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Emily Bernard - Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine

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Emily Bernard Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine
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ALSO BY EMILY BERNARD Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance A - photo 1
ALSO BY EMILY BERNARD

Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance:
A Portrait in Black and White

Some of My Best Friends:
Writings on Interracial Friendships

Remember Me to Harlem:
The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2019 by Emily - photo 2

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2019 by Emily Bernard

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Amistad Research Center for permission to reprint Incident by Countee Cullen. From the Countee Cullen Papers Collection at Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA.

Several of these essays appeared in slightly different versions in the following journals: Teaching the N-Word in The American Scholar (Autumn 2005); Scar Tissue in The American Scholar (Autumn 2011); Mother on Earth in Green Mountains Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (2014); Black Is the Body in Creative Nonfiction (Spring 2015); and Interstates in The American Scholar (Spring 2017). Teaching the N-Word was reprinted in The Best American Essays 2006. Mother on Earth, Black Is the Body, and Interstates were Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2015,2016, and 2018, respectively.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bernard, Emily, 1967 author.

Title: Black is the body : stories from my grandmothers time, my mothers time, and mine / by Emily Bernard.

Description: First edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | This is a Borzoi book.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018022594 (print) | LCCN 2018034693 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493026 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451493033 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Bernard, Emily, 1967 | African American womenBiography. | African AmericansSocial conditions21st century. | United StatesRace relations. | LCGFT : Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC E 185.97. B 337 (ebook) | LCC E 185.97. B 337 A 3 2019 (print) | DDC 305.48/896073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022594

Ebook ISBN9780451493033

Cover design by Adalis Martinez

v5.4

ep

For my daughters, Giulia and Isabella,

who lead me through the world by the hand, saying, Come on.

Interviewer:Then black is a state of mind too?
James Baldwin:No, black is a condition.

Esquire, July 1968

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Contents
Beginnings
This book was conceived in a hospital It was 2001 and I was recovering from - photo 3

This book was conceived in a hospital. It was 2001, and I was recovering from surgery on my lower bowel, which had been damaged in a stabbing. A friend, a writer, came to visit me in the hospital and suggested not only that there was a story to be told about the violence I had survived, but also that my body itself was trying to tell me something, which was that it was time to face down the fear that had kept me from telling the story of the stabbing, as well as other stories that I needed to tell.

I began to write essays. The first one I published was Teaching the N-Word. Over the next few years, more essays followed, along with several attempts to write about the stabbing. I couldnt tell that story yet because I didnt know what it meant. It took seven more years for me to understand that the experience of being at the wrong end of a hunting knife was only the situation, not the story itself; it was the stage, not the drama. In The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick writes: The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

The setting of Scar Tissue, which is the essay I eventually wrote about being stabbed, is my gut; the blood let flow by the knife is the trail I followed until I discovered the story, which is the mystery of storytelling itself, and how hard it is to tell the whole truth. Each essay in this book is anchored in this mystery, in blood. They are also rooted in contradictions, primary among them being that the stabbing unleashed the storyteller in me. In more than one way, that bizarre act of violence set me free.

But, of course, the stabbing has been a source of misery as well as opportunity. For instance, I suffered from recurrent, excruciating stomach pain for many years before another trip to the hospital revealed that I had developed adhesions in my bowel. The surgeon was able to untangle my intestines and scar tissue, but he warned me that the adhesions would return. There was nothing I could do to prevent or predict them. Youre just unlucky, he said sympathetically. The pain, he assured me, would be random and severe. It did return, thundered, again, throughout my body, and sent me back to the hospital, where a third surgeon ceded to the inherent mystery of the malady and confessed that medicine was more art than science. The gift of his honesty was, to me, as valuable as any solution to the problem would have been.

Once I accepted the randomness of the situation in my bowel, life took on a new urgency, and so did the desire to understand it. I turned to art over science, story over solution. I found a voice. The book imagined in 2001 began to take shape in a need to know, to explore, to understand, before it was too late. Insofar as the personal essay is, at heart, an attempt to grasp the mysteries of life, the form made sense to me on a visceral level. The need to understand, in fact, was what engendered the stabbing in the first place: I met the knife head on. Something in me just needed to know.

Each essay in this book was born in a struggle to find a language that would capture the totality of my experience, as a woman, a black American, a teacher, writer, mother, wife, and daughter. I wanted to discover a new way of telling; I wanted to tell the truth about life as I have lived it. That desire evolved into this collection, which includes a story about adoption that is as pragmatic as it is romantic; a portrait of interracial marriage that is absent of hand-wringing; and a journey into the word nigger that includes as much humor as grief. These stories grew into an entire book meant to contribute something to the American racial drama besides the enduring narrative of black innocence and white guilt. That particular narrative is not false, of course, which accounts for its endurance, but there are other true stories to tell, stories steeped in defiance of popular assumptions about race, whose contours are shaped by unease with conventional discussions about race relations. These other true stories I needed to explore, but I was mainly driven by a need to engage in what Zora Neale Hurston calls the oldest human longingself-revelation. The only way I knew how to do this was by letting the blood flow, and following the trail of my own ambivalence.

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