Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

by Emily Bernard Narrated by Emily Bernard

Overview

“Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . .*Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.”*

In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it.*

"Black Is the Body*is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." --Elizabeth Gilbert

WINNER OF THE*CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND*KIRKUS REVIEWS

ONE OF MAUREEN CORRIGAN'S 10 UNPUTDOWNABLE READS OF THE YEAR

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

Emily Bernard proves herself a gifted storyteller and a gifted narrator. This moving reading of her own essays is laced with nuance, emotion, and her ongoing struggle with the topics she addresses. As a graduate student at Yale, Bernard was one of seven victims of a random stabbing attack at a local coffee shop. Though it was traumatizing and painful, she also notes that the attack released her narrative power to explore the truth of bodies white and black living in America and how those bodies shape our knowledge of ourselves and each other across generations. These essays are full of powerful memories and thought-provoking challenges. Bernard guides the listener with a calm, earnest tone that seems like a conversation with a wise friend. B.E.K. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

11/12/2018
Bernard, a University of Vermont professor of English and race and ethnic studies, intimately explores her life through the lens of race in this contemplative and compassionate collection of personal essays. As a Yale graduate student, Bernard was the victim of a mass stabbing, an event at the center of the book’s opening essay, “Beginnings,” and her premise that writing about and remembering a traumatic past is a process “fundamental in black American experience.” She aims to “contribute something to the American racial drama besides the enduring narrative of black innocence and white guilt,” in essays that include “Teaching the N-Word” and “Motherland,” about adopting and raising two girls from Ethiopia with her white husband. Bernard’s voice throughout is personable yet incisive in exploring the lived reality of race. By examining her family’s Southern roots and her present life in Vermont, in “Interstates,” she explores the differences and the bridge between white and black in her life. In “Black Is the Body,” a beautiful reflection on racial difference and disparities, she acknowledges how race has informed “everything I do, and everything I write.” Bernard’s wisdom and compassion radiate throughout this thoughtful collection. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

"Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages."

—Elizabeth Gilbert

“My very favorite book that I have read so far this year…It’s really life changing. If you get no other book this year, get Black Is the Body by Emily Bernard.”

—Ann Patchett

"Of the 12 essays here, there's not one that even comes close to being forgettable. Bernard's language is fresh, poetically compact, and often witty ... Bernard proves herself to be a revelatory storyteller of race in America who can hold her own with some of those great writers she teaches."

—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

"Black Is the Body brings lucidity, honesty, and insight to the topics of race and interracial relationships ... quietly compelling ... [Bernard's] stories get under your skin."

—Carlo Wolff, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Bernard's lyrical book details traumas and pain from decades past to interrogate the nuances of her own life: growing up black in the South, marrying a white man from the North, and surviving a violent attack which unleashed the storyteller in her."

—Entertainment Weekly

"Echoes of Joan Didion—terse yet beautiful writing, a bracing honesty—in the graceful new essay collection by Emily Bernard ... Black Is the Body marks the debut of an essayist in command of her gifts, a book that belongs beside the best of contemporary autobiography."

—Hamilton Cain, Chapter 16

"Conceived while the author was hospitalized after being stabbed by a white man, these 13 formidable, destined-to-be-studied essays mark the emergence of an extraordinary voice on race in America."

—Oprah Magazine

"Like the absurdly devastating crime that opens this riveting collection, Bernard's essays are impossible to turn away from. Linked by the author's powerful voice and by her experiences of the world—of survival, of falling in love, of interracial marriage and friendship, and of motherhood—each account tells the agonizing story of race in America with realism, nuance, and profound hope. A supremely honest and utterly gripping book."

—Nell Freudenberger

"Bernard's honesty and vulnerability reveal a strong voice with no sugarcoating, sharing her struggle, ambivalence, hopes, and fears as an individual within a web of relationships, black and white. Highly recommended."

—Library Journal (starred review)

"Lucid ... deeply felt, unflinchingly honest, and openly questioning ... [Bernard] illuminates a legacy of storytelling ... and elaborates on the relationship between blacks and whites. A rare book of healing."

—Kirkus (starred review)

"Contemplative and compassionate ... Bernard's voice is personable yet incisive in exploring the lived reality of race ... [Her] wisdom and compassion radiate throughout this collection."

—Publishers Weekly

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

Emily Bernard proves herself a gifted storyteller and a gifted narrator. This moving reading of her own essays is laced with nuance, emotion, and her ongoing struggle with the topics she addresses. As a graduate student at Yale, Bernard was one of seven victims of a random stabbing attack at a local coffee shop. Though it was traumatizing and painful, she also notes that the attack released her narrative power to explore the truth of bodies white and black living in America and how those bodies shape our knowledge of ourselves and each other across generations. These essays are full of powerful memories and thought-provoking challenges. Bernard guides the listener with a calm, earnest tone that seems like a conversation with a wise friend. B.E.K. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-10-23

A memoir in essays about race that is as lucid as the issue is complicated.

