Because I Said So (29 page)

“That’s true,” I told him. “But even if I don’t have it, I might not be here in five years.” So I decided to take the chance.

At first,
I did not tell my partner about the life forming inside of me. I was afraid that the revelation, if made public, could damage his reputation and political ambitions. I broke off our relationship and told him that I was carrying someone else’s child.

But he knew the truth and the reasons for my secrecy. Given his family and professional obligations, I never had grand expectations of him, but I was gratified when he pledged to face his responsibility to stand by our child and me. My focus was on keeping my daughter and myself alive through the pregnancy and birth, but I was comforted that we would not be alone.

Publicly, the birth of our daughter, Ashley, was shrouded in secrecy, but behind closed doors, we felt the same joy and pride
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that other parents do when their child smiles or learns to talk and walk. We had the perfect baby. And despite the unconventional nature of our situation, we were determined to raise an emotionally healthy child. She had an attentive mother and father. She would grow up knowing that she was loved and cared for by
both
her parents. Someday later we would tell her why we could not marry, at least not then.

No matter how we tried to make our home as solid as brick, in the end it was a house of straw. Following up on a rumor, a national tabloid learned about our daughter. Reporters smelling scandal began calling me and showing up on my lawn.

My partner made a public statement acknowledging that he was Ashley’s father. Coming at a time when President Bill Clinton was being crucified for lying about his affair with a White House intern, my partner was praised by the media for his honesty. Then he quietly bowed out of public life for a while to “spend time with his family” and “revive his spirits.”

Suddenly, I was at the center of a mighty storm, one that was purely destructive. My life was torn from its roots, heaved about, and came crashing down in pieces. My partner’s withdrawal from political life left me alone to answer publicly for our relationship.

I was attacked by friends, strangers, and the black press without mercy, my only moral support coming from a few close friends and my family. I turned for spiritual help to a friend who was also a pastor, but instead he publicly accused me of “setting up” my now ex-partner. Black religious leaders and congregations prayed for him and his “family,” but not for our daughter and me.

Apparently, we didn’t merit any spiritual help.

The black media requested interviews with him, his family members, and our colleagues, but did not speak to me, choosing instead to label me a political stalker. While the black press ignored me, the tabloids couldn’t get enough of me: They offered me hundreds of thousands of dollars to share the secrets of our lives together. Though I refused them all—our daughter’s life was not for sale—the black establishment called me a gold digger and an opportunist.

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I soon realized that in one fell swoop I had joined the pantheon of women who—in the process of living, loving, and carrying out their lives—become seen in the black community as pariahs, women scorned, fatal attractions preying on the lives of famous black men.

Consider the case of Anita Hill, the bright young academic star who worked for Clarence Thomas when he was a federal judge and encountered a familiar brand of patriarchal control.

Having no choice but to testify during Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination hearings about his sexual impropriety on the job, she carried out her duty with grace and dignity. Nonetheless, Hill was excoriated in the press for having dared to challenge a black man’s career ambitions.

Likewise, when heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson was accused of raping Desiree Washington, a former Miss Teenage Black America, he was protected by black community leaders. Never mind that Tyson’s violent temper and abusive behavior were well known; his former wife, Robin Givens, had accused him of battery on a national news program. But just as Givens had been criticized for “going public” about her husband’s abuse and chastised for “gold digging,” Washington was demonized for charging Tyson with rape.

The sympathy received by O. J. Simpson after he was accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole, the white mother of two of his children, also shows how commonplace woman-bashing has become within the black community. Although race became the subtext for Simpson’s trial, among black people gender was also an important issue. It was not unusual in private conversations to hear Nicole Simpson referred to as an opportunist who deserved her fate because she had, after all, married O. J. for his money.

Another outrageous instance occurred in the summer of 2002, when R&B singer R. Kelly was charged with twenty-one counts of child pornography for videotaping sex acts with a minor. Although Kelly clearly had a predilection for underage women—at twenty-seven, he had married the fifteen-year-old singer Aaliyah—black supporters of Kelly called the teenager a

“slut” and hurled other insults at her at the pre-trial hearing. Two
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years later, Kelly was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and invited by the Congressional Black Caucus Spouses to perform at its annual benefit concert.

The list goes on, unfortunately now with my own name upon it.

Despite my attempt to become the quintessential race woman—

despite the fact that my life’s work had revolved around advocating for economic, political, and social justice for minority people—I was suddenly antithetical to all black interests. I became the scapegoat in an orchestrated effort to protect a black male, and part of that protection involved destroying my credibility. Those who sought to discredit me, attempted thieves of my humanity, were skillful. Their goal was to mute my voice, for fear of what I might say. And like so many black women before me, I found myself wondering, Am I not worthy of respect, protection, and support?

I was stunned by the fury from those who had no vested interest in my life. Whether the choice I made was right or wrong, it was a personal matter—how could my professional future and political life hinge on it? Yet overnight, the person whom I had worked so hard to become had been erased. Again, I was a nobody. Even my colleagues thought
I
needed to pay a price for
my
transgressions. A high-level position promised to me by the Democratic National Committee was delicately revoked. I was also quietly vetted out of all party activities. Colleagues who once considered my political and policy advice an asset refused to return my calls. At one point I found myself a single mother, unemployed, and with no real prospects for work. I became fully aware of how black women, no matter what their commitment, are liabilities in the world of black power—a world in which black men receive unquestioned loyalty despite their sometimes unconscionable actions.

