Who's house?

I've dated before. I've raised my girls in the safety of being, at home. Keeping men at bay was easy. Letting them in isn't. Men have no authority in the house that I built. Women feel free in my space. Men are merely useful visitors. Single parenting doesn't get a do over. What happens when the worlds collide? What happens when the princess questions her authority, because a suitor addressed his fraility at her expense? What happens when the suitor fails to read her discomfort while persuing the Queen? 

Choice makes this scenario seem as easy as learning hopscotch. Public dating hasn't been my M.O. for over 10 years. The last 2 times were tragic. Both men have other children. Mine were younger. I learned how they parented girls. It was almost aligned with how I did things. Only one lived with me. It was brief. He never made them feel ashamed of thier bodies. The other has different standards. His daughter lived with him. He provided for her. She wore whatever she wanted. I never paid too much attention to what she wore, at home. I didn't care.

Without the gaze of patriarchy, how can I teach my child women aren't as free as they seem. Sometimes, we make choices to keep all of safe in the long run. Sometimes, our greater need for support makes us look at suitors for a how, not a why. I used to balk at a man telling me to put clothes on. I thought it was controlling. I didn't understand my role. 

I didn't explain to the suitor how I ran my queendom. He feels like he can treat the princesses like others. This looks like favoritism. It looks creepy. It doesn't look like he truly likes them. I didn't see it. I have concurrent agreements about safety. They don't talk to each other.

I feel horrible. My child doesn't feel supported. The suitor will feel defensibly defeated. He won't know what to do. Thing is, I don't plan to stop seeing him. 

Toryland Beach

 There are moments where trauma doesn't begin or end. It just layers on the veins embedded in our rocks, our traumas. Gravel is the uncomfortable pebbling the path. Veining if is faint. Nonetheless, the trauma is showing.

    Are we the rocks? Therapists tell us that trauma happens to us. It changes our brains. What if we didn't know, bc trauma whipped our ancestors so badly, it showed up 4 generations down the line. What do we feel like? Are chips? Are we tumbled smooth? Are we light catchers? Which parts of sparkle? 

    What if you got your spark from trauma? Poverty dictates. It creates stories that socialize around lack. Basic needs are a party. Funerals are fish fries. Building fund is a few hands of poker. Prom was baking pies for the community. Lack forces you to see the world for what it gives not how you work with it. It demands you learn early and young to play with rocks.

    My middle daughter has always carried around rocks. I've never grasped her fascination. Hidden in patches of grass or barely missing from the driveway, she collected them. Currently, she has around 11 tucked into a pouch. They go with her everywhere. She saw things in those rocks that others take for granted. 

    I grew up on a gravel drive. When my mother bought her first home, it didn't have gravel. Over time, the compacted red clay gave way under Buicks and Chevys. At my grandmother's house, the putrid green walnut hull hugged the gravel every fall. My grandmother drove over them. I'd find the nuts. Little did I know, I was allergic. I could walk on rocks.

    I couldn't undo the trauma. I'd seen the affects. I didn't know. Words can't speak in silence. They can fill up intentional emptiness. All the rocks in the world aren't as big as Cancer.

Paper

I've spent more than enough moments begging. My performative presence decries how the need to weep is louder than the crying. My tears are reclusive, muffled, shut up in my bones and bedsheets. I've learned how to wear the mask. Dunbar had no idea his poetry was a reckoning for a future that included me. He just wrote how to survive. Fixing my face will not fix flagrancy. Silence still doesn't teach. To master that much self control is to deny the self you are showing up for. Explanations. Excuses. Who are we without the words to justify either our existence or erasure? Does my audacity unnerve you? Angelou been telling me, all my life, how gifts, talents, and craft all run through my veins. Black writers taught me about talent. The raw ingenuity to learn illegally and make a profit. Black writers gave me gifts that no Hallmark card could. I am their imagination. They see me as a niece, grandchild, or cousin. I am family in ways that are intentional and crafted. I am not the craft. I am not an expository on how or why. I am. My creativity rummages pages of words desperate for the essences. The tools only enhance. They do not define me. I am bigger than the leisure and wealth assumed to support art. My face still twitches and tires. My eyes wander. I'm looking for greatness where mediocrity is the means. And, it's very mean, very angry, very indignant. Hansberry knew being young, gifted and Black was dangerous. How many paper cuts come with being Grown, gifted, and Black? Should I beg the system to redesign itself, so hurting isn't the greatest vehicle? That's too much like right. I am not at war with what I cannot be. Begging won't bring me peace. 

