Savala Nolan is admittedly “in-between.”
“I am someone who occupies kind of an odd space in the culture because my life and my identity is made up of all of these opposites,” the San Anselmo native says.
“I’m a mixed Black woman and what folks have sometimes called ‘a whole lot of yellow wasted, meaning I have light (yellow) skin ‘wasted’ by Black features (kinky hair, broad nose). I’m Mexican on my dad’s side, but I don’t speak Spanish. I’m descended from enslaved people on my dad’s side, but slaveholder’s on my mom’s side.”
Her Black and Mexican father was dirt poor, quit school by the time he was 8 years old to help support his family, was incarcerated for many years and sometimes sold drugs to pay child support. When she visited him on the ranch he called home, with no electricity or running water and where his landlords called him Big Nig, she went to the bathroom in a bucket. Her mother, a Daughter of the American Revolution, finished graduate school. Nolan attended some of Marin’s toniest private schools — Marin Country Day School and Marin Academy — and clerked in the Obama Administration’s Office of White House Counsel. She’s also been both thin and fat after a lifetime of dieting that started when she was just a toddler.
She’s been an insider and an outsider at the same time.
It’s understandable that Nolan wanted to explore her multiple sides, which she does in the essays included in her first book, “Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body” (Simon & Schuster), which was published this summer.
Her 12 essays touch on motherhood, dating, sex, class, state and gendered violence, dieting, what it feels like to be a Black girl and woman in the United States, and our country’s long history of racism. What ties them together is the body, hers and all of ours, because the body is where everything happens, where we experience life and the world.
Exploring dislocation
Being an “in-between,” as she calls herself, “gives me an interesting perspective. I wanted to explore my own dislocation in the culture, to map out where I belong in relation to these categories.”
Marin is important backdrop to her story, although it doesn’t figure prominently in her essays. It gets a brief mention in her chapter titled “Bad Education,” which addresses how women accept violence as a way to participate in our culture, and in the chapter that gives the book its name, in which she describes meeting a mom at the neighborhood park in Berkeley, where she lives with her husband and daughter, who assumes she was from Marin City when Nolan told her she was “from Marin.” She seethes inside but smiles on the outside to play along with the stereotype when she knows full well the mother would never have assumed that if she were White.
Without romanticizing Marin City, she recalls it as a “bruised valley” when she was growing up, but also where “families made and make homes there, pride and joy lived there, there is wholeness there,” she writes.
Nolan’s mother came to Marin from upstate New York as a teen with her family, moved to West Marin to live in a commune and then settled in San Anselmo to raise her family with Nolan’s father, although they separated when Nolan was just a child. He grew up in a Southern California agricultural town near the border and ended up in Marin when he was sent to San Quentin.
Wealth ‘on steroids’
If she had attended public schools, maybe she might have felt different as a mixed-race girl in Marin, she admits. She was a bright kid and her mother decided private schools were the way to go.
“Having gone to private schools puts the Marin wealth thing on steroids,” she says. “I was such a fish out of water in terms of economics and race, and frankly my body since I was a chubby kid.
“As a woman, we’re so tethered tightly to how we look. So having had the ‘wrong’ kind of body and also the ‘right’ kind of body, to me represents yet another kind of way I’m in multiple places at once,” she says.
Nolan was aware at a young age that there were things in her life and about her that differed from her peers, and the tension that created within her. She just didn’t have a language for it. She began to find that language when she attended a semester at the Mountain School, a working farm in rural Vermont, in her junior year of high school.
“I became more critical, not of myself necessarily, but of my environment and the way it messed with my head,” she says.
Nolan’s writing, which has appeared in Bust, Time and Vogue, is closely related to the work she does as the executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, addressing issues related to belonging, subordination, privilege, power, resources and safety.
Vulnerable voice
Her book has earned praise for its honesty and willingness to explore the contradictions in her life, and a model for others to do the same.
Nolan’s “embrace of the heterogeneity of Black womanhood is part of this book’s charm,” the New York Times writes, adding that her voice is “vulnerable, but rarely veering into self-indulgence.”
“This fierce and intelligent book is important not just for how it celebrates hard-won pride in one’s identity, but also for how Nolan articulates the complicated — and too often overlooked — nature of personal and cultural in-betweenness,” notes Kirkus Reviews.
“Savala Nolan contains multitudes and is willing to ask herself questions she can’t comfortably answer. That alone makes this slim book of essays worthy of our time,” observes the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
Her chapters on her father, who recently died, and her White mother’s slave-owning history were particularly brutal and exhausting to research and write. Black people in America hunger to learn their history, but it only goes so far — much has been erased by the system of slavery, she says. She questions why more White people aren’t as curious about their own family background when information is so readily available..
“It fascinates me and frustrates me that so many White people don’t feel called to understand exactly how their family line intersected with chattel slavery. It was the basis of the economy,” she says. “Unless you’re living under a rock, you know that’s not going to be a pleasant exploration. At the same time, if you don’t call the truth, you’re fixing a lie. So I do wonder what we lose in terms of what is possible for our future when so many White people insist on not understanding the truth.”
Nolan hopes her book offers a way for people to have those conversations.
And as much as growing up in Marin helped further some of her feelings of in-betweenness, she acknowledges it gave her a lot.
“There were so many good things for me growing up in Marin. Physically it was a very safe place for me although emotionally it was not a very safe place for me,” she says. “Marin is a complicated place and it was a complicated place.”
