the things i learned from dorothy dandridge
By Caitlyn Woodall
after Morgan Parker
between these hips is black magic.
a molasses voodoo they been
stuck in for 400 years.
white bones trapped in the tar pit.
they say the mulatto is a breathing tragedy.
limboed between two identities,
they think i cry for white skin
but i know my black body
birthed the nation.
black-ish girl you are
the sex symbol they say
you are exotic.
dorothy dandridge,
mother of mulattos,
the first jezebel
that white men were allowed
to dream about.
so sad,
they thought,
that she was born in that black body.
just a drop too dark,
the rules say.
but at night these men
still imagined
that mixed mistress in their sheets
for a change.
i am not exotic.
too many generations removed,
i do not know that african
zion they speak of.
these hips are american
and i shake what this country gave me.
Caitlyn Woodall
June 3, 2020
This poem is after Morgan Parker, who unapologetically writes about her experiences as a black woman in America while also effortlessly relating her pieces to black pop culture. In that way, my poem takes after Parker in how it serves as a confrontation of gender, sexuality, and race and how it ties itself to the iconic Dorothy Dandridge, a prime figure in black American history. My poem was written shortly after I had finished reading her collection, Magical Negro, in which I came across her poem that referenced Sidney Poitier titled “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”. It was this poem that inspired me to find my muse in Dandridge and twentieth-century film.
Being the daughter of a black mother and a white father myself, Dorothy seemed to me to be a woman that felt appropriate to channel in order to confront my feelings about the fetishization of black women by white men, as her career was defined by the long-recycled cinematic trope of the tragic mulatto. Problematic in its entirety, this trope was made in order to garner white sympathy, respect, love, and lust as it forced mixed-black characters to remove themselves from their blackness and become more palatable to wider audiences. With this, the fetishization of mixed-black women has been able to thrive and persist for years, though I also acknowledge in my poem that white men had been sexualizing the black body long before the creation of films like Dorothy’s.
After combining my own frustrations that I’ve earned from having to navigate this world as a black woman along with my knowledge of the pressures that I know Dorothy had experienced in her career, this poem was born.
Listen to black voices. Respect and protect black bodies. Black lives matter and they always will.
