I have this memory from when I was a child. I was in my mother’s bedroom and we were either talking about Roots or the legacy of slavery. She made a mention of how enslaved Black women were taken advantage of by their masters which led to me looking the way that I do. My snap reaction was to look down at my relatively lighter skin and then back at hers in shock. I didn’t know how to hold this horror but I knew that this deep, corporeal memory stretched for generations. I didn’t have the language for this connection between a violation then and my existence now but I knew that I became like other Black women before me: anxious with a hint of reclusiveness, kind but also terrified of the world and all of its obscene elements. My body was not necessarily a home, but rather a fortress that had to be guarded and defended no matter what.
Ever since that moment over two decades ago, I have been thinking about the legacy of slavery in how we think, assess, and scrutinize Black womanhood. I wrote books on it, I’ve scoured academic articles about the topic, and I’ve even listened to music. I’m always led back to this one, irrefutable fact: Everyone else has a say about our bodies. From our hair down to the soles of our feet, Black women’s bodies are assigned meaning. Due to the transatlantic slave trade, we’re often seen as overly sexualized for existing in our bodies. This judgment is perpetuated in households, schoolyards, churches, and the media writ large. If we defend ourselves, more accusations follow. No matter whether we speak up or remain silent, we will not be at peace because others have made us into an archetype or a symbol rather than respecting and holding space for us as human beings. And I thought to myself, when are these women, my ancestors, going to speak–and move–for themselves? What if our bodies, no matter how much they labored, still were soft to touch and desired as we ourselves have desired others?
When I began to think about my forthcoming novel, Zeal, I wanted to write a multi-generational love story stemming from emancipation to the current era. My heart was raw and corroded due to the separation of the COVID-19 lockdown, and all I could hear at night were the ambulance sirens. Not only did I crave connection, but I needed something to re-animate spirit, and hopefully, enliven others. And of course, a love story would involve sex. But how? Ever since I was a child, all I knew about sex involving enslaved women was rape, something unavoidable and omnipresent on a plantation. In fact, one historian told me that whatever I could have imagined that happened during slavery, most likely it did—another horror chilled throughout my body. Plenty of times, whenever an enslaved Black woman is acknowledged in the archives, it’s usually with regards to violence done to her. We know of her through brute force or at the acknowledgment of her death. How could I make passion—hence the title—and furthermore, that particular woman’s body come alive in fiction?
The simplest answer is that I had to fight my own imagination and logic by speaking back to the histories that shaped my life and America as we know it. I had to look at flaws, erasures, and defects in the archives as windows of opportunity for my imagination to flourish. I had to question what was written about a Black woman because her story was often in the hands of those who oppressed her, and therefore their accounts should not be seen as the whole truth. No matter what the records said about her, she lived a life. She possessed an emotional interiority. She had a heart that thumped in her chest and she had thoughts, emotions, and observations. She had to have loved. She had to have made love. Because if she hadn’t, how could I, or any of my female ancestors have existed? I had to soothe my mind by understanding a knowledge that transcends explanation: We are more than just our pain. We are more than just the spectacle of our pain. We are because we are.
From there, I had to make stylistic choices. Yes, rape is alluded to in Zeal but I did not write any rape scenes. Because if I did, who would that serve? Sometimes violence towards a Black woman cannot only be expected, but also titillating. I did not want to retraumatize myself or another reader. Instead, I wrote about the aftermath of such encounters: a perverse smell in the room, a stunned muteness, or blood underneath fingernails. In my mind, I supposed that the aftermath is what lives on, and I intimately knew this by how that aftermath lived for generations through my mother’s words and the subsequent anxiety that swirled in my body.
Following those deliberations, I thought about sex. Lots of sex. Sex could not have stopped during oppressive times. Perhaps, sex had to be done covertly—and creatively. Perhaps in a forest where enslaved people would often gather for religious services and rebellion-inspired meetings. Perhaps near a meadow where an enslaved person might’ve known and recognized the sounds of nature more acutely than their own breathing. And their skin. I focused on their flesh pressing against one another—the sweat and fervor of it all. I recreated the circumstances that controlled their social life from slavery to racial terrorism during the reconstruction era and beyond. I hoped that a reader would never see this story as brutal. On the contrary, the systems under which these characters lived were brutal. They themselves were anything but.
Overall, I experienced a lot of circuitous, internal dialogue. I was fighting in my head about what would be appropriate. I didn’t want a reader to absorb the details of numerous love affairs and forget the threat of a noose or of a sudden disappearance that could happen at any moment. But then again, that’s not how I live my life. When I harbor feelings for someone, hell, when I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about death. The world closes when operated through fear. I intended for the door of a world to be burst wide open.
Zeal is a novel but it is also a body text in every sense of the word. Like the body, there are multiple extensions moving throughout space. It has its limits, namely a beginning, middle, and an end. Zeal is a novel that I had to put my whole feeling behind. I spoke dialogue aloud to feel the words and its intended sincerity on my tongue. I’d act out the gestures of particular descriptions so I can see if said movement was natural. I could not rely on a knowledge sheathed through horror or a history primarily written through the gaze of oppressors. Instead, I had to look towards hope. At the end of the day, that’s what love is: a dream of an integrated future with someone else, larger happiness, more pleasure, more, more, more. Because it is that deep craving that unites us as human beings. It is that yearning that transcends laws, and I endeavored for myself as a vessel and the characters as conduits to re-introduce themselves as a part of the human condition that has been there all along.
