Written by Jaminnia R. States
“Meditations on My Face” was the first runner-up in PRISM’s 2020 Creative Non-Fiction Contest, judged by Alexander Chee. To read the other winning essays, pick up a copy of Issue 59.2 from our online store.
Everyone does it.
At work, a library in the most “diverse” county in Virginia—diverse here meaning, as it often does, “we welcome everyone, but not so much the Blacks”—an elderly white woman in a black patterned blazer rushes up to me at the reference desk, the place you ask the librarian questions like “Where is the bathroom?” or “Do you have new audiobooks on climate change?”
She looks at me directly in the face and asks, “Where are you from?” It is not a greeting.
“Indiana.”
“Well, you look like an African woman.”
I smile, uncomfortably amused. “As an African American, I would think that most of us indeed look African.”
I thought this might be a good clarification, concise and politely stating the obvious. But ignorance knows no bounds.
“No. You don’t understand. I’ve been to Africa and you look just like the women there, with their head wraps and their beaded jewelry.”
“Again, I don’t disagree with you. I would think that most African Americans are descendants of African people and thus most of us look like African people displaced.”
She smiles, condescending. “I think you’re wrong about that.”
My heartbeat quickens and I take deeper breaths, sliding into “keep your job” mode.
“Okay. Do you have an information request or reference question?”
She shakes her head no and walks away, agitated as if I had tried to convince her that she didn’t look like her Ancestors, that the world is flat, and that coffee was a gift from space aliens.
I quit a month later.
***
African people do it too.
In the laundromat, picking up my clothing, several men look my way as I enter. Some are politely appreciative; others have an obvious hunger in their eyes. One of them approaches me, interrupts my purposeful stride by veering too far into my personal space. He smells vaguely of beer and his eyes are tired.
“Where are you from?”
“Indiana.”
He repeats the question, almost insisting I gave him the wrong answer. “No, where are you from?”
“I was born in California.”
“Your parents, where are they from?”
“Indiana, Mississippi, New Orleans.”
“Oh.”
He sighs, half in disbelief and half exasperated, and takes a step back to look at me again. His face is swirling with disappointment, confusion, and indignation. I look away, trying not to laugh. The people around us go back to minding their business. I resume my stride and go back to minding mine.
***
Sometimes, I want to answer those bewildered expressions by saying, “In 1492, while the Arabs were taking a break from stealing Africans and whisking them away to India, a little Italian man working for the Spanish introduced whiteness to this land, wiping out the natives with disease. Slowly but surely, more white men followed and sought to conquer the land and use the people for their own purposes. A couple of decades of that not working out, and they decided to do what Arabs did and steal some Africans to be the labor force. They proceeded to buy and mostly outright steal people as a prelude to colonizing the land from which they were stolen. Amid centuries of oppression, those stolen Africans had children, some by force, but far more were made on purpose. And wouldn’t you know it, seven generations later, a little girl descended from those stolen Africans was born.”
***
On the phone, venting to my mother, I complain about how often this happens to me. I try to express my frustration. She says, “Well honey, you just have one of those faces. You carry that old song.”
I can tell she wants me to be proud.
I don’t have the words to express to her that carrying that old song feels like a responsibility for which I never asked and surely am not interested in accepting.
It’s easy for her to say; she doesn’t have to wear this face out in the world every day.
But, then again, she made it, so what do I know?
***
At a house party, holding the wall. Unimpressed with the entire scene, too many strangers, too much noise, horrible music choices, lazy food presentation, everyone is too high, too drunk, or too young. I am aware that my face is probably creased into a deep frown, which is not appropriate for the party atmosphere, so I breathe deeply, still my body, and try to look unbothered.
I’m practicing being invisible when a kid, sloppy drunk, sporting a backwards purple cap and a thick gold chain around his neck, ambles into the room and stops in front of me with a jolt.
“Whoa! You look like an African queen.” He starts to walk away but jerks back into my view, shaken by his own revelation. “No! You look like an Ancestor.”
