Why I love Black Women: A personal narrative.
In which there is a submission to the PoC carnival: Beauty and WoC. Hosted by delux_vivens at yennenga.
I suppose any person’s likes and dislikes say a lot about them and not so much about the actual object of that feeling whoever or whatever that may be.
So in the best self-absorbed tradition of anthropology, I’d better tell you about me. I am a 45 year old Asian by heritage, Pacific Islander by nationality, male, straight, I grew up in Britain, I went to grad school in the US and I currently live in Hawai`i.
When I was growing up, back in the late 60s, there were very few people of color in Britain, at least in the suburban middle-class places that my family lived in. So for me, anyone who wasn’t Caucasian was in some way “one of us”. Interestingly though, I felt much more solidarity with Black folks than I did with people of South Asian descent.
This I think was due to the unexpressed economic rivalry between “us” (the Chinese) and “them” (South Asians) - there were virtually no Koreans or Japanese around at that time in the UK - South Asians were shopkeepers and restaurant workers and owners just like the Chinese, and the middle class ones were doctors, accountants and engineers just like the Chinese. Even my pre-teen brain somehow assimilated the idea that if the white folks were going to choose “someone ethnic” to be on their team, it was usually going to be set up as a zero-sum game between the Asians.
I didn’t know any black families growing up. There simply were none in the neighborhoods where my parents lived. We were the only family of color in any of the blocks that we lived on until I started high school, and we moved into a neighborhood where another middle-class Chinese family were living just up the hill.
So I got used to being the oddball in almost everything I did. But my response to that feeling wasn’t to fall back to the safety of my “own” people. In a move that felt as natural as breathing but was really (I now see) quite disruptive on some levels, I felt attracted to and in solidarity with other people who were seen as oddballs.
In fact, I’d have to say that I didn’t really start seriously interacting with black folks until I started grad school in Boston/Cambridge. And I didn’t start dating black women until I was in my 30s. My engagement with African and African American cultures like my engagement with black women has been gradual but I have found both to be profoundly meaningful and rewarding.
Which leads me to the topic of the carnival: Beauty and Women of Color.
I don’t feel I can do more at this point than simply give my own fragmentary and somewhat incoherent testament as to why I find Black women in particular so wonderfully and deeply beautiful. Which is not to say that I don’t find women of other races and ethnicities beautiful as well. I guess it’s just to say that for whatever reason, the women I now find to be the most physically beautiful are almost all black women and certainly the women that I find myself happiest to be around are almost all black women.
This may also seem objectifying in a certain way and I suppose this is inevitable in a way: one cannot talk about beauty without emphasizing in some way, some form of analytical separation between the observer and the observed.
And really, it’s such a tall order to talk about why I love black women. You can’t generalize over a whole group of people. Especially not with black folks.
So instead, perhaps I’ll just talk about my own reactions to one person in particular. Please don’t take from this that I think all black women have the same psychology as my friend Annie. I know that’s not true. But the memory of her has stayed with me in a way that other people haven’t. So please indulge my slight obsession here. I can’t talk about beauty in the abstract. I can only talk about what I find to be concretely beautiful. And no matter what else Annie is and was, she was, is and always will be beautiful.
*********
I guess we all have them. Those people who some how stay with us despite the changes in our lives. Who persist in our memories like a loose thread on a hem or a hook from a song that we otherwise despise.
Annie is my loose thread, my six bar swoop into chest-tightening "God-damn". I haven't seen her in years. At least nine years I think. It was around the time that I was finishing my contract in New Zealand. But Annie had me turned out for years before that.
Annie was ... No good.
She was beautiful: wide cheekbones, juicy lips, a cute flattened nose, eyes like pools in the moonlight. She was warm, talented, athletically lean but with nice booty curves: she'd run track in high school, the most incredible dancer you ever saw, and sexy.
Lord was she sexy. Her voice was like being stroked with velvet. Her hands were cool and smooth, and dry. Her touch could draw static. And she could focus on you and make you feel like you were the only thing on her mind.
But she also lied too easily and sometimes saw the people she met as opportunities to get the things she wanted: money, sex, trips to places, jobs, the next step up the ladder. If she had been a bit more ruthless or a bit more callous about other people, she could have been quite prosperous. But she never quite got it together.
