Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (15 page)

 

We have been trained to feel guilty for being less than perfect (even though as a wise poet once told me, there is no such thing as perfection). Even on occasions when my mother doesn’t give me a pitiful look, I project guilt. I can never do enough for her. After all, she carried me for nine months, dedicated herself to my well-being and has been my biggest cheerleader. How could I ever repay her? But is that even the point? We sustain our guilt by constantly trying to compensate for feelings of inadequacy about being less than “perfect,” less than
La Virgen,
showing our subscription to a
marianista
philosophy. The logic is that I am a
good
person when I
serve
her, and that must be 24-7.

Conveying to my mother that my love for her does not diminish when I don’t do what she wants was a challenge—for both of us. Giving myself permission to say no to her—
que Dios me perdone
—and not feeling like a bad person for doing so was a breakthrough. All of the sacrifices she made so I could have a better chance would be in vain if I did not bring to the table the knowledge and experiences I had gained. That scenarios of living and power could be different and not necessarily doomsday-negative, even in your fifties, was what I offered. We painfully go back and forth, more often than not trying to exorcise ourselves of some residual issue and climbing to a new plateau.

As a politically conscious, single woman, I have the internal critic as well as the external cultural judge evaluating whether I’m acting like a selfish, individualistic
gringa
or a community-building and respecting Latina. Whenever my twenty-four-year-old friend appears to do something that doesn’t have her family at center, she gets the old
Eso es una cosa Americana.
We both agree that our sense of community and family is a part of who we are, but not breathing and living family as the core of our beings every single minute of the day doesn’t make us sellouts or
Americanas
.
⁵
Claiming our own voices does not mean that we forego our people’s survival strategies and remarkable principles of sharing and looking out for one another.

The issues of class and economics are rarely divorced from any aspect of our lives. Most of my friends struggle to pay their rent, living expenses and student loans. We’re not affluent women who can support another person’s entire financial needs or hire attendants and housekeepers. Our mothers, approaching their retirement years, find themselves out of the male-as-principal-breadwinner structure to which they were accustomed. Our mothers also find their role of caretaker disappearing. What do you do when what you have based your identity on—caretaking—is no longer a need? How do you become emotionally and economically independent? How do you carve your own identity? How does a buena daughter help out of choice and love, not guilt?

The fears are valid. The fear of being alone. The fear of not having a purpose. The fear of not being able to afford basic necessities. The economy is not striking up the band for women in their fifties with limited skills. If professional Latinas make fifty cents on every dollar an Anglo man makes, imagine how a Latina with limited earning potential survives. An article in the
New York Times
described how older women are finding themselves in the predicament of entering their golden years but having to stay in the workforce as a result of divorce. This is attributed to women who spent years raising children but not having pensions of their own. Even older women who are able to land jobs now have to delay retirement as they play catch-up with someone who worked a lifetime.

As a dutiful daughter, I felt pressured. I wanted to take care of my mother, to tell her that she could just kick up her feet and relax because I had everything under control. This not being the case, however, I couldn’t help but feel inadequate about not meeting my own
supermujer
expectations. I also was afraid of feeling selfish or of being labeled as such for not putting her happiness before mine. This is why I would agonize over having to inform her or my family that I wanted to go away to school or to rent my own apartment. Then I would feel resentful about the comments or looks I would receive.

I didn’t want my mother to correlate my not being physically present in her house with not being in her life. And I was afraid of having every aspect of my life revolve around what would make my mother happy. I know that my decisions about school and the apartment were the right ones, but it doesn’t mean the guilt and anxiety disappear forever. On a few occasions when I haven’t been able to reach my mother, I have imagined the worst and chided myself for not living with her, for not protecting her enough. I have felt that if something happened to her, I would be full of regret for not being as dutiful as I could have been, for not preventing something bad from taking place. Yet us living together would roll back our relationship.

