My mother likens caring for the coats to the attention her own mane requires. Chemically, there is little difference between fur and hair. Mammals that are not primates are said to have fur, while hominids (humans, chimps, orangutans) have hair. As the least hirsute primates, humans have long sought out furred animals — trapping, killing and skinning them — for the purpose of wearing them. In “Fur, Fortune, and Empire,” the historian Eric Jay Dolin goes back to the Bible: Upon banishing Adam and Eve from Eden, he writes, God provided them with “garments of skins” to cover their nakedness.
These days there are plenty of other materials available to cover one’s nakedness, a point that anti-fur activists readily make. The past few decades have seen a humanitarian backlash to animal fur clothing. Major fashion designers, including Gucci, Stella McCartney and, most recently, Chanel, have forsaken it; several cities in California, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, have banned sales of the material.
But there is a sense among many black women that this broader, cultural disavowal of fur has coincided with our increased ability to purchase it. (Or as Paula Marie Seniors, a historian and professor of Africana studies at Virginia Tech, reported her mother saying: “As soon as black women could afford to buy mink coats, white society and white women said fur was all wrong, verboten, passé.”) For women like my mother and grandmother, my aunts and my sisters, a fur coat is more than a personal luxury item. It is an important investment.
My grandmother, Lucille Bones-Jarrett, was born in 1931 in Holly Grove, Ark., and migrated to Chicago at the age of 15, already a mother to one boy: two souls among six million black migrants who were propelled north by the tenuous hope of something better. Like many other émigrés of the Great Migration, my grandmother spent most of her life in a housing project. She raised nine children there.
“My mother never owned a house. She couldn’t afford it,” my mother said. “And even if she’d had the money, they wouldn’t have let her have one.” Federal housing codes that barred fair loans from being offered to black people, as well as other forms of housing discrimination, rendered homeownership impossible for many black families, and arduous for those who could attain it. So money was put toward other markers of personal prosperity, the kind that retained value and could be passed down to the next generation. “My mother never had a house,” my mother said again. “But she had fur.”
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