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Teaching the N-Word
Pages: 1 2
November 2004
SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS, my anthology of essays about interracial friendship, came out in August, and the publicity department has arranged for various interviews and other promotional events. When I did an on-air interview with a New York radio show, one of the hosts, Janice, a black woman, told me that the reason she could not marry a white man was because she believed if things ever got heated between them, the white man would call her a nigger. I nodded my head. I had heard this argument before. But strangely I had all but forgotten it. The fact that I had forgotten to fear “nigger” coming from the mouth of my white husband was more interesting to me than her fear, alive and ever-present.
“ARE YOU BI-RACIAL?”
“No.”
“Are you married to a white man?”
“Yes.”
These were among the first words exchanged between Janice, the radio host, and me. I could tell—by the way she looked at me, and didn’t look at me; by the way she kept her body turned away from me; by her tone—that she had made up her mind about me before I entered the room. I could tell that she didn’t like what she had decided about me, and that she had decided I was the wrong kind of black person. Maybe it was what I had written in Some of My Best Friends. Maybe it was the fact that I had decided to edit a collection about interracial friendships at all. When we met, she said, “I don’t trust white people,” as decisively and exactly as if she were handing me her business card. I knew she was telling me that I was foolish to trust them, to marry one. I was relieved to look inside myself and see that I was okay, I was still standing. A few years ago, her silent judgment—this silent judgment from any black person—would have crushed me.
When she said she could “tell” I was married to a white man, I asked her how. She said, “Because you are so friendly,” and did a little dance with her shoulders. I laughed.
But Janice couldn’t help it; she liked me in spite of herself. As the interview progressed, she let the corners of her mouth turn up in a smile. She admitted that she had a few white friends, even if they sometimes drove her crazy. At a commercial break, she said, “Maybe I ought to try a white man.” She was teasing me, of course. She hadn’t changed her mind about white people, or dating a white man, but she had changed her mind about me. It mattered to me. I took what she was offering. But when the interview was over, I left it behind.
MY HUSBAND THOUGHT MY STORY about the interview was hilarious. When I got home, he listened to the tape they gave me at the station. He said he wanted to use the interview in one of his classes.
A few days later, I told him what Janice said about dating a white man, that she won’t because she is afraid he will call her a nigger. As I told him, I felt an unfamiliar shyness creep up on me.
“That’s just so far out of . . . it’s not in my head at all.” He was having difficulty coming up with the words he wanted, I could tell. But that was okay. I knew what he meant. I looked at him sitting in his chair, the chair his mother gave us. I can usually find him in that chair when I come home. He is John, I told myself. And he is white. No more or less John and no more or less white than he was before the interview, and Janice’s reminder of the fear that I had forgotten to feel.
I TELL MY STUDENTS in the African-American autobiography class about Janice. I say, “You would not believe the indignities I have suffered in my humble attempts to ‘move this product,’ as they say in publishing.” I say, “I have been surrounded by morons, and now I gratefully return to the land of the intellectually agile.” They laugh.
I flatter them, in part because I feel guilty that I have missed so many classes in order to do publicity for my book. But I cringe, thinking of how I have called Janice, another black woman, a “moron” in front of these white students. I do not tell my students she is black.
“HERE IS A STORY FOR your students,” John tells me. We are in the car, on our way to Cambridge for the weekend. “The only time I ever heard ‘nigger’ in my home growing up was when my father’s cousin was over for a visit. It was 1988, I remember. Jesse Jackson was running for president. My father’s cousin was sitting in the kitchen, talking to my parents about the election. ‘I’m going to vote for the nigger,’ my father’s cousin said. ‘He’s the only one who cares about the workingman.’”
John laughs. He often laughs when he hears something extraordinary, whether it’s good or bad.
“That’s fascinating,” I say.
The next time class meets, I tell my students this story.
“So what do we care about in this sentence?” I say. “The fact that John’s father’s cousin used a racial epithet, or the fact that his voting for Jackson conveys a kind of ultimate respect for him? Isn’t his voting for Jackson more important for black progress than how his father’s cousin feels?”
I don’t remember what the students said. What I remember is that I tried to project for them a sense that I was untroubled by saying “nigger,” by my husband’s saying “nigger,” by his father’s cousin’s having said “nigger,” by his parents’—my in-laws—tolerance of “nigger” in their home, years ago, long before I came along. What I remember is that I leaned on the word “feels” with a near-sneer in my voice. It’s an intellectual issue, I beamed at them, and then I directed it back at myself. It has nothing to do with how it makes me feel.
AFTER MY INTERVIEW WITH Janice, I look at the white people around me differently, as if from a distance. I do this, from time to time, almost as an exercise. I even do it to my friends, particularly my friends. Which of them has “nigger” in the back of her throat?