Although my mother was somewhat better off than some of her pals in similar situations—she co-owns her house and receives financial maintenance from my father—she will have to pay for astronomical medical insurance and household expenses by herself. She also doesn’t feel comfortable with just relying on maintenance that could not be there one day. This insecurity led her to enroll in a course that provided computer training and job readiness to people in her age group. Not quite a tech nerd, Mami is now more proficient at Microsoft Excel than I am. But finding work hasn’t been easy. Sometimes she doesn’t meet the criteria of prospective jobs or feels she is denied an opportunity because she is older. Other times, jobs aren’t right for her needs. Besides technological skills, the program Mami participated in allowed her to develop a network of friends and her own life. To my delight, she would hang out with “the girls,” dictate her own comings and goings and excitedly recount her day to us. She enjoys volunteer work, where her contributions are valued and appreciated and tries to revisit goals she had once set for herself. My mother has created an opening that allowed for self-development and fulfillment and expanded her experiences beyond the world that was prescribed for her as a dutiful
mujer.

Our mother-daughter relationship is a work in progress. We—Mami, Sis and I—struggle through new ways of being in the world that will help redefine what kind of mothers and daughters we will be in the future, and what kind of sons, daughters and grandchildren we will raise.

 

 

I was four years old when my mother brought me and my three older sisters to the United States from British Guiana, a small Caribbean country on the northern tip of South America. The United States offered a different kind of access to higher education and the ability to change one’s economic class, if you could play the game. My mother, Ena, had grown up in colonial British Guiana during the 1930s. She lived in rural Bartica, where people were poor and Black and struggled to feed their children. My grandmother washed the dirty laundry of rich, white English people seven days a week. She stood all day at the washer board and basin and then later at the ironing board. My grandfather had left his family when my mother was ten years old. As a child, my mother scrubbed floors to help her mother. My mother’s education ended at the sixth grade. She says she “never had a head for school or book-learning.” She couldn’t keep any job that she got. By the time she was sixteen, she had already had two nervous breakdowns and had been raped by a friend of the family. My mother eventually learned to self-medicate with alcohol. She also learned to do hair and sex work.

Ena’s idea of strength lay in the power of her sexuality. Looking good and getting what you needed. On her limited budget she was always clean, well groomed, sexy. Heaving breasts, round wide hips hugged in by a long-line brassiere and girdle. Her hair wound up on the top of her head, pressed and shining with hair grease. She knew how to “get” things—money, kerosene to light the lamps and food for her children. This was her work, to survive and keep her girls alive, while her husband—twenty years her senior—supported his other family across town.

Through her sex work my mother found reason to feel accomplished, adequate, of use to her family, sending her sister, Lucille, to school and feeding Lucille’s children as well as her own. Ena found a means by which she could control both her life and her body. Even after my mother married at twenty-one, she continued to have several “boyfriends.” There had always been men who coveted her, and she used this to her advantage at a time and in a country where dark-skinned, poor women like her had few opportunities outside of telephone operator, secretary or teacher to make money. Colonialism, imperialism and white supremacy created an economic separation between light-skinned Black women and white women as smart women of leisure and dark-skinned Black women as thick-headed laborers.

In 1984 I was sixteen. I was a junior in high school, in love with my best friend, Jennifer. This is the same year that Susan Brownmiller published her book
Femininity.
I did not read it until two years later when I was taking a women’s studies course at my liberal arts college in New York City. (It was unheard of that I would go away to college—only white kids did that. So I lived with my mother in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and took the subway to school and work each day.) Brownmiller discussed a femininity rooted in heterosexuality and a female-to-female competition for male attention. She talked about femininity as a type of “feminine armor,” not a suit of metal in the traditional sense but rather an overstated and distorted display of weakness that was comforting and safe to men.

As a child, I often watched my mother from the bed. She would take out each clip from her hair and rings of long, pressed black hair would unravel down her head. She brushed it hard, and back, and pinned it up and to the side. Then she twisted the back in a French roll and brushed a little bang behind her ear and pinned it there. She pulled on her control-fitted panty hose over her shapely thighs and ass. Over her hose she put on her girdle and fastened her long-line brassiere. Sometimes I would have to help pull the hook and eyes together behind her.

I often watched her do her makeup in front of the small mirror that sat on a tiny square table across from the bed I slept on, in the bedroom I shared with my mother and sister. She would dab some foundation from the bottle into her hand and smear it evenly across and around her face. She used concealer around her eyes and covered that with powder. She wore black eyeliner, above and below her lid, which she administered with a pencil. She wore eye shadow and mascara. Lastly, she lined her lips, using some shade of burgundy. When she finished dressing, her shoes and pocketbook always matching, the room smelled like her expensive perfume long after she had gone.