I laugh—with him? at him? at me?—as he walks away.
I never knew if it was a compliment. I sometimes hope it was.
***
In the grocery store right before closing, waiting for a turn with the cashier, I notice a tall handsome man behind me wearing a clean white T-shirt and holding a package of salt fish. He observes me with a glimmer of homesickness in his eyes, a look I used to confuse with lusty hunger.
“Where are you from?” (Everyone does it.)
“Indianapolis.”
“Oh, Annapolis.”
“No, Indianapolis.”
He gives me a look of feigned recognition, poorly masking contemplation.
“Three hours south of Chicago. It’s in the Midwest.”
He pretends to know where that is while the spark of hope that I might be someone-who-knows-someone-he-knows fades from his eyes.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Ivory Coast. You are from America, but you wrap your hair like an African woman.” Pride lights up his eyes, but I am not home for him, only a déjà vu of home in a sea of unfamiliarity and unfulfilled yearning.
***
Maybe my African brothers and sisters are upset that slavery happened too. Maybe my face is an unpleasant reminder of a past that some like to forget, floating around the grocery store investigating apples, examining yams, and frowning at palm oil prices. An anachronism of sorts. Perhaps I am a ghost of Africa’s past, present, and future swirled into one little Black girl looking both right at home and so far from it.
***
Miriam Makeba. Lauryn Hill. India Arie. Angela Bassett. A girl somebody knows named Sheila. Your neighbour’s cousin’s best friend. His third grade nemesis. That one other Black woman you know who also works in a library. This is a sample list of women I am supposed to look like.
I don’t look like these women. My angular cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, wide smile, astute forehead, and regal nose combine to “look like” women who also have some combination of these features overlaid with dark skin.
If I am to look like anybody, the following is an acceptable list of comparisons.
I have Tahirah’s proud nose, Natalie’s grin, Jimmie’s chin, ears, and high intelligent forehead, feminized. I have Mama Sarah’s sharp mind and charming wit—her light shines out of my face, her wisdom fuels the “I know a secret” in my smile. My hand goes to my hip when I’m indignant; the sass is yet unsourced. I have Papa Allen’s wise, observing-all-of-you-that-you-can’t-see eyes. I have Aunt Dorothy’s grace and her colour on my face in summer. Richard Sr.’s and Mama Lillie’s red undertones make me glow warm like a little fire burns beneath my skin in drab winters. I’m blessed with Natalie’s calves (thanks Mom). Great-grandma Isabella’s small frame and sturdy, flatish, not-too-wide feet get me from here to there just fine.
I pray to have a fraction of the all love that Ms. Gussie held in her heart when she left behind seven children, twenty-five grands, and forty-two of us great-grands—not counting the host of others whose lives she made brighter when she took them into her care. How did one woman keep up with all those personalities, ambitions, hopes, and church fundraisers when she said her prayers each night? Is nurturing love and care as genetic as lips, noses, and eye colours? Only time (and future generations) will tell.
***
I was seven years old when home shifted beneath my feet, when I had my last bite of chili flavored tamarind candy, when I had my last trip to the ocean for years. California faded into Arizona’s sunset and we were on the road, heading east.
Our twenty-six-foot U-Haul arrived in Indy on a hot summer evening three-and-a-half days later. 4201 Downes Avenue was my new “home.” Francis Bellamy School #102 was on the east side, and most of my classmates were African American, Black like me. This was a culture shock for me, and I was a culture shock for them. It didn’t take long for kids to let me know that I was ugly. My hair was nappy. I talked funny. Eventually, the consensus was that I “sounded white.” My second grade teacher, bless her heart, tried to characterize it as a “western twang.” She said something about laid-back cowboys and the way they drawl their words, but I knew I didn’t sound like that.
That year, a local bakery called Roselyn’s was shut down by the health department for a roach infestation. Around the same time, it came out that my middle name was Rosalind. Talk about a PR disaster.
“That must be why she looks like a roach!”
