The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey

by Toi Derricotte

Spanning twenty years, from the time the author, a light-skinned black woman, moved into an all-white neighborhood, a journal ponders the meaning of being black in a racially divided country, and the price of denying it.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Memoir, Race, Essays, African American, Feminism

205 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Toi Derricotte is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and four earlier collections of poetry, including Tender, winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton), received the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her honors include, among many others, the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, two Pushcart Prizes and the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists.

Derricotte is the co-founder of Cave Canem Foundation (with Cornelius Eady), Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Reviews

[William Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Toi Derricotte is a voice. The Black Notebooks is an interior examination of race in first person narrative that captures a part of America and humanity where most don't go.

[Mj · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Black Notebooks is a study in contrasts. It is a study written by Toi Derricotte, an award winning poet and university professor, who wrote this book over a period of approximately twenty years. It could be described as a memoir because it is based on Derricotte’s reflections on her own life but it is perhaps more aptly categorized as a study and examination of internalized racism based primarily on the author’s own life and her examination of the events and feelings she experienced.

The writing is primarily meditative and reflective, often in an impersonal, seemingly detached “watcher” or observational manner. At times it is very emotional, the language strong, demanding and out there. Derricotte’s words and stories are filled with love and joy as well as anger, well-founded exasperation and self-loathing.

All of the reflections are based on Derricotte’s experiences and interpretations. Most are based on what she experienced in the outer world and how it made her feel in her internal world but she also shares the stories of many people in her life (family, neighbours, friends, colleagues, students and acquaintances.) All of these stories helped me understand the aggregate black experience from Derricotte’s personal interpretation and perception.

The book is very eye opening. While some may think that racism is improving because of laws and societal change, what Derricotte describes is a deep racism inside every single being living in a racist society – particularly black people. Whites internalize racism also, even if they do not realize it, by thinking and acting differently towards blacks at a gut or instinctual level. Often they are not even conscious of their feelings, thoughts or actions because it has been ingrained since birth in every experience that they have had.

The real damage however is the internalized racism that black people feel. From the time they are born they are bombarded with messages of not being good enough, sub par, dirty, unworthy. Small babies and children absorb this negativity into their own self worth or rather self unworthiness and begin to loathe themselves and to want to be different from what and who they are, to turn traitor to themselves in the aspiration of being worthy, loved, better, white. It is very sad.

As a black woman who could and has passed as a white woman for most of her life, as did her parents and relatives before her, Derricotte is in a unique position to write this study in internalized racism. Despite being able to “pass” as white she too writes about having absorbed all the negativity and done much self-blaming and self-loathing about her conundrum – wanting to love herself as a black woman but hating herself for being black and wanting all the privileges that whites enjoy thereby deep down wanting to be white to have and be worthy of these privileges. It is a complex issue and Derricotte has done a masterful job of helping us understand the significant damage that a racist culture does to its citizens.

Many have lauded this book as one of the best books on racism in America. It was twenty years in the making – write, review, rewrite and then start the process over again and again. The book is powerful and accomplished in its writing and word choices, as well as in its honesty and rawness. Despite the difficult subject matter, Derricotte does a superb job with her writing skills and makes the reading palatable but not pablum. She doesn’t mince words but makes her points directly and kept me continuing to read along and join her in her reflective journey about racism and its terrible aftermath. The poet in Derricotte is very evident. Her descriptions and word choices are excellent and The Black Notebooks is very evocative as a result.

In 1998 The Black Notebooks won The Anisfield-Wolf Non-Fiction Award – “the only American book award designated specifically to recognize works addressing issues of racism and diversity. This award recognizes books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures. They are books that open and challenge our minds.” (quote from the Goodreads Anisfield-Wolf Award description) It was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. I think this book should be required reading in schools, the workplace and elsewhere. Derricotte is fearless in sharing her story. I was moved, learned a lot and am grateful to her for her major contribution towards understanding and resolving this very divisive and unfair but fixable human issue.

[Hiram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutally honest, which is what I love about it. Excellent treatment of black shame. I've taught it a couple of times and people tend to love it or hate it.

[BookChampions · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poet Toi Derricotte says, in The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, that "one of my biggest strengths as a wrier, perhaps the only really unique thing I can give, is that I am determined to tell the truth" (184). Upon finishing this oddly written but deeply personal memoir/journal, I would say she certainly understands herself as a writer.

What's so brave about Derricotte's book is not that it is so "interior" or her astute observations of race in America, but that it is so honest. Derricotte is unflinchingly vulnerable in exploring how racism touches her as a light-skinned black woman (so light-skinned that most people assume she is white), and she doesn't hesitate to probe those areas of her psyche where she is saddled with shame by her own failures.

