The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

by Jesmyn Ward

Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5–4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for fourteen years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws. Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.

Yet I found my own results both surprising and troubling. I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great-grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers. My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the 1960s. My father was run out of segregated Pass Christian’s beaches and the local park. I was the only black girl at my private high school in Pass Christian, the target of my classmates’ backward ideas about race. Despite my parents’ sense of their mixed roots, I had thought that my genetic makeup would confirm the identity that I’d grown up with—one that located Africa as my ancestors’ primary point of origin, and that allowed me to claim a legacy of black resistance and strength. So it was discomfiting to find that my ancestry was 40 percent European—a mixture of British, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian, Iberian, Italian, and Ashkenazi—32 percent sub-Saharan African, a quarter Native American, and less than 1 percent North African. For a few days after I received my results, I looked into the mirror and didn’t know how to understand myself.

That’s how I remembered myself. I remembered that people of color from my region of the United States can choose to embrace all aspects of their ancestry, in the food they eat, in the music they listen to, in the stories they tell, while also choosing to war in one armor, that of black Americans, when they fight for racial equality. I remembered that in choosing to identify as black, to write about black characters in my fiction and to assert the humanity of black people in my nonfiction, I’ve remained true to my personal history, to my family history, to my political and moral choices, and to my essential self: a self that understands the world through the prism of being a black American, and stands in solidarity with the people of the African diaspora.

I watch obscure French movies with subtitles. I attend powwows and eat fry bread and walk along the outside of the dancing circles with a kind of wistful longing because I want to understand the singing so badly, because I want to stomp the earth in exultation and to belong in that circle, too. But I imagine that my ancestors from Sierra Leone and Britain, from France and the Choctaw settlements on the Mississippi bayou, from Spain and Ghana—all those people whose genetic strands intertwined to produce mine—felt that same longing, even as they found themselves making a new community here at the mouth of the Mississippi. Together, they would make new music, like blues and jazz and zydeco, and new dances, second lining through the streets. They would make a world that reflected back to them the richness of their heritage, and in doing so discover a new type of belonging.

When Rachel Dolezal first broke, and was simply a joke on Black Twitter, I identified some of my favorite Twitter titles for the inevitable, anticipated memoir: “Their Eyes Were Watching Oprah” (that one’s mine); “Imitation of Imitation of Life” (from Victor LaValle); “Blackish Like Me” (mine too). Now things done got serious.

Every black person has something “not black” about them. I don’t mean something white, because despite our easy dichotomies, the opposite of black is not white. This one likes European classical music; that one likes a little bit of country (hopefully the old stuff); this one is the first African American principal ballerina; this one can’t dance. Black people know this—any solidarity with each other is about something shared, a secret joy, a song, not about some stereotypical qualities that may be reproducible, imitable, even marketable. This doesn’t mean there aren’t similarities across black people or communities or better yet memory—just that these aren’t exactly about bodies and not really about skin at all, but culture.

One of the best things about being black is that, barring some key exceptions, it’s not a volunteer position. You can’t just wish on a dark star and become black. It’s not paid either. It’s more like a long internship with a chance of advancement.

Black people are constantly identifying and recognizing those who look like secret black folks—many light-skinned people I know get identified as white by white people, but we know they’re black. (This isn’t passing, btw.) Most look like one of my aunties. Knowing they are black, it is hard to see them another way. It’s one of the advantages of my folks being from Louisiana—there’s lots of folks who don’t “look black” but are (which of course should make us stop and reevaluate what “looking black” is). Because of the one-drop rule, though begun as a controlling race law, black people themselves adapted and even invented and accepted a broader blackness. In general this has made black people—I am speaking for every single black person without exception here, of course—wary yet accepting.

Every church I know of had a white lady who arrived one day. Ours in Topeka did. After she hung around awhile, and proved herself she wasn’t a tourist, “Mrs. Pete” was accepted and seen as part of the AME congregation, even singing in the choir (which was a high bar, as it were). But we never thought she was, or somehow became, black. She’s good people, folks would say.

There is the other, far rarer passing, which we may call reverse-passing, of whites living as black. The most prominent I know of may be Johnny Otis—who was successful enough that many race women and men I know aren’t aware he was actually born white. Or the Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, owner of a Negro League team who likely wasn’t black herself. What’s interesting is to wonder what the black people around them thought, usually accepting them—not necessarily as what they said they were, but how they acted. It isn’t that they weren’t judged, just that when they were, they weren’t found wanting.

Thomas Jefferson hated black people but slept with one who bore his children, six of them. (Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.—Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry, he wrote in Notes on Virginia.)

Jefferson had black heirs who he, and for centuries his (sorta) white heirs and white defenders, denied. In our time, Strom Thurmond had him a black daughter out of wedlock; the only people surprised by this were the white voters he courted by vehement racist rhetoric. Of course, this behavior, demeaning blacks while desiring at least one, descends from slavery and is how we got most light-skinned folks who “look white” in the first place.

Being black is not a feeling. I don’t always feel colored. Nor is it simply a state of mind. Blackness: a way of being.

