{"id":142950,"date":"2020-02-19T13:36:54","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T18:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=142950"},"modified":"2020-02-19T17:58:35","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T22:58:35","slug":"fairy-tales-and-the-bodies-of-black-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/19\/fairy-tales-and-the-bodies-of-black-boys\/","title":{"rendered":"Fairy Tales and the Bodies of Black Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column,\u00a0Happily<\/a>, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Joseph Martin Kronheim illustration for Tom Thumb, circa 1850s<\/p><\/div>\n

Noah, my eight-year-old son, and I go to Target. He is carrying a little stuffed monkey, and as we walk through the automatic doors he puts it under his shirt. \u201cNo, no,\u201d I say. \u201cBondo is shy,\u201d he says. \u201cI told him I\u2019d keep him safe.\u201d \u201cNo, no,\u201d I say. Under Noah\u2019s shirt, Bondo could be anything. He could be wild and alive. He could be something that doesn\u2019t belong to him. He could be a bouquet of flowers or a gun or a book of fairy tales about the bodies of black boys. \u201cWhy?\u201d he asks. \u201cWhy,\u201d I answer, or I start saying something and then stop, or I say \u201cbecause it isn\u2019t safe,\u201d or I say \u201cI love you,\u201d or I say \u201chere, let me hold him.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few days later, a friend posts on Facebook that her nine-year-old black son is now riding his bike to the supermarket by himself. \u201cWe have talked to him,\u201d she writes, \u201cabout using a bag for the items he\u2019s bought, not his pockets, keeping his receipt in his hand as he leaves the store, keeping his hands out of his pockets while shopping, taking his hood off.\u201d I imagine it continuing, \u201cwe have given him invisibility powder, we have made wings for him out of the feathers of ancient doves, we have given him the power to become a rain cloud and burst, if necessary, into a storm.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I was a child I could\u2019ve hidden a house under my dress, and all I would\u2019ve been was a girl with a house under my dress.<\/p>\n

As my sons grow, the American imagination grows around like them like water hemlock. Poisonous and hollow. My sons\u2019 skin is light. So the hemlock may not grow as thick as it would for a darker boy.<\/p>\n

I look for a fairy tale about the bodies of boys. There is Pinocchio, but he\u2019s wooden. And Peter Pan, although magical, is only the thin memory of a boy. There is Jack and his bean stalk, but Jack is more wish than body. And then I remember Tom Thumb who, like the body of the black boy, is caught inside a swallow cycle. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe History of Tom Thumb,\u201d published in 1621, was the first fairy tale printed in English. A metrical version was published in 1630. A plowman and his wife long for a child, but no child comes until Merlin, the magician, grants them a son no bigger than the father\u2019s thumb: \u201cthat men should heare him speake, but not \/ his wandring shadow touch.\u201d Tom Thumb is conceived and born in half an hour. The fairies visit him and make him a hat from an oak leaf, a shirt from a spider\u2019s web, boots from mouse skin, socks from apple peels, and a belt from his mother\u2019s eyelash.<\/p>\n

Tom Thumb is swallowed over and over again. He is swallowed by a red cow, a raven, a giant, a fish, a frog, a cinched sack filled with cherry pits, a mousetrap, and King Arthur\u2019s court (because his \u201cmerry tricks pleased the queen.\u201d). Will my sons, as they grow, become more and more vulnerable to ravishment? Will they be eaten and spit out? Will they be sent into a swallow cycle to satisfy the hunger of our dear, sick country?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want my sons anywhere near the mouth of this country. I am the mother looking up and calling, \u201cget down from there.\u201d They pretend not to hear me. They are so happy and free.<\/p>\n

With twine, Tom Thumb\u2019s mother ties him to a thistle while she milks the cows so the wind doesn\u2019t carry him off.<\/p>\n

I am the mother who is trying to untie my sons from a fairy tale that doesn\u2019t exist. A fairy tale that could carry them away. It\u2019s the one about a war that\u2019s being fought by children. But the children don\u2019t even know there is a war, and the children think they\u2019re still children. This fairy tale doesn\u2019t exist because it isn\u2019t a fairy tale. It\u2019s right outside. Put your hand through your kitchen window. Can you feel it?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe wind of my life,\u201d writes James Baldwin, \u201cis blowing me away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many years ago I wrote a poem that began, \u201cA few days before the first snow the soldiers dressed like children began to appear.\u201d It ends with all of the soldier children sailing away to another land. Where is our sailboat? Where is the sea? How far is the land?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s your plan for middle school,\u201d asks a mother. \u201cWhere is our sailboat? How far is the most faraway land?\u201d<\/p>\n

At 4 A.M.<\/small>, Eli, my six-year-old, comes into my bed. He smells like freshly baked bread and wet twigs. \u201cI had a dream,\u201d he says, \u201cI went into another dimension where there were no letters or numbers. Only signs.\u201d \u201cSigns?\u201d I ask. \u201cLike this one,\u201d he says. He points his index fingers down. It looks like an upside-down peace sign. Or like the tiny legs of a tiny boy walking away.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s your plan for middle school,\u201d asks a mother. \u201cWe are looking into,\u201d I want to say, \u201cother dimensions.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it rains, Tom Thumb sleeps in a buttonhole. He crawls through keyholes and sails away in an eggshell. He dances a minuet on the queen\u2019s fingernail. His body is the magic that will conquer him. His smallness is a spell cast over his body that is his beginning, middle, and his end.<\/p>\n

In one version of Tom Thumb, he dies by the breath of a poisonous spider. In another, a woman coughs on him. At the end what is most dangerous is not the swallow, but the breath that lives inside it. Like a slur crawling over the lip and hitting the air.<\/p>\n

I ask my husband what he would have said to Noah. \u201cI would\u2019ve let him keep Bondo under his shirt.\u201d \u201cAnd then what?\u201d I ask. \u201cAnd then nothing,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause God help anyone who tried to mess with him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes I wonder if my husband slips through little rips in space and time. He is always as much here as he is not here. Like dusk if dusk were a man. Maybe this is how he has outwitted the swallow. Maybe this is what he prays resides in our sons. Maybe he, too, is planning a move to another dimension.<\/p>\n

When I was pregnant with Eli, the sonographer had me return three times because each time she waved the wand over my belly, Eli would cover his face, which cast a dark shadow over his heart.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s nothing,\u201d said the sonographer. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard to see his heart through the shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n

By writing this down, am I swallowing my children and their father, too? By naming them, do I swallow them? By being afraid, do I swallow them? Sometimes I just want to hide them all under my coat. And walk through a world where nothing is ever named Target.<\/p>\n

I wonder if somewhere there\u2019s a very, very old fairy tale that dried, hardened, and eventually cracked. I imagine I might find it one day, and when I do something alive will stumble out and whisper into my ear all the answers to all the questions my sons will ever ask me about fear and hate. This morning Noah asked me to help him tighten the belt on his pants. \u201cI must be shrinking!\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m the incredible shrinking man!\u201d But he isn\u2019t shrinking. He is growing. May my sons live, like Tom Thumb, to be one hundred and one. May the wind never carry them away.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Happily here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>The Babies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tsim Tsum.\u00a0<\/em>Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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