Don't Let It Get You Down

Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

Savala Nolan

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982137298
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A "brutal, beautifully rendered" ( The New York Times Book Review ) collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society's most charged, politicized, and intractable polar spaces—between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat. Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan's mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother's encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.It is these liminal spaces—of race, class, and body type—that the essays in Don't Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society's most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with "gorgeous prose" (Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks ) and are as humorous and as full of Nolan's appetites as they are of anxiety. The result is lyrical and magnetic.In "On Dating White Guys While Me, " Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys weren't about preference but about self-erasure. In the titular essay "Don't Let it Get You Down, " we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, "large Black females" encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other people's fear. In "Bad Education, " we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence to participate in our own culture. And in "To Wit and Also, " we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolan's white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that America's original sin lives intimately within our present stories. Over and over again, Nolan reminds us that our true identities are often most authentically lived not in the black and white, but in the grey of the in-between.Perfect for fans of Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Don't Let It Get You Down delivers a "deeply personal insight" (Layla F. Saad, New York Times bestselling author of Me and White Supremacy ) on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.

On Dating White Guys While Me

Holt was a catch and I thought maybe we were heading somewhere, but then I saw his feet, and they were beautiful, unlike mine. Dating requires intimacy: bare feet, side by side, maybe touching at the foot of a bed, in the sand, the grass. I did not want to place my feet next to his.

His feet were smooth and well-shaped as if carved from marble, with neat cuticles and nails filed symmetrically. When I saw them I thought, They’re like David’s right foot! Years before, I’d sketched David’s feet in charcoal, full of hope, the filtered light as gentle as a powder puff in the Florentine museum, a hushed flow of tourists and art students around me. I wish I’d sketched the slaves and their pocked granite confines instead, but back then, in the spring of 2002, it was David who spoke to me. He was being cleaned with water and Q-tips, by erudite Italians kneeling on scaffolding beside his pensive brow; that’s how Holt’s feet seemed to me—like things another person would carefully clean for him.

There were many things about Holt that I liked. I liked how his biceps emerged from T-shirt sleeves. I liked how he stood next to me at that Christmas party on Benvenue Ave., brushed up and emitting a gently possessive warmth that made me giddy. I liked getting breakfast with him early in the morning at the coffee shop that served so-so coffee, and I liked how it looked to anyone walking by: me, with him. I liked how he lingered when I drove him home that brisk autumn night, leaning back into the car, suggesting we get together soon to study—we were in law school—his big-nosed face and impish smile illuminated by porchlight. I liked that he was from New York, that he was smart, that his dad was an iffy presence in his life, like mine. That his sneakers were always clean, that he drank gobs of whiskey and beer and never seemed drunk, that his East Coast self-possession shone brightly against the floppy California exuberance in which we lived.

And I liked that he was white. I liked his whiteness in an uncomfortable, subterranean way. I’d long sensed that the most succinct, irrefutable way to move up in the world was to be loved by a prototypical white man—i.e., someone at the top. There’s a cultural magic in their approval, a kind of magnetizing glitter that surrounds the approved-of object. So, I pursued them. I had relationships with men of color, too; but a certain type of white guy had a particular hold on my psyche. I hoped, in landing one, to earn a medal. To sling it around my neck and prove that I wasn’t too low on the ladder for blessings. Adjacent to them, accepted by them, I’d undo the injuries of not belonging I’d endured. I’d become the girl I’d ached and tried my whole childhood and adolescence to be: a version of that fairylike, Nordic blonde in a Timotei shampoo commercial, over whom I obsessed as a child, floating on my back in the bath and imagining my brown, cotton-candy hair was a white silk ribbon, like hers.

Holt had potential. He could be my world of oysters. We clicked; he seemed to see that I was bright, credentialed, special. He, with his jocular, confident whiteness, could slay my otherness, rescue me from the ogre of myself. I’d grieve, yes, but then watch my life bloom, unfettered by bigness, by brownness. I really believed this—until I saw his feet, which were so handsome—sophisticated, even—compared to mine.

