In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Marginalia
  • Negesti Kaudo (bio)

Dear reader, this text may be uncomfortable, inaccessible—consider your presence an intrusion.

Stop reading.

Now you know better than to treat people like that. If you don't, open up this page. You don't own this space; you are simply renting it. This is not your home. You don't have a home.

Right, my mistake.

JK. JK. Just kidding. Of course you're welcome here. Look at this space; this clearly isn't mine. I know where I'm intended to be: in the one-inch borders of the page. But why would I waste all this white space? The text is black. So, the text must be mine? Let's try something different: open up for me and I will spoon-feed my words to you, or rather, I can place each letter on your tongue one by one and maintain eye contact as you swallow.

I will wait to see whether you choke.

________

After black people had everything, and before they had something once again, there were white men transforming into black men for an audience. Minstrels. And minstrels were ignorant, minstrels were superstitious, minstrels were happy, minstrels jigged. Minstrels behaved how slave owners imagined their slaves did once the cotton was picked, and they were sleeping 36 bodies to a ten-by-ten space.

I think there is a man in half-blackface on a collage at my school outside of [End Page 17] the elevators to my workplace. I stare at him with his half-painted, half-bearded face, and I'm sure of it. But the photo is black-and-white, which gives him the benefit of the doubt—the dark color could be red, blue, green, purple, but my gut tells me it is black.

I bought a drugstore lipstick once, and my sister said I looked like a minstrel, so I hastily wiped it off in the car mirror with fast-food napkins.

I said, "After black people had everything" to remind you that at first, African people were given away as a form of punishment by more powerful Africans but never returned. Eventually, they were abducted—chained and stowed on boats as property or objects of trade. And as they lay on each other crossing the Atlantic, they were rocked by waves and covered with shit and piss and vomit and blood. Those who could jump did, sometimes taking their linked companions with them.

Can an ocean exist as hallowed ground?

Contemporary forms of blackface: makeup, tanning lotion, charcoal masks, body paint, Obama Halloween masks.

Shades of makeup I wear: dark cocoa, medium cocoa, dark deep, 8.5, 65 deep dark ebony. Am I making myself blacker? Is there anything blacker than heritage?

In elementary, I was the only black girl in my class at my private school for four years. My mother tells stories of my white classmates calling me beautiful and wishing they had dark skin like mine.

But I remember being drawn by my best friend as standing alone under the moon on a black-blue background with red lips while she and the rest of our friends basked in the sunlight.

Was I a minstrel or an outcast?

________

At about 18 months, children begin to recognize themselves as a self. When looking in the mirror, they will stop touching their reflections and begin to touch their own bodies.

At 18 months old, I'd been speaking for 15 months. I already had a sense of self, calling from my crib, "Come get the baby," and cheering myself on. And I exist in Polaroid pictures in which I, faded from white into color, stare into the camera, stare past the camera.

There is a photo of me as an infant being held by my father. I am in a [End Page 18] yellow onesie, and he is shirtless with a silver ankh hanging from his neck. My father looks down at me as I stare past him into the lens. I imagine that I am looking at my mother—my safety, my nurturance.

Black people have been staring into the lenses of cameras since their invention. Slaves in the periphery...

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