And if I step away from the mirror altogether, I can really look at myself: my skin, my large afro, and my curvy frame. The realization of who I am is more visceral. I look down at my thick thighs and my large breasts, and I know that I have this body. This body is mine and I hold on to it. I want to know how I exist in my own imagination. The black female imaginary is what happens when you see yourself as another black woman may see you. The black female imaginary is what happens when you look at yourself, when your body is what you hold on to and your mind focuses inward to inquire about who you are, not outward to actively combat what is out there. I know that as a black woman, I am a problem. I am a contradiction of what it means to be human, but I am still here anyhow. I speak, I talk, I think, and I walk with a swivel in my hips. Perhaps it is the black female imaginary and not whiteness that is strange and mysterious, but I prefer it to be that way. When I see other black women whose behavior and decision making towards their appearances I cannot understand, I know the parts I’m searching for in me are already in them and vice versa. We need to collect our many imaginations together in order to build a body of knowledge. We are fighting just by living.
I have been natural for over ten years now. My hair is longer than it’s ever been. Defining my curls takes a concerted effort. My afro is thick. My shrinkage is massive, although I prefer it this way. My hair holds much more than it ever has, and I feel like I am living who I really am. Rubbing coconut oil or shea butter into my curls becomes a meditative process, a way in which to maintain my beauty. If my hair is considered wild, so be it. I prefer it that way. Thankfully, a huge natural hair movement is happening. Many natural hair bloggers, video content makers, and even regular black women are emerging in our culture, so the dichotomized images of black hair are becoming less so.
Sexuality is harnessed through black women’s manes. Its wildness and expansiveness is a sight to behold. It is something that many institutions try to tame but cannot. And I, for one, enjoy living my life as a provocation.
I am who I am despite imposters, despite the carnivalesque images of my body reflected back at me by our society. I am a stranger and I like it.
4
A Hunger for Men’s Eyes
But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.
—1 Corinthians 7:9 KJV
When I was a child, I held in my head a concrete image of marrying at twenty-two. It seemed to me then like the perfect age because I would be finished with college, and I’d figured that women were over the hill by the age of twenty-five. On my mother’s side of the family, the oldest member, male or female, to get married had been twenty-six. My grandmother married at sixteen and my mother at seventeen. They had children less than two years into their marriages. I assumed that I would follow in their footsteps, not only because there was a clear pattern but also because I did not know how long I would be able to contain myself.
Aside from being off the mark about when a woman should reach personal milestones, unsurprisingly, I also had no idea what marriage entailed. I’d never envisioned a wedding gown, the exchange of rings, a first dance. I just imagined infinite kisses and bodies pressed together, the stuff I saw in R-rated movies when I was around twelve or thirteen. What exactly those bodies did, I wasn’t sure, but I knew it had to be good since neither party wanted to pull away. I was raised not to explore my sexuality with an unfettered curiosity unless it was set within the parameters of marriage. I believed that as long as I had a diamond ring encircling my finger, I would be in the clear.
I was around eleven years old, and it was summer. I was spending time at one of my cousins’ homes in South Jersey. Another cousin, Mia, who was only a couple years older than I was and whom I saw about once a year whenever her mom decided to come into town from Ohio, joined me in one of the spare rooms, where I was changing into my bathing suit to meet the rest of my family in the pool. I do not remember how we got on the topic of breasts, but I suppose it was because mine were either exposed or spilling over the cups of my bra because I was a 34C before I was in the sixth grade. Surprised, Mia commented on how big I was, and I nervously half smiled as I always did whenever these remarks were directed towards me.
And then she asked me, “You aren’t scared?”
I jerked my neck and asked, “Scared? Scared of what?”
The tone of her voice shifted and her reply sounded like a whine. “When I go back to school, I have to worry because the guys in my year pinch the boobs of any girl they see and I’m next.”
When I looked at Mia, however, I was surprised that she didn’t look terrified, but instead she seemed sort of annoyed, sort of excited. Her eyes were downcast, but her lips were upturned. I do not know if she was smiling to ease the tension. She was a mess of contradiction; I’d actually heard a note of fear and resignation.
“Can’t you tell someone if they do it to you?” I naively asked.
“It doesn’t matter. They gon’ do it anyway.”
There was nothing more to say and we finished changing.
I forgot about Mia’s words until I began sixth grade. The racial hierarchies of male desire were much more apparent that year. At the top there were the white girls, whom every boy wanted. White girls were always considered the most beautiful and popular, but they were mostly out of reach. Latinas were beautiful and popular, too, but more accessible; the boys considered them more sexually mature. Anyone of Asian descent was on the margins. As for the black girls, if you were not light-skinned, you were automatically considered the least attractive. It wasn’t unusual for me to hear dark-skinned black girls called “burnt,” as if they should be discarded because they’d been left on the heat for too long.
My male classmates openly competed to see how many butts they could slap at recess. Only the Latinas and black girls were targets. Sometimes, I would see girls looking over their shoulders and subsequently running away, smiling, before boys caught up with them to smack their butts and then run in the opposite direction. If a girl was slapped, she rarely got upset because at least she was considered attractive enough to slap. She was being watched, a guy just had to touch her, and who didn’t want that?
I was anxious about when I would get slapped. I had a crush on a guy named Juan, a Puerto Rican classmate with intense eyes and a suaveness that far surpassed his years. Although I had known him to exclusively date white girls, when he was single his arms would be like windmills, winding up and rolling around to see who he could slap. His hands were quicker than his friends’, and while they often almost got caught by the teachers within a millisecond, Juan always went undetected. I spent countless days fantasizing about when he would choose me to be his girlfriend, or at least say that I was pretty. But as time passed, my hope diminished. So I went for another approach: I wanted to learn how to be cooler. My rapidly growing rapport with a group of black girls could not have come at a better time. Two of them, Kiki and Bethany, had a kind of wit I desperately desired. Every recess, they taught me how to walk while rolling my hips, and they stood on each side of me as I practiced. They watched my jaw whenever I spoke and made me loosen it, to let the words flow and slur together on their own. They critiqued my laugh so that it no longer reached a higher octave but stayed consistent, my chuckles flittering until my diaphragm almost gave out. Finally, I had to become stylish, the hardest achievement of all. Instead of wearing Limited Too and Gap, I wanted Apple Bottom jeans, Baby Phat T-shirts, Timbs, and fitted hats. The Holy Grail was a jersey dress. A jersey dress was tight enough to accentuate curves, long enough to avoid a trip to the principal’s office, and short enough to make a guy notice all that you were working with.