Thick: And Other Essays

McMillan Cottom likes to read Black women’s biographies. As a young girl, she reads Coming of Age in Mississippi, the autobiography of Anne Moody, a prominent civil rights activist. McMillan Cottom is particularly interested in her stories of Black girlhood. Black girlhood is often narrated through sexual trauma: “being raped, molested, ‘touched’ seemed to be the one thing, other than Jim Crow and beauty salons and spirituals, that hung black womanhood together” (177). Black girls are viewed as disposable and not protected from male violence. Sexual trauma is what McMillan Cottom has in common with other Black women like Oprah Winfrey and Gabrielle Union, which she learns when she writes an essay about R. Kelly. R. Kelly became a cross-over hit with White audiences at the same time that Black communities were becoming more aware of his reputation as a sexual predator. Before the internet, these warnings moved through a word-of-mouth rumor mill. McMillan Cottom hears the rumor from a cousin, who told her that Black girls who were abused deserved it because they were “hoes.” Her father also teaches her that Black women cannot be victims. She describes going to visit her dad in the hospital where her dad meets her husband for the first time.