While The Black Notebooks is one of the most intriguing looks at race consciousness and racism at the end of the 20th century I've read, it is much more so an examination of how an individual comes to understand the complexity of identity and the depths of a wounded soul. Racism is clearly a problem that touches us all, both the oppressed, the oppressors and the bystanders just floating by, but I'm starting to believe that so many of us are facing our own demons. It's not my place to judge whose journey is rougher, or whose pain is more legitimate. But opening ourselves to our own journeys and learning from the journeys of others, especially with the help of brave souls who are different than us, is infinitely rewarding.

*NOTE: I did struggle with the structure of this book. It's a series of "essays," and it moves at an odd pace. I thought I could consider it as a "multigenre text," but it didn't have the variety I expect from multigenre. The point of view is also strange; Derricotte will talk about reading or sharing a chapter in the middle of the chapter, and that threw me a bit. This lack of narrative pace may be a result of the fact that Derricotte is primarily a poet. Her best chapters were the short ones (almost essay-poems) nestled in the middle of the book, but none of them were pointless. If you sense the same unevenness, stick with it.

[Sunshine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.
It doesn't get better than this.
Sometimes I have so much to say and so much I'm carrying from a text, that I find myself unable to actually say anything. I'm swimming it. So I'll share some quotes.

Toi Derricotte, here's to you. Hats off. You are among the best.

"Arriving for a stay of a few weeks, I was happy to find another black artist - who, unfortunately, was leaving on the day after I arrived. Coincidence? Or were we tokens? That question colored the rest of my time there. And another black artist arrived on the day I was leaving." - Toi Derricotte, the black notebooks

"what a hard book to have written, and what an important book to have read." - Grace Paley

"a book of trauma and recovery, namely the staging and repression of light-skinned racial passing in the United States...Derricotte transforms its haunting complexity into redemptive song." - Houston A. Baker, Jr

"this book's achievement lies in the telling light it casts on how white skin functions in a multiracial world ... a sternly disciplined, unsentimental work." - NYT book review

"many readers ... will want to find positive, hopeful image but poet Derricotte - a black woman who is sometimes mistaken for white - prefers to 'record the language of self-hate', the internalized racism she sees in herself and others. Her candor is brave." - publishers weekly

"An edited collection of personal journals accumulated over twenty years guides readers...through the mind of a woman who has been engaged in incessant warfare with the color of her skin...a candid, well-crafted expose on racism." - Emerge

[Black Bibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Can whites begin to understand and take in the pain of this racist society? So often white people, when a deep pain with regard to racism is uncovered, want it to be immediately addressed, healed, released. Black people have had to live with the wounds of racism for generations. Even goodwill an hard work won't make the personal hurts cease. If this book has any purpose, its to show the persistence of internal conflicts, of longing shame, and terror. It represents a twenty-year obsession to observe myself when these feelings arise, rather than to deny repress them. I have found that there is no cure. Perhaps awareness can give us a second to contain, so that we do not pass these damages on to others"

Heartbreaking and redemptive read.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toi Derricotte's book about her life and how she dealt with being light skinned so that people she met often didn't realize her African-American heritage.

"If you bring forth what is within you,
what is within you will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what is within you will destroy you."
--Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels

"Language is the only homeland."--Czeslaw Milosz

She speaks of memory not being linear. It's a "continuous and liquid process."

Once people know she is black, it changes how people read her poems and treat her.

She doesn't like being referred to as a "woman of color." She wants even her poems about color to be universal.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suddenly he yelled across the room. "You really should read that article. You'll find it interesting, really timely."
"What's it about?" another man called out.
"Racism," he yelled back.
The people in the room looked up. I felt the conversation go out of my hands.
The other man said, "That isn't timely. It's ongoing and eternal."
I was glad somebody spoke. And it wasn't me.

I remember a time when I thought reading and the right books would save the world. These days, I still find Forster's "Only connect!" a solid cornerstone, but if one is to preach diversity and equity and all that jazz, one best follow it up with labor solidarity and mass agitation, else you'll find yourself trapped in a merry-go-round of good intentions and glib marketing where the only thing diversified is the stock portfolios of your stockholders. To find this work at a local library now, then, is an exercise in observing what value I would have found it in had I read it nearly four years ago when I first came across it, and what it is still capable of offering me today. Upon finishing it, I would say that this is a meditation on what "privilege" any breed of "passing" affords a person, as well as the parts that US citizens are doomed to play along demilitarized zones of Black and white so long as it is economically beneficial to do so. How much worth that has for a reader depends on their needs and their experiences, but for me, it's always worth taking the opportunity to expand one's toolkit when it comes to interpersonal negotiations involving the most deadly of real world stakes, and Derricotte does not shy away from showing the consequences of white assumption and white neglect. In any case, not the work I expected to be my first read of 2024, but certainly not one that is bad, or boring, or like all the rest, and if this new year ends up falling out along similar nots and teaches me a worthwhile thing or two as well, there are far worse ways to live.