“African booty-scratcher!”
“I’m just going to call you Jumanji. That is easier to pronounce.”
Even at eight years old, I tried to educate. “All African Americans came from Africa. If you are talking about me, you’re talking about you and your Ancestors too.”
It didn’t matter.
They were home. I was a stranger in a foreign land.
To cope with the change, I created an invisible friend based on Denise, my real-life second-best friend back in California. She was a little Vietnamese girl from my first grade class who always smelled like ginger or steeped lemongrass when we arrived at school in the mornings.
During the day, I would imagine she was there with me on the bus to school, in the cafeteria at lunch, on the playground. We would talk only at night, while I lay awake on my cream-coloured, four-poster daybed. It had a box spring and a mattress just my size, and it was an antique so it creaked a little when I crawled into it at bed time. Sometimes, I tried to stay up late so I knew for sure my real-life friend was going to bed too. Syncing the time somehow made our “communications” more real.
Laying there under my rose-patterned comforter and sheets pulled up to my chin, I would start with prayer:
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord, my soul to keep, and if I shall die before I wake, I pray the Lord my Soul to take. Amen.”
Then, I would imagine my friend Denise. Sometimes, she’d be sitting or standing in the middle of my room, looking attentive. Sometimes we were on the phone. Other times, I’d see her lying awake in her own bed back in California. My biggest complaint about Indiana was that there was no beach. I told her about how we went to Lake Michigan, how people called that a beach but it wasn’t a beach—it wasn’t even an ocean. It was a lake that touched Gary, Indiana, which was the ugliest place I’d ever seen. The water was dirty, dark, and stinky. There were dead fish washed up on the shore.
I would tell her that the kids at school would say mean things about me, laugh at me, and call me names. How I wanted to run away, but California was too far for me to make it in my Barbie Jeep or on foot. I wanted to go home. In California, I was the only one at school who looked like me, but everyone else was different too and nobody made fun of anybody else for looking or talking differently. We were too busy having fun.
When it was her turn to talk, I’d imagine the things that my friends might be doing at recess, wondering if they were learning what I was learning in second grade thousands of miles away. The images floated in the shadows that glided across the room in the night, shifting and changing as a passing car’s headlights shone through.
My bed creaked as I turned over, keeping the covers close and clutching my stuffed Tom Cat. I would ask Denise to pass messages from me to our friends back home.
Drifting off to sleep, I vowed that someday, I would go home for good.
***
“You look just like my big sister when she was your age! How old are you now?”
“Thirty.”
“Whew! You look just like your grandmother!” my Uncle Mack exclaims. “I love my big sister. Your daddy and them was our first nieces and nephews. When she came to town with your daddy and them, we was so excited and so proud to see our big sister’s kids. ”
Every time I visit Chicago, I stay with my uncle. We go out to eat, run errands, pal around, visit his various businesses, and shoot the breeze. Our conversations always end up touching on how much I resemble my grandmother.
The third or fourth time, it strikes me that since I look so much like my grandmother, I can ask her what it was like to carry this face through her twenties and thirties. Was she as confused as I was? Did people mistake her for African and approach her as if they had found some stolen princess that they needed to rush back to the Motherland?
Just as quickly, it occurs to me that I maybe can’t do that. For one, my grandmother had had at least one husband and three or four kids by the time she was my age. Motherhood, I understand, preoccupies the mind and memory and eliminates many nuances of experiences that aren’t related to mothering, especially the years in which those children are relatively young.
Also a problem, mainly one of hypocrisy: I thought my grandmother was African until I was in third grade.
When we lived in California and I was still an only child, my parents would load up a car with food and clothes every late winter/early spring, and we’d drive across the I-10 to visit my paternal grandfather’s family in New Orleans, Louisiana. We’d get up to Mississippi as well—our family land is in Pocahontas—but I don’t recall spending time with my father’s mother, who lived in Indianapolis at the time Instead, I’d visit with her siblings and her mother, my great-grandmother Gussie Seals. I didn’t begin collecting memories of my grandmother––I call her Nana––until we moved to Indy.
