“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, because people refuse to see me.”
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
No, no, that really isn’t right.
“Hello, America. My name is Tracy Morgan, or as most of you know me...The Other Black Guy. I’ve been with Saturday Night Live for 23 shows, but sometimes I don’t even get recognized in my own neighborhood. But that’s alright, because I’m The Other Black Guy. And I’m just letting you know I’m here.”
—Tracy Morgan, “Saturday Night Live”
This is more fitting. Let’s begin.
I. I’d be the first to admit that I’m hardly a big man on campus. I’m not big on the clubbing scene, final or otherwise, and I didn’t meet a new person every night freshman year. I’m shy. I’m not drowning in a sea of nameless hangers-on and casual acquaintances.
Nevertheless, after three-plus years of sections, meetings, lunches and parties, even the shyest person meets so many people that it’s impossible to remember them all. And that’s what I’m thinking as I walk up Holyoke Street and wonder why this girl is smiling at me. Whoever she is, she sure looks glad to see me—there’s a billboard-wide grin on her face, and she’s practically barreling into my arms. I start to smile back blankly and my mind races like Guy Pearce’s in Memento. Do I KNOW this person? Think! Think! Who IS this?
Suddenly, the girl’s eyes grow wide and she slams the brakes. Her smile implodes. Her momentum carries her right past me, and as we pass each other, she mumbles an awkward “Hi.” I shrug. Odd girl, I think to myself. And then, frowning, it occurs to me that over the past two months I’ve run into more odd people than I had in the previous two years, back when—
And right as I’m crossing the street, the realization hits me like a truck full of epiphanies:
It’s happening again.
II. Who I am: Martin Bell, black male, senior in Winthrop House, about 6’0, thin build, from Brooklyn, New York, spends spare time playing Smash Brothers and watching “24.”
Partial list of who I’m not: Jay Williams, black male, senior in Mather House, about 6’2”, thin build, from Buffalo, New York, once spent a summer freeing slaves in the Sudan.
Sometimes I wish I were in fact Jay, a crusader against modern slavery who has already risked his life and done more for humanity than I probably will in a lifetime. He is one of the few people I’ve met who truly deserves the title “hero,” and being confused with him is in a sense quite flattering. But it’s also annoying.
It took me two weeks of living in Cambridge to figure out that Harvard people were really friendly. It took me another two weeks to figure out that some of them were even friendlier than they meant to be. I’d get nods and smiles from people I was pretty sure I’d never met before. Finally, one of these people had an all-out conversation with me, called me Jay, and I finally put two and two together.
Jay? Oh, I knew Jay—nice guy, lived in Holworthy a couple floors above a friend of mine and—wait a minute.
Outside of being slender black guys, Jay and I don’t look that much alike. What’s going on?
III. I’m thinking that Ellison’s Invisible Man doesn’t capture the problem. I’m thinking sometimes, blacks in America are the subject of hypervisibility. Those with the best of intentions want to tell us apart but can’t. Some people just aren’t used to distinguishing black people. There’s no formal segregation in America, but every suburb’s composition doesn’t reflect these legal updates. Through no fault of your own, Harvard may be your first real brush with blackness. And they say when you’re suddenly surrounded by darkness, it takes a while for your eyes to get well-enough adjusted to distinguish detail.
Sometimes this can take a while. One of my closest friends—we’ll call her Karen—walked into the Mather dining hall a couple Septembers ago for Sunday brunch. She saw me sitting at a table from across the room and bounded across the room to say hello. She threw her arms around me from behind and gasped.
Oops.
Hello, Not Martin! Hello, entirely different black person!
She told me about what happened later, embarrassed. I feigned outrage and eventually gave in to laughter. What else could I do? It was funny. “You had to be there,” Karen said. “I guess you wish I had been,” I responded.
I suppose familiarity is really the only way to learn. I went to an elementary school with sizable chunks of black, white, Hispanic and Asian students, which is rare, so maybe it made me think beyond skin to tell people apart. And when I first meet somebody, I do recognize them by non-facial features—braids, ears, chains, weight. I’ve made mistakes. Only through knowing people and seeing them repeatedly does the mind’s memory get more nuanced. It takes a while to become more than your primary distinguishing features, and to someone who doesn’t know a lot of blacks/Asians/whoever, well, being a black/Asian/whoever may well be your primary distinguishing feature. And if someone else happens to share that feature, tragicomic mishaps ensue until your threshold of distinction catches up to your surroundings.
IV. So I reason that, by being the subject of said tragicomic mishaps, I’m helping teach people that all black faces are not the same...Nonetheless, I’d like to things easier for people, including myself and Jay. (I talked to Jay recently and found out that he gets mistaken for me “all the time.” And that’s nice, if only for the sake of balance. We both also get mistaken for Toby Anekwe ’03.) So, you see that black guy up ahead? Take a good long look. Use facial cues. If those don’t work for you, proceed as follows:
Check to see if he’s got a mustache and some sort of scruffy bearded chaos. I usually have both.
Look for glasses. Is he bespectacled? If so, and they’re not shades, well, bzzzt, not me.
Does he have on a baseball cap? I usually do, regardless of the weather. Jay and Toby usually don’t. And, at any given point, I usually have more hair atop my head than the both of them combined.
How fast is he walking? I don’t walk, I usually flat-out trot. I’m the fastest relaxed walker I know. If he’s walking slower than 5 mph and he’s alone, he’s probably not me.
Oh, and I’ve got braces. This will only serve as a helpful clue for the next couple of months, but take advantage while you can. They’re visible whenever I smile and I tend to smile a lot, especially somewhat nervously as people I may or may not have ever met approach me like I’ve known them all my life. Catch the braces, the cap and the facial hair—and the bemused expression befitting someone who knows you should’ve figured this out by now—and you just might be about to run into Martin S. Bell, by gosh.
Martin S. Bell ’03, a government concentrator in Winthrop House, is associate sports editor of The Crimson. He is often mistaken for Brian E. Fallon ’03 by sheltered types who’ve never met a sports editor before.
