All about Skin Read online

  All about Skin

  Short Fiction

  by Women of Color

  Edited by

  Jina Ortiz

  and

  Rochelle Spencer

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through support from the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

  * * *

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

  Foreword © 2014 by Helena María Viramontes

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  All about skin: short fiction by women of color / edited by Jina Ortiz and Rochelle Spencer.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-299-30194-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-299-30193-4 (e-book)

  1. Short stories—Women authors. 2. Short stories—Minority authors.

  3. Minority women in literature.

  I. Ortiz, Jina, editor of compilation. II. Spencer, Rochelle (Writer), editor of compilation.

  PN6120.92.W65A45 2014

  823´.01089287—dc23

  2014007452

  The stories I have chosen are simply those I loved above all others given to me for consideration.

  Amy Tan,

  “Introduction,” from

  The Best American Short Stories, 1999

  Contents

  * * *

  Foreword

  Helena María Viramontes

  Preface

  Rochelle Spencer

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Part 1 Coming-of-Age

  Aida

  Patricia Engel

  Fairness

  Chinelo Okparanta

  Pita Delicious

  ZZ Packer

  Candidate

  Amina Gautier

  How to Leave the Midwest

  Renee Simms

  The Perfect Subject

  Ramola D

  A Different Story

  Ivelisse Rodriguez

  Part 2 Reinvention

  American Child

  Manjula Menon

  Arcadia

  Hope Wabuke

  Sirens

  Joshunda Sanders

  Just the Way She Does the Things

  Jennine Capó Crucet

  The Great Pretenders

  Ashley Young

  A Penny, a Pound

  Princess Joy L. Perry

  Part 3 Borderlands

  The Accidents of a Veronica

  Toni Margarita Plummer

  The Rapture

  Emily Raboteau

  The Lost Ones

  Aracelis González Asendorf

  Noelia and Amparo

  Glendaliz Camacho

  A Strange People

  Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

  Lillian Is an Ordinary Child

  Metta Sáma

  Entropy 20:12

  Learkana Chong

  Beautiful Things

  Jacqueline Bishop

  Lady Chatterley’s Mansion

  Unoma Azuah

  All about Skin

  Xu Xi

  Contributors

  Foreword

  * * *

  Helena María Viramontes

  It is the Afterword that’ll count.

  Toni Cade Bambara

  In the years charting the cultural shifts forced upon the country by the waves of activism and political movements of the sixties and seventies, we women writers of color came to understand that publishing houses remained slow in capturing the ever-changing, ever-inquiring flux of the times, nor were they interested in publishing our blooming flor y canto of resistance—our lyricisms performed in revolutionary celebration, our artistic offerings of flowering hope. In those years, one could hardly find a collection of women short fiction writers, much less women writers of color. Case in point: On my book shelf, I have two collections discovered and purchased as a feminism student and undergraduate attending Immaculate Heart College, the first one titled By and about Women: An Anthology of Short Fiction, edited by Beth Kline Schneiderman and published in 1973. Of the nineteen fine women writers selected for inclusion, only one, Gwendolyn Brooks, is a writer of color. Also published in 1973 was the collection No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, which was more inclusive, with a number of African American poets selected for inclusion, undoubtedly reflecting the black/white racial representational binary of the times. I did not fault these editors, and in fact pay tribute to their efforts. In 1973 I was extremely content to have discovered these books and was grateful for such important contributions to my well being as a woman beginning her overtures into literature.

  And yet …

  Where were the others of color? In those years of erasure, we women writers wrote poems on the backs of market receipts in the privacy of a bathroom, mimeographed stories to mail to one another, developed support groups for self-expression with such seriousness we bent our lives into midnights so as to light our world with words, because most of us believed, especially we writers of color, that our lives depended on it. This has surely become a cliché, but people, many of them women, were being beaten in the streets, stripped of their dignity, spit upon with unashamed hatred, bludgeoned with unfair laws, yet maintained a profound belief in our ability to change our cultural, racial, sexual, economic, and judicial injustices with words and practice. Since telling stories was our first engagement in democracy, we women writers of color are, have been, and will continue to be instrumental in the public area of labor strikes and civil rights; we maintain half of the ethnicity-identified self-determination and continue to fearlessly challenge the inhospitable heterosexual norms, providing consciousness-raising empowerment for past, present, and future generations. Little wonder why the seminal and game-changing collection edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa was titled This Bridge Called My Back. For we knew, we women writers of color, that we could create the bridge and have the resiliency to brave the treacherous accountability for the spiritual health of our neighborhood, our community, our country, and our planet.

