Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

...in every scar there is a story. The salve is the telling itself.

I am black - and I am brown, too: Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.

This was real life - no magic, only practice, commitment, and labor. This lesson, about life, about art, is one I am still learning.

The problem is not the visibility of dark skin, but who sees it and what the viewer feels motivated to do next.

This is your pain,' she said. 'You must bear witness.

This is marriage, I thought, or at least my marriage. It is not the stories of forbidden desire that thrilled me as a girl, or even magical rides through clouds and on dark waters. It is John’s right hand in mine, and his left one sure and steady on the wheel.

In order to narrate her own life, she needs another person to listen, to aid in the tending of her interior.

...perpetuating the pain of the past. Is the telling the salve or the wound?

Race is a social construction for which there is no scientific basis; racism is the foundation of that construction...but when I am out in the world with my daughters, it is not a construction or it’s consequences that I fear will hurt them. What I fear are human beings, white human beings, who are not made of theory, but of flesh and blood.

Dr. King’s noble dream has degenerated into a cliche, a catchphrase, like “diversity,” a way out of - as opposed to a way into - a complex and textured conversations about race. At best, what the civil rights movement appears to have produced is a generation that is keen to look beyond race, but finds on the other side not freedom but a riddle. The riddle of race, something you see but must always pretend not to see.

This South is nothing like the South in which I used to live, with its manicured lawns and gated country clubs. Even that South has changed. Over the years, Nashville has gotten bigger and more complex. The relatively modest, adolescent city in which I was born had grown into an adult with a tailored suit and gym-toned thighs, all glamour and muscle. It is part of the New South. In that South, there is no place for my daydreams. My true South, this South, is old, and deep, well into the belly of the region, far below the Mason-Dixon Line.

In my family, race was not a construction, or a theory, or an outdated consequence of history, but the active, living foundation of our reality. Race determined the contours of every choice we made; every mundane public act we performed was a project with a name. When we moved into our house, it was called integration. When my older brother and I entered the public school system, it was called desegregation. The split between black and white was not metaphorical; railroad tracks divided black and white Nashville. On the white side of town, South Nashville, we played a role in a grand project of enormous proportions. We lived in South Nashville, but in North Nashville we could be black in a way that was not possible in any other part of the city. In North Nashville, no one white was watching. We could relax. We were free.