In a way, I think both of them were reacting to something much larger, and neither had the wisdom to make us comfortable by saying so.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The emotions ranging from the author to the reader run the gamut! You're angered, engaged, understanding, horrified, hopeful, and even dismayed. Derricotte definitely captures much in her examination of not feeling Black but being Black and how others have come across her in life especially family. "Black Notebooks" definitely opened me up to more possibilities in writing about characters of different backgrounds and really latching onto things I've experienced and not experienced.
I'd strongly encourage this book to become a steady part of reading about the Black experience as well as the American experience. Everyone could be enlightened by what Derricotte has written here.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

These diaries are harrowing. They cover a period of years in the 70's when Toi Derricote, a light-skinned African American who could pass for white but chooses not to, describes her racially-charged encounters as well as her meditations on race & daily life.... Particularly astonishingly awful are the encounters in Montclair, NJ she describes where Derricote and her darker-skinner husband moved...the racism, exclusion and cruelty they experience are mind-numbing. Ultimately their marriage does not last and it is no wonder.

[Kristi Hovington · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the finest books on race that i've had the pleasure of reading. Plus, i met the author and she rocks. This book, and the lessons i learned from the brutally honest thoughts of someone who looks like me (caucasian), but is, in fact, black, navigating the world of social assumptions, race, and class still stay with me.

[Anika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fabulous read for anyone who's ever felt like an outsider. Toi writes like she's talking to you. And she's a pleasure to listen to.

[Maureen Stanton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An honest account of race in America in the 1970s and 80s, beautifully written in essay-like chapters.

[Diann Blakely]

Self-described as a black woman who looks white, Derricotte offers lyrically charged but anguished meditations on present-day racism in “progressive” suburbs, the academy, and even artists’ colonies. Her book is composed of journal entries made over the course of two decades, exploring how cultural racism becomes internalized, poisoning blacks and whites alike. In her own case, that racism leads to long years of paralyzing rage as well as profound self-hatred and clinical depression.

A renowned poet and teacher, Derricotte doesn’t deny that the civil rights movement paved the way for certain of her achievements. Nonetheless, she asks hard questions of writers like Marian Wright Edelman: “Many readers want literature that concentrates on solutions, on the strength and survival aspects of being black. The benefit is, of course, to nourish those of us who are starved for ‘positive’ images, for images of power. However, might these ‘hopeful’ images defend against knowledge of racism’s most devastating, deep-rooted, and intransigent blows, giving false assurance that the effects of racism are not universally devastating?”

Derricotte’s memoir embodies a psychic world doubly pained: Her appearance allows her entry into a realm where whites not only betray their own racial hatred but also assume she shares it; at the same time, the internalization of American racism makes her afraid of, and sometimes hateful toward, other black people. “I began to be conscious,” she writes, “that my reaction to hearing a comment in a shoe store or seeing a young black boy on the street was a reaction of fear. My adrenaline would increase, the fight-or-flight response, as if a part of me wanted to jump out of my skin.”

An anecdote about conducting a teachers’ workshop is even more telling about our culture’s instinctive, institutionalized racism, as well as its uneasiness regarding truths that only “darkness” teaches: “I explained how I have the children write poems using oxymorons.... Like Sun. Cold sun. Or—Rainbow. Black Rainbow. One teacher said, ‘That’s negative thinking. I don’t like negative thinking. I want my rainbows to be colored good colors. Pretty colors. Not black. I don’t like all this negative thinking.’ ”

A more hopeful conversation occurs near the end of Derricotte’s book. Swapping snapshots of the grandkids with a white woman, the author and her acquaintance discover the former has a blond grandson, the latter a dark one. These grandmoms go on to joke about a NEW YORK TIMES article that claims 60 percent of Americans would be defined as “black” if old miscegenation laws were reapplied using today’s DNA testing, and the percentage climbs as high as 80 percent in the Deep South. Scientists believe that not only sex, usually forced, but also the practice of African-American women wet-nursing white babies, accounts for what appear, at least at first, as shocking statistics.

