The Bold World Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Jodie Patterson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399179013

  Ebook ISBN 9780399179020

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Jaya Miceli

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: The South

  Part I: Sleep

  Chapter One: Roots

  Chapter Two: The Women

  Chapter Three: Serious Daring

  Chapter Four: She

  Chapter Five: Santa Claus Is a Black Man

  Chapter Six: Resurrection

  Chapter Seven: As It Were

  Chapter Eight: Faith Is Karma. Karma Is Faith.

  Chapter Nine: Penelope

  Chapter Ten: Tunnel Vision

  Chapter Eleven: The Room

  Chapter Twelve: Ten Thousand Hours

  Chapter Thirteen: Shifting

  Chapter Fourteen: What Breaks

  Chapter Fifteen: I, Woman (the South, Revisited)

  Part II: Woke

  Chapter Sixteen: This Body. This Boy. This Magic.

  Chapter Seventeen: The Highest Vibration

  Chapter Eighteen: The Widest Sense of We

  Chapter Nineteen: The Lab

  Chapter Twenty: Passing

  Chapter Twenty-one: A Boy Named Penelope

  Chapter Twenty-two: The Loss and the Gain

  Chapter Twenty-three: This Spot

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  And look out on the world

  And wonder

  What we’re gonna do

  In the face of

  What we remember

  —

  LANGSTON HUGHES, “Puzzled”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a memoir, a collection of my memories from childhood through adulthood. I chose to tell the stories that I felt shed light on my understanding of gender and race. There are things I’ve left out and names I’ve changed, simply to protect people I love. But each story is told to the best of my own recollection and with honesty. I created dialogue that I either specifically recalled or that I, today, feel is plausible and likely in order to bring the actual scenes to life and to match the best available recollections of those events and exchanges.

  PROLOGUE

  The South

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN TOLD that women are powerful, tenacious, and important. That we pull from limitless places. That we make magic wherever we go—shining light into the darkness, forming impenetrable shields with our love. That beneath moments of weakness are endless reserves of strength.

  But I, woman, am feeling none of these powers.

  A friend of mine once told me, “Parenthood means delivering optimism to your children.” But I’m filled with only pessimism about the future. It’s clear to me that dark envelops light, bad beats up on good. Women do, in fact, break. Smiling requires an effort I just don’t have. And joy? It’s packed up its bags and gone elsewhere.

  “I need to stay with you for a while,” I heard myself saying to my mother over the phone, weary from the last few years. “I just need to rest.”

  “I’m here,” she said without pausing. “Come as soon as you can.”

  I bought two plane tickets to Atlanta the next day.

  * * *

  —

  Although my parents brought up my sister Ramona and me in the North, my South Carolina–raised mother sprinkled our upbringing with Southern dust. We were city kids who spent summers with our grandmother in Georgia and who grew up appreciating hot bowls of grits and long family gatherings in the kitchen. These were the things that held a kind of magic for me—they were essential elements of a well-maintained soul. The South, I knew, had the power to fix anything. There was spirit in the soil. I believed that whatever my problems were, the South would always know what to do with them.

  But as I grew into adulthood, that magic had gotten lost. Somehow, I needed to find my way back.

  At forty-three years old, I am exhausted. Run ragged by the pressures, the expectations. Turned fragile in the face of hardship. Kept up at night by thoughts too scary to speak of during the day.

  With my grown-up life in full swing, there is never time to pause. I have five children, a husband, an ex-husband, a schedule that often leads to grinding sixty-hour workweeks—and a crippling fear of the life I’ve created. To “cope,” I simply set a goal and don’t stop until I, the bullet, hit the target.

  I’m in need of what the South holds, of the spirit in the earth and of Mama and her steady ways. Needing, too—maybe most of all—the women. My women. Those matriarchs of my lineage whose stories, voices, and faces I often lean on like prayers, especially during times like these. Times when I’ve lost myself completely.

  And so I return to the South once more, hoping to breathe the Atlanta air and remember where I come from.

  * * *

  —

  My mother lives in a sprawling suburb called Peachtree City. Her neighborhood is made up of neatly designed suburban dwellings and quaint dirt-covered back roads that wind around the subdivision’s golf courses and muddy green ponds. She left New York for Atlanta when she and my father divorced in 1989, and after a time moved into my grandmother Gloria’s house, where she remained after Gloria died. While this house isn’t quite the same as the one I visited during my childhood summers, it still feels like home. And even after Grandma Gloria passed away, the place still holds affectionately to her memory: her furniture, her smell, her love.

