Daughters of the Same Mother
““Sisterhood is no perfect science, it’s different for everyone, but the same elements are there for Black sisters.””
Written by Brikitta Hairston
There was a day I woke up old enough to realize that one day my sister would have a heart so big, there would be no room for me.
Every day since has been in pursuit of the days prior. When I had no worries, when I knew sisters were eternal, when I knew nothing of what it would mean to grow apart.
It didn’t take much longer after recognizing that fact to decide I would instead push us apart. I didn’t know it at the time of course but now all my memories are warped from my attempts at convincing myself that I wasn't doing that.
I regret missing so much.
You would think that as a younger sister you don’t necessarily have to be there. You’re not the shoulder, you seek the shoulder.
Until you learn, your shoulder is the only thing that could have saved her.
My sister is formidable in the same way she is flimsy. She is a creative soul and an easy mind full of intelligence forced by the powers of eldest child syndrome. Flimsy is not flappable, flimsy is frighteningly steadfast when it comes to her.
She told me one day that her year abroad was not the perfect year I thought it to be. See, one day I woke up and my sister went to college and not only to college but across the world. One day she was gone. For the first, second, third and so forth days in 16 years, I woke up without my sister. I decided that my pain was her doing and the only way to wake up and go to sleep again and again and again was to suffice that I had no fault, that everything happens to me.
So I started living forward in time.
As long as the current moment was the future’s past I didn’t have to be accountable for anything. Plausible deniability became my only refuge. Sisterhood is no perfect science, it’s different for everyone, but the same elements are there for Black sisters.
As if it were not enough that the world put us in competition with each other, our families did the same. I think I could talk for quite some time about the origin of colorism in Black Americans, the myths they told us about lighter skin meaning they were chosen as house slaves while those with dark skin looked as such because they were outside working the fields.
I first heard that fable or myth, or perhaps it’s the truth–when I was on the bus home with my sister in junior high. I was excited to be sitting with the eighth-grade kids as a little sixth-grader, my sister by my side. We got to the point in English when we were reading slave narratives, and another girl who was my sister’s friend (when she wanted to be) said “Well, little Brikitta would have been a house slave if we was back then, you’d be stuck outside because your skin is so dark.”
My sister didn’t say anything, as was common for her when people said something or teased her, or even bullied her, she never said anything. Me, it was my fifth fight of the school year. I got In School Suspension for the second time that year, if I had gotten in trouble again, it would mean expulsion. My mother was livid until my sister told her what happened. My two-week grounding became just a week, but my sister and I never really talked about it again. I don’t think we ever talked about anything that made us uncomfortable, which is not uncommon.
I realized our relationship was different from other sisters when I got to college. I would hear my roommates and floormates talking about their “annoying sister” and complain about them just existing. While my sister and I had differences, it was never animosity. So, I started taking a mental poll. My Black friends had different strifes with their siblings that I realized were very similar to mine.
I did not dislike my sister, I envied her for so long that it made me indifferent.
Around my junior year of college, I started reading more into pop culture and different perspectives on Black Sisterhood. Some of it was Real Housewives of Atlanta, others were bell hooks, the immortal works of Toni Morrison, and Twitter.
There is Black Sisterhood by blood and Black Sisterhood by necessity. The world has made it so that we only have each other, it often seems that even when we’re in relationships and have close family, we are our only shoulders to cry on. I believe that somewhere along the way – in the rise of social media and pop culture relevance – everyone caught on to this, and started using respectability politics to tear Black communities apart. Black women got the worst of it.
In my own family, there was the constant “be more like your sister” game whenever one of us succeeded in something. Most often, it was not me who was succeeding. Looking up to my sister made me look down on myself. It was not until we spent years apart in college that we were able to come together and say “Hey, what’s up with that?”
I fell victim to respectability politics before I even knew what it was.
I thought it was just the Nigerian family structure that thrust motherhood onto their daughters, but I've come to find it’s just as common in Black American households too. First-born daughters play with toys and baby bottles at the same time. Although I am not the eldest, when my kid brother was born when I was 8, I got only a fraction of the treatment my sister got and only then could I put it in perspective.
The generations before us give us no chance to escape the cyclical damage of that inequitable responsibility. We’re left with quiet resentment and loud envy with no idea how to talk about it. We’re left with Hollywood trying and failing to talk about the disparity and divide in the Black community. Movies like Passing try to talk about how colorism became so prevalent and what it does to the Black community, even sisters, but one could never show the true damage that it does lest they’ve lived it themselves.
I’ve discussed this topic a few times with a close friend of mine. She is Black, her grandfather was white and her mother is mixed, but her dad was Black. Her step-sister is Black and she grew up as an only child until they met when they were teenagers. She said the closest she got to feeling how I felt was watching how her step-sister was treated differently than her sister. It wasn’t that she never felt she got better treatment, but because they are step-siblings, there was never a reasonable excuse for their parents to pit them against each other. But, my friend watched how her step-sister was consistently overlooked because of her younger sister. Even in different households, they were always reminded – or rather made to believe – that the lighter-skinned sister didn’t have it as hard in life as the darker sister.
The duality reminded me of my sister and me – because my sister is the eldest and darker-skinned. She had more pressure to look after us but at the same time have stellar grades, participate in every extra-curricular possible and never show any protest. I never had any idea of what occurred until we were much older and a few steps from being SOHOs…Sisters on Holidays Only.
I don’t know a lot, but I know the best way to even start this conversation on a scalable level is to just keep talking about it. To place no blame on each other but instead on the powers that may be.
As long as it’s a safe place to do so, ask our parents and guardians to acknowledge possible harm they’ve done without taking it as blame. I’ve seen this conversation arise in my Diversity and Inclusion work before and I think the solution lies in understanding cultural sensitivity. If more people knew that societal and cultural norms could be challenged without necessarily vilifying the culture itself, it’d be less taboo and less harmful to try and address.
The solution may be lightyears away but accountability isn’t. I got to a certain age where I was old enough to clock what was happening between my sister and me and spoke up about it, the same thing happened with her. Numerous factors could be in place making that impossible for others, but I do not believe it’s impossible for all.
The Black Community is one of the strongest there is. It's not just perseverance that fuels us, but hope too. The same way we are fearless to break all glass ceilings is the same way we should tear down the barriers in our own houses. At least for me, I hope to clear the divide between me and my sister before we just became daughters of the same mother.
Brikitta Hairston (she/her), is an investigative victimologist, and graduate of the University of Iowa with a B.A. in English and an M.S. in Criminal Justice. Her words are in OffColour Magazine, Radish Media, Carefree Mag, Better to Speak, and Giddy Magazine.