I go out for drinks with David, my senior colleague. It is a ritual. We go on Thursdays after class, always to the same place. I know that he will order, in succession, two draft beers, and that he will ask the waitress to help him choose the second. “What do you have on draft that is interesting tonight?” he will say. I order red wine, and I, too, always ask the waitress’s advice. Then, we order a selection of cheeses, again soliciting assistance. We have our favorite waitresses. We like the ones who indulge us.
Tonight, David orders a cosmopolitan.
We never say it, but I suspect we both like the waitresses who appreciate the odd figure we cut. He is white, 60-something, male. I am black, 30-something, female. Not such an odd pairing elsewhere, perhaps, but uncommon in Burlington, insofar as black people are uncommon in Burlington.
Something you can’t see is that we are both from the South. Different Souths, perhaps, 30 years apart, black and white. I am often surprised by how much I like his company. All the way up here, I sometimes think when I am with him, and I am sitting with the South, the white South that, all of my childhood, I longed to escape. I once had a white boyfriend from New Orleans. “A white Southerner, Emily?” My mother asked, and sighed with worry. I understood. We broke up.
David and I catch up. We talk about the writing we have been doing. We talk each other out of bad feelings we are harboring against this and that person. (Like most Southerners, like the South in general, David and I have long memories.) We talk about classes. I describe to him the conversation I have been having with my students about “nigger.” He laughs at my anecdotes.
I am on my second glass of wine. I try to remember to keep my voice down. It’s a very nice restaurant. People in Burlington do not want to hear “nigger” while they are eating a nice dinner, I say, chastising myself. I am tipsy.
As we leave, I accidentally knock my leg against a chair. You are drunk, I tell myself. You are drunk and black in a restaurant in Burlington. What were you thinking? I feel eyes on me as I walk out of the restaurant, eyes that may have been focused elsewhere, as far as I know, because I do not allow myself to look.
LATER THAT EVENING, I am alone. I remember that David recently gave me a poem of his to read, a poem about his racist grandmother, now dead, whom he remembers using the word “nigger” often and with relish. I lie in bed and reconstruct the scene of David and me in the restaurant, our conversation about “nigger.” Was his grandmother at the table with us all along?
The next day, I see David in his office, which is next to mine, on the other side from Todd. I knock on the door. He invites me in. I sit in a chair, the chair I always sit in when I come to talk to him. He tells me how much he enjoyed our conversation the night before.
“Me, too,” I say. “But today it’s as if I’m looking at you across from something,” I say. “It has to do with race.” I blame a book I am reading, a book for my African-American autobiography class, Toi Derricote’s The Black Notebooks. “Have you read it?” David is a poet, like Derricote.
“No, but I know Toi and enjoy her poetry. Everything I know about her and her work would lead me to believe that I would enjoy that book.” He is leaning back in his chair, his arms folded behind his head.
“Well, it’s making me think about things, remember the ways that you and I will always be different,” I say abruptly.
David laughs. “I hope not.” He looks puzzled.
“It’s probably just temporary.” I don’t ask him my question about his grandmother, whether or not she is always somewhere with him, in him, in the back of his throat.
JOHN IS AT AN African-American studies conference in New York. Usually, I am thrilled to have the house to myself for a few days. But this time, I mope. I sit at the dining-room table, write this essay, watch out of the window.
Today, when John calls, he describes the activity at the conference. He tells me delicious and predictable gossip about people we know, and the divas that we know of. The personalities, the in-fighting—greedily, we sift over details on the phone.
“Did you enjoy your evening with David last night?” he asks.
“I did, very much,” I say. “But give me more of the who-said-what.” I know he’s in a hurry. In fact, he’s talking on a cell phone (my cell phone; he refuses to get one of his own) as he walks down a New York street.
“Oh, you know these Negroes.” His voice jounces as he walks.
“Yeah,” I say, laughing. I wonder who else can hear him.
TODD IS MARRIED TO Hilary, another of my close friends in the department. She is white. Like John, Todd is out of town this weekend. Since their two boys were born, our godsons, John and I see them less frequently than we used to. But Hilary and I are determined to spend some time together on this weekend with our husbands away.
Burlington traffic keeps me away from her and the boys for an hour, even though she lives only blocks away from me. When I get there, the boys are ready for their baths, one more feeding, and then bed. Finally, they are down, and we settle into grown-up conversation. I tell her about my class, our discussions about “nigger,” and my worries about David.
“That’s the thing about the South,” Hilary says. I agree, but then start to wonder about her grandmother. I decide I do not want to know, not tonight.