I saw them on a cool November night. We were in his kitchen drinking Two Buck Chuck as he fried salmon burgers and his roommates watched television. His long torso in a white T-shirt was so satisfying there, spatula in hand, rough whoosh of thick, sandy-blond hair on his head and gumdroppy lips saying something or other, basketball shorts low on his hips, when I looked down—how had I never seen them before?—to his feet on the terra-cotta kitchen tile. They were lovely. I almost blurted it out. Fizzy heat needled up my spine and sloshed down the front of my head as I thought how my own feet, shoved suddenly deeper into my shoes, were a particular kind of not beautiful, a big that attached to and amplified my blackness, my poorness, my body-bigness.

Laila Ali says she gets pedicures because her feet are a women’s size twelve and (she laughs) nobody wants to see them big old thangs looking more mannish than they already do. Her words, uttered in a husky voice with a toss of her straightened hair, have memed in my head for years. There’s no hiding big feet (like hers, mine are twelves or thirteens), even in hyper-feminine ballet flats, or carefree Havaianas, or high heels. And my feet are often dry because I never apply the shea butter I buy. And I rarely get pedicures because they’re expensive and exploitative and don’t actually change the size and shape of your feet.

My feet have always struck me as my tell of otherness, even more than my nose, or hair, or weight. No matter the private schools, the white-sounding voice, the white-sounding name, or how I put white people at ease, especially rich white people, my feet seemed to cast me out of belonging, if only in my mind, which is enough. Years ago, my uncle saw me barefoot and said, “I’d love to have those big wide bear paws!” He said it admiringly but looking down at my “bear paws” pressing heavily into the wood kitchen floor, I flushed. I was maybe ten when I couldn’t play-wear my mom’s shoes anymore, and somehow that day encapsulated something horribly wrong about me to myself. I was just a child, but I had outgrown my own mother.

A handsome military doctor once held my feet in the White House infirmary. I was spending a semester of law school as a clerk in Obama’s Office of White House Counsel. That day, in keeping with the rest of the internship, should have felt rare and exciting. But anxiety about my feet dragged me out of the moment’s headiness—what it was like to get up from my White House desk, get a bottle of White House–branded ibuprofen from the first-aid kit, then get permission to leave my memo on presidential power unfinished and visit the doctor’s office down the wide, curving wood steps. The doctor came in the room, realized he forgot his pen, and left to get it. I almost left, too, despite the ripping pain in my ankle, because he was white and tall and polished, and I was afraid my long wide feet, which he’d have to touch to examine, would displease or bother him. I started to sweat. My pulse picked up. If he noticed me freaking out, he ignored it. He sent me home with an Ace bandage and ice and orders to wear sneakers to work for two weeks, which I did not do; sneakers make your feet look bigger.

Did you know that when you go into Payless, and sneak to the size thirteen women’s aisle after pretending to pause in the size ten aisle, all you see are big Black women? It’s the same at Nordstrom Rack. Why we statuesque, thick women of African descent have big feet, I don’t know. Is it Africa, or miscegenation? Maybe our feet come from a robust gumbo of West African and Scottish and English and Native American blood and are unique to us in human history. Maybe they are an adaptation to standing all day in fields, hard at work and watchful, in rare autumn snows and dependable summer heat, or to running toward self-liberation. Maybe our feet survived because we, and they, were the fittest.

If I’d grown up with the Black and Mexican side of my family, where plenty of us are pudgy with stone-heavy bones and everyone’s brown and nobody’s white, I’d be less messed up about this. I might see my feet as a connection to my ancestors and their ingenious survival. But I grew up with my WASPy family, with ceaseless diet-and-binge cycles and forced trampoline jumping before dinner and no one, nothing, that reflected my body kindly. I went to an all-white school and, in second grade, had to announce my weight to the class every Monday so my little white school friends could help me make better choices in the lunch line. My mother, who is white, grabbed my fat and said it would kill me, or no boy would ever dance with me, let alone like me. My feet became the location where these lies about myself—which I took as truth—rested.

