blacksnextdoor

Despite everyone obsessing over Barack’s appearance on Leno, I think Michelle ‘shovel ready’, planting veggies around the White House was the far more provocative political moment of the last few days.  

If the country has come to characterize Ms. Obama as someone accessible and unpretentious, perhaps watching her toil over a patch of land around the White House was pushing things.

Yes, black folks should garden but there was something about watching her, our black first lady, digging and planting in what did not look like a yard as much as a field,  that was difficult — even as I applaud her efforts to lead America into a Green era.

Equally as interesting was her appearance at a DC public school where she attributed her success as a student in the black Chicago of her childhood to ‘talking like a white girl.’

I’m sure if Ms. Obama had been able to elaborate in less of a controlled setting, a really interesting discussion about black versus white English would have spun out because the Obamas – like most black people and even some whites who use black English to varying degrees, switch back and forth between both.

I believe Ms. Obama’s message to the young black audience she was addressing was that there are certain skills you have to acquire to make the transition from the margins into the mainstream though to some it may have seemed that she was advocating imitating white people as a program for self-improvement which I’m fairly certain she was not.

The whole subject of how black folks talk in America is weighed down by very neurotic identity issues. If I wanted to be morbid, I could recount stories of being ridiculed back in my own school days for the same reason as Michelle Obama, but the fact of the matter is you adapt.

 At 48, I now speak all kinds of ways.

I switch codes so much, I don’t even know what the real way is that I speak anymore – though when I’m in the company of certain African-American women there’s an expectation that I use a very specific black female voice – you know that cynical song that the black female character in every commercial and TV show has to sing with her hand on her hip and one eyebrow raised –  that I’m afraid for so many reasons just doesn’t work for me.

In fact, recently, during a first time business meeting with another black woman, when she instantly referred to me as ‘girl’ and then ‘chile,’  instead of her breaking the ice with me, what she did was make me doubt that I should be taking her seriously.

I’m  middle-aged, gray haired, in no way a child or a girl and find it unfortunate that so much of what passes so proudly  for black English, including that infamous word thrown around in every other rap song, is just an exercise in self-deprecation.

A few summers ago, I got in a cab in Harlem with a Guinean driver named Alpha, an intense guy who could switch from English to French to Spanish to even Russian not because he had some great passion for learning the world’s languages but because he had had to become versatile to survive.

Similarly, Black people in America are going to need to embrace a much more complex sense of self.

That said, may a patch of organic collards sprout somewhere in the Obama garden. Because this new paradigm could be as easily served by just seeing the greens in Green.

The week in review. Let’s see. Well, it seemed to include lots of honking horns. Squealing brakes.  Me dangerously strolling through it all like a ghost.

So many questions I grappled with. So, so many especially around myself as I relate or don’t to other black women.

For starters, there are only about four other black women that ever ride my daily express bus. Each morning, In that dim modular space between point A and point B as I ignore the other passengers on purpose and vice versa, I have always noticed a certain tension between us. It’s as if we’re breaking a taboo by not all sitting together in one designated area of the bus.

It finally happened and the other night I found myself in Manhattan in the bus queue with one of these other black women. I’m shivering and pogoing up and down as I tend to do when I’m cold and I notice her eyes flash with amusement when she says: are you cold?

I state the obvious when I tell her that I’m freezing. She seems taken aback. I’m left feeling like a game show contestant that just gave the wrong answer. Then another one of the black women who I see from time to time on the bus appears and the two of them jump into a dialogue with lots of happy ‘girl,’ ‘chile,’ and eye rolling even though it seems a bit tongue in cheek.

Once on the bus, the two sit side by side and continue talking and I wonder what it was about me being demonstrably cold that may have been so odd.

Then there’s a young woman about twenty years younger who I find myself beside on a sofa at a casual after work gathering.

During my first attempt at small talk with her, I couldn’t help but notice that her deep brown face was almost completely lost inside tendrils of silky Barbie hair. In fact she was completely trapped inside a web of artificial hair and thick make up and even spoke in a tiny Barbie voice that couldn’t possibly have been real.

I’ve noticed that the great rapper, Lil Kim, has become a Barbie doll of late too. Anyway, I inquired into what she did, and after she had responded, it was not at all clear to me what it was she actually did which is often the case these days in this complex business environment but I had a strong feeling by the way she was speaking that she was trying to make a certain impact and what she actually said didn’t matter. It was all in the delivery.

I dare to peek through the thickness of her disguise at one moment and it’s like looking into an unlit room where you sense someone hiding. I tried to break the ice once more, but her Barbie tones grew more shrill like a radio when it’s broken or seagull emitting signals of distress and I moved onto another area of the room.

Then, there’s my favorite aunt. I stopped by to visit her and raid her photo albums the other day. She has the oldest family albums in the family and I love to go through them and talk to her about different relatives, share stories that the photos evoke, but this trip I wanted her to let me leave with photos and make copies of them for myself which I didn’t think she’d agree to – she’s always kept these albums in impeccable condition and very well guarded.

But when I finally got the nerve to stop browsing and ask her, she not only encouraged me to start making copies of whatever I liked, she also mentioned she was thinking of leaving her photo albums for me ‘to manage’ when she passed because she thought they meant the most to me more than anyone else and I couldn’t believe she felt that way or express how honored I was.

Anyway, another high point last week was an email exchange with the daughter I would’ve had if I hadn’t had a son, Carmen. Carmen is currently in Senegal teaching – she has interesting observations on being a black feminist woman in a patriarchal society like Senegal that I would like to hear more of — not only is she an ambitious communicator – she speaks four or five languages – she’s travelled as much as she’s been able and is just wonderful in every way and very easily shares her thoughts with me whenever I need to pick a younger, more agile brain.

I wanted to know if she thought that black college students should study abroad as part of their whole career and personal development scheme or if it was just a luxury for the wealthiest white students and she of coursed confirmed my belief that black people be active players in globalization and that it’s a great thing to encourage our kids to achieve fluency in a second language, travel.

Very grateful to be part of a nurturing network of other black women. May it grow, though the politics and dynamics of black femininity still often leave me out in the cold…

Bisous….