Nana was and still is a towering presence. When I was a kid, she was larger than life. Not just tall, but loud and full of big energy. Always bursting with laughter and joy and spouting serious life lessons. She’s never shown me any fear of taking up space.
Nana is a professional storyteller, among other things, and during my early years in Indy, she was often storytelling at local cultural venues and events. Whenever she came to visit us, I would ask her to tell a story, and she would always say yes. When she was ready, she would sit up straight and bring herself to the edge of her chair. I would gather all of the other children in the house, my siblings, my cousins, family friends, and we would sit at her feet, totally engrossed by her stories. Even the adults would eventually stop their conversations to listen. The stories never got old, no matter how many times I heard them. Abiyoyo was a frequent request from the little kids, but I couldn’t get enough of the mischievous Anansi stories.
In addition to being an expert storyteller and having a mythical presence, at the time my grandmother also wore locs, which she usually adorned with a bright headwrap and matching voluminous skirt or dress. Her jewelry was often shells or adinkra symbols, and nearly everything she wore and did at the time was connected to African culture. Not only that, but my family made it clear that what we ate, what we wore, how we looked, was all because we were originally from Africa and endured the trials of slavery to journey from the American South to where we were now. Africa was our beginning.
So in third grade, when our class was studying world cultures in social studies, I volunteered to ask my grandmother to come tell us stories as a part of the Africa unit, because she was African. My grandmother happily agreed to attend, and I excitedly looked forward to the day that my Nana was going to come and share her magnificent stories with my class. I wanted to show her off and prove that I knew what I was talking about when I argued with my classmates that we were all African.
The day came, and as always, my grandmother was amazing. Twenty-some odd third graders sat raptly hanging on her every word, laughing and gasping at all the right parts, just like we did in my family’s living room.
During the Q&A, someone asked my grandmother what country she was from in Africa. She replied, “Well, I was born in Mississippi.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach and I gaped at her stupidly. “Mississippi! I thought you were from Africa!” I may or may not have said this aloud. My face surely said it. My grandmother had to stifle a laugh. I felt so betrayed, so lied to! And by extension, I had lied to my class. I felt their eyes on me and I tried to look small, wanting to sink into the floor. It is one of my earliest memories of embarrassment.
My teacher explained that I had claimed that my grandmother was from Africa. Nana told the class how Black people came from Africa and how important it was in our family to maintain our culture and know our roots. How much of what we do at home is rooted in that understanding, and maybe that’s why I thought she was African.
So, now as an adult carrying this face around, I can’t huffily ask the person who gave it to me “Why does everyone think we’re African?!?” when I made the same unwitting mistake in my own life.
***
If I get out of my head about how often people approach me with the “Are you from Africa?” question in the DMV, I can recall moments in which the question was obviously a compliment and, perhaps, a loving proclamation of “you belong here” instead of an accusation of strangeness.
In Cape Town, South Africa, summer (their winter) 2008, people speak to me in Xhosa and Zulu when I enter their stores. I just smile and carry on, relishing the moment of connection, which only breaks when I open my mouth and speak American English.
Everywhere I go in Cape Town, I meet people from all over the continent. A man from Namibia shows me a cousin who has my eyes. Two women in the market speak to me in Portuguese and when I respond they excitedly ask me if I am from Angola too. I share with them that I am from America, but I’ve been practicing my Portuguese in college. Raving about how much I look like people from home, they eagerly encourage me to visit their home country to continue practicing. Their certainty feels like love.
In Kemet (Egypt), the darker-skinned people are Nubians, basically indigenous to the region, especially the more Southern areas of the country. Black American tourists are greeted everywhere with “Nubia! My cousin!!!”
It doesn’t compare to arriving on Elephant Island (accessible only by boat), in Aswan, where nearly everyone is Nubian, and very excited to meet us, show us around, and welcome us home. “Nubia! My cousin!”