But the TIMES reporter merely echoes what Derricotte and her friend—like Holland, like Edelman in LANTERNS OF LEARNING (see separate review), like Albert Murray—already know in their hearts. Mainstream white American culture has been greatly enriched and defined by the African-American, especially by the blues, whose notes simultaneously celebrate and lament those whom history has pushed into our country’s most shadowy corners, singing "improvise, improvise, improvise!"

(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)

[Bowie Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapter that I found to be the most interesting model for me in The Black Notebooks is “The Club.” Something I have been thinking about in relation to my final project for a class I'm taking called "The Writer's Journal" is how to make a timeline and cover events and things I went through over several years in twelve to fifteen pages. After reading “The Club”, I realized that perhaps I could accomplish this by breaking down the material I want to write into months. I began to map out how this would work for the project I’m envisioning, and I think sectioning things off in this way allows me to do a lot more of the type of work that I’m interested in than if I attempted to create a fluid, seamless narrative.

In “The Club” I like how the month subtitles allow Derricotte to not have to explain how things happened over time. We see for ourselves how her feelings of isolation, anger, depression, and longing continued month after month without her having to say ‘And then in December.” We can just get straight to the heart of it. I also liked how sometimes there would be more than one entry for one month and then a few months would be skipped over, ostensibly because Derricotte hadn’t been writing or because what she wrote during those months wasn’t appropriate for this particular chapter.

Furthemore, another thing I gained by attempting to emulate this format was looking at the variety of content Derricotte deals with in each monthly chunk. It is not always the same. Sometimes we get a scene with very little exposition. Other times we get entries that sound like an essay, seeming somewhat calm and detached. Many times we see how her present situation triggers family memories and how those memories fit in with her life today and show her something else about herself, her reactions, and how little racism has changed over the years. Yet, even though the content is not always the same in each monthly section, “The Club” works because Derricotte has given us a sense of time with the monthly subtitles and everything she includes relates to feeling ostracized because of her race and the repercussions of that, which is triggered by her family not being invited to their neighborhood's club in the first place. I’m looking forward to seeing if I accomplish something similarly with my project, which also takes place over approximately six years like Derricotte's The Black Notebooks.

[Ginnie Leiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in the 1990's my friend, Bob Smith, told me that as a black man, you live your life every day with the knowledge of being black. At the time, I thought to myself, "Well, duh!" We did discuss this topic at length but until I read Toi Derricotte's THE BLACK NOTEBOOKS, I did not fully understand what Bob was trying to tell me. That being black in America is a burden you pick up everyday and learn to negotiate with every interaction you have. That "white" is considered normal and "black" is considered other, even and perhaps more profoundly to blacks. That racism is alive and well among blacks who judge their own worth by how dark their skin tone is. That racism cannot truly ever be eradicated as it is something bred into us by our parents and our culture, that, as Ms. Derricotte says, racism is a form of child abuse.

I have had the privilege to meet Ms. Derricotte twice when Cave Canem, America's home for black poetry, brought their annual meeting to Greensburg where I live. My employer, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, hosted two poetry readings and Ms. Derricotte attended. I also heard her speak at a performance of the Pittsburgh Symphony. She possesses the courage to speak truth, often truth we do not want to hear, to acknowledge, to accept in ourselves. From reading this book, I learned that this courage was achieved at a great and painful cost. I want to ask her now, 25 years later if it is still as painful a process to continue her quest everyday.

What did I learn from this book? That racism never dies. That a black president in the White House is a step forward but there is so much more to do. That when another human being shares with me his feelings of pain and injustice, most often the appropriate response is to simply listen and acknowledge. That Ms. Derricotte's struggle is all our struggle. Maybe we wake up every morning and take up the burden that we are fat or unkind or (in our perception of ourselves) unworthy. That in this very human pain, perhaps there is the bridge that can connect us if we have the strength and will to reach out. This I hold to be universal: "We are nothing more than some kind of spirit-movement walking through the world clothed in the story of our life. (page 78)" Thank you, Toi, for teaching me, for enlightening me, for helping me see the connection each of us has to each other. You many get a letter from me soon.

And so may Bob.

[Izetta Autumn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Receiving a book that you find truly moving and incisive, for me, has always raised both the meaningfulness of the book and of the relationship I have with the person who shared the book with me. Since the person who so graciously gave me this book, is a great friend, it was an even lovelier book.

