Maxine Beneba Clarke Character Analysis

This is my country, that much I am sure. I was born here, the child of Black British parents, in 1979, in a maternity ward of Syndey’s Ryde Hospital, on the stolen land of the Dharug people. My early ancestors were part of the Atlantic slave trade. They were dragged screaming from her homes in West Africa and chained by their necks and ankles, deep in the mouldy hulls of slave ships, destined to become free labour for the New World. If slaves were lucky, they died in transit to the Caribbean—bodies thrown overboard, washed clean of the blood, sweat and faeces in which they’d spend most of the harrowing journey. If they survived, they found themselves in a nightmare: put to work on the harshest plantations on earth, overseen by some of the cruellest masters in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. I am the descendant of those unbroken.

Despite these racial tensions, migrants of colour and their British-born children had truly made London their home. In Tottenham, a few island grocery shops had sprung up: aisles stacked with jerk seasoning, tinned ackee, smoked salt fish and bruised plantains. The occasional black hair salon could be seen, with racks of multi-coloured hair-weave pieces, giant tubs of sticky dreadlock wax and netted sleeping caps spilling onto the footpaths. After twenty or so years, a strong black community was being forged.

Cleopatra reached instinctively for one of the few coloured packets in the cheese section of the refrigerator. Bordeaux caught his young wife’s hand mid-air, recoiling in shock. In giant blue lettering, the word coon leered at them.

Again, those beasts of doubt, waking and turning, deep in my mother’s gut. What have we done? What have we done?!

Carlita Allen leaned towards me. ‘You,’ she whispered loudly, ‘are brown.’

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t realized this very obvious difference between our family and almost all of the other people we knew. My skin colour was simply a concrete matter of fact, much like the sky was blue. Carlita was right: I was brown. But until that very moment, holding my mother’s hand under the mulberry tree’s enormous fan-like leaves, it never occurred to me that being brown, rather than the pale pinkish of most of my friends and neighbors, was in any way relevant to anything.

My hand grew sweaty in Carlita’s as we walked side by side up the path towards the preschool buildings. I felt like I would burst with the unfairness of it—as if the air around me was pushing hard into my skin, bearing down. When we reached the classroom door, I dropped Carlita’s hand and looked back at her mother. Mrs Allen was still standing halfway up the front path, staring in our direction.

Inside the empty girl’s toilet block, I re-read my Student of the Week album then tore a jagged line between Jennifer’s words and the other comments. I read Jennifer’s words out loud to myself once, then twice, then four more times. I had never had anything written about me before, except for my kindergarten school reports and things the doctor wrote down in her folder when I was sick. The things Jennifer wrote were solid things now. She had grabbed them from the air when I spoke to the class, and listened to them. She had made them real.

‘Here it is!’ Carlita, whose designated bag hook was stationed next to mine, wrenched the doll from inside my bag and waved it above her head. ‘Look! Maxine has a brown doll! Look at it! It’s so ugly!’

The other kids unpacking their bags in the cloakroom turned to look. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the exclamation of disgust.

Susana, another of the girls in my class, rescued the doll from Carlita. ‘Of course it’s brown,’ she said, looking it over. ‘It’s the one that was grown especially for her. It’s her kid.’

‘I’ve never seen a brown one before,’ another girl said. ‘Pass it over here!’

[…]

‘It’s ugly,’ Carlita repeated.

‘Go away, Carlita,” Susana said firmly.

There was something different, something protruding and sticky-outty and not-quite-right about my behind. I was sure that, in time, everybody would look at my body and realise that I was some kind of circus freak: the only little girl on earth whose bottom did not align neatly with her thighs when standing in first position. When news of my enormous bottom went public, I would probably need some kind of painful, humiliating bottom-trimming operation.

I’d known somehow, when I prayed for this miracle, that there was something distinctly shameful about wanting to be something I could never be, something shameful about wanting to alter the colour of my skin—to be white. But it wasn’t about wanting to be better. I didn’t dislike being black. I didn’t think being white would make me a better person. I just wanted to be like everyone else I knew, and everyone else mostly did not look like me.