I do tell her, however, about the fear I have every day in Burlington, crossing that street to get back and forth from my office, what I do to guard myself against the fear.
“Did you grow up hearing that?” She asks. Even though we are close, and alone, she does not say the word.
I start to tell her a story I have never told anyone. It is a story about the only time I remember being called a nigger to my face.
“I was a teenager, maybe 16. I was standing on a sidewalk, trying to cross a busy street after school, to get to the mall and meet my friends. I happened to make eye contact with a white man in a car that was sort of stopped—traffic was heavy. Anyway, he just said it, kind of spit it up at me.”
“Oh, that’s why,” I say, stunned, remembering the daily ritual I have just confessed to her. She looks at me, just as surprised.
December 2004
I AM WALKING DOWN a Burlington street with my friend, Anh. My former quilting teacher, Anh is several years younger than I am. She has lived in Vermont her whole life. She is Vietnamese; her parents are white. Early in our friendship, she told me her father was a logger, as were most of the men in her family. Generations of Vietnamese loggers in Vermont, I mused. It wasn’t until I started to describe her to someone else that I realized she must be adopted.
Anh and I talk about race, about being minorities in Burlington, but we usually do it indirectly. In quilting class, we would give each other looks sometimes that said, You are not alone, or Oh, brother, when the subject of race came up in our class, which was made up entirely of white women, aside from the two of us.
There was the time, for instance, when a student explained why black men found her so attractive. “I have a black girl’s butt,” she said. Anh and I looked at each other: Oh, brother. We bent our heads back over our sewing machines.
As we walk, I tell Anh about my African-American autobiography class, the discussions my students and I have been having about “nigger.” She listens, and then describes to me the latest development in her on-again, offagain relationship with her 50-year-old boyfriend, another native Vermonter, a blond scuba instructor.
“He says everything has changed,” she tells me. “He’s going clean up the messes in his life.” She laughs.
Once, Anh introduced me to the boyfriend she had before the scuba instructor when I ran into them at a restaurant. He is also white.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said, and put out my hand.
“I’ve never slept with a black woman,” he said, and shook my hand. There was wonder in his voice. I excused myself and went back to my table. Later, when I looked over at them, they were sitting side by side, not speaking.
Even though Anh and I exchanged our usual glances that night, I doubted that we would be able to recover our growing friendship. Who could she be, dating someone like that? The next time I heard from her, months later, she had broken up with him.
I am rooting for the scuba instructor.
“He told me he’s a new person,” she says.
“Well, what did you say?” I ask her.
“In the immortal words of Jay-Z, I told him, ‘Nigga, please.’”
I look at her, and we laugh.
IN LIEU OF A FINAL class, my students come over for dinner. One by one, they file in. John takes coats while I pretend to look for things in the refrigerator. I can’t stop smiling.
“The books of your life” is the topic for tonight. I have asked them to bring a book, a poem, a passage, some art that has affected them. Hazel has brought a children’s book. Tyler talks about Saved by the Bell. Nate talks about Freud.
Dave has a photograph. Eric reads “The Seacoast of Despair” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
I read from Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid. Later I will wonder why I did not read “Incident” by Countee Cullen, the poem that has been circulating in my head ever since we began our discussion about “nigger.” What held me back from bringing “Incident” to class? The question will stay with me for months.
The night of our dinner is an emotional one. I tell my students that they are the kind of class a professor dreams about. They give me a gift certificate to the restaurant that David and I frequent. I give them copies of Some of My Best Friends and inscribe each one. Eric demands a hug, and then they all do; I happily comply. We talk about meeting again as a class, maybe once or twice in the spring. The two students who will be abroad promise to keep in touch through our Listserv, which we all agree to keep going until the end of the school year, at least. After they leave, the house is quiet and empty.
Weeks later, I post “Incident” on our Listserv and ask them to respond with their reactions. Days go by, then weeks. Silence. After more prodding, finally Lauren posts an analysis of the poem, and then her personal reactions to it. I thank her online, and ask for more responses. Silence.
I get e-mails and visits from these students about other matters, some of them race-related. Eric still comes by my office regularly. Once he brings his mother to meet me, a kind and engaging woman who gives me a redolent candle she purchased in France, and tells me her son enjoyed “African- American Autobiography.” Eric and I smile at each other.
A few days later, I see Eric outside the campus bookstore.
“What did you think about ‘Incident’?”
“I’ve been meaning to write you about it. I promise I will.”
In the meantime, Nigger is back in its special place on my bookshelf. It is tucked away so that only I can see the title on its spine, and then only with some effort.
Pages: 1 2
Copyright ©2005 The American Scholar. All rights reserved.