My sitting in this classroom seemed a tad incredible, considering that a little more than 150 years earlier, I would have been forced to help build the walls that now surrounded me. As I looked at these walls, they returned my stare, and my imagination was seized by the history that had brought these walls to be. These walls spoke of that history. Even the layers upon layers of paint and lacquer could not conceal their speech. They spoke a language that only I could hear. I could feel it. I could understand it, though I couldn’t speak it. They spoke of my ancestors with callused hands and bent backs, building these walls day and night. In the heat and in the cold, in the rain and in the sunshine. I could also see them big and Black, bent over with callused hands, scrubbing the windows that made the sun-drenched carpet look like a fading rainbow. I could hear the horrors trapped within these plastered walls—the muted screams of Black women and girls being raped by their slave masters, the moans and groans of field hands being whipped by overseers. I could hear the cries of families torn apart in the name of profit—sold on the auction block for a few pieces of silver. The acrid smell of human bodies, burnt and branded by the slave master’s whip and the sun’s heat, filled my senses. I had a total eclipse of the brain as sorrow and anger seeped through my spirit.
Everybody was still buzzing about themselves, but I was lost in deep thought about the “Middle Passage,” or the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of America. I thought of words like commodity, nihilism, slavocracy, and the banality of evil. Though I sat frozen in a trance, my imagination was set ablaze and fueled by the agonizing winds of history. Had I been listening, I would have known what the other class members had said as they introduced themselves. But I was beside myself, I was overwhelmed by the agony of my slave ancestors. I tried to remember my African dialect—my native language. I know this sounds unreal to a person whose language is his own, but my language is not mine. I strain in my dreams and my imagination to remember, but I can’t.
What should I say about myself? The class was waiting. They were all staring at me. I was thinking. I was teetering on the brink of—delirium. Anticipation lurked in the furrows and freckles of a sea of white faces. Suddenly, I realized that I was the only African American in the class.
Ten or twelve students stared at me, puzzled and confused, but I couldn’t respond. Ernest Gaines’ opening line from A Lesson Before Dying came back to me: “I WAS NOT THERE, yet I was there.” That was my condition. I was in a twilight zone that was my own purgatory. I felt trapped between past and present. I thought I heard some mumbling or a snicker or two, but I couldn’t snap out of it. I started thinking . . . why weren’t more Blacks in this class. At least one other Black person—just one so I wouldn’t feel so isolated, so alone. Could this really be so, that only one Black male and no Black females had registered for this class on Mark Twain? Did they know something that I didn’t know? Was Mark Twain considered a racist? Or was Huck Black as Shelley Fisher Fishkin had asked? Was he really that different from all other white Americans? There was so much that I didn’t know about Mark Twain and so much that I didn’t know about myself. My feelings took hold of me and I was surprised not by the joy of C. S. Lewis, but by pain and anger. Even a sorrowful sadness blanketed my face.
Why? In a university with thirty thousand students, how could this absence of Black students be explained? Maybe studying English literature in an age of technology was just too impractical for most young Black people. Maybe there was too much reading and writing and analysis and not enough sound bites. This class was not postmodern enough. It was not in the business school or the school of education. Maybe reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was just too painful. Maybe they really did know that the class conjured too many emotions and caused too much stress. Or maybe other Blacks just couldn’t see how this class would help them get a job to pay the rent and buy the groceries. It was too esoteric and not pragmatic enough. I already had a job.
I admit it is hard to survive in the jungles of our cities and communities. It is hard to read and study the life and words of old white men like Mark Twain and his progenitors—Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides, and others—when energy prices are sky high and the cost of a loaf of bread and a pound of anything edible is almost prohibitive. It could be a pound of cheese or a pound of bologna. This is a common folks’ food—like sardines and saltine crackers. Poor folk’s delectables. These are the realities that most Black people face. This is the world where some people were treated differently because of their dark skin and their dual African and American connection—like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, or Frederick Douglass.
It seems that the axis through American slavery makes the difference in life. We had a WASP neighbor a few years ago whose children were patients of a Black pediatrician who was a medium-brown-complexioned person with straight hair. The skin color was more Black than anything else. I knew the doctor to be African American, but my neighbor, in discussing her children’s physician, indicated that their doctor was Indian or Lebanese. I was not about to burst her bubble and tell her that her children’s doctor was in fact Black. It was okay for him to be anything except African American. The texture of his hair helped them to ignore the tone and color of his skin. Maybe that’s why some Black folk are hair freaks—obsessed with perms, wigs, extensions, weaves, relaxers. The goal is to transform kinky hair into straight hair, which is said to be “good hair.” When a Black woman has long, flowing, straight hair, other Blacks will quickly say, “Child, that’s not her hair. She bought that hair from the Koreans. Can’t you tell where her real, God–given hair ends?” Your skin can be as Black as soot, but if your hair is straight like the Asians and not kinky, then white folks will call you Indian or Asian or Hawaiian, but not Black or African American.
I thought my reasoning about hair was simply cultural until I read Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral, in which he describes the main character’s wife Dawn Levov, Miss New Jersey’s efforts to become Miss America. The narrator goes on and on about the details and intricacies of the pageant and then he interjects, “The Southern girls in particular, Dawn told him, could really lay it on: ‘Oh, you’re just so wonderful, your hair’s so wonderful . . . ” Then the narrator utters these words: “The veneration of hair took some getting used to for a girl as down-to-earth as Dawn; you might almost think, from listening to the conversation among the other girls, that life’s possibilities resided in hair—not in the hands of your destiny but in the hands of your hair.”
The veneration of hair is not simply a fetish for Black people. And, it was not the veneration of hair in the first place. It was the value and importance of hair texture. Straight versus kinky. White versus Black. That’s where the issue becomes more social and psychological than aesthetic. Still, I was glad to see that I wasn’t the only one who had such beliefs about hair. Henry Louis Gates in Colored People also gives us a short dissertation about Black people and their obsession with “nappy hair on colored heads.”
For Blacks, this veneration of straight hair exemplifies the desire to be like whites and to loathe that which is Black. The long hard fight for equality and justice in public education was hair- and skin color-related.
In 1950, Black psychologists Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie Phipps Clark published the findings of their legendary doll study demonstrating and documenting how racial segregation impacted the self-esteem of Black children. When the Clarks asked little Black children between three and seven years old to choose between identical Black and white dolls, the majority of Black children preferred the white doll, and attributed positive characteristics to it. When asked to color a picture of themselves, the same children used white or yellow crayons. Society, in the form of segregation and racism,