This was her ritual each day, the donning of her costume. This was her feminine armor, her feminist attire. This was the very thing that brought her strength and power. I could tell this by the way she stepped out onto the street in her blue polyester floral dress that hugged her hips and thighs, her strong calves shaping down into her white pumps, her ass and pocketbook both swaying. Her sexy gait was evidence of her prowess, and both she and I were proud. She was unknowingly modeling for me.

When I was eleven or twelve, I was punished for wearing makeup. I would wait until my mother was out of the room at bedtime and I would sneak an eyeliner pencil from the makeup drawer to under the bed. In the morning I would pretend I was looking for my shoes and slip the eyeliner into my pants pocket, sneaking it out of the house. Somewhere between the apartment door and the building’s front door down five flights of stairs, I would hurriedly apply the makeup, lining my eyes with the blue pencil and combing on the black mascara I had stolen from Woolworth’s. I was never delicate enough. I was rough, rushed and heavy-handed. Once applied, as hideously as it may have looked, I stepped out from that apartment building. Out onto Ocean Avenue in Flatbush, where I was a poor Black girl, living in someone else’s apartment in an all-white neighborhood, where my family was seen as “the help.” And at eight in the morning, on that street with all of its white faces staring down at me or not seeing me at all, I walked with my head high and made it to the bus stop without flinching. It was my armor, too.

 

My introduction to what “feminism” was and what it could mean for me as a woman of color came when I was twenty. At my private, predominately white college, we read many things, including
This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color.
It was the first time I saw in print something I could identify with, the intersection of history, culture, oppression and identity. It was a rite of passage for me. That year I came out as lesbian, as visible in terms of my Caribbean culture and heritage, as an abused daughter of a wounded, alcoholic mother. Until this point my existence as a chunky, curly-haired, brown-skinned, large-chested girl had been very much about how to remain unseen. I felt ugly, undesirable, unlovable. During summers as a teenager, in the heat of my Brooklyn neighborhood—which was changing from Jewish affluent to Puerto Rican/West Indian working class—I had felt large and uncomfortable in my T-shirt and shorts as well as in my own skin. Now in college I began to see myself and the world differently.

There I worked with five white women in a student group. We organized around “diversity” issues on our campus. I learned about leadership, voice and coalition-building as we worked on racism, sexism and homophobia at our school. We read and wrote together, staged actions, hung up signs and held caucuses, panel discussions and consciousness-raising groups. I learned about internalized oppression, not so much about racism as about sexism, and understood it to be at the heart of my desires for invisibility during those teen summers. Understood it to be at the heart of my sense of myself as ugly and undesirable—and simultaneously sexually perverted. (At this time I was being unhappily sexual with random men at my job.)

This internalization of all the destructive messages I had gotten over the years—which I continued to receive—about brown, round women was at the heart of my short stint of trying to deny my femme self (after I had come out) for a more politically correct (and accepted, by my white lesbian friends) androgynous presentation of myself. Still, in many ways this was an idyllic time: social activism and diversity work in a relatively safe environment. I wouldn’t know the real impact of patriarchy and its intersection with racism, sexism and homophobia until I left school.

After graduation I stayed in New York and found a job working as a secretary. I wanted to teach but wasn’t quite sure how to do it and I needed to support myself. I wanted to move out of my grandmother’s apartment, which was downstairs from my mother’s employer’s apartment. It was this life, after school, where I would face my reality without the built-in support of women from college, with whom I had become accountable for fighting against injustice. There were mornings on the subway, being felt up and doing nothing except enduring it. Sexual harassment at the gym, and being too ashamed to even feel my indignation until much later. Without the anger and righteousness of my women friends, how could I remember that I had a right to my own body, a right to say no? What a privilege it had been to be able to sit and talk about these things, to scream our rage, to write essays. What would I do with this new sensibility? Out here, alone.

My mother had known racism. She understood its existence as a fact of life, a given. It wasn’t something changeable, moveable. It was something to be maneuvered around, waded through like muck and mire. It wasn’t even something necessarily to be talked about. And she moved through it slowly, her pace crippled by clinical depression, little education and hard work from an early age. I think she found some strength in doing hair and sex work. She always said to her daughters, “You have two things against you: you’re Black and you’re a woman. Nothing is going to be easy.” She would urge us to get our education so that we would not have to “depend on a man.” My sister and I would cringe at hearing ourselves referred to as “Black,” certain that it wasn’t a good thing. Often in the same breath my mother would urge us to marry white men, so that we would have babies with “good hair.”