I think she was also afraid of success in a way I see in quite a lot of my black students, in a way that breaks my heart even now.
She was. I don’t know… Broken in a funny kind of way. Like one of those babies born addicted to something where emotionally and cognitively things just didn't fit back together properly.
And I loved her. In Boston we'd hung out and flirted a little. After I moved to New Zealand, and I'd broken up with my SouthSide girl. I came out to see her. She was addictive. Like good sex, or a good conversation with some one you really admire.
The first time I brought her out to New Zealand, I had to get up at five o'clock and drive to the airport to pick her up. It was a cold, crisp, dark, dark morning. I drove the 20 miles to the airport in 15 minutes. I had been back in New Zealand for a year and I hated it on some level. Annie was a breath of my old life in Boston, with drum and dance, with intellectual community, with a group of black folks who were my comrades and friends.
And she was her. We hugged at the airport. She kissed my cheeks. She smelled wonderful. Tunisian Frankincense. Shea butter. Her freshly-groomed dreads and Malian incense. And her warm silky-smooth skin. And she held me in her arms and called me baby.
We drove back to the house and I took her up to the top of the nearby volcanic cone to watch the sun come up. And as the sun rose, I gave her my old brown Chinese silk padded jacket to wear for warmth. And we watched the sun come up, and as it rose we could see there were cows grazing on the side of the cone.
For some strange reason, she went all squishy over the cows: she said they reminded her of her grandmother and the country. She was laughing and smiling and cooing at the cows. I have a photo of her that I took that morning: She's grinning like a million bucks. Her black eyes dancing, her teeth shining. I don't think I ever saw her so happy as that instant on that mountain in the early morning sun.
And right then I knew just how deeply I was infatuated with her.
I was never good at hiding it. When I'm feeling self-confident, I think that the intensity of my feelings for her scared her more than anything else. Other people loved her too of course. And some of them got to have sex with her. But I like to think that I was the one who loved her unconditionally. But actually, no, I did want something. I wanted her (not just her kisses or her pussy). And I did like the way I felt when I was with her.
Sex workers have a name for a guy who wants to hang out with them, who might pay for a woman’s time, but who doesn't pay to have sex. A man who likes the idea of being around (and being seen around) working girls. There's a type. And I guess that's a part of what I was with Annie. I was a hanger-on, someone who got to bask in the reflected light of a beautiful, stylish, young black woman when she walked around on his arm. I was her escort.
We never did have sex. Of course. I think that she feared that I wouldn't have been able to survive what would have happened next if we had slept together. So after our one near-miss (I had to go teach a class that morning but we'd gotten down to biting each other's nipples) she made it clear that she wasn't going to. And after a few more good-humored tries, I let it go at that.
People said I was like a stunned mullet when I was with her. And I was. Later I realized that she had glamour in the Dark Ages sense of the word: the ability to place a charm upon someone so that they would do anything she asked. Annie had that. And I think I would have walked into the mouth of Hell if she had asked me to. At one point we were flirting with the idea that I would help her move to New Zealand, but she always seemed a bit reluctant. A bit guarded. Because she wasn't sure what the price would be I think.
We were going to start an organization. Annie and I. It was going to be an Arts Center and an afro-centric educational project and an umbrella organization for dance and drum that was righteous and positive. I helped her set it up. I co-signed on a credit card. And then I went back to New Zealand and it fell apart. I think she really did try to make it work, but she didn't have the skills or in the end the confidence to do it on her own. She ran up debts. Used the card to pay her own bills. And left me with a debt of $5000.
Part of me sees what she did as a simple con. That she used my own sense of involvement with the cause and with her to get something she needed and she definitely used me to shield her from other people who she owed money to or whom she had dissed in some way. I don't know what was going through her mind when she did these things. I suspect she felt it was the only way she could get the things done that she wanted. And in that regard she was manipulative and dissembling, she got things from me and from other people under false pretences.
And I was never the type of man who got to her. I think she wanted someone who was bad. Who was the kind of cool, contained brother who had it going on but never let on. I was too soft for her. Too nice. And then again, there may have been the feeling that I wanted to save her. And she wasn’t going to be a charity case or a convert saved by missionary zeal. And that makes a lot of sense to me as well.
Even though I know all these things, I still can't think about her without coming back to a lingering sense of regret.
It's not like she was my soul mate or anything. She was Byronic in her awe-inspiring recklessness. She turned heads and hearts and wasn't too careful about the wreckage afterward. She liked smoke too much, and was capable of killing rages and vengefulness that bordered on the Shakespearean. I think I would have always felt two steps behind her, and she clearly wanted someone who was one step ahead. I was too polite, too National Public Radio, too bourgeois for her to feel comfortable around. She would have felt a nagging mal-aise at a faculty party even if she didn't show it.
But she was my itch. She had my nose open. Even today if I were to see her or smell her, I know my heart would do a slow flip and my pulse would race.
She has two kids. I don't think she's married. She had her first child (a son) not long after my ex and I had our son. She used to write to me, but the letters stopped around the time she realized she wasn't going to be able to pay the card off. We've spoken once or twice since then, and I think she's still in St. Louis. I hope she's OK. It would break my heart to know she isn't doing well. But I fear it. It's on the cards.
I still think about her, about her wild laugh, her withering anger if the drums weren't up to scratch. The way her face lit up when she danced. The way her nipples would harden, and she would look into your eyes and smile megawatts. And it always felt like the sun exploding in my throat. Even when I was mad at her.
I'm much happier now than I was then. I have a partner who loves me with a deep and ringing passion. I have a job that brings me a reasonable level of comfort, the chance to see my son every year and the opportunity to teach, think and write about things that I'm passionate about. I live in a beautiful part of the world among people who look like me. I have a son who I adore and who loves me back despite the fact that we're on opposite sides of the globe.
And yet, I can't let her go. She and I are like a ship with it's rigging brought down by a gale. The rigging's in the water: "fouling" the sailors call it. The sails are filled with water and sinking but the ropes still hold them to the ship so the ship is being pulled under too. If I want to save the ship, I have to cut the ropes. But if I cut the ropes, she'll sink and I'll be alone.
I know it's not the real Annie. What I carry is her ghost, her phantom, her vampire-essence. There's something about what I want from life that's personified by her. It isn't her at all.
And yet, the haunting has it's own addictive quantity. I've carried her ghost so close to my heart that she's bound up with many of the things that bring me joy. Her memory brings me pleasure of a terrible aching kind. I think of her smile. And the sun explodes in my throat.
I suppose any person’s likes and dislikes say a lot about them and not so much about the actual object of that feeling whoever or whatever that may be.
So in the best self-absorbed tradition of anthropology, I’d better tell you about me. I am a 45 year old Asian by heritage, Pacific Islander by nationality, male, straight, I grew up in Britain, I went to grad school in the US and I currently live in Hawai`i.
When I was growing up, back in the late 60s, there were very few people of color in Britain, at least in the suburban middle-class places that my family lived in. So for me, anyone who wasn’t Caucasian was in some way “one of us”. Interestingly though, I felt much more solidarity with Black folks than I did with people of South Asian descent.
This I think was due to the unexpressed economic rivalry between “us” (the Chinese) and “them” (South Asians) - there were virtually no Koreans or Japanese around at that time in the UK - South Asians were shopkeepers and restaurant workers and owners just like the Chinese, and the middle class ones were doctors, accountants and engineers just like the Chinese. Even my pre-teen brain somehow assimilated the idea that if the white folks were going to choose “someone ethnic” to be on their team, it was usually going to be set up as a zero-sum game between the Asians.
I didn’t know any black families growing up. There simply were none in the neighborhoods where my parents lived. We were the only family of color in any of the blocks that we lived on until I started high school, and we moved into a neighborhood where another middle-class Chinese family were living just up the hill.
So I got used to being the oddball in almost everything I did. But my response to that feeling wasn’t to fall back to the safety of my “own” people. In a move that felt as natural as breathing but was really (I now see) quite disruptive on some levels, I felt attracted to and in solidarity with other people who were seen as oddballs.
In fact, I’d have to say that I didn’t really start seriously interacting with black folks until I started grad school in Boston/Cambridge. And I didn’t start dating black women until I was in my 30s. My engagement with African and African American cultures like my engagement with black women has been gradual but I have found both to be profoundly meaningful and rewarding.
Which leads me to the topic of the carnival: Beauty and Women of Color.
