'For us, it’s less about the number and more about how you carry it.'
I’m fat in ways that white girls won’t understand. I’m fat in ways that my white mom didn’t understand, and still doesn’t; nearing 75, she diets and rebels, diets and rebels.
All of this is to say, I’m fat in ways that are okay because I’m black. I’ve always been thankful to be fat and black, not fat and white. My white sisters at least could look like models, so maybe they ought to. No matter what I try, I’ll never be white. There’s freedom in never. Mammy isn’t those things on her own, of course. She was mashed into that grotesque shape and then baked in the kiln of racism. “Mammy” is the lead box into which fat black women were/are shoved, and from which little holes were pierced for her wide nostrils to suck air, for her nipples to protrude and suckle white babies, for her hands to sooth feverish pink foreheads, for her mouth to speak soothing words to white fragility, for her broad brown feet to shuffle across the floors she cleaned.
Mammy’s work — washing, cooking, folding, wiping— is the work we value least. It’s the work we don’t pay, sometimes refuse even to see. It’s picking hardened food off pans with fingernails, scrubbing bits of shit from the toilet bowl, bending to shove clothes into the dryer, emptying trash bins of waxy Q-tips and tissue-wrapped tampons.
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