My college boyfriend, recently returned from Senegal, shares with me that he met a woman there that was my energetic carbon copy.
“Even speaking Wolof, I felt how goofy and sweet-humoured she was. She was just like you.” He pulls up a video of a woman smiling and laughing and leading them on a boat tour. The background is unrecognizable, but the light in her laugh is like looking in a mirror.
Every Kenyan (and every person who’s been to Kenya) thinks I am Kenyan. After completing my Rites of Passage program and receiving the Kikuyu name “Kioni,” it becomes even more difficult to convince them that I am not Kenyan. When they ask if I am Kenyan and I say no, they immediately respond, “So you must be from Tanzania then.” I feel bad saying no, so I tell them my parents are Kenyan so that we can move on to other topics.
Everyone claims me as their own.
Africa’s children all seem to know and hear this song in one another, the same “old song” that my mother and so many others recognize in my face. Our families may have been separated by choice or forced migration, our identities fractured and re-blended in the Americas, but our hearts all recognize each other instinctively when we meet, no matter where we are in the world.
For days after our conversation, I mull over what my mother said to me about that old song. Old meaning ancient. How can I look like me and everyone else at the same time? There must be some common thread. What is this component that I can’t see because it’s too close, too familiar for me to recognize?
After some time, I realize that the only way a woman can look like everyone is if she birthed them all. A Primordial being, the oldest kind, a Mother of Everything.
Perhaps then, I have been gifted the great blessing and responsibility of a Primordial Mother’s face.
I have no idea what to do with that, if anything at all. But at least I can begin to look in the mirror and feel some pride in the woman who looks back at me.
***
You can’t carry the face of the Ancient Foremothers and suck at African dance. It’s embarrassing. I’ve been unbearably embarrassed.
West African dance class is a place that has always felt challenging for me. The room is filled with women in lappas and leggings under the lappas, whereas I like to show my legs and showed up to my first class in teeny spandex shorts. The rapid-fire boom tikka tikka boom kang kang kang boomk boomk boomk boom boom bop bop bop of the drums is loud and constant, never slowing for a “beginner.” There are no beginners in a West African dance class; everyone seems to know the drill and the moves and the motions and the names of the dances right away. The atmosphere is almost as if the drums are expected to coax a DNA awakening and those who belong (“We welcome everybody! All levels!”) will eventually fall in line naturally, smoothly.
Because I have an African face, heavily melanated skin, and a runner’s body masquerading as a dancer’s, no one ever suspects I’m a beginner. Before class, people make polite conversation, asking me how long I’ve been dancing, have I ever been to this class, how did I find out about it? Even though I appreciate the genuine gestures of friendliness, the questions only highlight how out of place I feel, and how experienced everyone else seems to be.
Classes begin with light stretching. In my first class, I feel awkward, cold, and too visible with my bare legs. I miss the instructions to the first move because I am thinking about how, until this day, I have never seen or conceptualized a short lappa and can’t help but feel that there is a secret West African Dance Culture Club to which I have never been invited. The instructor begins to demonstrate the first routine and I proceed to flop around, half a step behind, then two, then three.
Immediately, I start to sweat, but not from exertion. In a room fully lined with mirrors, everyone can see me doing everything wrong. I can see me doing everything wrong. My muscles are toned, but they don’t seem to work right. I step left when everyone else steps right, my feet land on the ground when they are meant to hop and soar. My whole body refuses to play along, to follow the rhythm, two steps, three steps, four light hops. The more desperately I try to keep up, the more the blood rushes in my ears, drowning out the drums’ rhythms.
Instead, I am treated to the parade of voices from childhood bullies revelling in my obvious failure to fit in.
“You look like a roach.” “You can’t dance.”
“African booty-scratcher.” “You off beat.”
“You talk like a white girl.” “Why can’t you get this simple step?”
“You think you better than us?”