When the news media
ran its headlines, spreading false statements and innuendo, I did not run to pick up my pen. When the national tabloids and black press called me an opportunist, a wanton woman, I did not answer by sending them photocopies of
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my various degrees and hard-earned curriculum vitae. Nor did I hit the streets when black radio and talk show hosts accused me of trying to bring a good man down, to break yet another one of our people’s icons of success.

I was silent because I was shocked and frightened and had a feeling that my efforts would not make a difference. Other than family members and close friends, who would listen? Who would hear me? Who would care? In part, I was afraid that by engaging in public confrontations, I would continue to hurt the people I loved. I was especially concerned about protecting my daughter from being caught in media crossfire. But I was also concerned about protecting her relationship with her father—as a cancer survivor, I needed to know that no matter what happened, that would remain intact.

Perhaps somewhere deep inside me, I also believed the declarations that I was “a nobody.” In truth, I was not totally surprised by the treatment I received. Intuitively, I knew that sexism in the black community was stubbornly entrenched, though I was encouraged early on to ignore it. Like most young black women, I learned that it was our job to take care of ourselves while helping our black men succeed. We were urged to shield them from the mainstream’s genocidal bullet of bigotry—period. Nobody ever sat us down and told us this directly, at least not in my home.

Nobody said, “Black women, your job is to stay behind black men, not eclipse them.” But it was understood. It was a piece of knowledge that was handed down quietly, like an old pair of jeans or a picture quilt that tells a family saga.

In retrospect, I had always known subconsciously that those black female activists with big Afros did not always receive the respect their hard work warranted. I also knew the unspoken truth: that black women suffer disproportionately from abuse, battery, rape, assault, and lack of physical and financial child support. Contrary to the prevailing myth that black men endure the brunt of racism, black women suffer from the triple jeopardy of racism, classism, and sexism.

Black women have been complicit in maintaining this status
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quo. Surely for fear of being ostracized and left unmarried, we have been slow to critique the system that leaves us marginalized and often on our own. Years of being called “Jezebel,” “sap-phire,” “controlling matriarch,” and “emasculator” have silenced us, even when we are confronted with physical assault or sexual harassment.

Looking back, I can see clearly my own collusion with this unspoken code. I now realize that my initial attempt to lie about my pregnancy was a reflex, based on cultural expectations.

Drummed into my head by those who knew of our relationship were phrases such as, “Unlike white women, black women don’t tell.” My bifurcated childhood experiences, growing up in a harsh reality with fairy tale expectations, haunted me. I had pretended to reside in a world of gender equality, of black male and female camaraderie, that did not always exist. Although my partner did not attempt to protect my good name, I rushed to protect his. I realize now that I was upholding the idea that his reputation was more important than raising a child in truth.

Being a mother
has emboldened me. It took a while, but now I realize that my silence will not resolve the problem of sexism and gender bias within the black community. My silence, my capitulation, is a poor example for my daughter. To be silenced is one thing; to silence yourself is quite another. Now, in the words of John Edgar Wideman, I feel compelled to do “the disruptive duty of . . . bearing witness.” I hope that my words and example, and my support of other women who are stepping out of the shadows, will provide my daughter with courage and a candid understanding of the challenges she will face.

Sexism within the black community has not gone totally unchallenged. Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem,
for colored
girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,
and Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
Color Purple,
which was turned into a film by Steven Spielberg, both took on the issue of sexism in the black community. (And both provoked protest among blacks, who picketed stage performances of Shange’s work
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and admonished Walker and Spielberg for presenting black men in such a negative light.) Other feminist writers such as bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins—as well as black male intellectuals such as Michael E. Dyson, Manning Marble, and Cornel West—have continued to speak out for change in consciousness as well as public policy.

Even so, these are difficult times for black women and girls.

We live in a society and community that happily sacrifices our well-being for the success of black men and boys. Female degra-dation has become almost a staple of black youth pop culture: It is not uncommon to turn on a rap song and hear about “bitches”

and “’ho’s” or see images of girls and women in various states of subjugation in hip-hop videos.

It is no wonder that keen-eyed writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, in her 1937 novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, called the black woman “de mule uh de world” because she seemed to carry all the burdens of her race. What’s surprising is that black women continue to bear most of these burdens. To be black and female right here and right now is to be standing at the threshold of a freedom we have yet to win—for ourselves or our daughters.

My daughter, Ashley, is now five years old. She is beautiful, inquisitive, smart, and mischievous. Ashley’s most defining features are her vivacious laugh and her smile. Like other children, her simple questions about the nature of life are as complicated as the makings of a space station.

Although her father had originally caved in to the pressure to disassociate himself from our daughter, he has resumed a relationship with her. Ashley understands that our family life is different, but she knows she is cherished by both her mom and dad. She is truly a happy child.

At some point, however, our daughter will inevitably pick up a newspaper that calls her mother a “mistress” or “paramour.”

She will also discover that she has no relationship with some members of her father’s family. Someday she will question why the fury of her community was hurled at her mother after her birth by people who would never be part of her life.

When those days come, I will not presume to speak for her
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father, who can speak for his own actions. But I will have a conversation with her about the circumstances of her birth. I will tell my daughter that I acknowledge the view held by many that my relationship with her father was wrong, but for me it was a loving relationship that produced a wonderful baby girl. I will tell her that her birth was a miracle. I will tell her that she comes from a long line of strong women—women who gave me a sense of power and belonging.