All Her Little Secrets

by Wanda M. Morris

When elephants fight, the only thing that suffers is the grass. —African proverb

As I pulled into the parking garage, I noticed more protesters out front. Their numbers had nearly doubled since the day before and they were louder, too. Serious-looking brown faces like mine chanting, “Houghton hates Blacks . . . ! Houghton hates Blacks!” An uncomfortably repetitious ditty that could get stuck in your ear and nestled in your mind. A few passing cars honked their horns in support of the protesters as they drove by. The same guilty wash of shame flooded over me just like it did months ago when the protests began. Traitor. Turncoat. I collected a hefty paycheck every month from a company that rarely hired other people who looked like me. What would any of the protesters think if they knew I quietly worked at a place where they believed they were not welcome? Was I doing my part to help the tribe or taking ill-gotten gain from a corporate bigot?

So, Ellice Littlejohn . . . now what kind of name is that?” “Excuse me?” I said. “Littlejohn? I mean it’s not very common. What kind of name is that? Where d’ya come from with a name like that?” Was this guy serious? I glanced around the deck, stunned and offended at the same time. Half the Black people I know can’t trace their lineage past their great-grandparents. Who are my people? My people are his ancestors’ chattel. “Well, I haven’t done my Ancestry.com research, but I suspect my name comes about much like yours. From our shared ancestors, huh? I would love to hear about where your ancestors immigrated from, but maybe we can do that another time. Would you excuse me for a moment?” He blinked, stunned to silence. I sat my champagne flute on a nearby table and headed back inside. His question was another example of the “polite racism” of the New South, much like the way Black people in Atlanta coexisted around Confederate soldier statues and venues containing the words plantation and Dixie. The expectation was that such things were harmless symbols of white heritage. They weren’t. They were relics of slavery and a secessionist society that stirred hurtful messages of racism. And now, a board member wanted to know where my family’s slave owners were from.

For the rest of the party, I tried to make the best of things. But there was a disturbing undercurrent that ran through the crowd, as if people were anxious, nervous even. A few people tried to engage with me. But most of them stood off, staring at me or ignoring me altogether. I was a big girl. I could tell they didn’t want me here. The feeling was mutual. Office gatherings like this, the need to be “on,” can be so exhausting. Smiling and pretending to enjoy the stilted conversations and awaiting the threat that someone might tell a wildly inappropriate joke with everyone looking at me for reassurance that it was okay to laugh.

Racism is exhausting and embarrassing, even in front of your best friend, who’s also Black. It’s as if there’s a stealth undercurrent of unwarranted assumptions, petty slights, and dismissals always ready to pop up and reinforce the idea that people of color aren’t good enough, they aren’t welcome.

“You’d be surprised how few Black people there are in the executive ranks of major companies. It’s getting better, but we still have a long way to go.”

“To answer your question, this is an office, not my living room mantel. I don’t line the walls of my kitchen with legal memos, and likewise, I don’t particularly care to fill my office with mementos of my personal life. Work is work and home is home. Any other questions?”

Some people need to remember you long after you’ve left a room. Especially the people who didn’t think you deserved to be there in the first place.

New money has no class.”

Every lie you tell, every secret you keep, is a fragile little thing that must be protected and accounted for. One misstep, one miscalculation, and your safe little treasures can topple the perfect life you’ve built around them.

I realized who I really was. I was a fighter. Black girls—big-boned and thick-skinned—fight all the time. We fight to be heard, to be recognized, to stay alive. We fight even when we don’t know we’re fighting. And now, despite all the labels society tried to place on me, I knew I wasn’t an angry Black woman. I was a fighting Black woman and I’d trained hard right here in this town.

“Now you dry dem tears, baby. You ain’t got no time for tears. You fightin’ for ya life. Like I always told you, you use your heart to love but you use your head to fight.”

When I was younger, I used to pretend that I was born in New York City or Chicago, like Chillicothe, Georgia, never existed. When Vera and Birdie packed me up and shipped me off to boarding school, I stepped into my new life. I stepped out of one little box in my life and into another. But my cardboard life of elite schools and professional success never really eased the haunting ache of growing up poor, Black, and female in rural Georgia. And all the rage and anger that I was fully entitled to was tamped down by a chorus of voices telling me to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to look the other way. So that rage and anger sat bottled up, simmering on the inside. All the while, I spent an entire lifetime calmly trying to explain to people why I needed to be in a certain classroom or worthy of a certain job. Even after my rise, I was still explaining why I needed to be in the room, with a seat at the table, and a voice in the decisions.