond. “Go on.”
I try my damnedest to quiet this longing, mostly on rugged, old couches, with affirmations and critical race theory and flattened guilt, and though it calms and lies dormant for days, weeks at a time, I have yet to fully purge it—hack it up into the bathroom sink like the rancid poison it is, or onto the threshing floor like the demon it is. On days like this, when I sit as low on the couch as I feel in front of white folk and I give in to the desire to be seen under their gaze and raised high by their hand, I wonder if other Black folks on predominately white campuses have managed to rid themselves of this desire. More important, I wonder if they had to swallow something hard in its stead or if they found something soft inside leftover in its place. When I return, I’ll ask.
Ma’s been at 315 McCandless for three years now, longer than I’ve called one place home. She’s folded her 300-pound body, 50-something years, and 20-year-old dreams into halves and thirds to fit into this 700-square-foot space. Three layers of earth-tone drapes adorn the two windows. Her king-size bed layered in a faux-fur throw, a knitted quilt, and a down blanket takes half the room, and a mound of pillows of all shapes and sizes sits at its head propped against the wooden headboard that nearly touches the paneled ceiling. The room isn’t cluttered with trash or untouched items; it’s just barely appropriately full. Every solo piece of furniture is wide. If they must stand alone, they must take up space. Every small object is multiplied. What one cannot consume, many can.
As a teenager growing up in her home, I resented her for the shopping bags she’d haul in week after week. “If you weren’t always out buying makeup and stuff, you would have money to pay the rent,” I yelled in the middle of her living room that one time. Her hand hit hot on my cheek. “Get. Out,” she ordered, almost in a whisper.
Now, as an adult, I don’t think Ma’s obsessed with stuff, at least not for stuff’s sake. Now as I follow her down wide Walmart aisles and watch her file through wall art and area rugs and towel sets, I don’t think she’s primarily excited by the consumption of more, nor the importance she thinks that more will ascribe to her. That’s too easy, too plain. And I don’t want to be a cheater.
She deserves more.
Through the years, on late nights, when she ached from the creases in her body and the cracks in the lead-painted walls, she woke me out of sleep in Brooklyn to cry. “I’m just so tired.” She told me again of her age, her loneliness, the fat packed on her bones, and the debt attached to her name. I rolled my eyes and put the phone on the other side of the couch as I spread myself over it. Barely listening, I imagined what it would be like if Ma and I talked of new movies and sermons, the tender, smothered neck bones that salted the air as we slept last night. Our thoughts on Wendy’s latest, my doodles, that strange thing Jesus said. “I’m tired too,” I tell her. I don’t say her grief is too near for comfort; I want space. I don’t say her particular desperation—for money, company, thinness—is starting to bore me; I want new despairs. On good days, we lug our exhaustion and boredom together, and on not-so-good ones, we fling it at one another until we bleed red. I can’t tell what today is.
“So, uh, how’s your dissertation going?” I ask.
A dank one-night stand once told me that the best way to ensure you don’t have to answer questions is to ask them. I’ve held onto those words throughout my walk through swanky social clubs and private universities, tucked them into my clutch alongside matte lipsticks at black-tie galas and posh cocktail receptions, and each time I nervously fumble through my bag, I remember them and wish I had slept with him one more time.
She sighs and then takes a deep breath. “It’s a cumbersome process for reasons it really shouldn’t be. I’m posing some unexpected questions that are puzzling to the faculty, and the politics of it all is really starting to strain my relationships with advisers. I didn’t anticipate that, least of all from them.” She shakes her head and sips her gin and tonic.
Who are “they”? I want to ask. But something deep pulls the question out of my throat. “Mm,” I say as I nod my head, trying to keep my eyes from twitching and swiveling through the room.
The top floor of the hallmarked Faculty House is a mix of well-read, well-traveled, young and old Black scholars in Christmas cocktail dresses and starchy, dark pants suits. I recognize a few faces in the room from CNN clips on my social feeds, but I don’t know any of their names. With one hand swirling their drinks and the other tucked into their tight front pockets, they ping-pong words like fo show and fraudin’ across the high cocktail table.
They tell me they grew up in Westchester County, and in the summers, they vacation in Oak Bluffs. Their parents are professors and board members and homeowners. They are the thirds and the fourths, having long been freed of the burden of the first.
They, here, are The Culture.
I longed to be surrounded by the soundings of Black intimacy, Youse a clown … She said she didn’t feel like being vulnerable and I was like, “Girl, bye,” ain’t that friendship … You gotta tell her, bruh, otherwise you weak and you can’t sit with us no more. The wet, contagious cackles and witty banter of sweaty Black folks in tight and dimly lit spaces.