“Hand me your plate,” Holt said, lifting a burger. Silently, I did. I was smiling, but whatever confidence I once felt, or fun lust I once signaled, had disappeared. Fear replaced it. The place behind my solar plexus tightened. I chastised myself for my wishfulness—as if Holt would choose me, smart and witty and even pretty as I was, upon seeing through my feet just how completely I differed from the fetching white girls I presumed he dated (at least one of his exes was white, and petite, and cute; I’d seen a photo). This was the danger of pursuing the white male gaze: if it landed on you wrong, it hurt.

Holt wasn’t the first white guy I’d tried getting close to in order to game the social hierarchy. It never went the way I wanted it to. Years before Holt, whom I met in law school, there was Tucker. We were undergrads studying abroad in Italy. Tucker had a shag of blond hair falling across his forehead and a pack of Camel cigarettes flip-flipping in his fingers. He was tall enough that his blue eyes looked down at the top of my head from his Lacoste-and-Top-Siders perch. He was in a band, voted liberal, and laughed easily. We smoked joints in my living room, lay back on the scratchy brown couch, and I got much higher than him though he smoked much more than me. We drank beer and spritz at bars in the piazza while he glanced, confidently and continually, at my braless chest. He took me to see the Dave Holland Quintet in a dusty, golden town outside Florence, and I remember pretending it was a date, which it may have been. Beforehand, we ate hard-boiled eggs and caviar at the linoleum kitchen table in his apartment across the Arno. The sun was low and fell across the table, our food in a slab of goldenrod light. I’d never had fish eggs before, and he cracked a joke about our meal being from a Baby’s First Caviar kit. This delighted me—that he felt comfortable referencing caviar around me, that I was “baby” and he was orienting me to his world.

Back in America, we stayed in touch. Tucker was from Connecticut but spent time in New York City, where I lived. He could be pushy—I remember him telling me that, as a boy, when his nanny wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he peed on her coat—and I accepted his mild coerciveness as if it were an overture to my transformation. At a party on the Lower East Side, I sat on a bed, blurry and bobbing from liquor and leaning torpidly against the headboard, when Tucker walked across the dark room and sat beside me. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “There you are.” “Hi,” I answered. He pulled a joint from his pocket and lit it; his arm touched my arm. “Want some?” he asked. I said nah, and he asked again, and I said no. “Come on,” he said languidly, laughing, his face very close and his eyes on mine. “No, really, I’m drunk enough.” “Here,” he said, and, not moving his eyes, put the wet end of the joint between my lips. I felt his fingertips press more and more firmly on my mouth and I inhaled, though I didn’t want to. I wondered if he would kiss me, if this was it, the moment after which I would no longer have to be me. He didn’t, and it wasn’t. Quite the opposite. Soon, he’d snort coke with my girlfriend in a bar bathroom, and they’d hook up and spend half the night together. She was a film producer’s daughter from Manhattan with long golden hair she flat-ironed, pale skin, a little waist, and boobs that were like perky water balloons. I felt, at last, the wrecking ball of certainty that Tucker didn’t want me. I had not fooled him.