I looked around the bubbler hut. The only girls still in the game were myself; Belinda, who still had what Mrs Gerard called serious toileting issues and perpetually smelled like the wee smell that drifted out of the boys toilets; Mahana, the light brown girl who had recently started at our school with her twin brother Amira, and who wasn’t allowed to eat ham or sit in scripture classes or talk to boys; and Claire, the grade two bossy-boots.

I’d been the victor of Catch and Kiss for the last few days, but suddenly winning didn’t seem like such a victory.

‘How could Captain Cook discover Australia if there were already people here?’ I asked Mrs Hird dubiously.

‘He discovered it, because nobody knew it existed,’ Mrs Hird explained patiently. ‘Nobody had been to Australia before he arrived here as an explorer.’ She returned to writing on the blackboard, as if what she said had made perfect sense.

‘But, Mrs Hird, if the Aborigines were already here—’

‘They’re…they’re different. Only they knew they were here.’

I stared at my teacher, perplexed, as she continued writing the Explorers’ Timeline.

But the scene at the bike park just kept looping in my head. Her silence. The way they’d suddenly disappeared. I knew they were scared. I knew they were just kids. But so were we. My friend’s silence hurt more than the names we’d been called—more than seeing my brother’s bloody, grazed knee.

Slavery felt like a shameful thing to be descended from. As if it somehow made me less of a person. These people, chained, beaten, stolen, made to work for no money. These people, who had their babies sold away from them. These people, worked to death in the fields like I saw in American movies. I was them. I was these people, and they were me. I felt like I’d discovered an awful secret, something I should never speak of. I wondered if all of the people who called me and my family names and treated us badly did it because they knew. Because they knew we weren’t actual people, knew what we had once been.

As I read on, I became more and more uncomfortable. The Aboriginal characters in the book I’d been given were cheerful and simple-minded. Sarah, the matriarch of the Cleveland family, treated her son’s Indigenous wife with contempt, declaring the marriage was not real and referring to her grandchildren as blackmoor half-breeds. The tight-chested feeling started to creep in. The walls of my bedroom felt like they were slowly caving in on me. I felt the anger, throbbing again.

I sat down on my bed. Perhaps it hadn’t been that bad. Perhaps I had been oversensitive. Perhaps I’d expected too much. Maybe if I’d been tougher—more resilient—behaved differently. I would have to behave differently in high school, if the teasing started again. Teasing. That was all it had been. Just a bit of teasing. It didn’t seem so serious now, in hindsight. I would be tougher next time. I would ignore it. I was older, and I wouldn’t let it get to me the way it had before.

It was a don’t-say-a-word look. A turn-back-around-and-let’s-just-get-through-this look, at once empathetic and reprimanding. I understood. These are the cues we learn to read: the subtle gaps and shrugs and glances. The bullied know body language like bulls know red flags. To the bullied, reading body language is like having a compass: it keeps us from stumbling through dark forests, falling down cliff drops, slipping beneath fatal rapids.

‘I’m not a runner, sir. I mean, I don’t like running that much.’

Spencer looked at me, perplexed.

‘Your sister,’ he said, ‘she’s going to be a champion, Clarkey. Runs like the wind. It’s in the blood. You folks are built for it!’

‘Is there anything else going on?’ she asked me. ‘Other than a little bit of teasing?’

I stared at her, then looked around the obsessively tidy room. I thought about Timothy, with the scars up his arm, who was probably now Tina. I wondered if she’d said the words a little bit of teasing to him as well.

‘Yes—I have an eating disorder,’ I said. A girl on Degrassi Junior High, Kathleen, had an eating disorder. I’d decided an eating disorder was the kind of problem pretty white girls had. The kind of problem the counsellor could probably solve.

Standing out the front of the party girl’s house in my damp frizzy-again hair and yellow halter-neck swimmers, waiting for my mum to pick me up, I had at last come to realise that I didn’t even like most of these girls I’d somehow come to idolize. That if my best friend wasn’t around, I preferred my own company. The realisation was enormous. It was sad, and tragic, and depressing. It was comforting, glorious, and freeing. It was bittersweet.