 

 

I always admired my mother’s sense of what was powerful about herself: flirting. I remember hearing my mother on the phone or watching her with company. She flirted with everyone. It seemed a completely natural way of interaction. What I learned, listening to my mother’s sultry voice—placating, or asking questions like a little girl, giggling, sighing, her eyes wide and suggestive—was that women who had this skill had power. Did the men, and women, she used this on know what she was doing? Did they allow themselves to be manipulated, or distracted from the task at hand? I don’t know—not even now when I use my powers of flirt and distract.

It is moments like being stranded on the highway with a flat tire that what I have learned from my mother becomes necessary. I am on my way back from the beach with a white lover who looks like a boy. I am in a long cotton dress, slits up both sides, flip-flop high heels, hair in a curly pom-pom on the top of my head. We are somewhere between Durham and Wilmington, North Carolina. I am a Northerner with all kinds of frightening stereotypes about the South, all of which come into play when I am stranded on the side of the road at dusk.

We trudge across the highway to what looks like a road toward town or houses, at the very least. We end up at a bus repair shop. A man with a deep southern drawl and greasy overalls emerges from the back of the shop to greet us. My lover is concerned about her baseball cap and butch appearance. I am concerned about being Black. Will I be raped or lynched? Will they realize the person I am with is not a boy? Even with all my fear, there is no question between us that my femme affect is the safest bet here. I ask to use the phone, saying we have broken down. My girlfriend nods, smiles, stands idly by. The man directs me to the phone and I call AAA. I tell them I have a flat tire. “I can’t seem to get those screwy things off, you know, they hold the tire in place?” I say. The tone in my voice is of distress and silliness. I shift my weight from hip to hip, smiling at the greasy man as I wait for them to dispatch a truck. My girlfriend does not speak.

There is no real reason for me to maintain my femme performance on the phone with the AAA customer assistant. I am not really being paid attention to by the garage attendant. Still, I am deep in character, and it brings me a sense of control in the midst of this danger, as does the two-inch elevation from my shoes and my lipstick. The donning of my armor helps to hold at bay the anxiety and panic until it can be safely expressed later in the arms of my lover or with my friends.

Off the phone I talk more with the greasy man about the “screwy things” that we could not seem to remove and the jack, which we couldn’t get to work. When the tow truck arrives, we squeeze into the front seat with me next to the driver, a white man with a thick drawl and the smell of stale Coke and cigarettes permeating everything in the truck. He has had to move aside several girly magazines to make room for us. We drive ten miles before we can get back to the highway. In an effort to distract him from too much observation about the Black woman and white woman in his truck, one of whom looks suspiciously like a boy, I chatter. More conversation about the “screwy things.”

“Lug nuts,” he says.

“Oh, is that what they call them?” I giggle. “I just don’t know a thing about changing a tire. And what is that?” I point toward the fields of crops we whiz by.

“T’bacca.”

“Ohhh, really, is that what it looks like?” More giggling. My lover’s leg is anxiously pressed up against mine.

We finally make it back to my stranded car. The tow truck guy hoists a large jack from his truck, upon which he begins lifting my car. I flit around him. “Man size,” I say, referring to the jack suggestively. I am aware of my play-acting, feeling powerful in the skill of it. He is responding to it. I think it brings comfort to him. I look the part, like my Mama taught me.

The line is thin between empowerment of “femme” and its potential self-destructiveness. I wonder if it was like this for my mother. She turned to sex work out of necessity. This is not something I have to do. Femme brings with it what we have learned about what it means to be female and woman in this country and culture. As many times as I have felt empowered by it, I have also found the power of my femme affect slipping away, leaving instead the ways I feel defeated, inept, unable to handle difficult situations. Rationally, I know these to be the messages of the oppressors and colonizers. Still, I have competed with other femmes for the attention of butches and transgender men. I have both claimed and loathed the titles of Jezebel and Hoochie Mama after having an affair with a woman who already had a wife. And even though this particular relationship was damaging, my femme self finds pride in having been able to steal this woman away from her partner, if only for a moment. Sometimes I hate that part of me.