Erin Robinson
I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately. Not you as you are now, but as you were when you were born.
For nine months, everyone in the house was on edge, ever since your mother, my sister, announced she was pregnant at age nineteen. Your Granny was disappointed, but tried to make the most of the situation. She spent a lot of time shopping for baby clothes and parenting magazines. Your Granddaddy, as you’ve come to learn, is quiet when angry, and mostly spent his time shaking his head. I was only nine years old, and just tried to stay out of everybody’s way.
Your birth was a welcome release of tension, as if all had been forgiven. Everyone cooed over you, with your big eyes and bright skin. We gave you your mother’s old nickname: “Squirrel.” We dressed you up in that same yellow-ruffled baby dress your mother and I had worn years before, and got professional pictures taken. Now, you can only tell our three baby photos apart because you were drooling so much in yours. I know we joke about you stealing all the attention from me, but the truth is: The house felt happy and full during those years we all still lived together.
I’ve been thinking about that baby a lot. You were quick to laugh and fascinated by everything you saw. We all used to wonder aloud what you’d be like as you got older. As a baby, you knew nothing of the definitions the world was going to press onto you later in life—black, female, Southern. Nobody was yet telling you who to be like, who not to end up like. The world had not yet told you who you were, who you could or should be. You just were.
***
I was seven years old when the world first told me who I was. I had a crush on a white boy in my class with blue eyes and too much hair. Every day on the bus ride home, we would duck down low between the seats and sneak kisses back and forth. One day, his older brother caught us in the act, laughed, and screamed, “I can’t wait to tell Mom and Dad you were kissing a nigger.”
It wasn’t my first time hearing that word—but the version my family spoke ended with an “a” (I almost told him he pronounced it wrong). This was my first time hearing it said like that, like it was a dirty word, difficult for him to even hold in his mouth. And he’d used it to describe me.
I think I’ve been running from that moment and that word my whole life. A nigger isn’t smart, so I became Type-A obsessive over my grades and accomplishments. A nigger’s hair is kinky, so I sobbed every day until your Granny finally relented and let me perm my hair. A nigger spoke a certain way; so I sounded like I was raised by the Brady Bunch.
This is hard for me to admit to you and to myself, but my opinions of black people, including your mother, followed this behavior. Growing up, your mother was a lot like she is now—aggressively confident and headstrong. To her credit, I don’t think your mother ever believed the story the world tried to tell her about herself.
She wasn’t naive. She just learned early on that because she was black and a girl, the world would never give her her due. This injustice caused your mother to love herself even harder and louder, and place all of her faith in herself. I responded to the world’s view of me by apologizing and trying to correct what I saw as mistakes in myself; your mother responded by being fully herself and daring the world to say something about it.
The world, however, only saw a smart mouth on a black girl, and your mother was in trouble often, whether at home or at school. Even before she was pregnant with you, my sister was presented to me as the bad example. Your Granny told me, “Don’t be like your sister.” And when I got to high school, I would hear some version of this over and over again from teachers when they recognized my last name on the roll.
You can only be a token in their space for so long before someone reminds you of that dirty word and your place within it.
Each time, I felt an odd combination of fear for her and pride in myself. I wanted my sister to “act right,” like I did. I thought her life would be easier if she just changed how she behaved. Maybe if she turned her music down, she wouldn’t get pulled over. Maybe if she ignored her classmates’ taunts, she wouldn’t always be in detention. I wanted her to change how she responded to the world, to stop talking back, to quiet her attitude. When your mother announced she was pregnant, I thought of you as another confining definition she’d have to bear. In addition to being a black woman, now she was also a single teenage mother. Three strikes.
I didn’t realize how poisonous this kind of thinking is. I just wanted to fit in—after all, I was going to a predominantly white school and living in a predominantly white neighborhood. But now I know: because I didn’t want myself or anyone I loved to be associated with that word ever again, I judged us against someone else’s definition of what was “right.”
The crazy thing is, it almost worked. You’ve heard both black and white people say it to me before: “Why are you so white?” or “You’re the whitest black girl I know.” It is funny that what black people say as an insult or in jest, white people mean as a compliment. Once, when a friend’s mother called me “one of the good ones,” I felt a separation grow between myself and other black people. But there was, and maybe there always will be, a limit to how far I could go.
What I’ve learned is perhaps something your mother already knew: You can only be a token in their space for so long before someone reminds you of that dirty word and your place within it. Even if you do everything “right.” Even if you use your blinker and follow every traffic law, a cop will pull you over and ask “where a girl like you got a car like this.” (Remember that red convertible I had?)
Even if you sound like a white girl over the phone, you might not get the job after the in-person interview. Even if you’re a childless A-plus college student with two jobs, your white boyfriend’s parents will say he can “do better.” It was a hard lesson to learn, and I had to run face-first into that limit several times before I understood it.
***
It hit me again recently, when Botham Jean, a twenty-six-year-old black man, was killed in his Dallas apartment by off-duty police officer Amber Guyger, who claimed the whole thing was a misunderstanding.
In the days that followed, I watched as the news released facts about Botham. At first, it seemed as if he’d done everything “right.” I read that he was a college graduate, an accountant, and active in his church. When he was shot, he wasn’t driving with his music blasting loudly, or talking back to anyone. He was inside his own apartment on a Thursday evening after work, maybe sitting on the couch, maybe fixing himself dinner. Just like I was holding up accomplishments and certain behaviors to prove my own worth, newspapers rolled out these details as proof that Botham was one of the good ones, was not a threat, and did not deserve what happened to him.