  When I’m at the house, my mother and I don’t pull out all my baggage and spread it across her table, examining each piece to determine how to fix it, as my dad and I might have done. She isn’t one to tackle obstacles that way, and I don’t go to the South—or to her—for that. I don’t go to strategize. I go because being there resets something in me.

  I haven’t told her everything. I haven’t even had the time yet to fully put into words why I’m here. But she can see the strain on my face: My hair is thinning, I’ve lost weight, and I have new lines and creases she’s never seen before.

  I’ve left four of the kids at home with my husband. Georgia, my first child, has come with me. I’ve wanted to spend time alone with Georgia for months now, but the little ones, the business, and Penelope, my third child, demand so much of my time. Penelope, my determined toddler.

  Despite the awkwardness that has grown over the years between us, I always eventually call Mama when things get bad. After I’ve exhausted all my own methods and relentlessly tried to push my way through the problem. After I’ve looked to my girlfriends for help. After I no longer even want to be saved. When I’ve thrown in the towel and accepted that the thing I’m fighting is just way too big to defeat, I call Mama, knowing that there’s nothing more to do than yield. Mama is good at yielding.

  During this visit I spend most of my afternoons alone in the sitting ro
om. The space feels like a time capsule—there’s no TV, no computer, no gadgets or telephones. Rather, it’s filled with the same beautiful furniture that adorned the study in Grandma Gloria’s old house—furniture that was passed down from her mother, and her mother before that. Generations of memories live inside the wooden skeletons of those pieces, and Gloria was a meticulous preservationist. There’s not a tear or a scratch on any of them. After my grandmother died, my mother was reluctant to disturb anything—there was just too much of Grandma Gloria still lingering there. Instead, she opted to leave things as they were. If Grandma were to walk inside this room today, she’d know exactly where to rest her feet.

  The sitting room is filled with books—my grandmother had thousands of them; her collection was enormous and never-ending. Shelves upon shelves of weathered paperbacks and sun-faded hardcovers fit snug next to pristine first editions signed by her good friend Jimmy—James Baldwin—whom she first met on a university campus in the 1960s when the South was still reeling from The Fire Next Time. Grandma’s books were always around her, sprawled across her desk, stacked on the floor, tucked under her arm. I would often catch her in the study of her old house rereading six books at a time and scribbling notes in the pages, wondering what she was writing down.

  But the true soul of the sitting room lives in the photos. There are pictures everywhere: nineteenth-century portraits of women elegantly posing in their best outfits; group shots taken at family gatherings in the old days, in which four and five generations sit closely together, not so much smiling for the camera but telling the onlooker: We are unbothered by these times; we are steadfast and courageous.

  I want some of that. I need to know what it takes to be just that.

  Digging deep into a drawer, I pull out a photo I’ve always loved looking at—it must have been taken in the mid-1970s. Four generations of us women traveled to a local Sears and Roebuck to sit for a portrait. My mother’s at the top left corner of the frame, a young mom at the time, barely thirty. Grandma Gloria is to her right, all pointy lapels and gold dangling earrings, a pair of glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. My sister Ramona appears on the bottom left, small and defiant, and I’m on the bottom right, age six, wearing the same polyester jumpsuit as my big sissy. Between us sits Great-Grandmother Lurline. Never mind that the dark sunglasses she’s wearing obscure her eyes, her penetrating gaze is unmistakable. Lurline’s signature face, perfectly captured in that photo, said—then and always—“I am not playing.” She had a talent for communicating a lot without saying much at all. I don’t remember her smiling much, either.

  My great-great-great-grandmother “Ma”(bottom left) could pass for white, but she chose not to. Her daughter, Sissy (center), is seated with my great-grandmother Lurline, who would eventually become the most stoic woman I’ve ever known. My great-great-grandmother Ann (top right) was a sturdy woman who clearly “ran the show.”

  Lurline obtained her college degree and credits toward her master’s in the early 1900s. This, during the first decades of the long reign of “separate but equal,” a system that rarely translated into higher education for colored people. But she came from a long line of teachers, preachers, and entrepreneurs, who managed to work the system and carve out a place for themselves. They gained access to an accelerated track to opportunity. With that access came a deep sense of expectation. Lurline’s parents made it very clear that there was no other direction to go but forward, no other measure of doing well than by being the best. No excuses for failure—certainly not the color of your skin and most definitely not your gender.

  The morning of the photoshoot, Grandma Gloria had combed our hair. Ramona and I preferred our Afros in the style of my idols, the Jackson 5, an equal distribution of puff on all sides. But Grandma liked hers tapered at the bottom à la Nina Simone. And so, to our dismay, she shaped ours that way, too.