Henry was a white law student with a velvety buzz cut who took caffeine pills and talked a little bit like Chandler from Friends. He was senior to me in the Obama campaign, where I worked after college. I drove him home one night and could tell from the looks on our colleagues’ faces that they thought we were going to hook up. The freeway was empty and we sped to San Francisco. As I leaned over the pool table at a bar below his apartment, I felt his hand slap my ass, then grab it. Because I wasn’t cool, wasn’t the kind of girl who knew what to do, I told him “Stop!” like I actually meant it. Later, drunk, we sprawled across his floor mattress. There was a moment of quiet in which he popped up and walked barefoot to the kitchen for a long swig from a bottle next to the sink, and then another. When he came back to the mattress his lips and chin smelled like fresh scotch. He got up for another sip a few minutes later. I remember thinking, But we’ve already brushed our teeth… I felt the curdled energy in my gut say, I think he’s an alcoholic. Outside, the North Beach bars kicked their last patrons to the foggy sidewalks, and wasted hollers mingled with the sounds of idling trucks and Spanish-speaking delivery guys. Henry whispered, “Pull the blinds.” He curled his arm around me and stroked my arm and the side of my stomach. I felt the familiar, thrilling mix of nerves and possibility—this must be the beginning of him seeing me as a suitable girl. He ran his fingers along my arm, along the dip of my waist, down to my fingers, back up to my shoulder. I was turned on and hopeful, full of a throbbing buzz, but I was also tense. For the transformation to happen, he’d have to have access to my body—but not full access. I’d have to somehow conceal the telling parts, like my feet. I stayed frozen with my back to him, staring at the wall against which the mattress was shoved. I wanted him to touch me more daringly, decisively. I also longed for the freedom that might enable me to do the same. But I was too afraid of offending him. Eventually his hand stopped its slide, grew heavy with the relaxation of sleep. And that—that nothing—was it. The next morning, he said, “Hey, I’m sorry about last night, it was just instinct. You were a warm body.” I hadn’t asked, but I interpreted the comment as a signal of morning-after mortification. I replied, “No worries.”

That summer, I met Blake in the law firm kitchen where secretaries brewed coffee and lawyers filled their cups. I was a summer associate, and he’d already finished law school and been at the firm a few years. He wore San Francisco–slim khaki pants, brown suede shoes, bright yellow socks, and a crisp pink button-down shirt with Burberry-checked cuffs. “Too much, right?” he said, looking at the fabric on his pale, hairy wrist. “I’m gettin’ razzed for this shirt. Time to give it to Goodwill.” He was muscled and beautiful in a creamy way, Caravaggio’s Bacchus years later, running up the BART steps with a five-o’clock shadow and weekend-surfer’s tan every Monday morning. He seemed to come from money. He had backpacked or cycled on nearly every continent. He had gone to Harvard and Stanford. Philanthropic with a lusty appetite for food and wine, he taught me to use Maldon salt and he published op-eds about public policy in places like the Wall Street Journal.

Whatever those couple of months with Blake were, they ended sour and nasty. Before it ended, though, it took the same intoxicating, baffling form as so many of my relationships with gleaming, ticks-the-boxes white guys: we played a quasi-romantic, chaste, not-quite-right version of house that never ascended from the runway. I wanted them to want me, and to change me. (They wanted me for something, too, but more on that later.) We had dressed-up dinners at smart restaurants; we talked on the phone until batteries died; we had pet names (Skivvies, Cafecito, Bookie, Savalita); we shared forks and toothbrushes; we watched movies under blankets; we spent weekends together, starting with a Friday-night sleepover and ending with Sunday brunch.

We never even kissed, but once we were in this odd dynamic, people doted and cooed like they do around young love. The guys sometimes leaned into it. A deli owner handed me and Henry our paper-wrapped cheesesteaks and, looking me over pointedly, said to him, “You’re a lucky man, my friend.” My heart raced. Henry smiled and didn’t correct the assumption, and neither did I. Meeting me at the parking lot beside his building and tossing the familiar attendant a twenty for my overnight stay, Henry said, “He thinks we’re fucking, don’t you think?” I didn’t answer. Was this an invitation? A worry? A fear? The limbo exhausted me—the sense of being allowed in, but not wanted. Or wanted, but not allowed in. I slept at Henry’s apartment so often his roommate, who generally slept at his girlfriend’s house, asked how long we’d been dating. I said, “We’re not.” But I said it in a way that left room for interpretation. That night, we watched Rosemary’s Baby and gossiped about campaign volunteers. My bare feet were on his lap. He rubbed them for a minute but it seemed halfhearted. It was excruciating! I barely breathed and didn’t enjoy it and couldn’t pay attention to the movie until he paused (or was he done?) and leaned forward to grab his Tecate, at which point I moved my feet under the blanket.

