Essayist Emily Bernard writes with deep curiosity and honesty about bodies, families, race, art, friendship, violence, and memory—and the refractions of all these things in American culture. As she mentions below, she has also written about the experience and aftermath of being stabbed, along with six other people, in a coffee shop in New Haven in 1994. Born and raised in Nashville, she received her BA and PhD in American studies from Yale. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance she further considers the white writer, critic, and photographer whose fascination with Black culture involved him deeply in that movement. Her essay collection Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine was awarded the 2020 LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. Her work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Yale Review, Harper’s, O, the Oprah Magazine, Oxford American, and Best American Essays. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont and lives in South Burlington. She was interviewed by Molly McCully Brown at the Glen Workshop in Seattle.
Image: At the Glen Workshop this summer, we’ve talked about how sometimes people presume that they understand our stories. So I want to start by asking you to introduce yourself and your work on your own terms.
Emily Bernard: Of all my identities, the newest and in some ways the most liberating is realizing that I am a survivor of violent crime, and that will never leave me. There’s a kind of liberation in knowing that this is something I’ll be wrestling with for the rest of my life, when so many other things are uncertain. My maternity, for instance, is a different animal now that my children are nineteen and need a different kind of mothering. But sadly, since August 7, 1994, the effects of the knife have remained constant. There are some things I think about every day: Every day I think about Carl Van Vechten, who I wrote my first book on, about my children, about my mother, about the stabbing, and about God. Maybe because these are mysteries I don’t know how to resolve: how to be a mother, how to be a God-loving, God-fearing human being, how to attend to the past, how to give back. Maybe these are all just containers for that big question: What do we owe?
Image: That feels like an animating question throughout Black Is the Body. In that book, there’s this notion of inheritance as both a gift and a thing that weighs on us. What are you carrying every day—in your work and in the world?
EB: I love that question, and I think the companion question is, what can we let go of? As I get older and am concerned about my knees, I think I have a right to let some things go from the litany of things I carry. One of them is race. I don’t think about it every day. That’s not a forgetting, of course, but I am privileged to have been able to design a life where racism doesn’t intrude upon my daily activity. It comes with getting older, making certain choices, living in this country, being an intellectual, having a university job in a place like Vermont. I have peace of mind, though at a cost.
I think about what God wants of me every day, all day. I don’t always do that thing. I’m sure God doesn’t want me to spend three hours watching The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, but when I do, I watch it as a person who thinks about God. And in fact, there are people on that show who are contending with the question of God—maybe using different vocabularies than I would. But that question is part of my inheritance. I always say my patron saint is Peter, God’s favorite knucklehead: I have to learn my lessons the hard way.
I am going to be fifty-eight this summer, and I think a lot about winnowing down and this concept of Swedish death cleaning. Maybe that’s how we should live our emotional lives too. What can we let go of?
My parents collected everything. As I was going through the house I grew up in, where my father died, I found my baby book, which is a relic from another time. It was full of facts, like the exact time I was born. When I was younger, this kind of thing fascinated me, but what relevance does it have now to this adult person? When I was younger, I believed very strongly in right and wrong. I’m not saying that’s irrelevant now, but I have less faith in the right and wrong of things. I’m more interested in the how of things. How did things come to be?
I like the discipline of letting go. As an artist, I think about the sand mandalas Tibetan monks make and dismantle. For me, that is an ideal: to make beautiful art and then be able to walk away from it. Because again, the material my parents left behind is now in my house. Do I want my children to have to deal with that? Once I overheard my daughter say, “My parents have these gigantic bookshelves.” I thought, my goodness, these books are oppressive things in her life.
My twins are not writers, and sometimes I wonder what it costs them to have a mother who is. I know they will be liberated by my death in ways I can’t anticipate, because I’ve seen it happen. I hope I live long enough that they’re absolutely tired of me. I hope that will be a privilege for all of us. But you can love someone and also be held hostage to their memories, their inheritances, and everybody should have the chance to decide what their lives will be.
