title: The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey
author:  Toi Derricotte 
description: Realizing that her light skin and "good hair" conspired to give her a unique, unasked-for perspective on the racial divide in the United States, African American poet Toi Derricotte inscribed her anguish in two decades' worth of journal entries. <i>The Black Notebooks</i> records countless moments when Derricotte was showered with offhand entitlements and racist confidences by whites who assumed she, too, was white. She speaks ambivalently of milking such moments, deliberately making end runs around her dark-skinned husband, Bruce, while looking for a home in an all-white suburb or hoping for a decent hotel room. Derricotte talks bluntly, too, of a self-loathing that accompanies being black in America and of not being "black enough." Her honest, angry, painful truth-telling veers into self-absorption and repetition, but perhaps that's fitting: racism hammers away at people in tiny and huge events repeated day after day. Says Derricotte, "My skin causes certain problems continuously, problems that open the issue of racism over and over like a wound."
zlib_text: 
  
  
  _This is a room in a tenement building in a black ghetto in New York City.
  There is a kitchen with a stove and a large refrigerator. A door to the outer
  hallway and another presumably to a bedroom. The hallway door is fitted with a
  bizarre collection of locks and bars. There is a cheap formica table in the
  room and two chrome and plastic chairs. There is a drawer in the table. On the
  table is a bible and a newspaper. A pair of glasses. A pad and pencil. A large
  black man is sitting in one chair (stage right) and in the other a middle-aged
  white man dressed in running pants and athletic shoes. He wears a T-shirt and
  the jacket—which matches the pants—hangs on the chair behind him._
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Black
  
  
  
  
  
  So what am I supposed to do with you, Professor?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  White
  
  
  
  
  
  Why are you supposed to do anything?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Black
  
  
  
  
  
  I done told you. This aint none of my doin. I left out of here this mornin to
  go to work you wasnt no part of my plans at all. But here you is.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  White
  
  
  
  
  
  I