I didn’t want Michael Callingham anywhere near my school. But the rumours of him still had a strangely pacifying effect. The bullying slowed down. The comments about my skin stopped as the pigment slowly returned to its usual coffee bean hue. Some cute, rich white boy saw the worth in me, and that was major playground cachet, not to be taken lightly.

Whenever a friend passed me a note, whenever I saw a folded piece of paper, whenever the zip on my backpack was partly undone when I returned to it after a class, my stomach would flip and turn. My mind would conjure the precision-folded lined paper with the target drawn in the centre, the vile red lettering.

This is how it haunts us.

This is how it stalks.

That afternoon, I couldn’t concentrate on studying, I sat at the desk in my room. I could hear the scissors snapping in my hands, the ugly, abusive words I’d said to Bhagita. They played over, and over, and over in my head. I felt sick about what I’d done. I wondered what Bhagita was doing; if she’d gone home and told her parents about me hassling her. I hated myself. I wanted to tear the hair extensions out of my head.

‘You keep doing this,’ the man said, shaking a finger at me. ‘You were the best speaker here.’ Then the two of them turned and made their way through the throng of well-wishers towards the photographer waiting at the other end of the hall to do a photo shoot for the local paper.

‘I like your hand. The way the brown on the back of your hand meets the white of your palm, on the edge there. It looks…cute. Like a paw or something. Like a possum paw.’

It was there, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. Walking home with my boyfriend, when I least expected it. The dry tongue. The nakedness. The can’t-think freeze.

[…]

I was Patch again. Seven years old, standing in the line for tunnel ball. You look like my dog. He’s got white and brown patches all over him too. Fetch, Patch! Go fetch, doggy!

Cecelia was a spunky black-magic pixie, sparkling and vibrant. Her hair was cornrow braided flat to her head with the long ends hanging down her back. She was beautiful, my sister. Breathtaking. Not despite her blackness, but inextricably entwined with it.

This is my country, that much I am sure. I was born here, the child of Black British parents, in 1979, in a maternity ward of Syndey’s Ryde Hospital, on the stolen land of the Dharug people. My early ancestors were part of the Atlantic slave trade. They were dragged screaming from her homes in West Africa and chained by their necks and ankles, deep in the mouldy hulls of slave ships, destined to become free labour for the New World. If slaves were lucky, they died in transit to the Caribbean—bodies thrown overboard, washed clean of the blood, sweat and faeces in which they’d spend most of the harrowing journey. If they survived, they found themselves in a nightmare: put to work on the harshest plantations on earth, overseen by some of the cruellest masters in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. I am the descendant of those unbroken.

Despite these racial tensions, migrants of colour and their British-born children had truly made London their home. In Tottenham, a few island grocery shops had sprung up: aisles stacked with jerk seasoning, tinned ackee, smoked salt fish and bruised plantains. The occasional black hair salon could be seen, with racks of multi-coloured hair-weave pieces, giant tubs of sticky dreadlock wax and netted sleeping caps spilling onto the footpaths. After twenty or so years, a strong black community was being forged.

Cleopatra reached instinctively for one of the few coloured packets in the cheese section of the refrigerator. Bordeaux caught his young wife’s hand mid-air, recoiling in shock. In giant blue lettering, the word coon leered at them.

Again, those beasts of doubt, waking and turning, deep in my mother’s gut. What have we done? What have we done?!

Carlita Allen leaned towards me. ‘You,’ she whispered loudly, ‘are brown.’

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t realized this very obvious difference between our family and almost all of the other people we knew. My skin colour was simply a concrete matter of fact, much like the sky was blue. Carlita was right: I was brown. But until that very moment, holding my mother’s hand under the mulberry tree’s enormous fan-like leaves, it never occurred to me that being brown, rather than the pale pinkish of most of my friends and neighbors, was in any way relevant to anything.