And that's not to say because Derricotte's work, The Black Notebooks is all sweetness and beauty. It is not. It is raw and riven with pain. Sometimes nastiness gushes forth - and with it, that ravishing clarity of truths and brutal opening of the mind and heart, that renders a kind of terrifying dark beauty. The thing I think about when I consider what the word "awe" really means.

Derricotte's complex collection of memoir and essays, which combines and rearranges the two genres, in the end, really creates a new genre. Derricotte recounts her experience living in a predominantly white neighborhood, and the unraveling she experiences, living as a wife, a white-skinned Black womyn, and an artist. The Yellow Wallpaper has nothing on this! As Derricotte shares her depression, her rage, and her disappointments - all with a kind of honesty that made me quake (for I know I could never achieve such honesty, and nevermind on the page) - her previous experiences with race are unspooled. The memoir does not have a commitment to a strict timeline; sometimes one experience takes Derricotte back to the early days of her marriage, sometimes to its ending.

What remains, what stays the steady constant, is Derricotte determination to lay it all bare; from her internalized oppression, liberating in her truthfulness about how our own minds play tricks on us, to her dissection of marriage and upper middle class respectability - it's own trap in some ways. At each step she pushes through. I remember thinking: this womyn is BRAVE.

It is a thin volume - don't let that mislead you. It is incredibly dense and intense.

[Abby Frucht · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book of nonfiction, the poet's anguished observations about racism, which took her twenty years to write. The form - vignettes arranged in named parts (Among School Children, Race in the Creative Writing Classroom, Early Memory - is itself inviting to me, as is the books distillation into bursts of insight and emotion what could be a dense tome on a difficult subject. The subject IS difficult, and Toi Derricotte certainly pulls no punches on just how difficult it has been for her, a light skinned African American woman married to a dark skinned African American man. For that reason the book is, if not depressing, devastating....but also so lovely in its particulars. I highly recommend it.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author's in a very tough but unique situation. Her appearance is quite white, but she is black. I think it was very good that she kind of qualified everything she said by stating at the beginning of the book that she may not be qualified to comment on the situation of racism, whose worst consequences she may not have experienced. But the book is still very much a true account of how a black person has experienced racism, how she has suffered from it, and how she has sought to be released from the suffering. It's so unfortunate that blatant racism still persists today, and some of the anecdotes are astonishing. To remember things is easy, to forget things can be difficult.

[Nita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure about the date I read this, but I really enjoyed it. It was required reading for one of Natalie Goldberg's workhops. As a white girl living in a white suburb of a very segregated city (Columbus, Ohio), it's important to get bounced out of my denial about my own racism. This book was a small, elegant wake up call.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really fascinating. Selected journal entries from a very light-skinned black woman who often passes for white that span more than twenty years, through all-white neighborhoods and universities and drugstores, marriage and divorce to her dark-skinned husband, children, and friendships with other women. Fascinating and beautiful and sad and brave.

[Arpita · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I have come to realize that we negotiate a very complicated reality, and that we do the best we can, and that there is no perfect past to go back to."
One of the most illuminating books on race I have ever heard.

[Jac · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's like being inside someone's head, at once reassuringly and unnervingly familiar and surprisingly different to my own. I wish I was as self aware and honest as she is.

[Tom G · Rating 4 out of 5]

devastating

[Helida · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very necessary but depressing book. It touched on issues I know exist, but went deeper...an unsettling perspective that will cause me to come back again, a second, or even a third time, to better understand...

[Michael Gossett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of a terrific booklist for an Autobiographics class I took at UMD. Particularly interesting were the sections on racial passing. The parts that shine shine brightly; those that don't fall noticeably flat by comparison.

[Amanda Birdwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a poet's memoir... I finished it Saturday and started rereading it Sunday afternoon. So, so good.

[Tana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic, painful, and powerful.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a life-changing read for me. Derricotte gives a raw account that evokes a self-searching, soul searching experience.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Painfully honest and quietly brutal memoir of a black woman who can "pass" as white, and the compromises she has to choose to make (or not make) pretty much every second of the day. It's exhausting to read, I can't fathom having to live it. The quiet, permeating horror of life in the suburbs, the only black family and always different, as the neighbours are friendly to Derricotte on the one hand and on the other trot off to the club that excludes her because of her race... it's excruciating. That's the two main impressions I get from this book, really. Permeation and exhaustion - or more accurately the realisation of both, because these are compromises and excruciations that I myself will never have to face, and because of that never fully recognised in others.

I'm not even sure that I still do recognise it, at least not fully but this book brought me closer to adequate realisation. It's really powerful stuff - a hard read, sometimes, but a necessary one I think.