In the mid-1990s when Venus and Serena Williams were teenagers, when the jangle of beaded scalp-tight cornrows and silver braces on their teeth long preceded waist-length weaves and fake painted fingernails, and just about the same time a CablanAsian kid named Tiger turned professional, whacking his way across the whitest golf greens, neither blacks specifically nor America generally knew exactly what we were looking at when we looked at the Williams sisters.
They are specimens.
And in direct response to our furrowed brows — negroes in my own family early on said the Williams sisters “looked like monsters” — Venus and Serena have since responded to speculations of being born male, to juicing steroids, to looking uber-masculine on courts across the world (especially Serena) by remaking themselves in a kind of double-reverse-extreme drag that reads as hyper-feminized.
Serena is clearly trying to find balance between the granite-hard body she (and her wacky daddy, Richard) chiseled into a lion-hearted winning machine with what she thinks the world holds dear as “a woman.”
And since Serena is the bulkier, clearly physically stronger of the two sisters, this metamorphosis is more apparent in and on her body than it is in and on Venus’ more lithe physique.
It is all so very confusing and racist.
Even among blacks, who are now on board singing Serena’s praises because Serena has clearly demonstrated her penchant for “that championship season,” there was a long period of silence as the sisters grew out of their “ugly” phase. Just goes to show how Euro-centric we can be and how being stuck on the sticky flypaper of superficialities lands us in strange company.
The head of the Russian Tennis Federation has called Venus and Serena “the Williams Brothers.” Misguided and terribly misunderstood poems have been published about their black bodies — all in attempts to get at that ever-intriguing mystique of the black-female body that has plagued and befuddled humankind since The Venus Hottentot was caged and gawked at like a lab experiment.
Don’t accomplishment, sheer talent and drive account for anything anymore? There are hoards of black and brown children in America who are being taught as much.
According to the facts, the last time a male tennis player as old as Serena won a grand slam was in 1972. Serena has bagged three in the past six months.
According to Sports Illustrated, the totality of her tennis career is “one of the most sustained careers of excellence in the history of athletics.”
If Serena takes the U.S. Open next month, she’ll have swept all four slams in a calendar year, securing, once and f-ing for all, her place as the greatest and far-superior sportswoman of her generation or perhaps any other.
But something bigger than 33-year-old Serena happened on the way to all her trophies and accolades and eyeballing.
The booty.
I posit that if Beyonce, Jay-Lo, Nicki Minaj and any manner of Kardashian sister hadn’t, by injection or genetics, brought the world around to the notion that big asses on women are wholly acceptable, then Serena Williams would not be presently enjoying the (final) acceptance of, well, at least black men.
I hate to say — by actually saying it — how predictable men are, but before Serena became pow! pow! Serena, we saw her pictured with average-looking white, European men — seemingly the acceptors of all forms of black female beauty.
Now look at Common and Drake.
We still really aren’t accustomed to the sweaty, aggressive, back-talking, hard-bodied, hustling, ripped, messy-weaved sight of Serena moving some white European, probably blonde-headed Great White Hope all over the court with her Compton-based schematics and mathematics that appear to be inherent.
Watching Serena play tennis is sexual, I will admit it freely.
It is sexual in that it is liberating and makes the viewer susceptible to fits of shouts, a racing pulse; to deep spells of concentration so profound breathing stops and the viewer becomes light-headed and hollow-limbed.
For a black woman of any means or vocation watching another black woman succeed in the rarified air of international tennis, it is like saying a silent, yet unified, known-to-only-us prayer.
We are praying not merely for victory.
We pray to show them, to shut them up, to shut them down, to silence them.
Succeed, child, and that is how you dis’ them, a long-ago rapper once incanted.
And that is all we can send Serena through the television, as Wendy Williams says. The rest is up to her. Still, I do not know how she manages any headspace that isn’t filled with the words and images that exist to define her physical self by racist subjugation and lay her out on an examining table like a freaky science experiment.
On the cover of New York magazine’s fashion issue, there is Serena — sheathed in a long, form-fitting black piece, a nearly hip-high right split, her weave bone-straight and her muscular arms folded lazily atop her head as one muscular hand grips the opposite elbow.
The opening spread is literally a spread: Serena in a Idaho-splitting, open-legged pose on balance beams wearing an abs-baring one-piece, her thick legs toned, her muscular feet pointed and ending in painted toes. The makeup and jewelry are minimal.
Here, Serena ponders her very own black female body as it is, with all its capabilities and possibilities, and the nearly non-expression on her face reads to me thus: Oh, well. There is nothing I can do with everything I can do but use it all to be myself.
And this photograph that very nearly falls back into the space holder of being fodder for those who have and will continue to downplay the glory of this woman’s body for racism’s sake says it all.
It is a perfect mix of masculine and feminine, and even that is a grotesque oversimplification.
This photograph mixes grime and beauty, because in it are visible the scar tissue of foot and ankle injuries and the remnants of surgeries and therapies that fixed them.
In it are the shine and dark spaces of her copper-bronzed complexion, with those visible darker creases in the bends where a black woman’s thighs meet her hips.
And maybe it’s all this that has had so many people running scared and searching for ways to live comfortably with The Body of Serena.
It is itself the spectacle.
It’s in the way we’ve never been properly taught how to take in a black woman’s body when it’s a body not made merely for the bloodlust of sex or reproduction, but for winning.
Her body wins.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: [email protected]
