The Cost of What You Allow The World to Call You
When I tell you, I learned from my mother about the real lives that informed Black Southern history, will you believe me? I can confirm that there is existing documentation for Mama’s birthplace: There is a 1940 Eatonton/Putnam County census report that estimates her birth year as around 1934. (Actually, she was born in 1933.) There are the names of her parents, Charlie Jr. and Florence James on that census.
But I hesitate to keep going, in this time of fact checking. For how could I prove that my life took place?
Mama is elderly, her memory clouded by a stroke. Again, you’ll have to take my word for that, although there are living relatives who can confirm her declining health—but will they? In many Black families, talking about inside business is viewed as forbidden.
So I will give you a hypothetical history, which I suspect is the history of many actual Black women. I will go back 45 years and come forward to the present. I’ll tell you what might be in my imagination—or what might be the truth sipping slowly at my blood.
It is a year in the 1970s.
There is a Black woman’s voice, raised and contemptuous—no longer the harmonious drawl—at a doctor’s office or a store at the new shopping mall where that Black woman lives in Durham, North Carolina—the midsize city where she lives with her husband and three daughters.
Somebody will call that Black woman “Trellie” instead of her married name, “Mrs. Jeffers.” If that transgressing somebody is Black, she’ll remind them of their manners: She is not their friend, and they do not know her. She’ll put on her schoolteacher’s voice, but there is love and warmth rippling under the surface of scolding. A nudging toward African American cultural lessons: “You know better,” Mrs. Jeffers will say. Usually, the other Black person will instantly self-correct, with an apology and perhaps a respectful dip of the head.
But if that person who doesn’t use an honorific happens to be white? Mrs. Jeffers’s alto voice will pitch very close to shouting. Her contempt will coalesce into speech. She’ll correct that white person, “I am Mrs. Jeffers to you, and we are not social equals.” If they have the nerve to try to exchange words with Mrs. Jeffers—to tell her they didn’t have to put a handle on her name—there will be trouble. She’ll begin to lecture the white clerk—or nurse or person at a community meeting—about the historic disrespect of Black people. She’ll take that white person all the way back to Alex Haley’s Roots and remind them how other whites have demeaned and oppressed an entire race of people. As Mrs. Jeffers stands there, her voice will climb, while the air in the room will seem to whisper, “What on earth is the big deal? What is wrong with this loud, Black woman?”
In the car ride back home, Mrs. Jeffers will sputter even more and shout.
“These white folks don’t have any manners,” she’ll say.
Sometimes, she’ll use another word for “white folks,” (but I’m too polite to mention that word here). Beside her, Mrs. Jeffers’s youngest daughter will cringe and agree with the air in the room they had left: Why was her mother so upset? What was the power in an honorific, or—as her relatives said down south—in a handle on a name?
It takes a while for a daughter to see in her mother the woman the daughter might become, or even acknowledge that womanhood is possible. It seems so far away when you are a little girl, a daughter who doesn’t understand that one day, your younger smooth skin will begin to wrinkle. You are not capable of miracles. You cannot change anyone’s idea of womanhood. You can only imagine yourself.
And buried underneath this story is the fact that no Black daughter ever thinks—or wants to admit—that she, too, will become a grown, disrespected, Black woman in America. Like many Black daughters of the past, she will relive small pieces of history.
I reside in womanhood now, clutching my mother’s wisdom and my daughter’s duty, but I never wanted to have anger and obsessions. Here I am, a tender of history, but this is not what I dreamed of, this constant reaching back.
But now, I see those moments have meaning, not only for protecting Black ancestral lore, but unfortunately, meaning for my own Black woman’s life.
Anyway, Mrs. Jeffers’s daughter might have become a college teacher—Professor Jeffers—who moves to Norman, Oklahoma, in 2002.
Yes, let’s say that.
Norman had been a (real) “sundown” town: African Americans weren’t allowed within the city limits after dark. One of the first Black families to move into the town were the Hendersons, who came in 1967. The father was Dr. George Henderson, a professor at the University of Oklahoma. Eventually, his name would grace a building on campus.
Born in 1967, Professor Jeffers will remember this history of Norman, imagining what her already imaginary life would have been. How, in the past, she’d have to watch the sky, to make sure she wouldn’t be caught on the wrong side of time.
And after living a decade in Norman, Professor Jeffers will find a favorite grocery store, filled with natural foods and friendly young white kids who smile at her. There is peace in this formerly historically troubled place. Except there is a young white woman who works at the store, who will insist on calling Professor Jeffers “girlfriend.”
The older Black woman will seek all sorts of strategies to alert this young white woman that it is not appropriate to call someone old enough to be your mother “girlfriend.” And they aren’t friends: They only see each other at the store. Professor Jeffers will begin to refer to herself as “Miss Lady,” a (hopefully) polite nickname that catches on with everyone else working at the store, everyone besides this young white woman who tends the produce section.
Until one day—finally—Professor Jeffers informs the young white woman, it isn’t appropriate for her to call her girlfriend. “I’m an educated woman. I teach at the university, and I’m too old to be your girlfriend. I’m over 40.”
Then, the young white woman begins to justify why it was okay for her to set aside honorifics. “I’m educated too,” she says, explaining that she is a freshman in college.
The professor proceeds to give a lecture on racism in America. That while white people had been automatically given respect, nobody these days white seemed to want to call a Black person “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
The young white woman turns pink, until abruptly, she turns and leaves the produce section. But Professor Jeffers doesn’t look around her, frightened at how she’d be perceived by others. She feels powerful and full of righteousness. After she pays for her groceries, walks outside, and settles behind the wheel of her car, she congratulates herself. At least she hadn’t shouted at the young white woman. And besides, look, there was the sun, a sanctuary on the horizon.
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