I carry my parents’ and grandparents’ histories very proudly. I feel I’m a living witness. I think of how, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny says to Janie, “Ah wanted to preach a sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me.” And that is why I do most of the things I do: Nanny, my mother, my grandmother, my aunts—but that’s something I’ve chosen. No one asked me.
Image: You said you ask yourself every single day what God wants from you. You don’t often write explicitly about religion, but it is clearly so present for you personally. I wanted to ask you about how religion shows up in your work, and doesn’t, how you find that balance, and if it’s changed over the course of your writing life.
EB: Yeah, even to use the word Christian feels funny. That part of my identity is exciting and nourishing but also scary to me, because that word means something to many people in this country that’s so different from what it means to me. I’m absolutely terrified of some of those people, and yet we pray to the same God. But to declare myself a Christian—it’s because of this journal, and because of theologians like Richard Rohr that I can say it out loud. But I wouldn’t say it everywhere out loud.
It was such a part of my life growing up. I had a friend, and we both grew up in the Episcopal Church and fell feverishly in love with God and Jesus and the story. When we were younger, she thought she had stigmata. So much of my consciousness begins with being in church and listening to words I didn’t understand but knew were invested with so much emotion and history.
My family went to a chapel in Nashville that was an extension of this Black Du Boisian community of racial uplift and civil rights connected with Fisk University and Meharry Medical College. These were vital, rebellious institutions of learning built in the face of white racism. Talk about Black excellence. I saw it every week at church, in physicians and others who worked to serve their community and serve God. Growing up with those examples, the idea of service was romantic and erotic and intellectual and political.
Of course, I remember the annoyances too—church going on forever, and the old ladies with their perfume and talcum powder hugging me, and of course all the infighting. My mother ended up feeling very alienated in our church. So the romantic view leaves out a lot, but still I saw what was possible.
As I get older, I know I’m going to be testifying more and more openly. I don’t want to leave this out, and I don’t want to be afraid of this. When I first came to college, it was so looked down upon to go to church or talk about God seriously. I did not have the courage. I remember going to the Episcopal chapel on Yale’s campus, and all the observations were different from what I grew up with, and I couldn’t deal with it. I was too far away from home in every respect. I didn’t go back to church for at least another ten years, and I was a bit adrift. I wanted to fit in to this new way of being, and it seemed to me that being an intellectual meant you had to deny most of faith, and I didn’t have the courage to challenge that. I did take a religious studies class, but it was taught in a very secular way.
But it is still part of me—the source of my vitality, my joy, my humor, my love for language. A couple of years ago I was asked to write reflections on some passages from Scripture. My pastor from my home church in Vermont helped me. Doing that, I realized how much of the Bible I had internalized just by going to church for years and years. I felt it. I felt it.
This is a strange analogy, it’s been proven scientifically that for a drug user, even just talking about using excites the body the way a drug would. I think the language of God works the same way.
I never doubt that writing is the way I love God. I fail half the time, but I also feel sure that in the relationship it’s understood I’m trying.
Image: I love this notion that an incarnate relationship with God shows up on the page through the act of writing, even when you’re writing about something that has, on its face, nothing to do with God.
EB: I’ll never forget that line in Chariots of Fire: “When I run, I feel his pleasure.” When I’m writing well, I don’t know any other experience where I feel more perfectly aligned, more perfectly useful. Toni Morrison says, “Everything I see or do…everything actual is an advantage when I am writing.” When you’re writing well, everything suddenly has a purpose. Every slight, every injury, every bad behavior on your part or the part of others. I don’t know who I would be without it—probably a very destructive person with no avenue for release or making peace. I often go to the page mad as hell and then come out laughing. Something has happened in the rhythm of the words.
I’ve come to ask myself in the last couple of years: Does experience precede language, or does language precede experience? As artists, we’re trying to capture experience that is unwieldy in and of itself. We can’t see all the things happening in this room right now, all the molecules bopping around the atoms, our past selves, our ancestors hovering over us. God knows what we’d see under different lights. Writing is the only way I have to invite those spirits in. For other people, maybe it’s cooking or something else, but for me, writing is all I’ve got. It’s a way of living and inhabiting space and time and joining the great conversation. I believe in that more and more as I get older.
