Traveling While Black

I love traveling the Southeast the way I love fake-deep indie rock music by bands composed entirely of white men.

I love it the way I’ve loved too many hetero-centric rom-coms, the way I love the smell of meat grilling despite being a vegetarian, the way I love the joggers I bought on sale a few weeks ago from Anne Taylor Loft. The way I love things that are not mine. The way I love things that maybe ought to be. Were supposed to be. And it’s hard loving these things that look and feel like home when they insist on being forbidden, alienating, mean: Loving the idea of the thing, often getting nothing in return.

Rarely has my family traveled outside of the usual Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee area (with an occasional Louisiana or Alabama thrown in). Once, my mom’s job flew us out to Utah, which was my first time on an airplane, but not my first time getting peculiar stares as a result of being the only black person for a matter of square miles. We don’t usually stray too far from home. On longer trips—to college, to D.C.—we get to see the whole southeast in all it’s rural glory, making it the only part of the U.S. that feels like a whole, continuous, sprawling thing. The rest of the country reduced to a sleepy view from an airplane.

My butt gets sore from sitting up and looking out the window for hours, so I lay down, and the Southeast is scrolling past me in real time. I listen to John Denver, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash. I pee in endless roadside gas stations. I eat at Cracker Barrel. And in this way it’s mine. All of this Southern Americana. It’s mine because I say it is, and because damned if I haven’t seen my fair share of sunsets from Southern rest areas, damned if I don’t know every word to “Take me Home, Country Roads.”

On the way to school this year, we made our halfway stop in West Virginia. My parents and I got off the elevator, turned the corner onto our floor, and I immediately made eye contact with a middle-aged white man wearing a t-shirt with the confederate flag printed on the front. The man had been exiting his hotel room with his child, but when he saw us he clutched the toddler almost violently, yanking her back inside the doorway. I’ve grown up surrounded by Confederate flags. Talking to a college friend when Walmart decided to stop selling Confederate flag merchandise, they asked, appalled, “Walmart sells confederate flag merch?!” From my experience, Walmart doesn’t really sell much else. It wasn’t shocking, but that isn’t to say I didn’t think about it before going to sleep that night, and it isn’t to say I didn’t get up to make sure the door was dead bolted.

A few weeks earlier, we took our yearly trip to the beach, a family tradition by which I feel blessed. Even when I was younger I felt thankful for the privilege of that kind of leisure. Back then I was also already aware of the scarceness of any other family that looked like mine on the beach. Those vacations were a hotbed for terrible insecurity and self-loathing surrounding my giant, sandy, knotted hair and deepening brown skin as I looked around enviously at the literally endless sea of little white kids, frolicking carelessly. I’m over this now that I understand that no one does beach curls like black girls. Still, there’s always the clouds. This year, my family unknowingly planned the trip for the date one year since Darren Wilson, a police officer who walked away from the shooting physically and legally unscathed, murdered Michael Brown. On the beach, I watched my Twitter feed fill with accounts of the militarized police force attacking mourning residents, of another shooting, of continuous injustice for Brown and his family. So I got into Facebook arguments with people from home, because that was all I could do.

Later, we talked about going to a Gullah Museum, and my patently tight-lipped Dad disclosed for the first time that his grandmother’s great grandmother was an enslaved black woman, her great grandfather a slave master. I spent that night on the balcony researching the nearby plantation where she was enslaved, hopelessly searching ancestry.com, feeling itchy, restless. On the drive back from the beach we stopped at a gas station where a group of teenage boys were hanging out, sitting in and around a pickup truck bed from which they were flying a giant Confederate flag.

And still, people always ask, “Why are you always thinking and talking about race? It’s over, why won’t you just give it a rest?” And I wish I could, often. I feel guilty for being sad in the rented beach chair my dad saves every year to get. Arguing about protests I’m not at in neighborhoods that aren’t mine. Crying about the unmaking of bodies I never knew the making of.

I’m sick of white foolishness encroaching on my precious, magical, all-mine Black Joy. Even now, even writing this, I doubt whether Black Joy is a hot enough take about which to write a column, when in reality it’s the most revolutionary thing I could possibly write of. Sometimes, I think about how other people don’t ever have to deal with things like this pushing their joy out of the way, and the frustration with that unfairness leads me to near fury. Sometimes, I sit down to write a column about Black Joy, and I can’t stop thinking of the white guy in Tasty Burger yelling “White Lives Matter!” I would like to be able to drive across the land my family has made and made home without feeling threatened. I want to shake people sometimes, physically shake them from their shoulders. I can almost hear myself shouting: “Do you understand? None of the things that are mine feel all the way safe. Like literally, actually safe. None of the things that are mine feel mine. My grandma plucked honeysuckle from her front yard and made the best pies. Can’t the south just be mine? I lay on the grass in The Yard and do reading for all these difficult as hell classes. So that too, can’t that be mine? And these clothes? And these words? My dad’s green eyes? My name? If not, what is? Do you understand?”

It feels so basic. If you don’t ever have to think about the thing, how can you not spend all your time feeling thankful that you don’t have to think about the thing, instead of telling other people they are silly for thinking about the thing? But still, how could you? If you’ve never felt unsafe in a highway rest stop two hours from your bedroom; if you’ve never felt threatened walking down Mass Ave in the middle of the day; if you haven’t known night to be a deadly thing.

I trust my peers enough to at least imagine being hit by the ripple in the air when the kid in section says that word. To consider the privilege of a frightless summer. To at least make a guess about how it feels to have a thousand words to say about a feeling. And still, people won’t.

Do you understand?

Madison E. Johnson ’18 lives in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.