My hand grew sweaty in Carlita’s as we walked side by side up the path towards the preschool buildings. I felt like I would burst with the unfairness of it—as if the air around me was pushing hard into my skin, bearing down. When we reached the classroom door, I dropped Carlita’s hand and looked back at her mother. Mrs Allen was still standing halfway up the front path, staring in our direction.

Inside the empty girl’s toilet block, I re-read my Student of the Week album then tore a jagged line between Jennifer’s words and the other comments. I read Jennifer’s words out loud to myself once, then twice, then four more times. I had never had anything written about me before, except for my kindergarten school reports and things the doctor wrote down in her folder when I was sick. The things Jennifer wrote were solid things now. She had grabbed them from the air when I spoke to the class, and listened to them. She had made them real.

‘Here it is!’ Carlita, whose designated bag hook was stationed next to mine, wrenched the doll from inside my bag and waved it above her head. ‘Look! Maxine has a brown doll! Look at it! It’s so ugly!’

The other kids unpacking their bags in the cloakroom turned to look. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the exclamation of disgust.

Susana, another of the girls in my class, rescued the doll from Carlita. ‘Of course it’s brown,’ she said, looking it over. ‘It’s the one that was grown especially for her. It’s her kid.’

‘I’ve never seen a brown one before,’ another girl said. ‘Pass it over here!’

[…]

‘It’s ugly,’ Carlita repeated.

‘Go away, Carlita,” Susana said firmly.

There was something different, something protruding and sticky-outty and not-quite-right about my behind. I was sure that, in time, everybody would look at my body and realise that I was some kind of circus freak: the only little girl on earth whose bottom did not align neatly with her thighs when standing in first position. When news of my enormous bottom went public, I would probably need some kind of painful, humiliating bottom-trimming operation.

I’d known somehow, when I prayed for this miracle, that there was something distinctly shameful about wanting to be something I could never be, something shameful about wanting to alter the colour of my skin—to be white. But it wasn’t about wanting to be better. I didn’t dislike being black. I didn’t think being white would make me a better person. I just wanted to be like everyone else I knew, and everyone else mostly did not look like me.

I looked around the bubbler hut. The only girls still in the game were myself; Belinda, who still had what Mrs Gerard called serious toileting issues and perpetually smelled like the wee smell that drifted out of the boys toilets; Mahana, the light brown girl who had recently started at our school with her twin brother Amira, and who wasn’t allowed to eat ham or sit in scripture classes or talk to boys; and Claire, the grade two bossy-boots.

I’d been the victor of Catch and Kiss for the last few days, but suddenly winning didn’t seem like such a victory.

‘How could Captain Cook discover Australia if there were already people here?’ I asked Mrs Hird dubiously.

‘He discovered it, because nobody knew it existed,’ Mrs Hird explained patiently. ‘Nobody had been to Australia before he arrived here as an explorer.’ She returned to writing on the blackboard, as if what she said had made perfect sense.

‘But, Mrs Hird, if the Aborigines were already here—’

‘They’re…they’re different. Only they knew they were here.’

I stared at my teacher, perplexed, as she continued writing the Explorers’ Timeline.

But the scene at the bike park just kept looping in my head. Her silence. The way they’d suddenly disappeared. I knew they were scared. I knew they were just kids. But so were we. My friend’s silence hurt more than the names we’d been called—more than seeing my brother’s bloody, grazed knee.

Slavery felt like a shameful thing to be descended from. As if it somehow made me less of a person. These people, chained, beaten, stolen, made to work for no money. These people, who had their babies sold away from them. These people, worked to death in the fields like I saw in American movies. I was them. I was these people, and they were me. I felt like I’d discovered an awful secret, something I should never speak of. I wondered if all of the people who called me and my family names and treated us badly did it because they knew. Because they knew we weren’t actual people, knew what we had once been.

As I read on, I became more and more uncomfortable. The Aboriginal characters in the book I’d been given were cheerful and simple-minded. Sarah, the matriarch of the Cleveland family, treated her son’s Indigenous wife with contempt, declaring the marriage was not real and referring to her grandchildren as blackmoor half-breeds. The tight-chested feeling started to creep in. The walls of my bedroom felt like they were slowly caving in on me. I felt the anger, throbbing again.