But this open room fills with lofty talk of Black theater and Black exhibitions and Black politics, and I feel like I can’t reach the woman in the Heathcliff sweater standing right next to me. If we could reach one another, I’d feel safe telling her I don’t give a damn about her academic studies or what she thinks about the latest presidential election, I just want to know if she has a stalky Black barber called Steady like I do. I’d ask her what things she overhears her Steady whispering to the little black boys in his chair and what latest jokes her Banana Pudding Man or Oil Man or Bootleg Man came side-stepping into the shop with.
My parents have always been poor, not the they-paid-for-my-undergraduate-degree-and-refuse-to-pay-for-my-advanced-degree type of poor, but the take-out-another-credit-card-in-my-baby-sister’s-name-and-park-the-car-eight-blocks-down-to-hide-it-from-the-repo-man type of poor. Daddy was an orphaned mechanic who could barely read and write on an eighth-grade level when he decided to pursue the Gospel, while Ma, a cosmetologist, dropped out of high school at 17 years old with several college acceptance letters abandoned in her mailbox. I wish they had an inspiring American Dream story of how they escaped a life of struggle in their youth, hurdled over rusted steel gates, and emerged as idols in their prime. But the truth is my parents were broker at 50 than they were at 20.
As I wash my hair out in the small of Ma’s bathroom, she calls, “You done yet?”
“Almost. Aye, you wanna get ramen on Sunday in the city?” I say while patting myself dry.
“I got a date. When you going down to the school? I’ll go with you,” she tells me.
“Oh, you don’t have to; nothing’s happening. I just wanted to see it.”
She leans through the narrow opening of the door with thebroomstick in hand, “Well, I want to see it too.”
“It looks like Hogwarts in the pictures,” I chuckle as I step out of the tub.
“I remember when we went up to Boston. Walking around that campus with your dad, we was amazed. They make those colleges so pretty, all that open space and grass, those buildings. I always knew God would take you there though—”
“How you know?” I say in a smirk.
Ma sucks her teeth. “Imma be there too. Ain’t gonna be here for much longer. Soon and very soon,” she says, sweeping the tile floor.
I fall back onto the couch and continue typing my letter. The church bell across the street is still ringing. But for the both us. Trying to turn our attention from the theys and heres and out theres, hoping to settle our restlessness in the too little and too much, and though we hear, we don’t fully understand.
“I’m most interested in the ways queerness, Blackness, and madness are in conversation with the sacred,” she says.
You mean God? Maybe not my God, but God as an idea? Mad like the Mad Hatter or Corner Store Eddie?
How’d you get here, she’d respond.
I can’t ask her. I imagine she’d be perplexed, or worse offended, at how I passed through the second set of Black gates unaware of those studies in which Ma’s studio apartment is the site, my cultural traditions the research methods, and I am the subject and investigator. In this moment, it seems to me that if I confess my ignorance to this Black stranger, I’d ultimately be confessing I don’t know myself to myself, and that, I think, is perhaps the most tormenting confession.
The “Cupid Shuffle” drops, and with it, so does the recitation of name, study, and profession. The crowd trickles onto the dance floor. I like dancing. I want to dance. My classmate grabs my wrist to pull me toward the swaying hips, but I smile and politely decline.
“Another drink,” I say and head toward the bar. If I start vibing to the music and we dance, I won’t be able to tell where I end and they begin. “Jack and Coke, please.” To be at this bar on the edge of the room peering inward feels safest. To be the only one here like I am out there, resisting and wallowing and secretly loving it feels most normal.
“These things are so boring, right?” I say to the Black bartender.
He nods without looking up, twisting the caps back onto bottles, as if trying to distract himself from telling us both the truth. I look out to the shuffling crowd. The woman with the hair shaved down on the sides like mine rolls her neck with each turn.
I imagine walking up to her and ripping off her Heathcliff sweater, snatching the ankh necklace from around her neck, handing her a bundle of long, straight hair, something less colorful, more still, something that’ll mark, for me, for the well-read, well-traveled Black folk in the room, for the white people out there, how different we all are.
But I can’t. Because we, I, am not. And it is precisely the too-subtle differences between all of us that maddens me. I don’t truly want accessibility, at least not for them or for the others out there. At the very least, isolation anywhere offers a measure of distinction. OR At the very least, isolation—as the only poor Black person in here or the only Black woman out there—offers a measure of distinction. And I so need to feel exceptional.
I trail away from the silent Black bartender, farther to the edges of the room, sipping my Jack and Coke and looking out the seventh-floor window. It overlooks the Eastside of Harlem—a mosaic of shimmering reds and yellows and whites. Standing atop Morningside Park, I wonder what the Black folks of Harlem are talking about on their rugged, old couches.s. I wonder if they’re crowded around the coffee table imagining a different kind of Black excellence. One that doesn’t look like us. I wonder if they’re planning a different kind of revolution. One we hadn’t imagined for them. One that necessitates our demise. And I wonder, when they begin marching our way, if we will surrender willingly, and if we will be invited to join them.
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