Re: The First Lady

On the Subject of Her Chainmail Dress

Before I started grade school, my mom worked nights, managing back of house for a chain restaurant. It was about 30 minutes away from our house. Most evenings, she’d kiss me goodnight, disappear, and suddenly reappear in the morning once I awoke. Although I’m sure it killed her to leave, I never registered it as anything other than normal.

She often wore these silk blouses printed with clocks and horse-bits. Between my then limited fashion knowledge, and what I could pull from urban radio in the 90s, I falsely identified them as Versace or Gucci, and immediately figured that we were rich. I could not understand why I could not have a Coogi sweater like Bill Cosby or the Notorious B.I.G.

There was a level of reserve and effortlessness to how my mom moved in and out of space at that point that made her seem almost immortal to me. Available to help me construct mud pies in the morning and afternoon, dressed in Versace at night as I drifted into sleep, and back to start it all again once I was awake. She was my version of Clark Kent: there to save the day, without question or concern.

I often have flashbacks to those days of watching my mom in clothes that she loved, and made her feel as invincible as I thought she was. From the silk blouses to a favorite pair of brown crepe culottes, or the pair of black leather cowgirl boots she turned to, as a last resort, to dig her car out from under the blizzard of ‘96.

I can now rationalize that my mother could not afford Gucci. I didn’t get Coogi, but I wore quite a bit of Osh-Kosh. We weren’t rich, but my mother, in her way, was a superhero. She soon dropped that late shift, sacrificing income and title, to spend more time watching me grow. She did so without much fanfare or alarm. That takes superhuman strength and a level of graceful reserve that I’m only beginning to understand and contextualize. It’s a special type of reserve that seems to be part and parcel of the female experience, especially for women of color, and especially black women. The clothed body is scrutinized in unimaginable ways. Challenged as matronly by some, too sexy and shapely for others.

If you look a certain way — white, young, thin — there seems to be a period where the idea of patient, gracious reserve can be placed on theoretic pause. See Miley Cyrus during her Bangerz phase, where we tolerated her sexual antics as normal post-adolescent rebellion. Or Britney Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1999, where we as a public gladly ushered our homespun princess into a bombshell for our gaze and consumption.

But women like my mother — darker, physically present, powerful — aren’t really given the choice as to whether to act with reserve or not. Each move, each glance has meaning. It’s less waiting to exhale, but more about knowing when to exhale, and how audible that breath is. Who will hear it? How will they respond? Each exhale a studied calculation how the fold of a blouse will land. The sway of a kick pleat signaling aggression, seduction or worse, suppression.

I’ve been thinking about Mrs. Obama in her last year, and the ways in which she was able to use the scrutiny applied to her clothes. She faced the same predicament like so many black women who have to navigate the world as mothers, women, professionals, black people. Where in 2008 she was in J. Crew trying to show she was one of us (or rather… them), she closed the year bearing her strong, brown arms, her body draped in gold and in full view. She was free. But also so full of power and influence. Not just one of us anymore, but suddenly the best of us.

Funnily enough for me, she was wearing Versace.