And that’s when my mother chimed in because engaging in hypotheticals is a strength of hers, a fear tactic that works very well. “He could’ve kidnapped you, tied you up somewhere, and got you addicted to heroin. That’s how stuff like that happens.” All I did was have a conversation, and my parents thought that was the gateway to a man being unable to control himself around me. For the rest of the conversation, all I could think about was me in a dark basement with disheveled hair and sullen eyes, the guy coming down there regularly to inject me with heroin, and each time finding a vein on my arm with more difficulty. My parents avoided calling me a “fast-tailed girl,” but they could have. I was lucky.
Black girls are not just under the surveillance of men, both black and white, but also of their mothers and the elders within their community. The notion of the “fast-tailed girl” reinforces the idea that black girls should privilege the incalculable eyes on their body rather than focusing on their own conceptions of themselves. Mothers scare black girls into believing that their power is already lost, and that whatever goodness there is in sex and attraction is found only within marriage. If they can scare their black daughters, make them afraid of going back out into the world, then these black mothers will seize some kind of power that they might not have had while they were growing up. When those fearful black daughters become mothers themselves, they will try to reclaim power by instilling the same fear in their daughters. If a black mother can shame a black girl by warning her what she could become, that warning can serve as a vaccine, a small dosage of poison, so that when she goes into another environment, she is already protected. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way.
Consent is a language spoken among white feminists in their spaces. This is not to say that Harlem is some lawless place; I believe that it is one of the greatest neighborhoods in the world. And this is not to say that all men do not know boundaries. I have walked past plenty of men who have simply said “God bless you” or “Have a good day, beautiful,” and left it at that. But many a woman’s “no” may as well be spoken in a different language. Her pulling away from the man may as well as be the opposite because it only builds his excitement and urges him to try harder. If she responds in a way that he likes, she’s a woman. If she doesn’t, then she’s “being a bitch about it,” reduced to an animal for not understanding that in this human world of logic and reason, this kind of interaction between men and women is normal.
I have never talked to a black woman about the loss of her virginity and heard her describe it as anything other than traumatic. There is the undressing, the kisses here and there, maybe a little fondling, and then: an absolute struggle. Some could not even relax their bodies enough for the man to enter them without multiple attempts. In these stories that I’ve heard, there is barely a mention of adequate foreplay and pleasure is hardly, if ever, discussed. I wonder what is cursing black girls and women with an inability to relax? Are black women also nervous because of how much we have been warned about being “fast-tailed”? Because even if we are in love, we have been taught that lovemaking is not a consummation but a shameful act? If a black girl has grown up fearful of wanting male attention of any kind, how can she release her inhibitions?
I was seventeen years old, and for several weeks straight I’d been having dreams about sex; dreams in which I could count the number of sweat beads on a man’s chest, recall our mingling scents, and name any accoutrements in the room. Seconds before waking, my pelvic muscles would spasm and my face would contort. I would wake up with beads of my own sweat decorating my forehead like a diadem and my legs spread. The dreams were so real that I thought that I was in fact being penetrated, that my skin was breaking and something was trying to break through me. After months had gone by, I finally told my mother during a car ride about what was happening in order to make sense of my body. My mother told me that this was an orgasm, but the sensation seemed frightening and not as pleasurable as I’d thought it would be. They left me disoriented, and it took a concentrated effort to refamiliarize myself with my usual surroundings. I was twenty-two when she bought me a small pink vibrator to break the fever, and I kept it in my top drawer hidden underneath loose-leaf paper and jewelry. It looked like an alien; I had no idea how a mechanical object would help.
I pointed the tip at my vulva and winced at the buzzing sensation. After a few minutes, I gave up. I felt embarrassed. Not too long afterwards, I awoke in the middle of night, burning. I was shaking and my heart was racing; I thought that I was on the verge of a panic attack. I thought I would be burned alive from the inside out if I didn’t do something quickly. I grabbed the vibrator from my top drawer again, hid underneath the covers, lifted my legs, and rested it on my clitoris. Soon, I was rocking back and forth. I don’t know where or how I was able to find a rhythm, but I did and my movements became frenetic, then jerky. Suddenly, my mouth gaped open and my eyelids flickered, my eyes momentarily rolling into the back of my head. I came to splayed across my bed as stars shot across my pitch-black ceiling. And all the while the vibrator, which had fallen out of my right hand, rolled across my blankets, still buzzing.
Around this same time, I remember spending the night at my father’s house in Atlantic City, sharing a bedroom with one of my older sisters. She lay sound asleep while I twisted and turned underneath the sheets. Although our twin beds were not the most comfortable, I was acclimated to their feel, and so I knew that my insomnia had to be coming from someplace else. Like I did most nights when I had trouble falling asleep, I peeked through the shutters and stared at the adjacent streetlights and, as I focused, the undulating waves of the inlet. But these tactics were to no avail. My body was on fire. I didn’t know whether to strip naked or fill the bathtub with ice to cool down. Yet this heat was different. I was not sweating. My tongue was not dry. I was not out of breath. I did not feel physically exhausted. I thought that I was losing my mind. The only associative feeling I had with this heat was the craving for sex. This craving was so immense that I grabbed my cell phone and texted my mother to tell her that something needed to be done. I was too turned on, and there was not a man in sight who could turn me off by getting me off.