Our pastor, who has since retired, said something so beautiful at Easter. He said, we have to understand these things metaphorically, because no human language can capture the essence of God. It’s all a kind of approximation. I thought, I can get down with this guy, because I also believe that. The impossibility of knowing God’s will is like the impossibility of making art. I’m always trying to make sense of my experience and never quite getting there, and in a way I hope that never ends. If I could write the thing that says, “This is what it all means,” then what purpose would I have on earth? The impossibility of the task is what gives us joy. That’s what believing in God teaches me.
I don’t know if I was supposed to get stabbed, but certainly I was supposed to be an adoptive parent. I promise you that I never wanted to be pregnant—it was something I was never curious about—but I really wanted to be a mother. It was an awareness I suddenly had the courage to follow through on. My father was an ob-gyn, and I thought he would insist that I fight to get pregnant to the bitter end, but he didn’t. For all of his flaws, he was a godly man, and I was his daughter, and at this important turning point in my life, he was right with me. I must confess I only really understood this about him after he was dead. I feel I owe him a lot of reconsidering, if not an outright apology, because as he got older I didn’t let him be different from the father he had been when I was a child, with whom I did not get along.
Image: And who was that father?
EB: A much younger man who believed it was his right to rule the family like his small kingdom, because I’m sure that’s the way his father ruled his family. My father didn’t believe it was his job to build emotional relationships with his children. That was foreign to him, and I felt entitled to it, so we were at cross-purposes for a long time. He softened and I softened, but I was still very stubborn and self-protective. We went through a typical arc where I was daddy’s little girl, and then I got my period and became a hormonal teenage monster, and he was not interested. We fought a lot, until I stopped defining myself in opposition to him and left home and had to make my own way and realized things were less black and white. To his credit, he kept trying to love me. Maybe he understood that that child who adored him was still there. When he died, we were on very good terms, which I’m grateful for.
Image: That’s a remarkable gift.
EB: It is. Because true forgiveness didn’t happen. I couldn’t just forgive him for being who he was. I think he forgave me for being who I was, but I held on to being that outraged daughter raised by someone who was not a feminist. To be fair, he never told me I could not be a writer, a professor, an intellectual. He told me I could marry a Morehouse man. He thought, “I have a smart daughter. She could be a smart man’s wife.” Happily, my mother knew her husband well, and she also knew me, and she prepared me. She said, “You close your mouth, Emily.” She let him say what he was going to say, and then we were going to do what we were going to do. That’s how she ruled her half of the roof. She was determined that I would lead an independent life, but she was subtle.
I didn’t understand at the time that he was trying to offer me the greatest status he could imagine, which was to be like my mother, the wife of a prominent man. That’s all he knew, and he let it go. Once my mother had said, “No, we’re not doing that with her,” he didn’t try to force my hand. So I have a lot to be grateful for.
My grandmother was kind of forced down. She wanted to divorce, and she would flee to her mother, but her mother would say, “You’re married forever. That’s what God says. Now go back home.” Thankfully, my grandmother outlived my grandfather, so she got to have a second life, because she was freed naturally from a marriage that was hard for her.
But about my dad, I really didn’t take the time. He was also quite secretive, a very private person, so it wasn’t easy to get to know him. I think when he was ready to have me know him a little bit, I wasn’t ready, and I regret that deeply. If I could say anything to a young person, I’d say, just try to be open. I certainly didn’t understand that my father was a person until I ran into some hardships that forced me into an empathetic relationship with him. I felt that was God’s hand. I like to think of myself as fairly open, but I reveal myself to be as stubborn and set in my ways as my parents, and it sometimes takes a medicine ball for me to realize that I don’t know everything.
Image: You mentioned becoming more open about your faith as you get older. Does that come with some trepidation?