Then a few days later, the story changed. Botham had run into that limit, the final rung of the ladder we’re not allowed to grasp. Now, police said they needed to search his apartment. They found—aha!—a small amount of marijuana. And why, they asked, didn’t he respond to the officer’s verbal commands? In a matter of days, Botham went from being an educated and hardworking man at home after a long day of work to being a black man who got high and didn’t listen. Three strikes.
While officer Guyger has been charged with murder, rare for a police shooting, you know Botham isn’t a lone example. You know about Trayvon Martin and Laquan McDonald and Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice. You saw how the world reduced these people to their final moments, more than anything that came before. Why did she talk back? Why did he run? It didn’t matter that Trayvon called his mom “Cupcake,” that Laquan worked at a youth advocate program after school, or that Sandra had an agriculture degree. It didn’t matter that Tamir was twelve. In the end, when it mattered, they could go only so far.
***
You were only nine when I left for college, so I missed a lot of your preteen and teenage milestones. I don’t know who your first kiss was with, or when you first had the word “nigger” thrown at you like a slap to the face. (Some will say, “Well, maybe that’s never happened to her,” but I know better.)
Each time I returned home for a visit, you seemed more fully realized, like I was pressing fast-forward on a video of your life. All of a sudden when I came home for the holidays, you were painting your nails, wearing a bra, and joining the track team. You weren’t “Squirrel” anymore, the kid with big front teeth and plaited ponytails. You were Thalia, popular in school, but struggling in math. You rolled your eyes at everything your mom said, not realizing how much you reminded everyone of her at that age.
Do you remember the night you ran away from home? I think you were fifteen or sixteen. I wasn’t there, but your Granny called and told me how you ran out of the house barefoot in the middle of an argument with your mother, and I was struck. I wasn’t worried about your safety—we are either related to or know everybody in that town, and I heard our cousin Kelsey chased you until his bad knee gave out. I wasn’t even surprised that you and your mother had gotten into an argument. You two are exactly alike—headstrong, proud. She’d probably threatened you with a whooping. I’m sure of it.
You showed me that if there’s one place in this world for us, one place where all those dirty words and narrow definitions can be discarded and we can be ourselves without judgment or fear, it should be from whence we came.
No, it was the helplessness of that running that got to me, the pointlessness of it. Where did you imagine yourself going? What place was going to be better than the comfort of your own home, your mother, your family? Growing up, Granny used to remind me that you were always watching, always looking up to me. But it was you who taught me something. You showed me that if there’s one place in this world for us, one place where all those dirty words and narrow definitions can be discarded and we can be ourselves without judgment or fear, it should be from whence we came.
If you were looking up to me all those years, Thalia, I hope you learned what not to do. That girl was fundamentally insecure, looking to others to confirm her worth and trying to escape the truth, like someone running away barefoot. I spent so many years of my life trying desperately to prove I wasn’t whatever that dirty word meant. In the process, I missed out on knowing myself.
It is only recently that I have stopped running. I eventually tired of having to balance the different versions of myself. It’s difficult to maintain a superiority complex and an inferiority complex at once, to view one’s self in two completely different lights, and to constantly question which one you’re supposed to be, which one is worthier of love or life. I had to ask myself: If I can do everything “right” and still be a nigger (or worse, a dead nigger), then why spend so much time trying to fit this narrow definition? If my middle-class upbringing, my formal education, and the way I present myself to the world don’t matter, then what does?
As colossal as that question sounds, the answer was freeing. The answer brought me back to you, back to that baby born on a clear December day in 1999. I realized that I still carried within me the same clean slate I once envied you for. I could shed those layers, return to the start, and underneath, perhaps there was someone you could look up to.
***
Now, I’m working to create a definition of myself that is real and mine. I want an expansive and personal definition, one that includes the way I overly pronounce my consonants when I speak, and how talking to you and the rest of our family brings out my country accent. A definition that makes room for my inability to leave the house without coconut oil in my purse or watch You’ve Got Mail without crying; one that includes my equal obsessions with Joan Didion and Plies. The goals I chase now are for me, not for someone else’s approval. I’m not asking who I should be to make others happy or at least comfortable in my skin; I just am.
This means I’m also constantly removing the filters the world gave me for viewing others, and I’ll admit that I’m not always good at it. Another confession: I was disappointed in you when your mother first told me you were pregnant at seventeen. Three hours away in my own apartment, I rolled out of bed, placed my feet on the floor, and sat there in the dark for what felt like a long time.
Conflicted feelings warred inside of me. Now that I’m older, I know teenage pregnancy isn’t the end of the world, even if you are a black girl from the South. I watched your mother finish college twice, get married, buy a house, and raise two smart and kind children. I knew that one experience did not define her and it should not define you. But at the same time, I recalled how your mother was treated, how society’s disdain for her only deepened after you’d arrived. I cringed at the thought of anyone seeing you like that, and I almost fell back into old habits. Why wasn’t she more careful? Didn’t she know what people would think? Why didn’t she act right? And then I stopped myself short.
There are ten years between your mother and me, and nearly ten years between me and you. Now we are thirty-eight, twenty-eight, and nineteen years old. Each of us has struggled with how to live as a black woman in a world that has set limits on who we can be. I don’t know what insights your mother has shared with you on the topic, but for my part I want you to understand this:
You have nothing to run away from. It doesn’t matter what labels the world gives you, as long as you do the defining.
Only you can decide how you’re going to move through this world, what you hold dear, what parts of yourself you find pride in. Try to forgive those of us in the family who have helped press those definitions onto you. Backward as it must seem, it comes from love, and from an understanding that the world wants to deny you your humanity. Forgive me, Thalia, as I learn that this world must adjust to you, not the other way around.