I don’t feel I can do more at this point than simply give my own fragmentary and somewhat incoherent testament as to why I find Black women in particular so wonderfully and deeply beautiful. Which is not to say that I don’t find women of other races and ethnicities beautiful as well. I guess it’s just to say that for whatever reason, the women I now find to be the most physically beautiful are almost all black women and certainly the women that I find myself happiest to be around are almost all black women.
This may also seem objectifying in a certain way and I suppose this is inevitable in a way: one cannot talk about beauty without emphasizing in some way, some form of analytical separation between the observer and the observed.
And really, it’s such a tall order to talk about why I love black women. You can’t generalize over a whole group of people. Especially not with black folks.
So instead, perhaps I’ll just talk about my own reactions to one person in particular. Please don’t take from this that I think all black women have the same psychology as my friend Annie. I know that’s not true. But the memory of her has stayed with me in a way that other people haven’t. So please indulge my slight obsession here. I can’t talk about beauty in the abstract. I can only talk about what I find to be concretely beautiful. And no matter what else Annie is and was, she was, is and always will be beautiful.
*********
I guess we all have them. Those people who some how stay with us despite the changes in our lives. Who persist in our memories like a loose thread on a hem or a hook from a song that we otherwise despise.
Annie is my loose thread, my six bar swoop into chest-tightening "God-damn". I haven't seen her in years. At least nine years I think. It was around the time that I was finishing my contract in New Zealand. But Annie had me turned out for years before that.
Annie was ... No good.
She was beautiful: wide cheekbones, juicy lips, a cute flattened nose, eyes like pools in the moonlight. She was warm, talented, athletically lean but with nice booty curves: she'd run track in high school, the most incredible dancer you ever saw, and sexy.
Lord was she sexy. Her voice was like being stroked with velvet. Her hands were cool and smooth, and dry. Her touch could draw static. And she could focus on you and make you feel like you were the only thing on her mind.
But she also lied too easily and sometimes saw the people she met as opportunities to get the things she wanted: money, sex, trips to places, jobs, the next step up the ladder. If she had been a bit more ruthless or a bit more callous about other people, she could have been quite prosperous. But she never quite got it together.
I think she was also afraid of success in a way I see in quite a lot of my black students, in a way that breaks my heart even now.
She was. I don’t know… Broken in a funny kind of way. Like one of those babies born addicted to something where emotionally and cognitively things just didn't fit back together properly.
And I loved her. In Boston we'd hung out and flirted a little. After I moved to New Zealand, and I'd broken up with my SouthSide girl. I came out to see her. She was addictive. Like good sex, or a good conversation with some one you really admire.
The first time I brought her out to New Zealand, I had to get up at five o'clock and drive to the airport to pick her up. It was a cold, crisp, dark, dark morning. I drove the 20 miles to the airport in 15 minutes. I had been back in New Zealand for a year and I hated it on some level. Annie was a breath of my old life in Boston, with drum and dance, with intellectual community, with a group of black folks who were my comrades and friends.
And she was her. We hugged at the airport. She kissed my cheeks. She smelled wonderful. Tunisian Frankincense. Shea butter. Her freshly-groomed dreads and Malian incense. And her warm silky-smooth skin. And she held me in her arms and called me baby.
We drove back to the house and I took her up to the top of the nearby volcanic cone to watch the sun come up. And as the sun rose, I gave her my old brown Chinese silk padded jacket to wear for warmth. And we watched the sun come up, and as it rose we could see there were cows grazing on the side of the cone.
For some strange reason, she went all squishy over the cows: she said they reminded her of her grandmother and the country. She was laughing and smiling and cooing at the cows. I have a photo of her that I took that morning: She's grinning like a million bucks. Her black eyes dancing, her teeth shining. I don't think I ever saw her so happy as that instant on that mountain in the early morning sun.
And right then I knew just how deeply I was infatuated with her.
I was never good at hiding it. When I'm feeling self-confident, I think that the intensity of my feelings for her scared her more than anything else. Other people loved her too of course. And some of them got to have sex with her. But I like to think that I was the one who loved her unconditionally. But actually, no, I did want something. I wanted her (not just her kisses or her pussy). And I did like the way I felt when I was with her.
Sex workers have a name for a guy who wants to hang out with them, who might pay for a woman’s time, but who doesn't pay to have sex. A man who likes the idea of being around (and being seen around) working girls. There's a type. And I guess that's a part of what I was with Annie. I was a hanger-on, someone who got to bask in the reflected light of a beautiful, stylish, young black woman when she walked around on his arm. I was her escort.