EB: When I was younger, I didn’t think I was qualified to speak about God because I didn’t have a divinity degree.
Image: If I could pause the trajectory of my life, the first thing I would go do is get a divinity degree.
EB: Same! It’s funny, the writer Garth Greenwell has an MDiv, and he’s not religious. He’s wrestling. It’s interesting to see how he thinks about faith, and I’m curious about his path. We had a talk about it, and I told him, I see God at work in your work. I don’t know how he felt about that, but I had to say it.
Image: He resists the description of his work as religious, but he clearly has an intellectual interest in it, and many deeply spiritual writers are moved by his work.
EB: I have dear writer friends who don’t at all believe in God and find the whole thing ridiculous. But at this point in my life, there are just things I’m not willing to question or qualify or explain. I don’t think I could be close with a certain kind of atheist who wants to live in a kind of cynicism, without wonder, who wants to undermine wonder. I feel I can’t be free around them.
Image: In an essay for Image issue 118, “What Is Touching,” you described figuring out how to be both available to your daughters and available to the page as one of the great problems of your life. I wonder if you’d talk a little bit about how that negotiation has played out over the course of your writing life.
EB: When I was a kid, all I did was read. My mother would even let me take books to dinner parties. I think now about what a loving gesture that was. I think the question is how to let your kids be themselves but also remain a person yourself. I learned so much from my daughters, and I miss them. I miss the way they educated me every day, through everything from the music they listened to to the little challenges they would bring home from school. Now they’re nineteen and in college. We’re in frequent contact, but it’s hard to accept. I wrote an essay about that part of our lives being over as a way of coping with my own grief. It’s actually about one of my daughters going to Japan on a study abroad program.
I struggled, of course, when they were younger, literally carving up time in the desperate search for time to write, but actually I think the struggle was good for the work. I mean, I cherished every thirty-minute block of time, and I think that shows up in the work. I look back at some of those essays and think, God, I really struggled to find the time to do that. I remember all the things I pushed away to be able to relax into that narrative and tell that story.
Them leaving has been a seismic shift in thinking about identity. I am still very much a mother, but it’s a different charge now. When you’re a mother of young children, you’re constantly protecting these little people in your platoon from the hand grenades and tripwires and enemies and friendly fire. And at the end of each day you think, whew, I got them through the day.
Now they’re living their own lives. They’re independent thinkers; they’re not dependent on me. I hope they’re making good decisions. I hope they know they can come to me if they need me. But they make every decision, and that’s a good thing. So what am I called to do as a mother now, as someone who still cherishes that identity? I remember a close friend from childhood whose mother, as soon as she left home, took over her room and made it into a sewing room. Back then I felt that was awful, but now I completely understand this mother who said, “Let me not waste a moment living in the past. Let me decide who I am.” She’s someone I still really admire, in that she embraced every stage of life. Whereas with my mother, our house was sort of a mausoleum, like something out of Great Expectations, Miss Havisham style. And I loved it that way, of course, because I was still the center of the story.
So, as we speak, I’m trying to figure it. I’ll be honest with you: I feel very lost. I didn’t realize that with my mother, the empty nest was the story of her later years. She wanted me to go off and have a life, but it was very painful for her.
When my turn came, I thought I could outsmart this by getting a bunch of jobs and fellowships and things. I thought I could distract myself from the loneliness of their absence, but it’s not true. It’s something you can’t outrun. I really am living in the loss of them. And they don’t grieve the same way. I’ll send them baby pictures, and they’ll ask me, “Why are you sending us these? Why are you spending your day looking at baby pictures?” It’s over. They don’t want to be those little girls anymore.
It’s terrible to recognize in yourself the violence of motherhood. If I could, I’d just stick them in my pocket. I guess it’s because I feel this powerlessness that is of course just part of being a human being on the planet. I know they’re going to have to have their hearts broken. They’re going to make choices they regret, and it doesn’t help them to try to prevent that. I’ve learned more from the times I’ve failed and fallen on my face than from my achievements. I always say that with every win, it’s the same email: Congratulations! But every failure is different, with its own subject line, and you have to figure out who you are, what you believe, in those moments of loss and grief. Unfortunately, as Richard Rohr says, not all suffering leads to enlightenment, but there is no enlightenment without suffering. Goddamn if that is not true.