  But walking into Sears, I fixed my face and strode inside with a sense of purpose. Without being told why, I knew somehow that it was a big day for all of us—more important than the hairstyle I was so desperately trying to channel. It wasn’t just about me, it was about preserving the order and honoring the line: Lurline, then Gloria, then my mom, then Ramona and me. Arranging myself in front of the photographer, my grandmother’s hand on my shoulder, I knew I was needed to capture something important. With any one of us missing, the meaning would have been lost.

  Mama and Grandmother Gloria standing; Ramona and I seated next to our great-grandmother Lurline—the matriarch.

  Now, years later, I can slip into any of those generations, into any of those times in my life—I can be the annoyed kid, the young mom, I can even imagine myself as the older woman. I think that’s what I like about looking at the pictures. I can see myself in each of them. I’ve imagined my daughters stepping into the frame, and into that lineage. Penelope included. My persistent Penelope. But staring into the photo now, the image is shaky, blurred, and unclear.

  I grew up feasting on the photos of these women—faded images of Lurline and my aunt Lurma, my mother, Jamelle, and their sister, Ramona, my own sister’s namesake, who died in a car crash when she was just five years old. Each year I ran my hands across their portraits and learned a little bit more about the formidable women inside the frames. About their determination, their loves and losses, the sacrifices they made, and the convictions that allowed them to survive whatever they were faced with. Preserved in those images, they showed their strength in their posture—in the straight of their back, the square of their shoulders, the lift of their chin, the steadiness of their gaze.

  But I am weak—shoulders slumped, back bent, eyes fixed to the ground. I haven’t slept in months. I squat down on the floor, cross-legged, like a child might do—and I lean against the couch to steady myself. I continue to fixate on the photos. I know that now is the time for searching. For figuring out how I, woman, can put myself back together and be bold in this world. There is no other place I need to be than here—in the South on this floor.

  My women will be the ones to answer my questions. They were alchemists, transforming the weight of expectation into drive, grief and hardship into vision. Each of them took whatever scary thoughts might have kept them up at night and turned those thoughts into power. They never imagined themselves being stomped out, and they always insisted on their freedom. They were activists, educators, leaders—women who refused to follow. And if they ever felt restraint rising up, they just got up and left—changed their circumstances and never turned back.

  My grandmother divorced four times. My mother divorced twice. And Aunt Lurma, very pretty but not at all interested in being the pretty girl, opted for children without marriage, partnership without laws. She decided early on that convention wasn’t for her. Lurma, like the rest of the women in my line, was guided principally by one thing: the freedom she felt in her bones.

  My grandmother learned self-determination from Lurline. Gloria passed that knowledge down to Mama. Mama passed it down to me and Ramona. And I was intent on passing it down to my daughters.

  Three generations later, we have Penelope. My third child, my angry toddler, who, after round one thousand of what had become a steady stream of anguished outbursts and fights, told me, “Mama, I’m not a girl. I am a boy.”

  Today, back in the South—with the time to move slowly, to finally reflect, I know that it’s not only the demands of work and city life that have brought me here. It’s Penelope. It’s dealing with everything that comes after hearing my child say “I am a boy.” It’s grappling with my fears about what that means for the future; living with a reality that has turned me upside down. I’ve been running away from the chaos, barrelling forward into a future that I can’t quite name. Racing through each hour, each day, each month, without a plan.

  But what I do have holds value. I have these pictures of womanhood, excellence, Blackness, and freedom. And they are real and ver
y powerful.

  In the sitting room, with these stories and these photos, I see the pattern. Like his grandmothers before him, Penelope has made demands too—that his voice be heard, that the world fall in line with him. Penelope, like the rest of our clan, is more than a bundle of expectations. He is more than one thing. More than what we see. And he is most certainly not a girl. His declaration of self, his total dismissal of conformity and expectation, is elemental—etched into his DNA by his ancestors.

  But with all of this comes a steady, nagging, terrifying truth. Because I know the world is unkind to people it doesn’t understand—to those who don’t live by its rules. I know, too, that the same America that has been divided on race and class and love for so many centuries will no doubt be divided on Penelope. A boy with a vagina.

  What if the world, for the rest of his life, tells Penelope, “No”?

  I think fear sometimes forces us to primal places. When we’re scared, we seek comfort. We look for something, or someone, familiar. When we don’t know what’s next, we look to the past to give us a preview, or a road map, of what’s to come. We search for answers in those memories, looking for clues within our own stories to show us how to find a way forward. And with that knowledge at our back, we hope to pick up the pieces of who we are along the way, and make ourselves whole once more.

  PART I

  Sleep

  One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful woman.