We never did have sex. Of course. I think that she feared that I wouldn't have been able to survive what would have happened next if we had slept together. So after our one near-miss (I had to go teach a class that morning but we'd gotten down to biting each other's nipples) she made it clear that she wasn't going to. And after a few more good-humored tries, I let it go at that.
People said I was like a stunned mullet when I was with her. And I was. Later I realized that she had glamour in the Dark Ages sense of the word: the ability to place a charm upon someone so that they would do anything she asked. Annie had that. And I think I would have walked into the mouth of Hell if she had asked me to. At one point we were flirting with the idea that I would help her move to New Zealand, but she always seemed a bit reluctant. A bit guarded. Because she wasn't sure what the price would be I think.
We were going to start an organization. Annie and I. It was going to be an Arts Center and an afro-centric educational project and an umbrella organization for dance and drum that was righteous and positive. I helped her set it up. I co-signed on a credit card. And then I went back to New Zealand and it fell apart. I think she really did try to make it work, but she didn't have the skills or in the end the confidence to do it on her own. She ran up debts. Used the card to pay her own bills. And left me with a debt of $5000.
Part of me sees what she did as a simple con. That she used my own sense of involvement with the cause and with her to get something she needed and she definitely used me to shield her from other people who she owed money to or whom she had dissed in some way. I don't know what was going through her mind when she did these things. I suspect she felt it was the only way she could get the things done that she wanted. And in that regard she was manipulative and dissembling, she got things from me and from other people under false pretences.
And I was never the type of man who got to her. I think she wanted someone who was bad. Who was the kind of cool, contained brother who had it going on but never let on. I was too soft for her. Too nice. And then again, there may have been the feeling that I wanted to save her. And she wasn’t going to be a charity case or a convert saved by missionary zeal. And that makes a lot of sense to me as well.
Even though I know all these things, I still can't think about her without coming back to a lingering sense of regret.
It's not like she was my soul mate or anything. She was Byronic in her awe-inspiring recklessness. She turned heads and hearts and wasn't too careful about the wreckage afterward. She liked smoke too much, and was capable of killing rages and vengefulness that bordered on the Shakespearean. I think I would have always felt two steps behind her, and she clearly wanted someone who was one step ahead. I was too polite, too National Public Radio, too bourgeois for her to feel comfortable around. She would have felt a nagging mal-aise at a faculty party even if she didn't show it.
But she was my itch. She had my nose open. Even today if I were to see her or smell her, I know my heart would do a slow flip and my pulse would race.
She has two kids. I don't think she's married. She had her first child (a son) not long after my ex and I had our son. She used to write to me, but the letters stopped around the time she realized she wasn't going to be able to pay the card off. We've spoken once or twice since then, and I think she's still in St. Louis. I hope she's OK. It would break my heart to know she isn't doing well. But I fear it. It's on the cards.
I still think about her, about her wild laugh, her withering anger if the drums weren't up to scratch. The way her face lit up when she danced. The way her nipples would harden, and she would look into your eyes and smile megawatts. And it always felt like the sun exploding in my throat. Even when I was mad at her.
I'm much happier now than I was then. I have a partner who loves me with a deep and ringing passion. I have a job that brings me a reasonable level of comfort, the chance to see my son every year and the opportunity to teach, think and write about things that I'm passionate about. I live in a beautiful part of the world among people who look like me. I have a son who I adore and who loves me back despite the fact that we're on opposite sides of the globe.
And yet, I can't let her go. She and I are like a ship with it's rigging brought down by a gale. The rigging's in the water: "fouling" the sailors call it. The sails are filled with water and sinking but the ropes still hold them to the ship so the ship is being pulled under too. If I want to save the ship, I have to cut the ropes. But if I cut the ropes, she'll sink and I'll be alone.
I know it's not the real Annie. What I carry is her ghost, her phantom, her vampire-essence. There's something about what I want from life that's personified by her. It isn't her at all.
And yet, the haunting has it's own addictive quantity. I've carried her ghost so close to my heart that she's bound up with many of the things that bring me joy. Her memory brings me pleasure of a terrible aching kind. I think of her smile. And the sun explodes in my throat.