Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man

Serena Williams, Whiteness, and the Act of Writing

27 serena wiLLiaMs, whiteness, and the act of writing the brown boy is afraid, because he can’t tell, exactly, what his work is. He identifies with Serena Williams, the gorgeous, black tennis star who was booed at indian Wells. the rumor is that her father, richard, fixed an earlier match in the tournament where she was to play her sister, Venus, who pulled out with tendinitis in her knees seconds before they were about to begin. the theory is that he rigged this meeting, just as he did their first All-Williams Wimbledon Semifinal, where Serena is rumored to have thrown the contest. in his apartment in Brooklyn, the brown boy has dozens of photos of both sisters that plaster the walls above his computer. in the one where they are standing next to one another at Wimbledon, Serena is crying. Venus’s consoling arm is around her sister’s shoulder. this photo is next to cut-up shots of two old men with fat cocks, a collage he made and covered with a sheet of paper that reads: travelogue . Behind this cover, one man is bald and his eyes are glazed shut, the other is all crotch, grainy black and white hands, fat fingers and thigh. When he thinks of the connection between his sad sisters and his turned-on old men strangers caught sucking and being sucked, and covered, he feels that his mind is one confused object that pulses about unknowing, wound up, a note toward itself with no answers but the need to cut, suspend, look. Paste, cover, and tape. each piece locks up to the next, making sense only in 28 his own mind. Somehow, he thinks, if he could bring these shots together, things would start to make sense, the whole of them becoming more like a finished puzzle. What would it have been like? if when the brown boy was small playing tennis with his mother at Cabrillo Park, he could have imagined being Serena instead of tracy Austin? He liked tracy because of her size, the small pink purse of her mouth, her tough little ponytails, Pony tennis shoes, and short, triangular, one-piece dresses. He loved what the announcers called her moon balling, the way she hit the ball high over the net, back and forth, looping it deep against an opponent like Andrea Jaeger or Chris evert. though the brown boy’s father taught him a one-handed backhand for better reach and cleaner volleys, the brown boy switched to two because of the power he felt he could have striking the ball, double-fisted. it was as though he had no choice but to hit with two hands, to forget what his father taught him and to rear back and try to stroke the ball with the whole of Amelia island, tracy’s crowd, behind him. What would have happened to his small, dreaming brown frame of a body if it had not pudged out into the impossible desire to be white, small, and a girl like tracy Austin? What if he could have seen Serena then, imagined invading her body, becoming her muscled frame, pounding the ball back into oblivion? What if he could have seen her powerful torque, unleashing and winning against all that booing at indian Wells? Still, he finds himself, while swimming, shaking his 29 head forward and to the left, his fingers brushing aside an imagined blonde slick of chlorine water–logged hair, stuck then freed from in front of his eyes. But he also remembers when he was six that his hair was straight; and even when dry, it lay flat on his head. there is a photo of him, his face covered by the gaping bottom of an rC paper cup stuck around his mouth. His hair, then, is straight and light brown, bleached by the sun, flat and just lying there. the quiet of this picture and the smoothed down curls that he palms down to his grown up head remind him, again, of who he is, and who he is not. ...