One of my Winter Break reading pleasures was Jennifer Baszile’s The Black Girl Next Door, a memoir of growing up in Palos Verdes, California in the 1970s and 1980s as the youngest daughter of the only black family in her neighborhood, and one of only a handful of African American children and teenagers in her schools. This title piqued my interest for a few reasons: first, I should say that I met Baszile through a good friend and had friendly conversations with her when she was at Princeton in the 1990s, although I doubt she would remember me. She was training as an early Americanist there, another point of common interest, and wrote a fine dissertation on colonial Florida using French, Spanish, and English-langage sources. Finally, she’s just a year younger than me, so I was interested in a memoir by someone in my generation who wasn’t the son or daughter of a famous writer or other celebrity–someone who got a book contract because she had an interesting story to tell, and she tells it well, with evocative details and striking originality.
Baszile’s experience introduces us to a rich and important subject, the first generation of African American children to be raised in integrated schools and neighborhoods. Her book is especially poignant as she develops and explores the breach that separates her sister and her from her mother and father, who had grown up in segregation in Detroit and Louisiana, respectively, and who strove to live the American integrated dream for their daughters’ sakes. But there are troubling silences when, for example, racist graffiti was sprayed on the street in front of their house and a cherub on a fountain in their yard is painted black. Young Jennifer wants to talk to her father about this and to ask questions, but knows somehow that questions won’t be welcome, just as she knows somehow that putting on a wig and glasses and performing a pantomime as her “country granny” for white neighbor children one afternoon won’t be applauded by her parents the way it was by her white friends.
The tensions Mr. and Mrs. Baszile and their children attempt to navigate, between integration with their affluent white peers and affiliation with other middle-class and wealthy African Americans, and between their hopes for racial equality and evidence on their own doorsteps of the persistence of white racism, erupt strangely on a family vacation, when Jennifer and her sister are instructed to get to know every single black child on the ship and to bring their parents a report before dinner. Some of the saddest and funniest passages of the book are on Jennifer’s teenage years as she wonders whether love will ever come to her as the not-as-pretty younger sibling of her glamorous and accomplished sister. First, she realizes that she’s being treated like an exotic by her white classmates: white boys flirted with her but told her that if they dated her their parents would “kill” them. She then agrees to be set up on a series of dates with extremely awkward (or just plain weird) young black men, and spends most of high school thinking that she’ll never be kissed (by anyone she wants to kiss, that is.)
Through it all, she understands implicitly that she is never to complain or question her parents’ decision to live the American integrated dream–Baszile realizes how fortunate she is by comparison to her parents, who grew up in Jim Crow Louisiana and in the enduringly segregated city of Detroit, and she’s grateful for the opportunities they gave her. But she chafes at the silences, and wonders about all of the things she knows she can’t ask her parents.
This book will be of interests to feminists and women’s historians for many reasons, but one highlight for me was the education in hair maintenance Baszile offers to those of us who don’t have black hair. Her descriptions of the methods, tools, and solutions her mother used to “cook hair” for her and her older sister are harrowing, as is the story of her first relaxer in a salon. (As the victim of a few bad perms in the 1980s myself, I could identify a little bit with some of the pain she describes, but I’m guessing that most white women have no idea about the amounts of time, energy, and money that black women spend on their hair.) There are other passages relating to adolescence and self-consciousness about beauty and appearance. The story of her middle-school “makeover” at the makeup counter of a local department store that didn’t stock makeup in tones that matched or complemented black skin elicited in me all of the humiliation and outrage she felt at the time.
The Black Girl Next Door ends with Baszile’s high school graduation and acceptance to Columbia University. Her conclusion suggests that she’s writing a follow-up book that will cover her college and (I hope) her graduate school years and her years as the first black woman on the Yale History Department faculty (from 1999 to 2007). You can be sure I’ll review it here as soon as it hits the bookstores!
Historiann 
It’s already in stock at Amazon. I just ordered it for 2nd-day delivery on Wednesday.
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Great post and recommendation–thanks! I’m struck by the hair part; hair burdens on African-American women have always struck me as especially oppressive. Of course, grooming rules force all women to decide how much physical pain, financial demands (from a baseline of lower pay), and wasted time they can live with in compliance with beauty mandates. They can opt out of some practices, but not 100%. In that context, making women who are MORE oppressed suffer even more is extra heinous.
In “It’s the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races,” Lena Williams starts with hair. She says that for a black woman, the sight of a white woman fiddling with or tossing strands of loose hair looks like deliberate cruelty: “You want what I’ve got but you can’t have it. Hahaha.” Depressing as hell to this absent-minded hair-fiddler. I’ve tried to curb the habit, but can’t take back whatever damage I’ve done; I also can’t know how correct Williams’s claim is.
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Great review; I thought it was an amazing, poignant, informative book as well. Am I a bad historian that I enjoy reading it more than her (very fine) work on colonial history?
I think this would be a great assignment for a 20th-c U.S./women’s/AA/U.S. West history class — I would imagine students would be engaged, would relate, but also would be shocked at what went on a short generation ago…
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Oh, I’ve been looking forward to that book too! Thanks for the review. I hung out with her for a time in the archives, and I’m always intrigued by people’s other directions!
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Tangent on the hair: I was teaching Columbus’ 1493 letter of the first voyage and was struck by: “nor are they negroes as in Guinea, but their hair is flowing”
Added the book to my library list, though as someone who grew up in an extraordinarily integrated neighborhood in CA a few years later, it might have too much dissonance for me.
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Interestingly, in a coincidental way, a bulletin board I’ve been passing for months has a poster dated in December, informing that an African-American students organization here is/(was) organizing an upcoming event entitled the “6th Annual HAIR SHOW: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair.” Sometimes you only notice something proximate after you’ve read about it in a blog.
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Does the book address the disconnect between telling such a personal story, and having shelved the early-America dissertation and the career opportunities at Yale? Or will the next book go that route?
No matter how accomplished a memoir, somehow it seems limiting if this is the only way the “first black woman on the Yale History Department faculty” feels she can succeed. Thoughts?
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I don’t think we can assume that writing a memoir instead of a monograph was “the only way” Baszile felt she could succeed. I hope she’ll write more about her grad school and professional experiences in her next book. To my understanding, Yale never tenures the junior faculty it hires, which may well have led Baszile to consider different careers, and not just different academic jobs.
Plenty of people decide to leave the careers for which they trained, but what I think your question gets at, Ph.D./Writer?, is the question of push factors at Yale as well as her own pull factors leading her away from academia. I would bet that there were a great deal of extra pressures and expectations put on her as the first African American woman in the History department there, and I’d like to hear about them.
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I’d like to hear about them as well. Seeing as how you apparently got your hands on a pre-publication copy of her book, any chance you could get her to come here and tell us?
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CPP–the book reviewed here was published a year ago, in 2009, and what I wrote above was just speculation/interest to hear about her faculty experiences in a follow-up volume.
I didn’t get a preview copy–I just borrowed it from the library like everyone else!
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Oh, man! I am such a fucking dumbfuck! I totally misread that as applying to the book you reviewed here. I was about to comment about how I am like the first person in the world to get their copy from Amazon.
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I’ll definately check this one out. Having grown up myself in a nearby area, I am quite familar with Palos Verdes. An African American friend of mine in high school in the early 90s had similar sounding experiences in PV.
The one that stuck with me was the police showing up and asking what she was doing while hanging out in her own front yard. Then being repeatedly questioned whether it was actually her home.
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This book is fucking amazing! Basziles really crafts beautiful sentences.
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