Though I grew up in the same town as W.E.B. Du Bois I never read his writing, or that of almost any Black writers. It was only later that I realized I was scared of what I might read and what I might feel. I had convinced myself that I hadn’t been overly affected by race and didn’t want anything to disrupt that narrative. When I finally opened the book, there it was on the first page…
To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others;
The exact same thing had happened to me as a kid in that same town. I passed a note to my childhood crush, she looked at it and very cheerfully said, “ Thanks but my parents would never let me date a nigger.” It wasn’t as much what she said as my internal response: “Of course! What was I thinking?” I realized that though I’d never read Du Bois’s words, I’d been internalizing the idea for my entire life that my very existence constituted a problem.
When I entered recovery, I was asked to see how resentments played into my drug addiction. I saw that my life had revolved around trying to avoid the topic of race/racism and it had turned into a resentment against myself for not speaking up. I now understood how traumatizing it had been to grow up where I did. All the memories were coming back. Classmates wanting to pat my hair. Being called a monkey. Teachers telling racist jokes and everybody laughing. Gym teacher making grunting monkey noises as made my way up the climbing rope. And when I finally left the “sanctuary” of Great Barrington I ended up standing on a busy Albuquerque street in handcuffs, though I was the one who’d called the police to help me with deal with the racist taxi driver who was attacking me. I’d filed all these incidents away, pretending they didn’t hurt and not talking about them.
All of this was now coming back to me.
