I purchased a UNC–Chapel Hill jersey dress when I went on vacation with one of my friends and refused to wear it until I returned to school post–spring break. When I pulled the dress over my head and walked to the bus stop, I quietly began to panic. I could not swish my hips in that dress. If I did, I was sure someone would catch a glimpse of my panties. How could I laugh and talk how they’d taught me when I was worried that I could be exposed at any moment? Throughout the morning, I kept my books over my pelvic area and secretly patted my backside behind corners to make sure that I was still protected. At recess, both Kiki and Bethany praised my outfit, and I embellished the story of a ten-minute splurge at an Orlando mall and made it sound like an epic adventure.
Once the whistle was blown, the signal for us to gather into single-file lines, I saw that Juan and his friends were the last to regroup with our class. Before I wouldn’t have dared pay him mind, but this day was different; today I was wearing a jersey dress. He had to see me now. The jersey dress was the equivalent of a blinking neon sign, saying, Woo-hoo, over here. I glanced over my shoulder as we walked back into the building, our lines dispersing into the usual friend circles. I glanced over my shoulder again and saw that Juan and his friends were looking at me. One raised his eyebrows, another smiled, the other nodded. I smiled and kept walking but slowed my feet. Then suddenly, I felt a light wind and a hard smack landed on my butt. When I turned, I saw that it was Juan. I sucked my teeth and feigned offense and took my seat.
Juan never ended up being my boyfriend. He got back together with his ex, Casey, a white girl with dirty-blonde hair and blue eyes. She was one of the cheerleaders I sucked up to during tryouts, and she made the team every year. She could have had anyone in the school. She knew it, too.
Around that time, my mother expressed her concern about how I was dressing and the girls I’d decided to befriend. It wasn’t the clothes themselves but rather the brands and what kind of impressions they gave to others. She did not want me becoming a “fast-tailed girl” because that was not who I was. That was not who she raised me to be. Her voice was clear, her eyes unwavering, and she didn’t smile. This was not a joke, but a message that I needed to heed for as long as I lived on this earth in this body. I might have heard about the dangers of “fast-tailed girls” before, but this was different because the warning was directed at me. I sat still in quiet submission and then left her bedroom more confused than before, desire and propriety battling within me. Years later, when I read Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time, I realized that these sexual childhood games are not limited to America, but are a problem for young black girls across the globe. In the novel, the unnamed British narrator details the tradition of black girls being cornered by their male classmates, who would push their panties aside and stick as many fingers inside their vaginas as they could. The white girls were not a part of the game. The narrator does not say why, but I know why. It is the same reason why the white girls at my middle school did not get slapped on the butts while the black girls and the Latinas were open territory. I love that Smith chooses not to openly articulate this, because doing so would present an issue for which black girls and women have yet to find its origins.
I do not know where I first encountered the phrase “fast-tailed girl.” My mother doesn’t either. It is always used by older generations, as it was used by the older generations before them. I’ve heard it spoken most by black Christian women, and men use it from time to time. “Sluts” or “whores” are terms used more in white spaces; black girls are “fast-tailed” or “ho(e)s.” A “fast-tailed girl” may be a black girl who wants attention from men, gets pregnant out of wedlock, spends too much time talking to boys, wears dresses or skirts that are too short, crosses one leg over the other with too much thigh showing during this rearrangement, et cetera, et cetera. It would be wrong to unilaterally categorize this phrase as slut-shaming. On one level, it is. On another level, though, “fast-tailed girl” is a weaponized phrase intended to protect black girls, although its impact tends to be the opposite.
Only black women know black girlhood well enough to understand that once a black baby girl exits the womb, it is not enough that she is alive and well. Even before she’s born, folks want to know whether she will be light-or dark-skinned, have good curly hair or a thick afro, share her father’s big lips or have her mother’s big nose. All of these cultural burdens weigh down her body before she is fully formed. Once she is brought into this world, everyone silently acknowledges the battles that she will fight just for being born a black girl. She cannot just be good; she has to be better than good in order to meet the white female standard. This black girl cannot just be presentable in terms of hair and style; she has to be acceptable. She cannot just be conservative in terms of sexuality; she has to be closed off. Black girls are not afforded the luxury of just being girls. They are never innocent or cute. If only a black girl can be a “fast-tailed girl,” then she is not a girl at all, but a beast.
There is no male equivalent for a “fast-tailed girl” within the black community because male sexuality is not only encouraged but praised. Boys are boys, and men are men. Female elders may purse their lips and speak about a black boy’s player ways with the ladies, but he is not admonished for being potentially promiscuous like black girls are. When he is criticized for his dress, if his pants sag, it is not because this means that his dick is accessible to anyone, or that he is a sexual deviant. He is criticized for his dress because no one wants anyone to assume that he is a lazy good-for-nothing person. No one worries if he’s talking too much to girls; in fact, this may even instill pride in his father (though his mother may worry about an unexpected pregnancy). Black girls, however, are oftentimes treated as outsiders inside black spaces.
Even though neither my grandmother nor my mother graduated from college, they bought into the general cultural narrative that college is where American women are supposed to find their husbands. I never got into a relationship in high school, for fear of being academically distracted, and so they felt that Princeton was my time to find love. But my mother assumed that because I was entering into an extremely white institution, I would most likely not marry someone black. Furthermore, black women outnumbered black men almost three to one at Princeton, and black Americans were the minority compared to the number of Africans and West Indians. I was always open to dating a man of any race, but I first wanted to prove her wrong by any means necessary. I suppose I was less concerned with matters of love and more concerned with showing myself and my mother that I was not unattractive to men of my own community. But when I got there, I soon realized the challenges that I faced.