Composing a Life

asked her how she knew “nigger” was a bad word. “The tone of voice,” she retorted, provoked by the question, “and the rocks that are being thrown—they tell you that ‘nigger’ is an insult.
    “Very early on,” she continued, shifting to an analytical tone, “black kids are told as a means of cushioning or protecting, of they come and say why are they calling me that? I think it’s very common for black parents to try to protect, to give those early years of warmth and love without the lessons that one is gonna shortly learn. I would argue that there are few black folk that do not remember the first time. The reason for taking such a term and making it a term of endearment is to soften the intensity of that pain, so ‘my main nigger’ becomes ‘my best friend.’ It’s compensatory because it is so very very painful.
    “I remember always having to wait in stores and thinking that was so unfair, I got there first, why was I having to wait? And if the salespeople weren’t kin, why were they calling the black folk ‘auntie’ and ‘uncle’? I just remember thinking that white people really ought to cool it—that this was ridiculous.”
    Johnnetta was sharply conscious of race as a child in the South, but like most of us before the contemporary women’s movement, she was largely unaware that being female can be just as much of a disadvantage as being black. “You’ve got to get out of the household at least for a moment to meet up with the race question, but you wake up every day meeting the gender question, so you don’t even notice it. It’s pretty intimate.
    “I remember looking up at the white faces in the stained-glass windows and thinking, all these people down here are black. Much later on in the black-power movement, it wasn’t hard to think back that in Sunday School I would sing, ‘And Jesus will wash me whiter than snow.’ But I never remember raising the question that Jesus was male and so was God. That never occurred to me as a kid. I also remember thinking that I certainly should not be raising questions about was there a God. Sumpin’ prob’ly be comin’ in zap me any minute!” Johnnetta plays fluently between different speech styles, ringing the changes between the southern black English of her childhood and the formal academic style of the northern universities where she has spent most of her life.
    Johnnetta only became aware of gender issues and the complex relationship between gender and race at the end of the struggles of the sixties, partly because gender differences take a different form in the black community, partly because the race issue seemed more urgent. In Johnnetta’s childhood, all the women she knew worked, including her mother, who taught English and was registrar at a small church-affiliated black school called Edward Waters College. Johnnetta only started thinking seriously about gender on her first visit to Cuba.
    “There I was, seeing for the first time the possibility that the race thing was not forever and ever; and then the other -ism was right up there saying, what about me? Then of course came the real whammy, that dealing with sexism is far more difficult. It’s gonna be one that takes us longer as a species than almost any other. How early we socialize about this stuff—and how intimately!”
    She went to Cuba with a delegation of Afro-Americans who were highly sensitized to issues of color. Wherever they went, they asked how many blacks there were (on the hospital staff, in the university, and so on), deeply suspicious when no one seemed willing to answer. Finally they realized that Cubans, while aware of shades of complexion, simply do not organize society in terms of color (particularly not the empirically nonsensical black and white of North American society). Johnnetta had simply not believed in the possibility of a society not stratified by race. But at every turn in Cuba, she was sharply reminded that the society was still organized on gender lines and that postrevolutionary Cuba was dominated by old-fashioned patriarchy and Latin American machismo, which the government has only started to address seriously in the last few years.
    “Another thing is where racism and sexism are reproduced. You can zap racism a lot easier because you have it expressed behaviorally in the public square. There’s no need to express racism behaviorally in the household cause you’re not gonna have none o’
them
people in there with you, OK? But