Book Report: Black Is the Body

5. Emily Bernard, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine (2019) (3/15/19)

I heard this book reviewed by Maureen Corrigan on NPR's Fresh Air. She said that each essay in it is "unforgettable." That was enough for me to want to read the book, but even better was the fact that it's on a subject I am trying to grapple with: race and racism; being black in this country. Or so I thought.

In the end, I liked the book fine, but I am left with a sensation of blandness. One goodreads reviewer, K (a 24-year-old queer black person), said they felt the book had been written for white people. I wouldn't say that. I think the book may have been written for people generally like the author herself: educated, intellectual, capable, successful, more in her head than in her heart. Someone like me, in fact. But not because I'm white.

Indeed, the author treads carefully along the black-white divide, describing her life as a professor of African American studies in the very white state of Vermont, in her happy marriage to a white man, as the mother of adopted Ethiopian twin girls, in her origins in the South—her grandmother's Mississippi, her own childhood in racially segregated Nashville. She does touch on racial issues, but it's as if she didn't experience prejudice or hatred herself; she seems to view these things through a telescope, rationalizing, distancing. She knows racism is part of her people's past, but it seems to be more "out there" than "in here."

Instead she writes about more universal experiences: her pleasure helping her daughters with their hair (African hair, to be sure, but not because it's African hair); attending the funeral of her grandmother and delving into family history; her and her husband's trip to Ethiopia to adopt their children; her first visit with her fiancé to her parents. Yes, he's white and they're black, and that difference arouses a certain uncomfortablenesses, but it's all . . . good natured? Even when discussing the word nigger with her (white) students, she views it as an academic exercise, an intellectual issue: "It has nothing to do with how it makes me feel."

The most riveting essay is the first, "Scar Tissue," in which Bernard describes an event during grad school where seven people were stabbed, including Bernard herself. Nothing racial about the attack; the perpetrator was of an altered state of mind, striking out at whoever was available. 

I remember stillness, the hum of low voices and the lights, bright yet soothing, like the talk surrounding me. People talking and laughing quietly. Students, professors, writers; I was the only black person present, but these were people just like me, who looked like me. So many moments like these over the years in coffee shops in so many cities; all forgettable, ordinary, and uneventful. But these particular moments on this particular evening stay with me more palpably than any other moments from that long night. The stillness, the quiet hum of low pleasant talk. The sensation of being inside of those moments—it is the only real memory I retain from that night. Yet, just beyond the borders of that quiet, pleasant memory, I can still hear the rhythmic, continuous sound of a dog barking outside, like a warning.
 . . . I saw the knife before it entered me. What was the sensation upon impact? I don't remember. But I do remember that when he pulled it out of my gut, I fell to the ground. What did it feel like? Strange. Weird. Unusual. Lying on the ground, I beseeched God for help. When I neither felt nor heard a thundering reply, I started to laugh. I knew that I needed a hospital, not God. But I call this a "God Moment" anyway, because when I laughed, my wound gaped open, and I looked down and saw and then felt the thick, warm blood rush over my fingers. It is time to get to a hospital, God was saying. I got up, and ran. . . .

As in that first paragraph, when Bernard does allude to herself as a black woman, she often quickly reasserts that she's just another person, trying to make sense of it all. Which may be true enough, but the book's title led me to expect something else. (And why is that? There's another question to ponder.)

To my mind, perhaps the most telling incident regarding Bernard's orientation to her story, and her audience, occurred in the essay "Going Home," where she describes attending an "authentic Southern Baptist church service" with her grandmother. Bernard is a college student at this juncture, and she was raised Episcopalian, so she looks forward to this "down home" experience. She describes how, after the unremarkable sermon "about faith, forgiveness, and the power of redemption," the preacher's voice changed:

First, he added a little vibrato. Then, a steady cadence emerged and held firm. Finally, his voice took flight.
 "I felt something," I wrote in my journal that night. I sat mesmerized, listening as the preacher balanced his words precisely in a sacred space between speech and song. He maintained that balance and opened the door wide to the new space he had made. The choir entered, took up his rhythm, expanded it, glorified it, and then the organ joined them. The church was ablaze with something big, something bigger than language, something I had never experienced before.

She goes on to describe the congregation, jumping, shouting, falling to the floor.

"I want so much to be a part of something like that. But I probably will never be," I wrote. "I was born to be a spectator, to watch and feel but to keep my mouth closed." The only release I could manage was to cry. I let the tears fall, overwhelmed by the show of organic, spontaneous vitality in the room, and awash in self-pity at my utter aloneness. So this was real life, I thought, from which I was doomed to stand forever apart. . . . I felt happy and guilty, as if I had stolen something precious and no one would ever know.
 We went to church again the next week. I tried to walk like an ordinary person up to our pew, but I wasn't an ordinary person anymore. I had been a witness to a miracle; I had experienced a true revelation. Nothing about me would ever be the same again.
 My excitement wilted as the service began and unfolded exactly as it had the previous week. The preacher spoke, then shook his words with vibrato, which cued the chorus, who matched his gait, which signaled the organist, who added dimension, which stirred the people, some of whom shook loose and dropped to the floor.
 What I had witnessed the week before was less an organism than an elegant machine; not chaos but perfectly crafted choreography. But fascination quickly elbowed disappointment off the stage of my imagination. This was real life—not magic, only practice, commitment, and labor. This lesson, about life, about art, is one I am still learning.

That quest for "real life," which each of us can only experience in our own unique way, is what underscores the essays in this book. But there is a certain lack of a center in this quest, a lack of self (or self-awareness), of feeling, that I found a tad offputting. The yearning to be part of something remains just that: a yearning. That said, there is also something admirable about Bernard's vulnerability, about her laying her quest (and her yearning) out for all to see. In the end, I felt that Bernard and I could be friends, discussing these very questions. Maybe that's why K felt it was written for white people, but I wonder if it isn't more accurate to say it was written for people puzzling out the meaning of it all. There's bound to be overlap, and insight—universalities—in what any of us conclude. At least, I would hope so.

Maybe my feeling of dissatisfaction comes from my wanting something more particular, by which I mean, something unlike my own experience. I wasn't looking to nod my head and say, "Yeah, I get that; me too." I wanted my understanding of the kaleidoscope that is humanity to be enlarged; I wanted to be surprised, or maybe confounded.