White Girls Read Free Page A

hearing what SL said through his tears, I murmured through my own: I bet K will like that black Jesus on top of him. Then we said good-bye and SL became the only one for a long time.
    SL and I met at an alternative weekly, where we both worked in the art department; I was the department assistant, SL a freelance graphic designer. By way of introduction he would shyly offer me things he thought might interest me: postcards, books, photographs. One of the first postcards he sent me was by the photographer Helen Levitt. It showed two colored boys on a street in New York, in the nineteen forties. One boy is facing the camera; the other boy’s back faces the camera. Their arms are linked. They look like two sides of the same coin, like Janus. SL passed along a play: Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman . In it, twin sisters long to be loved by or control the same man. Hedies. In the end, the twins accept being “twin sisters...of one mind.” Because of SL—he loved her work—I also read Gertrude Stein’s Ida: A Novel . In it, Ida, the heroine, wishes for a twin. She writes letters to her imaginary twin, also named Ida. “Dear Ida my twin,” one such letter begins. Then, continuing, “Are you beautiful as beautiful as I am dear twin Ida, are you, and if you are perhaps I am not.” SL gave me a VHS tape: Chained for Life (1951). In it, real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton star in a fiction about their struggle for love, set against a show-business backdrop. No man can separate them, though; they’re emotionally “chained for life.” Then there was Thought to Be Retarded , written and designed by SL himself. It was based on a performance he’d done in collaboration with the photographer Daniel Lerner. Their piece was based on the story of Grace and Virginia Kennedy, the famous German American twins born in Georgia in the early nineteen seventies, who developed their own language and were “thought to be retarded” because their parents, social workers, and speech therapists alike couldn’t understand them. (The Kennedy girls were themselves the subject of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s exceptional 1980 documentary Poto and Cabengo .)
    SL and I had both grown up feeling that the language we spoke was somehow incomprehensible or fuzzy to those around us. He’d spent his adolescence on army bases in England, France, and Germany, while I had no direct experience with white people until I was a teenager. SL’s parents were middle-class American Negroes from the Midwest who went to work in Europe to escape, if it can be done, racism. (SL’s father taught college-level chemistry on various army bases, while his mother worked as an administrator.)But his father brought that racism with him. Like many men of his background, his racism was really counterphobic: he revered white people. That his only son couldn’t assimilate enough for his angry, continually disappointed father—an impossible task; SL was a black kid in a white world; no matter how much he was lauded or fucked over in that world, he would always be black—was just one of the small crucifixions SL endured for his father’s sake. Other nails and splinters: the irrefutable sense that he didn’t really know why he was here, in the world, at all. He had no I because he had no country. He would not have his maleness because that was a sick and diseased and controlling thing—like his father.
    In the late early nineteen seventies, SL, a tremendous reader, began to hear bits of himself not in Piri Thomas or Eldridge Cleaver but in Shulamith Firestone, and Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Carolee Schneemann, and Robin Morgan: women who were of SL’s class, more or less, and had experienced, growing up, something akin to what he had known at the hands of a father: being subject to emotional violence because they owned you, you were their property. He and his mother had grown up in what Shulamith Firestone called “shared oppression.” The difference between her and her