COMMITMENTS : Breaking the Silence That Hides the Pain

It was a rainy Saturday in Los Angeles. Some parts of the city had already started flooding.

“Great,” I thought as I arranged food on the dining room table, “nobody’s going to show up.” Nobody drives in the rain in L.A. I had spent all week and all my spare money preparing for this brunch.

Why had I even thought of hosting a black women’s brunch? What did I expect to gain from this gathering? I’ve done therapy, Prozac and shop-till-you-drop. What words of wisdom could a group of black women offer to explain or assuage the growing space of dissatisfaction and disillusionment within me?

As if in answer to my question the first guest arrived. (I’ll call her Becca; the names of all these women have been changed.)

“I thought nobody was going to show,” I laughingly admitted.

“Girl, please,” Becca snapped. “I would have missed the birth of the messiah to come to this.”

I knew then that it hadn’t been a stupid idea, but a vital one. Soon the others came marching to the door, one behind the other, with an umbrella in one hand and the requested potluck dish in the other. No men, children or pajama-party chit-chat about lovers allowed. All of us were eager to communicate candidly about something we hardly ever get an opportunity to discuss (unless it is romanticized, pathologized or trivialized): the day-to-day businessof being a black woman in America.

As black women, one historical myth we have had to endure our entire lives is that of our assumed birthright to strength. All black women are supposed to be strong--caretakers, nurturers, healers--any of the 12 dozen variations of mammy.

It might as well be in our genes. It’s certainly in the images society insists on thrusting upon us. From Aunt Jemima on the pancake box to any number of the stoic matriarchs in film and on television (the blacker the actress, the more mammyish her role.)

Of course, there is nothing wrong with being strong. But these images cannot be stripped from their social and historical contexts. Consequently, they create limits and expectations that are emotionally crippling.

This was the one thing all the women at the brunch discovered that we had in common: At one time or another in our lives, we have all felt caged and held back by the fact that we are both black and female.

Regina, a tall, mahogany-colored actress, told her story. She had been chosen to play the only black character in a television series. In the one year she worked on the show, she was never reprimanded and had no disagreements with anyone on the cast or production team. Nevertheless, her contract was not renewed.

This is the reason she was given: “We do not know how or what to write for your character. We can’t very well have her sleeping around, that would be too controversial.”

So, through no fault of her own, Regina went back to pounding the pavement. The show has gone on to be one of the hottest hits in the country.

Victoria, who hadn’t spoken a word until that moment, pulled her dreadlocks away from her face and twisted them into a makeshift ponytail: “I wish people would stop putting their hands in my hair without permission.”

Once, she told us, she had been in a reception room waiting to be called into a meeting when a strange man just ran his fingers through her dreads while saying to her, “Wow, these are really cool.”

Even Victoria was shocked by the rage and violation she felt. When she approached the front office and demanded the names of the man and his supervisor, the receptionist--a white woman--asked her, “What’s the big deal? It’s not like he grabbed your breast.”

At that, Beverly stood up, placed her hands on her hips, pursed her lips and crooked her neck.

“Everybody knows,” she sarcastically preached, “that black folks tend to overreact.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what I need to start doing,” said a soft-spoken Janice. “I was filling out a rental application the other day and the landlord asked me, ‘ How many children do you have?’--not whether I had any. When I walk through restaurants and department stores, no matter how dressed up I am, people assume that I am the help.”

“At least,” Beverly said seriously, “they ask where the Size 8s are, not whether someone in your family smokes crack. Whether you went to school on scholarship. Or if you and your siblings have the same father. Everybody expects me to have a hard-luck story and when I don’t I get grilled until they can find a reasonable excuse for my not having had a hard life.”

*

Another woman, Angela, had recently attended a forum on diversity in the workplace. One of the speakers was an influential man in Angela’s field. Early in his talk, the white speaker announced to the majority-black audience that he was “half racist.”

“How can someone be half racist?” Angela asked at the audience microphone. “Isn’t that like being half pregnant?”

The speaker responded, “That’s sort of the street expression, like saying someone is half a wise guy or something. What I was saying was that I am racist. My saying that would be intended to sort of preempt your perception that I am more racist than I think I am. I think I know how racist I am.”

Angela left the forum and drove around aimlessly for hours until finding herself in a Builders Emporium. “I needed to do something with my hands,” she told us. “Now I have seen racism and I have seen mo’ racism but this was. . . . “

“We have to remember,” Regina interrupted, “that we are strong; we can bounce back. Our parents survived and their parents before them survived.”

“I don’t believe that,” another woman chimed in. “I think that our parents did not survive. I think that they were damaged and have passed on those injuries to us. I really think we need to face up to the fact that we are seriously hurting and leave this strength stuff alone.”

*

Heeding those words, Regina began to weep. A few others joined her. When what we are imagined to be collides with how we truly see ourselves, a fissure rips through our psyches.

We are ill-equipped to bridge this schism. Relying on the same methods of effective resistance that our foremothers attempted to use, we silence ourselves from our sorrows and embrace the antiquated illusion of invincibility. And we do this by absorbing the oppressive beliefs.

That Saturday my women friends and I held our collective pain and all its crudeness, like an onion in the palms of our hands and triumphantly peeled away its first and toughest layer.

As the conversations continued, we shed away other layers, reaching finally the space where the subtler, more pervasive forms of racism and sexism make their home.

Food grew cold on the table as we talked. The rain fell harder. We cried more freely and frequently. Morning turned to day turned to night. We kept talking. The answering machine intercepted calls from lonely husbands and impatient baby-sitters. We continued to talk, acutely aware of the mending that was taking place in each of us as individual black women, in the company of our sisters.