ARTS INTERVIEW: JENNIFER BASZILE

Schoolyard Bullying to God-Awful Blind Dates in Her Memoir, ‘The Black Girl Next Door’

By: Annie Berke

January 10, 2010

(Touchstone/Simon & Schuster) In her final year of teaching at Yale University, Professor Jennifer Baszile offered a seminar on Black Women in America. Over 75 students applied to a course with a cap of 15, and not only African-American students and history majors applied. Baszile received applications from students from all departments and ethnicities who felt they had something to contribute to the conversation and questions that needed answering. Professor Baszile characterized the Yale student body to me as "achievement-driven" –- a quality she recognized in herself.

Her students and that seminar inspired Baszile to write her memoir, The Black Girl Next Door. Teaching the class had made her wonder if, with her training as an early Americanist, she had been "hiding out " in her study of the nation's past. Baszile notes that writing her memoir ran counter to the scholarly training that had taught her to view history as "one great person and one big event at a time." Of her time in the academy, she now believes that "it was a stimulating, intellectually meaningful exercise, but it was also a cop-out…I was a professional historian trying to avoid her personal history. My personal history is the history of integration." Driven by this realization, she began to write her story, starting with a memory of being bullied in the schoolyard; this would become the first chapter of her memoir, with the rest of the book, Baszile says, “flow[ing]” from there. The result is a deeply personal book with an eye toward historical and sociological analysis.

In one of the most memorable scenes in the book, young Jennifer first goes to the salon to have her hair straightened, unprepared for the excruciating chemical burn that follows. Baszile recognizes this moment as one that all black women can share. African-American women, she informs me, spend more money on hair styling and maintenance than any other group of women in America, and most black women have a "complicated relationship to [their] hair, no matter what hairstyle they choose." As for her own coming-of-age in an upper-middle-class, white neighborhood, Baszile notes that her story is about class as well as race, and this simple childhood recollection of the salon "binds [her] to other black women from whatever socioeconomic class… Whether you're doing very well or you're living in the projects, most women have that kind of story to tell." As proof of this bond, Baszile recounts an informal survey she took at a book signing in Los Angeles:

"I asked [them]: 'How many of you have seen a newspaper?' Everybody raised their hands. I said, 'How many of you have a newspaper with the Obama family in it?' Everybody kept their hands up. I said, 'How many of you have watched the girls?' A lot of people kept their hands up. Then I said, 'How many of you have thought about how the Obama girls are going to wear their hair and what it means?' And only the black women in the audience kept their hands up." Indeed, Baszile's memoir could not have been published at a more relevant moment in our nation's history. The Black Girl Next Door centers on an African-American girl who experiences multiple, even oppositional, pressures: to be accomplished and flawless in all aspects of her life and to win the approval of white America while maintaining a deep connection to her ethnicity and history. Will Malia and Sasha Obama have to cope with these same demands but under national, even global, scrutiny? Baszile says that we will never know how these girls experience their time in the White House, but what can be commented on is how we interpret their experiences, and how we all see them very differently. The book signing survey demonstrates Baszile's point: "Although we can see the same picture [in a newspaper], we draw very different conclusions about what those pictures mean... These girls have this kind of remarkable visibility, and it is going to be a question as to what we as the people who are spectators make of those girls' experiences."

Baszile's story also speaks to the Obama campaign and its distinctly optimistic message. Baszile remarks that, "this moment has a resonance with what happened in the country when the Johnson administration had passed all of that historic civil rights legislation, and everybody was really overjoyed and optimistic and so hopeful...this is another huge milestone." But we must be warning against blind optimism: "there is a kind of caution to ask not what happens in Washington at beautiful ceremonies but what happens in neighborhoods just around the corner. That becomes the question: not the iconic moment, which is important, and the historic administration, which of course is important, but what are the individual choices that people are making in their day-to-day lives." Here, we see again what has inspired Baszile to write a personal history: though her story is but one case study of the integration period, it is as significant and truthful as a narrative focusing on policy or legislative change.

In her upcoming sequel to The Black Girl Next Door, Baszile promises to tell the story of "How The Black Girl Next Door Became Her Own Woman" -- a compelling teaser indeed. From tales of schoolyard bullying to god-awful blind dates, family grudges, and reconciliations, Professor Baszile shares her life story with candor, wit, and grace -- no question that her follow-up memoir will be as memorable as this powerful debut.