Reflections on Love and Violence

A Story by Snoukabuka

The black body; fearfully and violently made.

I was in the fifth grade when I first learned I was black.

Every day, my mother would wake us up at five o’clock in the morning and watch us to make sure we didn’t sneak back into the bed to sleep. My older brother would take a shower first, and then myself, and my younger brother would go in last. I envied him at times for this special privilege because I truly hated waking up so early.

After getting dressed, I would go downstairs, greet my father, and then prepare myself a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios that I would drown in warmed milk that had been heated for precisely thirty seconds. We read our Bibles, discussed what we learned with each other, held hands for morning prayer and then went outside to wait for the school bus at promptly 6:45 a.m. every day. Today was no different. There hadn’t been any turbulence in my daily prep. I had showered, ate, read my Bible, and prayed.

I went back over these details meticulously years later, and nothing seemed out of place as I stood out there in the cold waiting for the bus to arrive in the fall of 2005. I do need to mention now that my mother loved plastering our faces, arms, and chests with Vaseline every morning. She would rub it in so good that our faces would shine, especially on cold days like this when most kids came to class ashy as hell. I was the kid in class with the greasy-looking face covered in Vaseline. My Nigerian mother, whom I loved dearly, was more accustomed to employing the use of Vaseline for dryness than regular lotion which she didn’t think did the job as well (“Gịnị bụ cocoa butter?”[1]).

On the bus that day, a former friend of mine, Keisha Johnson, decided she wanted to pick on me and my little brother because of our greasy-looking faces. Our friendship had come to its timely end the previous year after I had received my second bus report for using foul language. She had been the one to introduce me to the sailor’s dictionary. The school suspended my brother and me off the bus for two weeks, and my dad had to take us to school every morning on his way to work during that period. He made sure that we received a daily lecture on the importance of keeping a clean mouth and warned us that if we did not change our ways, we would be damned to hell for all eternity.

“Why are y’all’s faces so damn shiny,” Keisha asked. “Don’t make no sense y’all come on the bus every day looking like that.”

This was her way of saying, “Welcome back!”

I replied quickly that we already talked about this, “We don’t use lotion, we use Vaseline.”

Two white boys, Chase and Brett, overheard our conversation and jumped in. “Y’all put the stuff in Chapstick on your faces? That’s for your lips! Y’all are weird dude. Why can’t y’all act like other black people and just use lotion?”

“Well,” I replied with what I thought was an honest answer, “I am Nigerian, and my skin is brown thank you very much.”

The shock and rage on their faces anticipated a reaction that I will never forget. “What did you just say! You are black! You’re black! You’re black!”

I was puzzled. Obviously, my skin was brown, and I had always marked “African/Other” instead of “Black” when prompted by a test sheet to do so. In my household, black people had always been referred to as “Akata,” and my people had always been referred to as “Igbo.”

On top of that, I had felt that there was a psychological load that came with that word, a heavy and harsh one, that I had previously not thought of as my own nor worth carrying.

Was it something I said? Are black and Igbo people the same? Why were these people so angry that I had not called myself black? Their rage promised me to an unwarranted violence if I did not accept the term. I felt the need to fight back.

“I am not black. I am Igbo!”

Brett and Chase got up and pushed me down out of my seat. They sat on me and said that they would not get up until I admitted that I was black.

Holding back tears, I did what they asked me to do, got up, and rubbed the Vaseline off of my face. From that day onward, I stopped putting on Vaseline. I had learned the hard way that I had been black the whole time.

Before I could even speak for myself, I had been spoken for. I had been unable to see what was already apparent to everyone else on the bus who all gave me this look suggesting in ways that I was either bougie or naive. The black identity was not up for debate in this country, there was no possible way that I could even dissent to it. Keisha, who had been an onlooker to the altercation, twisted her braids and laughed at me. “Did this kid really not think he was black?”

[1] Translating from Igbo, this means “What is cocoa butter?”