The cruelest cut
A black woman’s struggle with racial indifference — and a stabbing
“Black Is the Body,” Emily Bernard’s essays on being a black woman in a state almost totally white, brings lucidity, honesty and insight to the topics of race and interracial relationships.
As her own quietly compelling account suggests, Ms. Bernard is complex and resilient. Her stories get under your skin.
A Nashville native who grew up in that Tennessee city, Emily Bernard earned her doctorate in American studies from Yale University in New Haven, Conn.; in 1994, she was stabbed by a white man in a bizarre coffeehouse incident there.
The scars the stabbing left on Ms. Bernard’s insides launch this fearless philosophical work. Those scars are an active volcano in her psyche.
Ms. Bernard is a professor of critical and race studies in the department of English at the University of Vermont in Burlington, the state’s largest city.
As one of very few blacks in Vermont, she confronts identity questions daily, whether shopping in the supermarket, schooling her predominantly white classes in African-American culture, or vaulting daunting bureaucratic hurdles such as those involved in adopting her Ethiopian twin daughters, Giulia and Isabella.
Subtitled “Stories From My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine,” Ms. Bernard’s musings “grew into an entire book meant to contribute something to the American racial drama besides the enduring narrative of black innocence and white guilt,” she writes in “Beginnings.”
A contribution to that drama she particularly enjoys is her marriage to John Gennari, an ItalianAmerican from western Massachusetts who teaches the same topics as she does; he’s an associate professor in the UVM English department.
“He and I talk a lot about race,” Ms. Bernard writes of her husband. “We like racial difference — to experience it and then discuss it. There are interracial relationships in which each party claims not to see racial difference. I don’t understand those couples and consider their relationships fundamentally humorless.”
An account of Mr. Gennari driving the family car through the South with Ms. Bernard’s skeptical father a backseat passenger is a warm take on travel that might have been far less pleasant.
Ms. Bernard reveals subtly; she doesn’t pile on, and her language is expressive and careful. “It was as dark as the bottom of a pocket,” she writes of standing outside that coffeehouse just before she is stabbed.
After the knife nearly disemboweled her — as if she hadn’t endured enough hurt — she experienced extra pain thanks to the surgeon on call, who never spoke to her or even looked at her before he “plunged his fingers into my gaping wound.
“I gasped and instinctively grabbed his hand. It was only then that the man looked at me, and said icily, ‘Don’t. Touch. My. Hand.’ His eyes were Aryan-blue and as cold as his voice.”
Her fury is palpable, but her intelligence keeps her from defaulting to racist hatred. A white student tells Ms. Bernard in one of her “crash courses in and against bigotry” that she thought “we weren’t supposed to see race anymore.” Ms. Bernard says that in the classroom, she encounters “a generation afraid to say what they see.” Naming what you see is not condemnation, she suggests. It’s clarification.
While her book primarily deals with personal issues, it’s also very much about academia and her efforts to school her charges in racial sensitivity. “Teaching the NWord” is about accustoming her students to her blackness, to making them comfortable in discussion of race and of her own makeup.
She’s both brown and black, Ms. Bernard tells the daughters she and Mr. Gennari struggled so to adopt.
“It goes deep, beyond the skin, the organic racial romance that informs everything I do and everything I write. I am black — and brown, too: Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of stories I tell.”
These are stories the shedding of the blood of Ms. Bernard, an African-American, and her African ancestors — compel her to write. Her book probes what W.E.B. Dubois dubbed the “twoness” of the black American.
Reconciliation, reckoning and pride intertwine as Ms. Bernard addresses her heritage, her vibrant family and her complicated comfort in being an anomaly, a black woman in a state as white as the snow that blankets it for much of the year.
Anomaly doesn’t have to mean token.
“BLACK IS THE BODY: STORIES FROM MY GRANDMOTHER’S TIME, MY MOTHER’S TIME, AND MINE” By Emily Bernard Knopf $25.95