  I am pleased and profoundly excited by another seminal and game-changing collection edited by Rochelle Spencer and Jina Ortiz and titled All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color. Not since D. Soyini Madison’s The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color (1994) has there been, for me, such a remarkable and wonderful collection of mostly younger, vibrant, and astonishing voices aptly deserving of their many awards and recognition. I am so very proud and honored to be a small part of this oasis of literary work, one that cannot, will not, be permitted to be ignored, erased, or forgotten.

  Many of these stories are written from the fringes of life and time with such searing imagination, it is a testament to the talent of these women writers of color—they know how to solder their words into ste
el girders. Through their stories, they make us live in another’s feel of life, in another person’s shoes, because they invest the inertia of words with active meaning so as to experience an empathy crucial for our survival. They are talented writers who build on sensory architecture, of the divine detail, of the forensic historical research with an ice axe of language intent on shattering Kafka’s frozen seas, creating an intimacy like no other. Here Paul Auster’s observation of fiction is useful: “Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader, and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.” Empathy is the glue that makes the words of a writer stick to the reader, and in this era of globalization, understanding and feeling the life of another through narratives is a nonviolent act of sheer humane importance. That these women writers of color are brave enough to open up to others with their stories—opening up to those who are different from us, those we do not know or who cannot recognize our cultural terms—is also apprehending that these others, the readers, are themselves open to intimate interactions. We need to imagine so much more of this. To share stories then, imbrications then, pain and suffering then, but also hope then, in life as in art, is what these wonderful women writers of color celebrate with fearlessness, audacity, and beauty.

  Preface

  * * *

  Rochelle Spencer

  Short stories are not mini-novels. The condensed nature of the short story forces us to focus on a single moment in time, and if a story soars or falters, its achievement lies in its ability to capture a moment of understanding, that moment when the story’s protagonist (and subsequently, its reader) becomes wise yet vulnerable—and breathtakingly lucid.

  This isn’t easy. The contrasting tensions inherent in the short story—a tightly controlled text that explores the human experience in one ephemeral moment—mean that it seldom reads like a novel. A genius (see Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” Louise Erdrich’s “Shamengwa,” or Paule Marshall’s “Reena”) may produce a short fiction that spans multiple years and generations, but for most writers, the short story is a narrow, highly specific genre. Short stories are not mini-novels; they are little moments of grace.

  As MFA programs proliferate, short stories’ tightness and complexity have made them the dominant form for teaching fiction. Seemingly, the relative ease of writing a short story, as compared with that of writing a longer work, would make it a good choice for the working-class writer. Yet, because it is notoriously difficult to sustain a career writing short fiction, achieving mastery at the short story has become almost a luxury. In the 1970s, Toni Cade Bambara, author of the brilliant short story collection Gorilla, My Love, spoke often of the pressures she faced to complete her novel The Salteaters; more than thirty years later, the sundry writers publishing short fiction on personal blogs and websites have made it even more difficult to achieve acclaim as a writer of short stories.

  Complicating matters even more for emerging short fiction writers is the fact that being anthologized is a common way of gaining recognition, and spaces in these anthologies are, of course, limited. Toni Morrison’s essay “Black Matters” from her landmark study Playing in the Dark suggests not only that writers write about people like themselves but also that readers are drawn to protagonists who look like them. And, in a society that isn’t yet postracial, this often leaves writers of color in marginalized spaces.

  These odds are even more daunting for women writers of color, as traditionally, women writers have also received less attention than have male writers. (Every year, the website Vidaweb.org’s “The Count” has regularly pointed out the disparity of women authors who are reviewed or published in prestigious outlets such as the New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Harper’s.) Thus, because of limited places for publication, an anthologized story written by a woman of color is often left with the burden of representing an entire population.

  Jina Ortiz and I have seen up-close how damaging this “single story” phenomenon can be. Years ago, as a young writing instructor at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, I heard a student complain that “all black women writers write the same story.” My student’s attitude wasn’t unique; many of her classmates felt the same way: they truly believed that there really was one black experience or one woman experience worth writing about, for in their high schools, that was all they had been taught. Despite being female and of color themselves, they had rarely been exposed to multicultural writing by women authors.

  As new writing instructors, Jina and I found ourselves looking for anthologies featuring the short fiction of contemporary women writers of color and were at a loss. We knew meaningful fiction was being written—and garnering prizes (we were acquainted with two young writers, Emily Raboteau and ZZ Packer, whose short stories had been reprinted in Best American Short Stories)—but it was difficult to locate this work in one anthology.

  It is one thing to complain about a problem, but it’s another to do something about it. On a sleepy Saturday morning, Jina and I made a list of both brilliant women of color who were in love with the short story and the publications that rightly championed their work. We e-mailed these people and places and asked them to send us work that was contemporary, exciting, and a celebration of the short story’s revelatory nature.

  And so All about Skin was born.

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  Special thanks to Opal Moore, Maria Acosta Cruz, Sandra Govan, Veronica Watson, Sharan Strange, Winston Napier, Kathleen Cleaver, our parents, our mentors from our MFA programs (Solstice of Pine Manor College and New York University), and to the following publications:

  Epigraph: “Introduction,” copyright 1999 by Amy Tan, from The Best American Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999). Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  “Aida,” copyright 2012 by Patricia Engel. First published in Harvard Review 43 (Winter 2012).

  “Fairness,” copyright 2012 by Chinelo Okparanta. First published in Subtropics 14 (Spring/Summer 2012). Reprinted in Happiness, Like Water, copyright 2013 by Chinelo Okparanta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  “Pita Delicious,” originally published as “Gideon,” copyright 2007 by ZZ Packer. First published in The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith (Penguin Books, 2007).

  “Candidate,” copyright 2012 by Amina Gautier. First published in Crazyhorse 82 (2012).

  “How to Leave the Midwest,” copyright 2009 by Renee Simms. First published in Oregon Literary Review 4, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2009).

  “A Different Story,” copyright 2010 by Ivelisse Rodriguez. First published in Quercus Review 10 (2010).

  “American Child,” copyright 2006 by Manjula Menon. First published in North American Review, March/April 2006.

  “Sirens,” copyright 2013 by Joshunda Sanders. First published in Bellevue Literary Review 13, no. 2 (Fall 2013).

  “Just the Way She Does the Things,” copyright 2010 by Jennine Capó Crucet. First published in Los Angeles Review 8 (Fall 2010).

  “The Rapture,” copyright 2013 by Emily Raboteau. First published in Creative Writing: Writers on Writing, edited by Amal Chatterjee (The Professional and Higher Partnership Ltd, 2012). Reprinted by permission of the publisher and editor.

  “The Lost Ones,” copyright 2011 by Aracelis González Asendorf. First published in Kweli Journal, December 2011.

  “Noelia and Amparo,” copyright 2013 by Glendaliz Camacho. First published in the Southern Pacific Review, July 4, 2013.

  “A Strange People,” copyright 2008 by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan. First published in Crab Orchard Review 14, no. 1 (Winter 2008).

  “Beautiful Things,” copyright 2004 by Jacqueline Bishop. First published in Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism (Spring 2004).

  “Lady Chatterley’s Mansion,” copyright 2008
by Unoma Azuah. First published in The Length of Light: A Collection of Short Stories (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008). Reprinted in the New Black Magazine, May 1, 2010.

  “All about Skin,” copyright 2012 by Xu Xi. First published in the Kenyon Review’s KROnline 9, no. 2 (Spring 2012).

  All about Skin

  * * *

  Introduction

  * * *

  The subtitle of this anthology includes terms that have become loaded with meaning in contemporary society: “women,” “color,” “fiction.”

  In a world that has grown increasingly knowledgeable about the complexity of gender identity, we can wonder what it means to declare oneself “woman”; we can also debate what it means to identify as a “person of color” in the United States, where the Pew Center reports that in the last decade, “racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 91.7 percent of the nation’s population growth.” Finally, twenty-plus years of postmodern theory have dismantled traditional ideas about authorship and truth, and so we may very well ask ourselves: what does it mean to write fiction?

  Nearly thirty-three years after the publication of Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa’s landmark anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, the popularity of Twitter hashtags such as #notyourasiansidekick, #solitaryisforwhite women, or #blackpowerisforblackmen reveals that contemporary discourse continues to focus exclusively on one’s gender or race but rarely on both. Today, women writers of color are not “unlikely to be friends of people in high literary places,” as Anzaldúa would put it, but several flourishing new talents still deserve much greater attention. To that end, we decided that the usefulness of acknowledging the work of these gifted individuals justifies the use of the term “women of color”; furthermore, we felt that whatever the emotional truth in their writing, these writers’ abilities to imagine entirely new worlds necessitates the use of the word “fiction.”