"What is she anyway?" -- Re-arranging Bodily Mythologies

Abstract

"Are you comfortable with our people?" Aunt Grace asked me: a question that made her taller by the certainty of her own membership. She stretched our to exclude me, dressing it with southern gravy. Aunt Grace clarified, " I mean, Frances says that Ida's son's wife, Betty [who is white], don't feel comfortable around us"—us referring to the same collective as the aforementioned our. A jury of my partner's elder aunts and uncles in rural Mississippi eyed me cautiously, but at the same time, lovingly; my blackness was on trial. Perhaps it didn't really matter to the elders as they offer sweet potato pie regardless, but it mattered enough to compel the asking. Even though my partner's mother chimed in that I am adopted by a black family, and even though I catalogued a list of immediate and distant family who are black, the initial visual register clung quicker than the sting of the Southern heat. And later that day, the same interrogator lightly remarked, "well, maybe you can give Betty some tips [on being comfortable around black folks]." And I thought, By telling her she should've been raised by a black family? By raising a discussion about the social construction of race? I am in constant struggle around honoring the space and place, the time and generation: the context of the asking; such a query comes from a place of familial security and a sense of cultural coalition, but a place that becomes a proving ground as well.