Though Bernard (English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies/Univ. of Vermont; Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, 2012, etc.) is a scholar, her latest book is almost devoid of jargon. Instead, the writing is deeply felt, unflinchingly honest, and openly questioning. The author makes no claims to have all the answers about what it means to be a black woman from the South who has long lived and worked in the very white state of Vermont, where she might be the first black person that some of her students have encountered. From the evidence on display here, Bernard is a top-notch teacher who explores territory that many of her students might prefer to leave unexplored. She is married to a white professor of African-American Studies, and she ponders how his relationship with the students might be different than hers, how he is comfortable letting them call him by his first name while she ponders whether to adopt a more formal address. The couple also adopted twin daughters from Ethiopia, which gives all of them different perspectives on the African-American hyphenate. But it also illuminates a legacy of storytelling, from her mother and the Nashville where the author was raised and her grandparents' Mississippi. "I could not leave the South behind. I still can't," she writes, and then elaborates on the relationship between blacks and whites there: "We were ensnared in the same historical drama. I was forged—mind and body—in the unending conversation between southern blacks and whites. I don't hate the South. To despise it would be to despise myself." The book's genesis and opening is her life-threatening stabbing by a deranged white stranger, a seemingly random crime. Toward the end of the book, she realizes that "in every scar there is a story. The salve is the telling itself."

A rare book of healing on multiple levels.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169440980
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	01/29/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Beginnings

This book was conceived in a hospital. It was 2001, and I was recovering from surgery on my lower bowel, which had been damaged in a stabbing. A friend, a writer, came to visit me in the hospital and suggested not only that there was a story to be told about the violence I had survived, but also that my body itself was trying to tell me some­thing, which was that it was time to face down the fear that had kept me from telling the story of the stabbing, as well as other stories that I needed to tell.

I began to write essays. The first one I published was “Teaching the N-Word.” Over the next few years, more essays followed, along with several attempts to write about the stabbing. I couldn’t tell that story yet because I didn’t know what it meant. It took seven more years for me to understand that the experience of being at the wrong end of a hunting knife was only the situation, not the story itself; it was the stage, not the drama. In The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick writes: “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

The setting of “Scar Tissue,” which is the essay I even­tually wrote about being stabbed, is my gut; the blood let flow by the knife is the trail I followed until I discovered the story, which is the mystery of storytelling itself, and how hard it is to tell the whole truth. Each essay in this book is anchored in this mystery, in blood. They are also rooted in contradictions, primary among them being that the stabbing unleashed the storyteller in me. In more than one way, that bizarre act of violence set me free.

But, of course, the stabbing has been a source of mis­ery as well as opportunity. For instance, I suffered from recurrent, excruciating stomach pain for many years before another trip to the hospital revealed that I had developed adhesions in my bowel. The surgeon was able to untangle my intestines and scar tissue, but he warned me that the adhesions would return. There was nothing I could do to prevent or predict them. “You’re just unlucky,” he said sympathetically. The pain, he assured me, would be ran­dom and severe. It did return, thundered, again, through­out my body, and sent me back to the hospital, where a third surgeon ceded to the inherent mystery of the malady and confessed that medicine was more art than science. The gift of his honesty was, to me, as valuable as any solu­tion to the problem would have been.

Once I accepted the randomness of the situation in my bowel, life took on a new urgency, and so did the desire to understand it. I turned to art over science, story over solu­tion. I found a voice. The book imagined in 2001 began to take shape in a need to know, to explore, to understand, before it was too late. Insofar as the personal essay is, at heart, an attempt to grasp the mysteries of life, the form made sense to me on a visceral level. The need to under­stand, in fact, was what engendered the stabbing in the first place: I met the knife head on. Something in me just needed to know.

Each essay in this book was born in a struggle to find a language that would capture the totality of my experi­ence, as a woman, a black American, a teacher, writer, mother, wife, and daughter. I wanted to discover a new way of telling; I wanted to tell the truth about life as I have lived it. That desire evolved into this collection, which includes a story about adoption that is as pragmatic as it is romantic; a portrait of interracial marriage that is absent of hand-wringing; and a journey into the word “nigger” that includes as much humor as grief. These stories grew into an entire book meant to contribute something to the American racial drama besides the enduring narrative of black innocence and white guilt. That particular narrative is not false, of course, which accounts for its endurance, but there are other true stories to tell, stories steeped in defiance of popular assumptions about race, whose con­tours are shaped by unease with conventional discussions about race relations. These other true stories I needed to explore, but I was mainly driven by a need to engage in what Zora Neale Hurston calls “the oldest human longing—self-revelation.” The only way I knew how to do this was by letting the blood flow, and following the trail of my own ambivalence.

I was not stabbed because I was black, but I have always viewed the violence I survived as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized Ameri­can race relations. The man who stabbed me was white. But more meaningful to me than his skin was the look in his eyes, which were vacant of emotion. There was no connection between us, no common sphere, yet we were suddenly and irreparably bound by a knife, an attachment that cost us both: him, his freedom; me, my wholeness. Revisiting that wound has been a way of putting myself back together. The equation of writing and regeneration is fundamental in black American experience. So, if race was not an essential factor in what brought me into contact with a hunting knife, I have certainly treated the wound with the salve that I inherited from people whose experi­ences of blackness shaped their lives as fully and poetically as it has shaped mine. I am most interested in blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness, in fear and hope, in anguish and love, just as I am most drawn to the line between self and other, in family, friendship, romance, and other intimate relationships.

Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intan­gible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experi­ence emerges sometimes randomly and unpredictably in life as I have lived it. It is inconsistent, continuously in flux, and yet also a constant condition that I carry in and on my body. It is a condition that encompasses beauty, misery, wonder, and opportunity. In its inherent contra­dictions, utter mysteries, and bottomlessness as a reservoir of narratives, race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.

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