TCNJ

26 The College of New Jersey Magazine Williams The hardest thing for me to talk about is my secret experience growing up in Southbury, Connecticut, as the only black girl trying to get through puberty, dating, and being viewed in that exotic, weird way that now I've learned to call fetish. I can remember a moment talking with Cassandra [when we were at Spelman College in Atlanta together], who was like, "What about that white guy you dated? No, that other one, and the one in math class?" Just the idea that they were racking up was frightening. { B O O K E X C E R P T } TOO MANY WHITE GUYS In Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Florens — while just a child of eight — is targeted as a sexual object, causing her mother to ask a "kinder" slave owner to purchase her daughter. Jacob Vaark, the reluctant slave owner at the center of the story, is the best master that Florens' mother can hope to have for her daughter, and she begs him to rescue her daughter from the desires of a Portuguese slave owner. This is the mercy of the novel, a transfer of ownership, one that saves the young girl from a life of rape and sexual subjugation. In this powerful glimpse into the past, Morrison imagines the degradations that black women faced and the trauma of violence upon their bodies. Why do we need to know, so many years later, the specific ways that black women in the antebellum South experienced this constant threat of physical and psychic violence? What can it tell us about the reduction of black women in our own time to a fetish? There has been, indeed, an explosion of writers addressing the dangers of the fetishization of women of color and its link to white supremacy and slavery, and although many young women of color may not have always had the language to name these early assaults on their bodies and humanity, many of us carry those first disturbing experiences around with us like invisible bruises. —Piper Kendrix Williams "Being immersed in Morrison's world is not unlike attending a crowded party and discovering that I was the only white person in the room." —Juda Bennett

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