I sat down on my bed. Perhaps it hadn’t been that bad. Perhaps I had been oversensitive. Perhaps I’d expected too much. Maybe if I’d been tougher—more resilient—behaved differently. I would have to behave differently in high school, if the teasing started again. Teasing. That was all it had been. Just a bit of teasing. It didn’t seem so serious now, in hindsight. I would be tougher next time. I would ignore it. I was older, and I wouldn’t let it get to me the way it had before.

It was a don’t-say-a-word look. A turn-back-around-and-let’s-just-get-through-this look, at once empathetic and reprimanding. I understood. These are the cues we learn to read: the subtle gaps and shrugs and glances. The bullied know body language like bulls know red flags. To the bullied, reading body language is like having a compass: it keeps us from stumbling through dark forests, falling down cliff drops, slipping beneath fatal rapids.

‘I’m not a runner, sir. I mean, I don’t like running that much.’

Spencer looked at me, perplexed.

‘Your sister,’ he said, ‘she’s going to be a champion, Clarkey. Runs like the wind. It’s in the blood. You folks are built for it!’

‘Is there anything else going on?’ she asked me. ‘Other than a little bit of teasing?’

I stared at her, then looked around the obsessively tidy room. I thought about Timothy, with the scars up his arm, who was probably now Tina. I wondered if she’d said the words a little bit of teasing to him as well.

‘Yes—I have an eating disorder,’ I said. A girl on Degrassi Junior High, Kathleen, had an eating disorder. I’d decided an eating disorder was the kind of problem pretty white girls had. The kind of problem the counsellor could probably solve.

Standing out the front of the party girl’s house in my damp frizzy-again hair and yellow halter-neck swimmers, waiting for my mum to pick me up, I had at last come to realise that I didn’t even like most of these girls I’d somehow come to idolize. That if my best friend wasn’t around, I preferred my own company. The realisation was enormous. It was sad, and tragic, and depressing. It was comforting, glorious, and freeing. It was bittersweet.

I didn’t want Michael Callingham anywhere near my school. But the rumours of him still had a strangely pacifying effect. The bullying slowed down. The comments about my skin stopped as the pigment slowly returned to its usual coffee bean hue. Some cute, rich white boy saw the worth in me, and that was major playground cachet, not to be taken lightly.

Whenever a friend passed me a note, whenever I saw a folded piece of paper, whenever the zip on my backpack was partly undone when I returned to it after a class, my stomach would flip and turn. My mind would conjure the precision-folded lined paper with the target drawn in the centre, the vile red lettering.

This is how it haunts us.

This is how it stalks.

That afternoon, I couldn’t concentrate on studying, I sat at the desk in my room. I could hear the scissors snapping in my hands, the ugly, abusive words I’d said to Bhagita. They played over, and over, and over in my head. I felt sick about what I’d done. I wondered what Bhagita was doing; if she’d gone home and told her parents about me hassling her. I hated myself. I wanted to tear the hair extensions out of my head.

‘You keep doing this,’ the man said, shaking a finger at me. ‘You were the best speaker here.’ Then the two of them turned and made their way through the throng of well-wishers towards the photographer waiting at the other end of the hall to do a photo shoot for the local paper.

‘I like your hand. The way the brown on the back of your hand meets the white of your palm, on the edge there. It looks…cute. Like a paw or something. Like a possum paw.’

It was there, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. Walking home with my boyfriend, when I least expected it. The dry tongue. The nakedness. The can’t-think freeze.

[…]

I was Patch again. Seven years old, standing in the line for tunnel ball. You look like my dog. He’s got white and brown patches all over him too. Fetch, Patch! Go fetch, doggy!

Cecelia was a spunky black-magic pixie, sparkling and vibrant. Her hair was cornrow braided flat to her head with the long ends hanging down her back. She was beautiful, my sister. Breathtaking. Not despite her blackness, but inextricably entwined with it.