“They are obviously right, you know. How do you look like that and move like this?” The internalized mean girl, champion of low self-esteem and impossible, shame-based standards thunders her critique, her laughter flashing like lightning across the dark rooms of my mind. Even she is on beat with the drums; the words echo to the rhythm. I think back to my mother saying I should be proud to carry the “old song” in my genes.
“If only I had the old dance too,” I think to myself. Maybe it’s lost in translation?
I hold my face straight, even as I internally scream, cry, and want to curl up into a ball. They make you stand at the front of the class when you are new, right behind the instructor, clearly blocking someone else’s view of their own flawless, or nearly flawless, movements. No one slows down. No one offers to pull me off to the side to quietly re-teach what everyone else seemed to catch on the first jump into the fray. So I try to remember to breathe, smile sheepishly when I falter, and gradually make my movements smaller, more half-assed, pretending to be concentrating on learning when I am silently praying for Ṣàngó to take over the mighty thunder of the drums and use it to break open the Earth beneath my feet, swallowing me up for being such a shame to the Ancestors. I deserve no less.
After class, I rush to the bathroom, ostensibly to change my clothes, but as I close the bathroom stall, I lean against the stall door and bawl my eyes out as quietly as possible. The next week, I go back to try again. It ends the same, tears in the bathroom, or if the bathroom is busy, tears in my car as I sit behind the steering wheel, convinced I am broken and divorced from the culture I revere so much. Perhaps I am just not African enough, despite my genetic expression’s insistence that I must be. After a few sessions, I just don’t go to classes anymore.
To come home to West African dance, I had to first acknowledge that African American dance, US Edition, is home for me, and I’m proud of that. Bebop jazz, seventies funk, and West Coast rap are among my native languages. Motown musical arrangements come naturally to me. Anything that debuted on Total Request Live or 106th & Park between roughly 1997 and 2003 are my happy songs. Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Little Richard are my most familiar ancestral languages. The djembe, duns, and marimba and their compositional stylings are Ancestors to many of the sounds that make up the music I grew up listening to, but like the distinct languages of the Italian tribes that migrated to the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those sounds have both maintained aspects that no longer prevail in the Motherland and have synthesized into new ones—hybrid sounds that are mutually foreign, though they share a common origin.* We are all impacted by the ships and shifts that carry us across time and space.
To come home to West African dance, I had to learn to love my face, my mouth, my hands, my feet. I had to recognize and accept that my ancestral tongues are foreign to me; those sounds are surely resonant, yet incomprehensible to my untrained ear. I had to embrace the notion that to be a beginner is just fine and not a marker of personal failure.
Even if my elegantly curved face and deep brown skin signify otherwise, I am a visitor in my ancestral homeland. And that is okay. In many ways, I had to release the desire to belong anywhere other than where I am.
I eventually found a teacher who understood that although West African dance is an ancestral language, she would indeed have students who come to the language as adult beginners. And as any adult learning a new language past the spongy-brain time of their primary years, they would need that dance language broken down and the movements translated into simple, relatable forms, repeated over and over and over until they could independently translate it back. Lanecia knew that the drum could and should be slowed down, and the movements simplified.
First, get the feet right; bring the jumps down to steps. Next, add the arms. Keep practicing, keep flowing; then, you can soar. And finally, you can communicate in a language the Ancestors living on your pretty Black face can understand.
*The Italian reference here is an obscure one, but this article shows that people who are removed from ancestral knowledge and language, no matter the nature of their migrations, maintain a sort of uninterrupted continuity that looks like something new, but perhaps really isn’t. Nosowitz, Dan. “How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained.” Atlas Obscrua, November 5, 2015.
Jaminnia R. States is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Converse College and serving as managing editor for A Gathering Together. Her work appears there as well as in Root Work Journal. As a graduate of both Howard University and Indiana University, she has moonlighted as a passionate elementary school teacher-librarian, university and public librarian, researcher, and joyful camp counselor. She’s always been a writer. Currently, she resides in beautiful Georgia, where she creates learning experiences for students of all ages.