And motherhood is not a neutral thing. It’s not neutral as a verb or a noun. The best-case scenario is that they outlive me. There are tripwires everywhere. If you don’t do it right, you might do it utterly wrong. There is no way to be neutral in your child’s life.
Image: It’s strangely comforting to hear you talk about being actively inside a period of loneliness and casting around and feeling a little lost. I wonder if you see that showing up in a changing relationship to your work.
EB: I think so, yes. At the Glen Workshop I met a woman who said, “I’m living in the middle of my choices. I have no choice but to be open.” I love that. It’s good when you realize you don’t have it all figured out. The last few years have been pretty tumultuous for me personally, due to a range of family-related troubles and changes. It sounds so obvious, but Covid taught me that a year is just a series of days. It took being stuck in one place to realize that time really does march on, regardless of what we do. You really are inventing your life every day. All there is is the sun rising and setting, and we make meaning out of it. In the same way, words are just words, and we imbue them with meaning. We have that power. That’s the divine in us.
One day when my daughters were four or five, I was trying to read to them after school, and they kept laughing because somebody had passed gas during circle time. I said very seriously, “Excuse me, girls. When I was five years old, I passed gas in circle, and it was the most humiliating moment of my life.” They started laughing their little five-year-old heads off. I mean rolling on the ground. I had never seen that story as funny. It was my private shame. And I brought it up to shame them, and it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. They were like, “Put the book away. Tell that gas story again!”
That, to me, is something divine. When you have something broken in you, and you let somebody else breathe into it with that hidden ingredient you never would have thought of, like adding a little Tabasco sauce or honey or brown sugar, and oh my God, it’s actually tasting interesting now. And we forget to do that. I think hopefully the pleasure of getting older is that, since nobody likes a grumpy old person, we have to learn to take ourselves less seriously.
Image: And is that happening in your work? Do you find yourself taking your work less seriously?
EB: That’s my goal. When I take it too seriously, that’s when I don’t work my work. I’m just paralyzed at the easel. But when I think of the work as an extension of myself, it’s better.
Within the last couple of years, I’ve had the privilege of a lot of contemplation. I used to believe that the faith was in service of the work. I now believe that my work is in service of my faith, and that enables me to take myself a lot less seriously. It also answers the struggle of feeling like I’m a serious intellectual and I don’t want anyone to know I believe in God. Now I just take all of that less seriously. It’s an advantage of gray hair. I don’t have to prove I’m an adult. I can wear blue nails.
Picasso said he spent his whole life trying to learn to paint as a child again. As a writer, I want to learn to live as a child again, to wonder again, to say, “Wow, look at that leaf. Look at the ladybug.” That’s the privilege of childhood, and it’s where we learn to fall in love with art. I want to deliver that to the reader in this joyless world where people are trying to punish each other all the time. I’d like to be someone who can interrupt wherever I can with wonder.
If you are a certain type of young person, you are so afraid of being embarrassed, and that was me. So I try to embarrass myself a little every day in front of my daughters, just to lose something every day. I think Richard Rohr says he tries to humiliate himself every day just to help deal with pride. He says that in Falling Upward, a book about embracing what failure can teach us in the second half of life. A woman I didn’t even know directed me to that book, and it was the book I needed. Something was happening in me, and I didn’t have a language for it, but Rohr had the story. I reached a point of realizing that I no longer needed things I used to need. I understood, finally, that salvation was not in the material world. I had read that; I believed it intellectually; but I didn’t know it. I had outgrown the need to be the fastest, the best, the most, the first. But I needed other things—things that existed in stories people had been telling for years. Nothing new.
Vivian Gornick once said to me she wanted to be able to leave behind something of lasting value. I thought that was hilarious, because hasn’t she done that twenty times? But no, not to her satisfaction.
