Tahija’s voice and touch seemed rough to me. The boys cried too much, I thought, especially during the bath. Any suggestions — like, maybe the water’s too hot, or, if you went slower — made things suddenly uncomfortable, and I held my tongue. It was better, I would find, simply to be gentle with them (and her), and let the results be seen. If she wanted those results she could try those methods. I might use the very same words she did — “hold still” or “you don’t want to smell funky, do you?” — but more gently. Sometimes I’d hear her try on my tone for size, and I’d try hers — “Why you gotta do that?”
I noticed the kids in the neighborhood heard me better when I used the tone I learned from Tahija.
Harsh words directed at hair, lips (especially Damear’s bigger lower one), complexion, head size, and supposed body odor or bad breath, however, I did not repeat, in any tone. How could a child spoken to that way grow up to feel good about himself, and wasn’t it the main job of a parent or care giver, after protection and care of the body, to build healthy self image and strong self esteem?
Well where did I get that idea? It certainly hadn’t been the way in my family, where our parents seemed ashamed of our very existence. So of course it bothered me, pushed my buttons, to hear that language used now on these boys still so tiny and vulnerable, but it disturbed me still more because so much of the harshness seemed racial. Was this internalized racism; self-hate and self-loathing springing all ugly and slimy from the parents’ chests, ala Alien?
I wanted to deny it. I felt (irrationally) angry at Tahija and Lamarr for bearing this evidence of society’s racism. But there seemed also to be a conscious, practical purpose to this ugly inheritance as well: to toughen the boys up, to hurt them before the world hurt them and in the same way, so the world’s hurt would hurt less, or, at least, not be fatal.
Can an insult be literally fatal? Yes, if in reaction to it you snap, or say the wrong thing to the wrong person. Lamarr and Tahija knew that, in their bones, and if they were more harsh than they needed to be, who was I to say they should risk being less harsh?
This is more of the tragedy of racism: that even as it may decrease in some white people and some institutions, the reaction to it, the distortions caused by it, continue to be passed on: DDT in the breast milk, PCP’s in the drinking water, HIV through the umbilical cord.
I saw it go into them. I saw Damear, at three, begin to bight down on his lower lip, sucking it in, hiding it, like Morrison’s Nel in The Bluest Eye made to wear a clothespin on her nose in the hopes of squashing it into a more European-looking nose. I saw Mahad pull at his hair so much it began to fall out. I saw Lamarr grow vain over his green eyes, and I saw the fear in all their eyes — that they bore in their very bodies an irreversible stigma of inferiority.
This made me mad, and still does. But there’s no point being mad at the river for having PCB’s in its sediment. Be mad at GE for dumping them there, gallon after gallon decade after decade. Know who to send the dredging bill too. Meanwhile, keep the kids out of the river, if you can.
I cut this because it seemed too harsh a characterization of Tahija’s way with her children. I think now that cutting it may have been a mistake. It gives evidence to the legacy of slavery as it was passed down to the triplets. This reality was one of the hardest for me to face, but I could not deny it. Perhaps in cutting the passage I have tried to deny it.
No comments:
Post a Comment