Black History by Sophia Hall

CW: graphic imagery. Names have been changed for the sake of privacy.

In elementary school, I had a fantastic music teacher. Our school was tucked inside a residential neighborhood in suburban Washington state, and twice a week, we would walk double-file to the music room, where we’d sit in rows to learn about all kinds of instruments, and the cultures from which they originated.

But above all, we sang. We sang year round, following Mrs. Wilson’s pointer as it trailed across the music staff on the board, and every year, in February, we would learn Black music.

That sounds like a strange thing to say, doesn’t it? “Black music.” Why not define it as soul, or gospel, or even Negro spiritual (which is what it was)? Well, we sang Negro Spirituals because they are Black, and because they are Black, Black History Month is when we sang them. It needed no further explanation to my fourth-grade ears, the color of which I struggle to describe without the use of “chocolate,” or “caramel,” or some other sweet treat.

It was simple, really. My ears, along with my fingertips, my heaaad, shoulders, knees, and toes were Black, which equals the “Black” in Black History Month, which equals Black music, which equals every little white boy, and girl, and person turning to give me unbridled glances every time the word “slave” fell from Mrs. Wilson’s mouth. Which equals a picture of a Black man broadcast across the projector screen, crisscrossing whip wounds stretching back and forth across his Black hardened back.                     

Wait, what?

Mrs. Wilson’s preemptive warning of the graphic material faded into a low din, bouncing around inside my eardrums and drowning out her subsequent explanation of the image. I stared at the board, which minutes before had been filled with rising and falling scales, and empty staffs for our rhythm transcription competitions. Now, I just sat, my face burning in an unidentifiable blush, as I attempted to force my nine-year-old body to assume a position of understanding, because I was meant to be the authority on this subject. The subject of me. This was, of course, Black History.

With my eyes glued to the rough, entangled bulges of the man’s scarring, I waited patiently for the arresting discomfort of his form to sink into 25 sets of eyes. I waited patiently for those eyes to begin to wander, to settle upon me, to deposit that discomfort—a sensation so unfamiliar to their young, paler bodies. I waited, as their guilt boiled on the surface of my skin, the saccharine drops of a momentary nonverbal apology slowly caramelizing against the heat of my face, until its bubbles browned, and thickened, and hardened into a smooth Black shell that warned me not to say a word. Class ended. I stood carefully, and found my place in line. We walked out of the room, and I held firmly erect posture, focused intently on the wispy strands of hair attached to the head in front of me. I couldn’t speak, for fear of what I might say. One wrong move could shatter that fragile shell. If that happened, I was sure it would scatter all over the clean walkway, and the whole class would have to stop, and it would be my fault. So, I stayed silent, to avoid making a mess I couldn’t clean up.

Mrs. Wilson had taught us a song called “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd,” which slaves would sing as a way of remembering to use the Big Dipper to follow the North Star to their escape. I still remember the tune, and it was a good class. For a white teacher in a majority white suburb, Mrs. Wilson had gone above and beyond. But every February for the decade since, I’ve thought about Black History, a history that is mine, and all I see is that man and his scars, and all I hear is the hum of a music room devoid of sound. I tried for years to expel that image from my mind, and to put something else in its place. The album cover for Lemonade. Barack Obama’s name flashing across the screen on CNN on November 4th, 2008. Anything that represented the Black History I wanted to know. The history I had lived, not the ugly one heavy with fascination and pity I had been told belonged to me because some white men hundreds of years ago decided it should. Yet, there the image stayed.

I often wondered if any of those 25 other sets of eyes still see the man’s warped skin when they close their eyes at night. I would ask myself over and over, were they somehow able to deflect the imprint of his image onto me with just a sidelong glance? Sometimes, that seems entirely possible. Not knowing him or his story doesn’t change their lives in the slightest, but if I were to forget, and I were to finally replace him with something more beautiful in my mind, am I responsible for the loss of that day’s memory? I would ask myself, if I take all of the guilt from the memories that were dumped upon me that day, and I push them to the depths of my own memory so far that they disappear with nursery rhymes and infant-speak, then is it as though Mrs. Wilson never taught it at all? And because that man was Black too, and that day in February was supposed to be ours, by deciding to forget him, am I erasing a part of our history? Of mine? I thought I might be. And so, I let him stay. Now, I see him all the time, and I hear the silence of that room, and I remember for all of us.

What I feel, however, is different entirely from that day, because somewhere along the way, in spite of my careful tiptoeing, my incessant listening to Top 40 radio, and six years of frying my hair into submission, that shell of deflected guilt shattered on its own. It could no longer keep the undeniable Blackness of me from being shared with the world. No longer do I feel trapped by the misguided expectations of Blackness that my peers place upon me. I have spent ten years being nourished by the Blackness I see in the world every day. The ceaseless joy, the pain, the art which dictates the very movements of pop culture. The Blackness I see is strong, resilient, rooted in a shared history which has been severed from its genesis, but that has been rich in power for as far back as we may remember. And we must remember.

It is not enough to care about what Blackness is today, because Blackness, the source of our vibrancy and light and soul, must be whole and true. It must be both the knotting of that man’s scarred back, and the shea butter on my legs. It must be wild, unable to be contained, and surpassing time and definition. It lives in me, wrapping roots around the memories my naiveté wishes I would let go, sprouting branches, and exploding forth from that shell the way cotton explodes from its seed in the heat of August. It is all of us. Because we are all true, and we are all whole. We are all blooming, finally.

Sophia Hall is a columnist for Changing Womxn Collective from Seattle, Washington. Besides editorial writing, she does playwriting and dramaturgy.