There are two black figurines sitting in my office. Their wooden legs dangle off the ledge of the bookcase above my desk. From where I sit now, in the grey light of an early morning in Vermont, I can see the bright white dots of their eyes staring out of their black faces.
The figurines are black and Black. Meaning, they are Black in the racial sense, like me, and black in the literal sense, as well. Their faces and arms are as dark as the middle of the night. The female figurine wears a dull red dress with painted flowers and a kerchief on her head. The male has a halo of little tufts of hair. He wears blue overalls with a pocket on the right side. Both of their mouths hang open in circular “o”s.
My husband John and I liberated the figurines from his childhood home in western Massachusetts. For years into our relationship, they held court on a ledge in his mother’s kitchen. They were imbedded so deeply into the terrain of the house, John looked up in surprise when I pointed them out one day. On impulse, he went to take them down. I asked him not to.
It took a long time for me to become comfortable talking about race around John’s family. His parents were working-class Italian Americans, which is to say, they worked with their hands. His father and uncles built the house he grew up in.
My parents both had professional degrees in the medical field. My father was an obstetrician-gynecologist; my mother managed his practice. Our families lived over a thousand miles apart but the cultural distance between them was immeasurable. There were commonalities, though. John’s father’s family left Italy just as Mussolini rose to power. My parents encouraged me to settle in the North, hoping that I might be spared the blunt edge of racism they had experienced in the American South.
Both sets of parents put family and community first; they all believed in giving back and lifting others up. The ethos of service that we both grew up with is part of the foundation of our marriage. It’s an invisible but durable bond that is more meaningful to us that our obvious differences in race, class, region, and gender.
If it were possible to imagine an America in which our parents would have met on their own, I bet they would have become friends. This is not the America we live in, however. I was just as foreign to John’s parents as he was to mine. Still, John’s family received me easily, and never once, over many years of holiday meals and weekends at their home, did they ever make me feel unwelcome at their table.
It was hard for me to believe it. When John and I were dating, I heard stories from friends in interracial relationships who were taken by surprise by the rejection of the families of their romantic partners. Sitting at the table with John’s parents, rehearsing these stories in my mind, my shoulders would tense as I imagined a moment when I would become similarly disillusioned. I was afraid that someone would say something that could never be taken back, that someone would take us to a place from which there would be no return. Years went by and nothing happened. And then one day, I looked up and saw the figurines.
Once I noticed them, I could see them from anywhere. No matter where I was in the house, I felt them confront me. What are you going to do about us? demanded the little bright dots of their eyes. I had never noticed them before, but suddenly they seemed to define my position in the house. You do not belong here. The verdict emanated from their rigid wooden bodies.
“Let’s just take them down,” John would say whenever we found ourselves alone in his mother’s kitchen. But something was happening in that kitchen that felt more bigger and more meaningful than the small pieces of wood that sat just above our heads. That something was love, and it was mutual.
I didn’t want the blooming of that wonderful experience to be stunted by something so negligible, I told myself. But it wasn’t negligible. In fact, the more I tried to ignore the figures the larger they loomed in my imagination. We finally we brought up the figurines to his mother, who had forgotten they were even there. We talked to her about what those figures meant to us and the racist stereotypes they represented.
“I’m going to throw them out,” she said. But John pocketed them instead, and later gave them to me when I asked for them. And that was that. No more figurines, and no love lost.
John’s mother never saw the house where the two figurines now reside. She died several years ago at the age of 85. Out of all the items that migrated from John’s parents’ house to mine, the figurines are among the most valuable, at least for me. They take me back to the first time I spoke freely to John’s mother about who I was and the history I carry. When she gave up the figurines, she made more room for me.
A new day is emerging in more than one way on this grey, early morning. The day before I wrote this was an historic Inauguration Day in the United States; it is hard even for political cynics not to be hopeful. I was struck by the talk of love that circulated in the speeches and presentations. It feels like it’s been a long time since that word has appeared in American popular discourse.
Over the last four years we have become entombed in our differences. Calls for empathy are ignored or shouted down as irrelevant and naïve. But the language of love that fueled my childhood, and was evident in my parents’ commitment to their ideal of a common good, is still the only vocabulary that suits me.
Love alone cannot heal or fix us. It can’t raise salaries, protect people from violence, or liberate anyone from the straightjacket of racism. But systemic changes cannot take hold without the dedication of individual human beings working together. I believe in the power of the interpersonal connection. The personal is political – this was the rallying cry of the feminist movement that burgeoned in the late 1960s.
The reverse is true, too, and many Americans have watched families and friendships fracture over political divisions that have blasted through relationships like fault lines, in some cases unearthing disagreements that were already there; in other cases, stoking ruptures inspired by outright lies and “fake news.” It may take generations to determine the true depth of the damage wrought by the previous administration that this new administration will attempt to repair. Still, love was the word that resounded on Inauguration Day. Love is not everything, but without it, we are nothing.
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up,” wrote the late literary statesman James Baldwin. Love was the foundation of his ethical and creative philosophy. It was the engine that drove his rage and eloquence. He was relentless in his criticism of America, he wrote, because he loved it so much. I would not be much of a writer without James Baldwin’s example of love. It is an aspiration and a touchstone of honesty, ferocity, and grace.
There was no one more honest than John’s mother. She was gracious in her compassion and ferocious in her love. I will never forget the first time she saw my twin daughters, her Ethiopian-born grandchildren. She was there when John and I disembarked from the plane that brought us back from Addis Ababa. She doubled over when she saw us with the babies in our arms, her shoulders shaking with joy and relief. The girls were hers from that moment on. She never questioned it, just as she never questioned me when I confessed my feelings about the figurines in her kitchen. She saw what was good for us, her family, and acted accordingly.
An intimate act of grace performed in the sanctuary of a kitchen can live on and bloom for years. It can serve as a story to tell your children about their grandmother, how people can make one choice and then another. It’s as simple and profound as love itself.
Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine by Emily Bernard was published by Doubleday on February 11th