Blake and I once had dinner at a fancy restaurant we both wanted to try. He made us a reservation for a Friday night and we drove there in his car. The waitress asked us where we wanted to sit and I said, “Anywhere, surprise us”; she walked us through the dark, Pacific Heights restaurant, a blur of mahogany and gold light, tinkling glasses and low chatter, to a section where each small table had one loveseat instead of chairs, so Blake and I ate our exorbitant, egg-topped burgers side by side, legs touching. When he stretched before dessert, he put his arm around me. The waitress arrived with our cake and said to me, “You’re so pretty, by the way.” And instantly, for just a second, I broke character, flashed my cards: I whipped around to Blake and cried, “See?” as if we’d been fighting about whether I was beautiful—him saying No, you aren’t, me saying Yes, I am—and the waitress had just proved me right.

We drove to Blake’s apartment. From the passenger seat, I moved playfully to grab the manual gearshift as we hit a hill. He laughed and said how frisky I was, grinning. Inside, we lay on his bed while he told me how fit he was, almost too fit to find a challenging workout, he said. He was in basketball shorts by then and his warm, hairy legs were stretched out, his thigh next to mine like a golden rock. Should I touch it? Did he want me to? I got up and went to get lip balm from my purse. Bent over and rummaging, I felt him come up behind me, laying his body on top of mine and sighing, resting his stubbled cheek on my back. (This was one of the most awkward and inscrutable physical encounters I’ve ever experienced; I felt both like a table he was resting his exhausted body on and a lover about to have rear-entry sex.) I slept over, but on the couch; we’d started a cryptic European movie and at some point he said, “I’m exhausted,” stood, and walked to his bedroom. There didn’t seem to be an invitation to follow him. A moment later he called, “There’s blankets in the hutch!” The sense of being allowed in, but not wanted. Or wanted, but not allowed in.

Not long after, we had dinner in a Financial District bar. Slanting into me with heavy, buzzed affection and scrawling his name on the receipt, he sighed and said, “Oh, the day will come when you’ll hate Blake Williams…” I didn’t respond, but it plucked me out of the foamy reverie I was lolling in beside him at the bar. The next week, I met him at his apartment after a day of moot court competition (a debate team for law students). I took a quick shower while he answered work emails and fried us eggs for dinner. We made salads in mixing bowls. Mouth full of greens, he said, “So my friend is coming up next weekend. Where should I take her?” “Your friend?” “Yeah, well”—he put another forkful in his mouth—“friend is the word I use. But I need someplace romantic.” “Ah,” I said. He chomped his food. “So. Any ideas?”

I remember sitting at Plant Cafe with a girlfriend, the brackish smell of the bay and shrill seagull calls in the air, and going on and on about Blake and the “girlfriend” development, energized by my own confusion, by his alternating warmth and chilliness, by my parallel certainties that he was into me (his behavior) and that there was no way he could be into me (my appearance, my identity, his behavior), by how he reinforced, maybe unknowingly, my googly-eyed longing and then elbowed me away. I insisted to my friend that my confusion was not unfounded: that same night he asked me where to take the girlfriend, he also gave me a CD of slow, swinging Rubén González and one of his oldest T-shirts, thin and blue and fragrant with his body.

I met this girl a couple weeks later at a birthday party. She was like a doe, quiet in the bashful way of Jackie O, with a delicate, small body. Her snow-colored prettiness had the precision of a porcelain doll. She had brown hair that lay across her back and shoulders in smooth waves and she kept her purse on her lap. Her skin had the color and poreless clarity of a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. On Dating White Guys While Me
• 2. Don’t Let It Get You Down
• 3. White Doll
• 4. Dear White Sister
• 5. Bad Education
• 6. To Wit, and Also
• 7. State
• 8. Nearly, Not Quite
• 9. On the Sources of Cultural Identity
• 10. The Body Endures
• 11. Fat in Ways White Girls Don’t Understand
• 12. Little Satin Bomber Body
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright