BALANCE DE MASA EN LA COLUMNA DE ABSORCIÓN DE ENDULZAMIENTO (CA-201)

Duality & The Emotional Labor Of Black Womanhoodelaborates earlier concerns regarding representation, identity, and performance, particularly the effects of misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media on Black women’s conceptions of self and their (de)valuation in society, and the complex desires, negotiations, and self-making practices of Black women subjects. Profiling two masseuses—Eva, a Black two-something aspiring actress from Chicago, and Veronica, a mixed-race fifty-something computer programmer, licensed masseuse, escort, and BDSM mistress—these essays use individual experiences to explore broad issues, such as identity, representation, sexuality, and what Eva refers to as "duality" (a concept similar to DuBois' notion of "double consciousness"), as well as the ways these women negotiate such obstacles in late capitalist America and a culture of long standing silence around Black female sexuality. As Evelynn Hammonds points out, “Black women’s sexuality is

often described in metaphors of speechlessness, space, or vision; as a ‘void’ or empty space that is simultaneously ever-visible (exposed) and invisible, where black women’s bodies are already colonized.”1 Resistance includes challenging and negotiating traditional notions of race, gender, and respectability, recreating ourselves, and telling our stories.

CROOKED ROOMS, LOCKED DOORS: AN ESSAY

[T]hat's all Hollywood is, is locks. A whole bunch of closed doors...When you just imagine that there's one type of voice that's really being pushed to the forefront is the white male voice. In terms of cinema, it's really clear that the rest of us are locked out...So, yeah, it's a whole bunch of locked doors.2

—AVA DUVERNAY

When they confront race and gender stereotypes, black women are standing in a crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion.3

—MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.4

—AUDRE LORDE

The first time I got in the passenger seat of Eva's '99 Chevy Cavalier with the dented Illinois license plate, last two digits 88, the number of perfection, we were going on a weave hunt. Eva needed the perfect ponytail for an upcoming audition—it had to be curly, preferably loose bohemian curls and dark brown, number 10—and I just wanted to get out of the Office. Could’ve gone after work or over the weekend, but that was what we did, found errands to run, went for walks or drives to get food when we had the money to spare, worked hard at keeping busy.

It was the end of January of 2011, the final days of a week-long warm spell, highs in the 80s, heat rising from the hot and dry pavement like steam from a coffee mug. We headed east, deeper into Inglewood, into the hood. I stared out the window, watching as we drove past a stretch of two star motels, fast food restaurants, graffiti covered bus stops, the color line. A five- minute drive from the Office had a way of making the sun seem like a sick joke. Hard to believe we were in the middle of the American Dream—more like the edge. Ten miles south of

If you looked high enough, you might even glimpse the rows of flush, gated enclaves nestled in the rolling hills, smell the salt from the Pacific Ocean and beaches a lot of people around here would never step foot on.

I thought about the movie Baby Boy—what I thought about every time I drove around South LA, I think a combination of the palm trees, Pollo Locos, congregations of Black men on street corners, in front of bodegas smoking, sipping from brown paper bags. In Baby Boy, actor slash singer Tyrese Gibson plays 20-year-old Jody Summers, a young Black man from South Central attempting to mature in a world determined to stunt his growth. The movie opens with an image of grown ass Jody asleep in fetal position in his mother's womb as he recites a voiceover about Afrocentrist psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing and her theory on Black men in America:

She says because of the system of racism in this country, the black man is meant to think of himself as a baby. A not yet fully formed being, who has not yet realized his full potential. To support her claim, she offers the following: First off, what does a black man call his woman? Mama. Secondly, what does a black man call his closest acquaintances? His boys. And finally, what does a black man call his place of residence? The crib.

I looked over at Eva as she sat upright behind the wheel at a red light, hands at 9 and 3. She smiled, her perfect little teeth like white Chiclets. Her smile took me back to the first time we met. Alice was giving me a tour of the Office, and when she opened the door to Room 5, there she was. Eva, Alice said, this is Crystal, she's going to be working with us. I was Crystal. Hi, Eva said, smiling. She had skin the color of cornflakes, big brown eyes, and an even bigger smile, a smile, according to one of her clients, that made you feel comfortable. Safe. She put down a half folded towel so she could wave. Nice to meet you, she said. I remember she sounded like she meant it, and she had a slight southern accent that reminded me of my family down south. She sounded like home.

I considered doing my impression of Yvette, Jody's girlfriend and the mother of his child. Jody, Jody, Jody...You been fuckin' around on me?...Let me smell ya dick. But I stayed silent. Eva’s impersonations put mine to shame. She was an aspiring actress with a knack for observing people and imitating them, nailing dialects. Sometimes in Room 5, she'd do the best impressions

of our boss, Rhonda.

Y’all gone have men buying y’all all types of stuff, she’d say with her hand on her hip, her body weight and lip tilted to one side. She’d talk in a real raspy voice, stopping every few seconds to make that bird noise Black girls make sometimes, sounds like you’re popping chewing gum but there’s nothing in your mouth. They gone get you nice bags and shoes and stuff. Even with her unglossed mouth twisted to one side, she still looked cute. Eva was girl-next-door beautiful, the kind of girl men liked because she was attractive but not too attractive, you knew there was a chance. She had skin the color of cornflakes, a baby face and grown woman's body, large breasts and thick thighs always compressed in her work uniform: a pair of leggings, a tank top, and worn chestnut Uggs. Rhonda would get mad at her in the beginning. Girl, put on some shoes, she'd say. Get you some heels or borrow some of mine. Eva never bought or borrowed shoes. I'd rather be comfortable, she said. They’re just gonna try to rip my clothes off anyway. I bought shoes.

And make sure you treat them nice and stuff, make ‘em feel good, Eva would continue, her voice all brassy and curt. She was like Wanda Sykes with her ease of delivery, how she captured the nuances and inflections of Black vernacular speech. I'd stare in awe, wondering, how did she end up here? Watching her was like driving through South Central on a sunny day, found yourself wondering how something could be so beautiful and so sad at the same time. Yeah, we needed the laughter to bring some light to that windowless Office, the artificial light giving it the feel of a casino, but it still hurt knowing her routine should've been behind a camera instead of some closed door in a rub-and-tug.

Eva said the job was temporary, something to pay the bills while she worked on her acting career. Like her family that had moved from rural Mississippi to Chicago during the Great Migration, Eva moved to Los Angeles in search of better, and like her family in Chicago, she would learn that golden dreams only came gold plated for people like us. When Langston Hughes visited LA in 1932, he said it seemed more like a miracle than a city, a place where oranges sold for one cent a dozen, ordinary Black folks lived in huge houses with miles of yards, and prosperity seemed to reign in spite of the Depression…Seven years later, when Hughes attempted to work

within the studio system, he discovered that the only available role for a Black writer was

furnishing demeaning dialogue for cotton-field parodies of Black life. After a humiliating experience with the film Way Down South, Hughes declared that so far as Negroes are concerned, [Hollywood] might just as well be controlled by Hitler.

Eva had been a child actress back home, part of the urban theatre circuit—a revamped version of the earlier chitlin’ circuit—and wanted to continue her acting career. After high school, she moved to LA and enrolled in an acting conservatory, took on odd-jobs to pay the bills: entertainer at children’s parties, valet parking girl, escort driver and booker, then masseuse. The escorts would always say, you're really pretty, you should do this, Eva said. But I never had the guts or the desire to sleep with a bunch of men, especially for money, plus I hadn’t had sex yet. So one of the escorts told me about sensual massaging. Topless, hand job. I figured hey, I can handle that. I've always been one to tread the water, stick my toe in without going all the way.

Treading water. What the job was also about, finding a balance so you didn't get too deep. Reminded me of Omar Epps in the movie In Too Deep. He plays Jeff “J. Reid” Cole, a young Black cop who gets an undercover assignment posing as a drug dealer his first day out of the academy so he can help bring down the crack empire of Dwayne “God” Gittens (played by LL Cool J). His superiors are impressed with how quickly he gains God's trust, but his boss also notices that his behavior has changed, worries that the line between good cop and bad guy is getting blurred, that both identities are becoming one and starting to affect his morals. After making some questionable choices, Cole helps bring God down, testifies against him and the organization in court, and also puts in a good word for Breezy T., a member of God's crew, to help him get his sentence reduced. God gets two back-to-back life sentences. In the last scenes, Cole’s in the car with his girl listening to a press conference on the radio, during which his boss takes all the credit. His girl reminds him that he did all the work. It ends with Cole teaching a bunch of new young officers about undercover work and the importance of never losing your cover but also never getting too deep.

I was expecting life to be easier if I did the right thing, Eva told me. I went to acting school, I didn’t do anything horrible, I worked hard, I did kid’s parties and everything, worked as

an actor’s assistant, and I was like everything is gonna pay off and it just didn’t happen like that. You could hear the confusion in her tone, sense the feeling that life had promised her something when she was younger and failed to keep its end of the bargain.

She didn't realize when she moved to LA just how vastly underrepresented Black women were both in front of and behind the camera, that she had a better chance running for Office than winning an Oscar, that she would have to deal with the double bind actors of color have been negotiating for over a century: either accept stereotypical roles and chance increasing damage to self and group identity or refuse stereotypical roles and face economic hardship. Neither of us knew we’d have this same double bind working at the Office.

We stepped outside into a muggy plaza parking lot, the heat hanging like dry clothes. A bell rang when we walked inside the beauty supply store, a huge DISCOUNT YAKI sign in the window. Two sets of eyes followed us around the fluorescent-lit aisles as we scanned the hair section: synthetic, human, regular virgin, remy virgin, yaki, braiding hair, weaving hair, clip ins, ponytails. Eva said she had never worn weave until she moved to LA. Back home, she said, we just got relaxers. I asked her if she wore extensions for herself or for other people, to make herself whiter, because my mother was always pestering me to take my weave out, blasting India Arie's I am not my hair while looking at old photos and saying, One day I'm gonna see your hair again.

I do it for me, Eva said. I like the way it looks on me and I know clients like it. They like beautiful things. I felt the same. I'd tried every style over the years: relaxer, fro, braids, curly weaves, straight weaves, china bangs, swoop bangs, bobs. I knew what made me look best--long black extensions with bangs across my forehead. And clients agreed. You had to be strategic, figure out what you were and weren't willing to negotiate, change. We all wore fake hair at the Office, long, straight, or wavy weaves and wigs. Part of the performance. They may have wanted you to be Black, but not too Black.

A few days later Eva walked into Room 5 with a look of disgust on her face—her sun-kissed button nose all scrunched up like she’d just driven through rotten Jersey wastelands. The first

time I’d ever seen Eva not smiling. Yuck, that man is gross, she said. Before we could ask what she was talking about, she said, I'll tell y’all in a minute. She walked over to the towel warmer in the lobby to get some hand cloths to wipe the gross client down. I sat impatiently, my laptop resting on my bare legs. Veronica sat on the edge of the love seat, changing out of her work outfit, a short silky black dress, and back into the jeans and tee-shirt she’d left her house in.

Eva had the same look when she came back. She said the man who just left kept trying to grope her, treated her like she was dumb.

They think just because I do this that I can't be smart, she would tell me later. Like I'm some wayward girl who needs help and an education and only do this job because I live some hard street life. We're not all like that. It’s crazy how surprised they are when they actually talk to me that I am very articulate and that I can complete a sentence and I know a lot about things outside of just sex and I can hold a conversation. We're not all stupid!

Duality. That was the word Eva would use to describe what it took to last in the industry. I have a different type of identity, she said, when I asked her about how she dealt with clients. But in a way it's still me. I never give the clients a lot. They always ask crazy questions, like where am I from, where do I live, why do I do this, and I just make something up because I don't want them to know who I really am. And I really feel like it's none of their business. This is just a job for me. This isn't a way of life. They don't need to know anything about Monica (the name on her birth certificate). They can know whatever they want about Eva, but it ends right there at the end of the session.

You can burn out because guys feel like, I’m paying you, I can do whatever I want to you and they don’t respect you and it’s not cool and you know you’re more than that and you’re not that type of girl to just do anything for a dime. But then again, she continued, you do have those guys that are respectful of you and understand that they’re not gonna get more than you’re willing to give. They understand it’s just a sensual massage and they don’t try to take it beyond that. But there are a lot of guys who don’t care. They pay you the money, they want what they want. And you should give it to them.

Her words reminded me of double consciousness, a term I first heard in an Africana Studies class in college. W.E.B. Du Bois uses the phrase to describe the internal struggle of Black people in America, constantly trying to be both Black and American. He writes: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength