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• W4239572163 abstract "4 7 R G E T T I N G I T T W I S T E D J A B A R I A S I M Your silence will not protect you. – Audre Lorde Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you? – Muriel Rukeyser, ‘‘The Speed of Darkness’’ In my childhood home, we were not allowed to call each other liars. It fueled my father’s indignation. Slung with the casual malice that only bickering siblings can summon, Liar! somehow set o√ a warning beacon, alerting my father wherever he was. A schoolteacher with a reputation for discipline, he wasn’t remotely as stern as my friends imagined. But proper speech was an area he patrolled with diligence, and his radar was remarkably sensitive. Lazy enunciation, insults, and vulgarities were the blunders most likely to set him o√. Once, in the middle of an argument, I told my brother to drop dead. My father’s admonishment was calmly but pointedly delivered, and even now my ears burn at the memory of it. His catalogue of deplorable lingo was expansive and, to our 4 8 A S I M Y considerable confusion, unpredictable. Words that hardly raised other parents’ eyebrows could quickly draw his ire, words like butt, funk, and especially – inexplicably – liar. No such codes existed beyond our front yard, and the streets presented delectable opportunities to mix it up with the neighborhood kids. We gave as well as we got, diving into the exchange of insults and threats like stragglers in the desert plunging into a sparkling oasis. If we caught someone making an assertion without evidence to back it up, we unleashed our vernacular and let the culprit have it. The local dialect turned you’re a liar into you a lie, a contraction I found irresistible despite my father’s prohibitions . I appreciated the way it transformed people into the very thing they were accused of. Our lies and tall tales usually revolved around girls or athletic exploits and were only occasionally malicious. They were lighthearted fabrications inspired and shaped by the stories we heard at the feet of our fathers, in barbershops and on front porches, at barbecues and ball games. For black people in the 1960s, even less welcomed as full-fledged members of society than we are today, yarn-spinning presented a rare American ritual in which we could freely participate. Other venerable traditions, like burning our neighbors alive, casting a ballot, or taking communion alongside white Christians, had long been denied us. But lying, now that was an equal-opportunity activity. With roots in stories about Aunt Nancy, Brer Rabbit, and John Henry, our inventions were smallscale variations on the African American experience, more about outwitting the powerful than manipulating privilege at the expense of the weak. Our bluster was closer in style to Troy Maxson recalling his tussles with Death in August Wilson’s Fences than, say, Thomas Je√erson arguing in Notes on the State of Virginia that orangutans find black women sexy. Those di√erences aside, what could be more American than pretending truths were self-evident when they seldom were? What could be more American than dressing up a lie in tailor-made language, like romanticizing treason as a Lost Cause or sugarcoating genocide by rebranding it as Manifest Destiny? As a bulwark against the realities of life in a racist republic, our fictions helped us believe we belonged. In our world, the consequences of being caught in a lie were usually no harsher than schoolyard ridicule or parental discipline. G E T T I N G I T T W I S T E D 4 9 R A person could get grounded or ‘‘put on punishment,’’ as neighborhood parlance would have it. Our falsehoods possessed little power to influence another person’s circumstances or alter a destiny, and we understood that their relative impotence stemmed more from our blackness than our youth. Anyone could see that ‘‘I blamed that broken window on Johnny and he got put on punishment’’ was a far cry from ‘‘I accused that nigger boy of whistling at me and he got strangled, chopped up, and..." @default.
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• W4239572163 date "2018-01-01" @default.
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• W4239572163 title "GETTING IT TWISTED" @default.
• W4239572163 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2018.0024" @default.
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