Savala Nolan - Dont Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

Dont Let It Get You Down

Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

Savala Nolan

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2021 by Savala Nolan

Names and identifying characteristics of some individuals have been changed.

Previous versions of Dear White Sister and Fat in Ways White Girls Dont Understand ran in Bust.com.

Excerpts from SHADES OF BLACK by Sandra L. Pinkney. Text copyright 2000 by Sandra L. Pinkney. Reprinted by permission of Scholastic Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2021

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Interior design by Carly Loman

Jacket design by Zoe Norvell

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Trepczynski, Savala N., author.

Title: Dont let it get you down : essays on race, gender, and the body / Savala N. Trepczynski.

Description: New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020046649 | ISBN 9781982137267 (hardback) | ISBN 9781982137281 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781982137298 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Feminine beauty (Aesthetics)United States. | Body imageUnited States. | FeminismUnited States. | Interracial datingUnited States. | Racially mixed peopleUnited States.

Classification: LCC HQ1220.U5 T64 2021 | DDC 305.420973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046649

ISBN 978-1-9821-3726-7

ISBN 978-1-9821-3729-8 (ebook)

For Mom

For Dad

In 1997, at the age of sixteen, I left my home in California to spend the summer in New York City. I stayed in the luxurious apartments of the prep school kids Id befriended that spring at the Mountain School, an idyllic, warmhearted, working farm in Vermont where wed all participated in an elite semester-long program for high school juniors. I wore size 26 pantsthats a womens plus-size 26sported worn-out cornrows and acne, and had divorced parents and no money. Except for my mindwhich got me into an exclusive program like the Mountain SchoolI was nothing like the Manhattan teenagers who hosted me, who lived in apartments with staff entrances and Picassos hung casually in hallways, who carried twenty-dollar lip balm and had faces as clear and cared-for as pearls, who were both profligate and cheap in the unusual way of the wealthy, thinking nothing of three-hundred-dollar dinners yet walking an extra four blocks to buy the cheapest pack of cigarettes.

I think our friendships were real. I think they loved me, and it was mutual. But I can never know how much of their love was tethered to the sheer delight and surprise of meeting a fat brown girl on scholarship who could quote Wordsworth, whose family came to America in the 1600s, who wore preppy clothes, even if big. Whether our friendships were deeply honest or a little bit rotten, when we hung out I always felt I was listeningeavesdroppingfrom another room, ear pressed to the wall. They were tip-top upper class; I was with them, but not of them. I heard what they said and, like a spy, observed how they moved, their words and actions rich with layers of meaning even they didnt understand because fish never fully understand the water. That summers experience, when I felt my incredible proximity to power but also my irreconcilable distance from it, has stayed with me. It has, in fact, been one of the defining dynamics of my life.

I call myself in-between: Im a mixed Black woman and what folks have sometimes called a whole lot of yellow wasted, meaning I have light (yellow) skin wasted by Black features (kinky hair, broad nose). Im Mexican on my dads side, but I dont speak Spanish. Im descended from enslaved people on my dads side, but slaveholders on my moms side. Their progeny disowned her and her future kids when she married a Black man. Im a Daughter of the American Revolution. My mom completed graduate school, as did I; my dad didnt finish elementary school and spent nearly twenty years incarcerated (a few years here, a few years there). I started my first diet at age three or four, and have been painfully thin and truly fat, multiple times, for thirty years, which is to say I know things about womanhood that you cant know if your body is normal or your weight hasnt fluctuated wildly. Im a lawyer, and in law school I worked for the United States Attorneys Office and the Obama administration, and as a child I watched my dad deal cocaine to pay child support. I went to tony private schools and grew up in Marin County, which had the worlds highest per capita income in those days; I also sometimes spent weekends with my dad, who was so poor we went to the bathroom in buckets under a ceiling hole repaired with a tarp.

This book began as a way to process my own dislocation, as the kind of cartography we all do to address certain ambiguities in our lives. Ultimately, it is about living between societys most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces: between Black and white, between rich and poor, between thin and fat (as a woman). Its about the processes of growing up, dating, working, mothering, and self-discovering while occupying these interstitial identities. I live on the balcony and the dance floor at the same time, and my story is rooted in my body: a brown, female, and currently fat body the world more or less despises, and onto which the culture ascribes a bizarre constellation of faults, sins, fates, and histories; and also a body with light-skin privilege, and access to thin privilege, and which has successfully carried me through elite spaces from the White House to Park Avenue apartments. Through the eyes of my body, I see the worlds dominant cultures and subordinated cultures as an insider and an outsider at once. I wrote this book to illuminate these dominant and subordinated spaces, and the space that both separates and binds them. I wrote it to articulate a space in between.

Holt was a catch and I thought maybe we were heading somewhere, but then I saw his feet, and they were beautiful, unlike mine. Dating requires intimacy: bare feet, side by side, maybe touching at the foot of a bed, in the sand, the grass. I did not want to place my feet next to his.

His feet were smooth and well-shaped as if carved from marble, with neat cuticles and nails filed symmetrically. When I saw them I thought, Theyre like Davids right foot! Years before, Id sketched Davids feet in charcoal, full of hope, the filtered light as gentle as a powder puff in the Florentine museum, a hushed flow of tourists and art students around me. I wish Id sketched the slaves and their pocked granite confines instead, but back then, in the spring of 2002, it was