It was my first job, and I was regularly thought by strangers at the university to be passing for a student (and not a grad student). You look too young to be a professor, surprised interrogators would say, usually after asking what year in school I was. (It’s true I was only twenty-five, but had a book already and a degree or two.) After a while, I began to translate the comment about looking young to be a more polite way of saying what they couldn’t: You look too black to be a professor.

Dolezal’s righteous rage looks more like self-righteousness—or is it other-righteousness?

Finally the chief problem with racial impostors or blackface: it can be only, as James Weldon Johnson said of stereotypical black dialect, comic or tragic. Ultimately, it conforms to white views of “the blacks” themselves, offstage: as either a joke or a set of jailed youths and stooped old people.

Standing back, maybe it’s true: not that being black is only comic or tragic, but that too often white thinking or acting out about it, as demonstrated in Dolezal’s hoax and the Charleston murders, remains only polarized: comic or tragic. Both are nullifying. Amid the bewilderment and grief, for just a moment I wondered how onetime NAACP chapter leader Dolezal would’ve responded, as surely she would have sought to, had she not been unmasked. Where’s our fearless leader now? I thought. Then I didn’t think of her again.

Da Art of Storytellin’ (a Prequel) KIESE LAYMON

“There’s layers to this,” Grandmama often said, when describing her job to folks. She went into that plant every day, knowing it was a laboratory for racial and gendered terror. Still, she wanted to be the best at what she did—and not just the best buttonhole slicer in the plant, but the best, most stylized, most efficient worker in Mississippi. She understood that the audience for her work was not just her coworkers or her white male shift managers, but all the Southern black women workers who preceded her and, most important, all the Southern black women workers coming next.

She was committed to out-freshing herself, which meant that she was up late on Saturday nights, working like a wizard, taking pieces of this blouse from 1984 and sewing them into these dresses from 1969. Grandmama’s primary audience on Sundays, her church sisters, looked with awe and envy at her outfits, inferring she had a fashion industry hookup from Atlanta, or a few secret revenue streams. Not so. This was just how Grandmama brought the stank of her work life into her spiritual communal life, in a way that I loved and laughed at as a kid. I didn’t fully understand or feel inspired by Grandmama’s stank or freshness until years later, when I heard the albums ATLiens and Aquemini from those Georgia-based artists called OutKast.

I already knew OutKast; I loved their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, in part because of the clever way they interpolated funk and soul into rap. ATLiens, however, sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard or imagined. The vocal tones were familiar, but the rhyme patterns, the composition, the production were equal parts red clay, thick buttery grits, and Mars. Nothing sounded like ATLiens. The album instantly changed not just my expectations of music, but my expectations of myself as a young black Southern artist. By then, I already knew I was going to be a writer. I had no idea if I would eat off of what I wrote, but I knew I had to write to be a decent human being.

When André said, “The South got something to say and that’s all I got to say,” at the Source awards in 1995, I heard him saying that we were no longer going to artistically follow New York. Not because the artists of New York were wack, but because disregarding our particular stank in favor of a stink that didn’t love or respect us was like taking a broken elevator down into artistic and spiritual death.

OutKast created a different kind of stank, too: an urban Southern stank so familiar with and indebted to the gospel, blues, jazz, rock, and funk born in the rural black South. And while they were lyrically competing against each other on track after track, together Big and Dre were united, railing and wailing against New York and standing up to a post-civil-rights South chiding young Southern black boys to pull up our pants and fight white supremacy with swords of respectability and narrow conceptions of excellence. ATLiens made me love being black, Southern, celibate, sexy, awkward, free of drugs and alcohol, Grandmama’s grandbaby, and cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.

In The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, I saw myself as the intimate partner doing wrong by Lauryn, and she made me consider how for all the differences between André and Big Boi, they shared in the same kind of misogynoir on their first two albums. (Particularly on the song “Jazzy Belle”: “. . . even Bo knew, that you got poked / like acupuncture patients while our nation is a boat.”) Miseducation had me expecting a lot more from my male heroes. A month later, OutKast dropped Aquemini.

Hip-hop has always embraced metafiction. In the next track—“Da Art of Storytellin’ (Pt. 2)”—Big and Dre deliver a pair of verses about the last recording they’ll ever create due to an environmental apocalypse. We’ve long had emcees rhyming about the potency of their own rhymes. But I have never heard a song attribute the end of the world to a rhyme. In the middle of Dre’s verse, he nudges us to understand that there’s something more happening in this song: “Hope I’m not over your head, but if so you will catch on later.”

I was reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred at the time Aquemini came out. Steeped in all that stank, I conceived of a book within a book within a book, written by a young Southern black girl whose parents disappear. “I’m a round runaway character” was the first sentence my narrator wrote. I decided that she would be an emcee, but I didn’t know her name. I knew that she would tell the world that she was an ellipsis, a runaway ellipsis willing to do any and all things to stop her black Southern community from being written off the face of the earth. I scribbled these notes on the blank pages of Kindred while Aquemini kept playing in the background. By the time the song “Liberation” was done, Long Division, my first novel, was born.