Even in middle school, the black female body was always a target for destruction. Violence was a legitimate way to resolve arguments. Talking was not a conclusion but rather a trigger. You fought someone who talked badly about you or someone who wanted your man. In other words, you fought to maintain your space in an environment where your place was already on the margins. For what black girl wants to be even more invisible than she thinks she already is? Fighting was a way to assert that you were present and in motion. Fighting brought you respect that institutions refused to give you. I thought I wanted to be invisible. I wanted those institutions to respect me, and I believed I could earn it through silence, through assimilation. But my path of nonviolence only led to a cascade of madness.
I didn’t need to lie in bed with my curtains closed because whatever light permeated my windows could do nothing to dilute the darkness welling in my spirit. I spent many nights hidden underneath my covers, hot tears streaming down my puffy cheeks, unable to voice my pain even in private. In my head, I replayed my daily humiliation in front of all my classmates, and there was no sign of it letting up. I thought of no other escape than to commit suicide, but despite having called the local suicide hotline, I had no concrete plans for flinging myself out of this world. I just hoped that I would one day disappear and find myself on a transcendental plane where there was no more pain and humiliation. Secretly, I envisioned that all the tears I cried would drain my body and my mom would eventually find my desiccated corpse in my bed. I prayed to God to take my misery away from me, and my prayers became more impassioned the longer the harassment continued.
After realizing that my despondent behavior was not symptomatic of PMS—since it dragged on for weeks—my mother ultimately found out what ailed me. She spoke to the Williamstown High School administration about my problems and they did nothing, chalking up the bullying as a rite of passage. She then suggested that I transfer to a private school but I was too afraid to start over again. Since I could not be protected by the higher powers, one of my sisters offered to come to the school in sneakers, ready to fight Jamirah. I rejected both suggestions because I wasn’t entirely lonely. I had a few friends, one of them a boy named Dennis, who told me that Jamirah’s envy was the reason she bullied me. Dennis was one of my closest friends; he had moved to Williamstown the same year as I did. We lived only five minutes from each other and spoke for hours through the telephone on the weekends, talking about anything and watching shows together. He was my saving grace, and I figured it was better to suffer in high school with him by my side than to transfer to another school and start all over again. Not to mention I thought the change in schools, along with classes and extracurriculars, would make it difficult for me to get into a top college.
I had moved to another lunch table to sit with upperclassmen to avoid Jamirah at all costs. One of my friends called me back over, and Jamirah eviscerated me with such panache. She smiled, flicked her hand at me, and asked, “Why you talkin’ ’bout me? What’s good?” I stuttered through it all, explaining how I had other friends and that she was mean to me, which led me to leave the table. Finally, Jamirah stood up from the table and ended with, “I don’t give a fuck about you. So you can kiss my ass,” and protruded her ass before sashaying to another side of the room.
The friend who betrayed my trust smiled and sucked her tongue. She said, “You betta’ say something back! Don’t let her get away with it!” I assumed my friend must’ve told Jamirah why I moved, for how else could she have known? I left quietly, on the verge of a breakdown. I spent the next period silently crying while taking a test, the social studies teacher hovering over me but never asking if I was okay.
A sick game was played: I was tested on whether I could assert myself. I was not only supposed to “buck up,” or be aggressive, but also prepare to fight. Jamirah pushed me to leave that lunch table. She pushed me out of that space. Although I found another one, the underlying point was that I needed to reclaim my original space even if I had no intention to return. Instead, I cried and fled to another table with a shattered sense of self. I hated Jamirah, I hated my friend, and I hated every single black girl who laughed at me that day.
I blamed myself for not saying what I’d really wanted to say to Jamirah. I’d wanted to narrow my eyes at her, smirk, and say, No, I don’t give a fuck about you. I’m prettier than you, I have longer hair than you, I’m smarter than you, and I’m going to be more successful than you. You know it. I know it. Teachers know it, and there is nothing that you can do to change what’s already been set up for your life. You’ll hit me because you already know you failed and every time you see me, you see the reflection of your failure. That’s why you’re mad, and frankly, I would be, too, if I were you. But thankfully, I’m not.
I considered myself to be the bigger person because my passiveness had afforded Jamirah power that she would never have outside of Williamstown High School. I thought that because of the tone of her voice, the profaneness of her mouth, and her lackadaisical attitude towards school, she was going to end up a statistic, whereas I—if I remained respectable with my honors and advanced placement courses, preppy clothes, and clean hair—was set to bypass all of that. But I also regretted not doing more to defend myself. I entertained the thought of calling the police on Jamirah, perhaps even lying and claiming that she had put her hands on me or she was a threat to my safety. The officer would take one look at me and then at her and tackle her. I would watch with glee as her body was pinned to the ground by an officer two to three times her size. It would not have mattered to me that this officer was protecting me not because I was afraid, but rather because, out of the two of us, I was the closest approximation to whiteness and its rules. I wanted her to be humiliated as she had humiliated me, and if I could not do it myself, I would rely on the institutions to do the job for me.
It was a violent anti-black-girl fantasy of which I am, almost a decade later, beyond ashamed. We were two kinds of black girls raging for dominance and assertion. I wanted us to get along, and I thought that such harmony was contingent upon white acceptance. I hated black girls like Jamirah who did not conform to respectability politics; I hated their loud voices, their cadences, how they gelled their baby hairs with toothbrushes, their eye rolls, their neck rolls, the way they clapped their hands in exhortation, their tongue-sucking in disgust. They didn’t like me because I did conform. Jamirah relied on that validation from within, and I from without.
A few months later, I lost my Dooney & Bourke wristlet, which was a status symbol for white girls back in the mid-aughts, and I panicked. The wristlet contained both my wallet and cell phone, and I was sure that I would never see either one again. I checked in every single one of my classes, spoke to teachers, scanned every hallway, but nothing. When I finally went down to the main office to call my mother to pick me up from school since I had missed the buses, I found my wristlet—with my wallet and cell phone still inside—behind the receptionist’s desk. Someone was kind enough to bring it there, and I soon found out that that someone was Jamirah and Tiana. Blindsided is an understatement. I felt as small as the wristlet itself. Why would the two girls who’d made my freshman year a living hell be so kind as to return my valuables? Perhaps because, regardless of what they felt towards me, those valuables were mine. I imagined all the people who might have passed by my belongings, all of those who left them there. But neither Tiana nor Jamirah was going to allow anyone, not even themselves, to take from another black girl. In a strange twist of events, they looked out for me. I thanked them, but I wished that I could’ve done more.