I want to learn some lessons. I want that to show up in my work. I want my life to be in alignment with my work, with whatever purpose my life is meant to serve. I want to walk that path as precisely as I can and be faithful to it, however hard it is, for the rest of my life. And I don’t think that I could have said that before. It wasn’t as clear. The writing is an avenue, a vocabulary, a medium, but I think the exploration of faith comes first. I am entering a period where witnessing to that truth is what I have to do.
James Baldwin talked about the importance of witnessing. I’ve spent a lot of time reading writers’ archives, and because of that I feel I owe something. I’ve learned so much from the lives of people who made mistakes and came back from them and had regrets but left a record behind for others. I don’t know if I’d have the courage to leave all my papers behind, but I try to write as honestly about my life as I can, because isn’t that what we’re here for? If my mistakes don’t help you, then what’s the good of them?
I believe deeply in a younger generation of writers, especially younger women who are challenging traditional ways of thinking and writing about identity. It’s such a pleasure to be welcomed into conversations with people who are following a similar path and have much to teach you. I want to stay open to revision. I want to stay open to learning. The people I’ve watched age with the most bitterness are people who just can’t accept that the world they grew up in is no more. And I can feel that in myself, that resistance to just letting go. I have a need for things to stay the same, to go as I want them to go. And every day there are opportunities to accept that challenge.
What I wrote in “What Is Touching,” about God, time, death, intimacy, and ghosts, felt so important to say. And it was scary. I was writing in a different way, trying to write in between things and find a truth in between things. It felt like going out on a limb, but I was happy to be challenged in a new kind of vulnerability.
Image: I love hearing you talk about the things you want to learn or change or grow more graceful in, rather than what you want your writing to achieve. Because we have so little control over that—just as we have so little control over what cataclysmic things happen in our lives.
EB: We all want stability. We want to know where our next meal is coming from, what our job will be tomorrow, who we’ll love, that they’ll love us back. Since life is chaos, an illusion of order is important and necessary. In our work we need a beginning, middle, and end. But we also need to stay mindful that that’s a necessary illusion, but only an illusion.
I want to write a book about writing that would talk about the tightrope. I love the documentary about Philippe Petit, Man on Wire, and also his writing. He says to the world, “I need to do this thing”—to cross a tightrope between the towers of Notre Dame, or the Twin Towers in New York—and when you do something like that, you need dreamers to collude with. I think about that so often when writing. We’re inviting the reader into our dream. There’s a lot of faith, a lot of trust, in that, and the stakes should be high. I don’t know if Petit believes in God, but to do that you have to have faith in something. That’s what he seems to demonstrate. Of course, he’s attracted to the danger as well, but there’s a commitment to elegance in the chaos and insistence on the straight line. Before he begins, that line doesn’t exist. But he sees it somehow, and then he erects it, and then he walks across it. I often google to see if he’s still alive. One day he’ll die, and maybe he’ll die in doing the thing he loves. That’s the charge.
I think about how my grandmother greeted death. She was ready. What a blessing. My mother was ready too. She was young, only seventy, but I think she made peace with her life. My father died abruptly. I don’t know what kind of peace he made. He was on the way, I think. I think about the kind of death I want, and the kind that would be abhorrent. Being a survivor of a stabbing, death is always around the corner.
I wonder about that legacy and what it means for my daughters. There’s a purpose we’re serving in each other’s lives. I think of myself as a shepherd to them, because I am not their first mother. I’m here for this part of their journey, though I hope they’ll always need me as mother, and I pray for that. But this mother comes with baggage, and I think about what it’s like to be the children of the kind of violence I experienced, and for my daughters to have witnessed its effects. I wonder if trying to protect them from my vulnerability was actually a failure to communicate, to let them know me as a human being who had experienced something.
I guess it goes back to that question of motherhood: How much do we want to know our parents as people? How much do we want to be part of their learning to take themselves less seriously? I have a lot of questions these days.
