White Girls (16 page)

I SHOULD LIKE
so much to begin with an idea, would you mind? This idea—it concerns the definition of one or two words. Some words—they are defined by the exigencies of time, right? And generally words defined by their epoch become very stupid words. The words currently defining our epoch are
otherness
and
difference
. Appropriate definitions of these words are “beside the point” and “never mind.” Those definitions—they must stick. And why? Because writers of a color who find their expression—so called—in their “otherness” and “difference” do so in a manner comfortable to the legions who buy their work not to read it, oh no, but because these writers confirm the nonideas stupid people assume about otherness and difference—two words that define privilege in the epoch of some.

If pressed by the thumb of thought, where does the idea of this otherness and difference come from? It is an acquired habit really. One learns it in infancy, sitting on the knee of someone—perhaps Mom—who may not be unlike oneself in a respect: her appearance.
Appearances speak not of themselves but of preceding generations and the haunting of each subsequent one with: Because I appear not unlike you, we are each other. What folly! The belief that the dimensions of some mother’s mask, say, fitting—becoming—one’s physiognomy is oneself. What manipulation! To appropriate her mask of a different sex—if you are a boy—a different generation—if you are a child—so experientially different—if you are a person—because experience is an awful thing. Truly, who “loves” it? In order not to have it—experience—we do a number of things, chief among them speaking to stupid people who cannot possibly understand us. How slimily we creep toward them—on our bellies, masks intact, the better to make our way toward the inconvenient places their ignorant experience hides—in their armpit, in their speech, in their sex, the last being, for many, experience in toto.

The cowardly experience described previously—applying that mother’s mask, say, to protect oneself. How easily this is done! How easily this is done! We apply her mask to get us through a world we do not understand wherein we embrace the experience of people who cannot understand us. We accomplish this brand of retarded experience by nursing her words through the tit of her experience. Are we less lonely because of it? In X situation, Mother does exactly as I would have done. Mother says. And I am so much like her, et cetera. What if all this was simply untrue? What if one were to remove oneself from the lap of comfort—the comfort of identification with Mom? It is never done. One fears the isolation of one’s own language so much one upholsters Mom and others like her in the blind fabric of others-like-myself.

These others like myself. What does their mask of piety yield? For those who write but do not care to dissect the mask—let alone its expression of piety—it yields a career. This career is celebrated by very stupid people who define an epoch with one or two words. Their entire world comprises one or two words—in it they support writers of a color who do not challenge their privilege by writing against it. These writers are limited to becoming those one or two words—
other
and
different
. What can this mean? It does not mean writing. These writers are killed by stupid people and their acceptance. Their acceptance is a form of control, as it has always been, and for generations.

When these writers of a color are embraced—it is wrong. The world is too quick to celebrate their wearing of the mask of piety, behind which they sit, writing nothing. These writers of a color often center on the figure of Mom, say, as a symbol of piety—she of an oppressed race, depressed sex, and the bad men who didn’t love her and how meek and self-sacrificing she was and what shape her mask of piety took and just how big her lap was—which the child, the writer, knew the measure of because of crapping in it. Once Mom is crapped upon, she is never wondered about or cared for again because she’s beside the point, she’s Mom and a symbol of all one would like to get away from in this common world. Which is one reason a career as an author, and authorship, is crazily struggled for in the first place: to get away from all the true and infinitely more horrible stories Mom could tell about how she came to wear the mask of piety in the first place. The mask of piety—it is the one thing standing between her children and death. Yes sir, yes ma’am, she says from behind the mask. And, with eyes lowered, Please, sir, do not kill my children. And with
breasts exposed, We will not take too much. And in the bile of a tearful farewell: Children, please do not reach toward the world that despises you because it despises me.

Regardless of what Mother says, everyone reaches toward the world, everyone, and when it burns the only thing standing between you and this burning death is the idea of others like myself—a wall that protects. Writers of a color write stupidly on this wall of race for the approval of very stupid people who, in granting their approval, may decide not to kill you. If these stupid people decide not to kill you, something must be compromised, given up. Generally, what is compromised is one’s voice. That voice—it is all a writer has. Stupid people do not ask to claim this voice outright—one way in which they are not stupid. They acquire it slowly: at drinking parties and over the telephone to discuss the drinking party of the night before and at dinner and the walk following dinner under the glare of gossip dinner chat generates, and in the feigned intimacy of shared experience. That experience—it is found in the armpit and has been described at length before. It is so dreary, the scenario people of a color follow as they live an experience they believe to be intimate. This experience generally amounts to: Let me wear the mask of my mother, the mask of piety, generosity, and forbearance, for you. The “you” to whom all this is addressed—it is almost never to another person of a color. That would be too much. If the mask of piety were understood, one would be forced to speak from behind it, and the fake piety, generosity, and forbearance one has used to get what one needs: feigned intimacy, the armpit not of a color.

Perhaps Mom knows all of this. What Mom knows: in reaching
toward the world, her child of a color will eventually have to wear the mask of piety, too. What Mom knows: very stupid people look upon this mask with affection, especially as it stutters: Yes, sir, Yes, ma’am. This bowing down—it is so familiar and colored one kills oneself in it, speaking to people who cannot understand us, hoping they are not colored beneath all that ignorance.

Does Mom protect and nurture this child so that the child remains “open” to experience? Or to a career? Or to fill her lap? In the end, no one can say, but I should like to so much anyway: What Mom wants is for her child’s life not to be loveless and to have some fortitude and be capable of calling a thing stupid if it is so, not behind a mask, oh no, and without fear of death.

But I digress.

Past the ostensible subject, Mrs. Louise Little.

In writing “Mrs. Louise Little,” I digress even further. For in writing her name do you not see my intention? To become a writer of a color complicit with another—Malcolm X—who will compromise any understanding of her for a career. This career—it is a handful of dust in the end. One may fixate on it as if it were not. Presumably this career safeguards one from having to regard one’s face and the mask behind it, which reveals, truly, what is in the mind and the quality of what is in the mind. When this mask cracks—underneath it, that is writing. How rarely does that happen? Is
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
on Mrs. Little writing? “My mother, who was born in Grenada, in the British West Indies, looked like a white woman. Her father was
white. She had straight black hair, and her accent did not sound like a Negro’s.” What beauty in the sentence “She had straight black hair, and her accent did not sound like a Negro’s”! Enough beauty undoubtedly to provoke nonthought in the mind of very stupid people: no complexity whatsoever, just Mom as the symbol of her son’s career-to-be: reverence of people not of a color.

Could any critical analysis of Mrs. Little substantiated by biographical fact bear up to “My mother...looked like a white woman”? No, it could not. Unless one’s sense of competition as a writer of a color in relation to another—Malcolm X—were very keen on representing Mrs. Little as something other than a nearly colorless vision. Since practically any audience will make me a writer of a color solely and, as such, I am meant to suffer, I will gladly undertake the gargantuan task of remaking Mrs. Little. But how? And according to whose specifications? Shall I begin with the hatred and self-hatred Malcolm projected onto his mother’s face—“My mother...looked like a white woman...I looked like my mother”—while remembering—at times—my own passion for Mother? How shall I “capture” Mrs. Little? As an abhorrent phantom eventually driven mad by her ghostly, noncolored half? What if one were to write of her not as a mother at all, but as Louise, adrift in Grenada, in the then-British West Indies—as part of this common world my own female forebearers understood well enough to escape? To write of Louise in the crêpe de chine dress—her only one—limping as she eventually made her way to America—are these facts? Did she see her future in the stars—the murder of her husband by men not of a color; the murder of her son by men perhaps of a color; her not-gradual slide into madness following her husband’s
death and the removal of her children to one foster home or another? Why could she not save them? Didn’t she know obeah? She was so alone. Was her life more horrible than Malcolm’s? And if so, why did she not make the world pay for it, like Malcolm? Was she lonelier than Malcolm, living in this common world? Was she not lonelier than Malcolm, living in this common world? Malcolm lived less for other people than he did for power. His mother had no choice but to live for other people, being first a woman and then a mother. She was not alone long enough to know herself, emigrating, as she did, from Grenada, in the then-British West Indies, to Canada, where she met Earl Little, “an itinerant minister,” whom she married and settled with, finally, in Lansing, Michigan, in western America. No one knew just how young she was before she met Earl Little. In Canada, what did Earl Little preach as an “itinerant” minister? Was Louise Little charmed by his speech? Was it as mad as Malcolm’s? Was Earl Little charmed by Louise Little’s crêpe de chine dress—her only one—as he limped through the provinces, preaching what? Did Louise Little have more language? No one knew what her presence would mean to the United States, its future. Her emigrating to the States—it is never explained let alone described in the
Autobiography
. She exists in the
Autobiography
to give birth to Malcolm, go mad, and look nearly colorless. What did Louise feel, growing up in Grenada? What did Louise feel in America? She came from Grenada, in the West Indies, and its green limes, subbitter people, the blue sea, and sense, garnered from her family, that the yellowness of her skin raised her above having to don the mask of piety. Being yellow in the West Indies—what does it mean? It is a kind of elevated status, based in delusions and folly. This
folly began in the minds of those who contributed to the creation of this yellow skin. It began: Those smart-mouthed coloreds who want to come into this house where they will learn to hate darkness and the dark ones who remain in the sun, please come in. The stupid people—no, the Masters—who offered this up: They created another race within the colored race when they separated the dark ones from the Yellows. The meaning of the Yellows to people in the West Indies is this: Their external self calls up hatred, self-hatred, and contempt in the dark; pity and fascination in the whites.

People not of a color who “loved” the
Autobiography:
in the main they are not different from the noncolored people Louise Little was born to. Since we know so little about these people, we have to assume what Bruce Perry’s biography says about one pivotal person is true: Louise “had never seen her Scottish father.” Had Louise Little’s father read his grandson’s book, I am certain he would have loved it. I am certain of this because for someone neither Earl nor Malcolm knew, Mrs. Little’s Scottish father commanded so much attention. The success of a thing is best measured by the attention men pay it. The noncolored ghost that is Louise Little’s father hovers happily in the
Autobiography
. That is because he commands the attention of the living ghosts who read this book and love it, not knowing why. They love it, for starters, because of Grandfather. He is what Malcolm’s noncolored readers identify with—a power. Earl and Malcolm speak of no one else with such passion. Earl Little is reported to have said to his parents, on the occasion of Malcolm’s birth: “It’s a boy...But he’s white, just like mama!” Malcolm is reported to have said to his collaborator, Alex Haley: “Of this white father of hers I know nothing
except her shame about it.” What is Louise reported to have said about her own father? And of Louise’s “shame.” Did she ever describe it as that? And to a child? Malcolm said: “I remember hearing her say she was glad that she had never seen him. It was, of course, because of him that I...was the lightest child in our family.” Was Louise Little glad not to have seen her father for reasons other than his skin not of a color? Was she glad not to have seen him so as to imagine him dead as her unfortunate mother who died “giving birth to the last of her three illegitimate children?” Was Louise Little glad not to have seen him because she was frightened by Malcolm’s more than physical resemblance to her father’s side of the family? Did Malcolm want to be noncolored too? He had so much ambition—was it genetic? And his need for love on his own terms. From whom did he learn the need not to ask for it? Grandfather? Grandfather did not wear the mask of piety. In order not to, one must believe in oneself to the exclusion of other people. Malcolm believed in the reality of his experience to the exclusion of all other realities except one: Grandfather, who was a ghost.