Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, and Hair.

REFUSING TO SEE THE WORLD in simple black and white doesn't mean being color blind. The nauseatingly liberal whine "Why do we always have to talk about race I don't see people in terms of color" is not an antiracist expression of solidarity, it's just another way to keep blackness and other forms of color otherness at bay. Hey folks, here it is once and for all: black-womanness is no less globally relevant and powerful than any other identity or group of identities experienced in one body--white male, black male, white woman, black-latin lesbian, bisexual and biracial male, etc.

Speaking freely and multidimensionally from her position as a biracial black feminist, race worker, artist, esthetician, critic, New Yorker, and hair activist, Jones is an alchemist-cum-investigative reporter. Her tales, rich wit history, address black folks' century-long concerns. They include notes on: white fantasies of tragic mulattoes; white fears of black male bodies; race men who are drop-dead fine, and other men who need life sentences in a black-feminist Club Med; black women who are "swollen with dreams" and with black women's collective energies, and other sisters who hate black women more than anybody else can. Her stories don't buttress the binary oppositions of popular race talk (as in, Problack is antiwhite); they don't divide an imaginar "us." Instead they bring to the fore the specificities and complexities of blackness in day-to-day life. They revel in the mixed pleasures (pun intended) we take in ourselves and others. And they mix up the us-versus-them binary, exposing a scarred nerve in the neural network of the American identity: as Jones puts it, "Might all Americans check 'multiracial,' finally recognizing their heritage for what it is?"

Bulletproof Diva is a critically cathartic series of essays that work at just this matrix. Culled from her "Skin Trade" column in The Village Voice, Jones' generally short, witty tales are both all over the map and in-the-pocket thematically coherent. Organized in five chapters ("how i invented multiculturalism," "bring the heroines," "the blackest market," "genitalia and the paycheck," and "the hair trade"), Diva intervenes in black identities, styles, sexualities, and the larger cultural politics that work in and around all of us. Unafraid to speak of black pleasure and subjectivities, never seeing in simple black and white, Jones camps out where black women's multiracial, problack, multiculturalist, feminist, antiracist principles meet their hair architecture, the black booty as shrine, and the pleasures black girls of all ages get from displays of black sexualities. It is a charged, painful, and glorious place to be.

Jones has a keen eye and ear for texture and detail. Even in pieces a scant two pages long, she gives you real people you remember and patches of the real worl in which they live. In "Video Soul (and Salsa)" she spends an evening at a Lowe East Side video rental, Tompkins Square Video, owned by Tony Smith and run by Carmen Montalvo: "Tony's slim with a crooked smile," Jones observes, "He's got Nuyorican accent, though he's black, as in black American. Carmen's healthy figured and Puerto Rican. In a former life she was a Jewish mother." Later she quotes Tony, "My mother calls me Mr. Public Relations. . . . If anything happen on the block, I know about it. The other day, a white customer was being followed, so he came in the store, and I had someone walk him home." Jones continues, "You can't hear the rest of Tony's story because Carmen is shrieking 'DON'T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!' at some brown-skinned cutie with long eyelashes who's returned Switchblade Sisters a couple of days late."

Jones plays freely in inspiring and creative streams such as the trials and jouissance of Rodeo Caldonia High-Fidelity Performance Theater, the black-feminist music, performance-art, and dance group of which she is a rounding member. ("Give me a girl gang, a crew," Jones writes; "A zillion sisters ain't enough.") She navigates rivers of bile, like the media repetition of Clarence Thomas' cruel depiction of his hardworking, family-supporting sister, Emma Mae Martin. And she finds the bitter-sweet moments where resistance, pleasure, and oppression are joined: "Just in a gesture, this woman's hand on her hip, I found a reservoir of cultural history--a history of pleasure and a history of self-defense--and it was all so close to home."

If there's anything I wanted more of, it would be exploration of the life lessons Jones has gleaned from personal experience. The essays on her black Aun Cora and her Jewish mother, Hettie Jones, do some of this work, but even here I craved more of Jones bringing her sharp intellect, insightful probing, and emotional honesty to bear on her personal life. In one moving passage from "she came with the rodeo" she describes her reaction to a boyfriend's criticism of a play she had written: "Midnight somewhere downtown, on a side street empty except for cabs shooting from the dark like comets. I sit on a stoop and stare at my hands. Then get tough, shake a finger in his face, throw a punch. Finally I cry. So it had mattered what he thought. Rain falls and I go on crying like the movies. Unlike the movies, he stands there guilty, twenty-eight years old and still unable to put his arms around a woman in public." I wanted more of this, not simply to get into Ms. Jones' business but because I was moved by and learned from the intimate honesty of it. We rarely get access to black women's self-authored intimate desires, pains, and strength all in the same moment.

But this is not Jones' main agenda: Bulletproof Diva is about inventing your ow heroine out of all the heroines who populate our everyday lives. As Jones writes, that heroine is "whoever you make her--as long as she has the lip and nerve, and as long as she uses that lip and nerve to raise up herself and the world." Solid. You can't beat that with a baseball bat.