A Raisin

 I have an angst, an angry dangling carrot, rotting in my pocket. Why carry seepy stench? Why be putrid and petrified? My power is gunpowder. Black girl Magic is a shotgun. Womanism is the bullet. My target is closer than the length of the barrel. She became the friends I thought loved me, until sleeping over was out of the question. Her mother decided being a friend meant paying me to watch her siblings. She chose humiliation loudly, attacking every insecurity in a chant that I'll never forget. She always calls me cute. She pets my hair. We laugh. She denies she would ever walk to my house. All of them had cars, even if their older siblings drove them. None of them shopped where I did. Some of them went to the football games. They cheered for different players. Players who parked under 8 squares of plastic covered bulbs and drank from scary loud pick up trucks. The players I knew souped up cars with pine boxes, rims, and sat at the carwash til midnight. Our cars are clean, not new. Your cars are not new or clean. We were friendly, at best. The inside of home was a couch we'd sit on in dreams. Real friends find a way to bend back the fears until shooting means a camera. Violence cannot build. Passive aggression smells like racism rotting in my pocket. Desperately loving power, loving those who wield it, withers in the sun. It dries up, too brittle to add to gunpowder. No shots will fire. My pockets weep.

Words and labels

 What makes one a Master of a particular Fine Art? Is it the coursework, the talent, the gift, the craft, or something we've missed. In the Bible, there's the trinity. Father/Mother, Son/daughter, and Holy Spirit/wisdom. Wisdom is silently feminine. It is the magic and the stillness, the caring, the presence in and of ritual. Do you actually master wisdom or do you practice it? Indigenous cultures often work with the world around them. Controlling is far less of a goal. How does wisdom work in buildings and institutions built to control? Choose your words carefully.

To confer a degree is to recognize completion. To become a Master at something defines the work. The specialized research and study. Wisdom whispers in the late night. It wakes us from terrifying dreams. It guides us to write differently, bc we know the institution. We know how it feels in our bodies. Muscle memory is real. The degree reminds us of what we cannot see.

Words are spoken before they reach the page, just like a thought is subconscious before we think it. Wisdom is that journey. The greatest gift is to accept, without comparison, that your steps don't need nobody else's feet. You aren't meant to run another race. It won't be easy. It is yours.

I've spent my life carrying words. From nicknames to birth names, I swell and shrink, depending on what I am called. What feels best is what I call myself. I create titles for myself. I define me, outside of legacy and who knew me when. To live prodigally is to embrace freedom and accountability. It is the comfort to roam while being rooted. My practice is telling healthy stories. Healthy stories embrace the culture, the nuances, the dynamics, the language. They define aches and disease in context. My protocol is wisdometry. I use wisdom to get you to see. I have lots of tools. 

To master may mean to complete. For me, it's the beginning. It confirms I am authorized to do what I've been doing. I need to live in order to access my wisdom. How you living?

The Elephant in the room/Zoo Story

 Today, I pulled out photos. My mother captured the essence of teenage rebellion and depression. We still lived in my grandmother's house. For 3 years, we moved like she was on an extended vacation. The furniture remained. The cabinet full of salt and pepper shakers gathered dust. The custom cabinets, in the dining room, were still filled with china and linens. The plastic runners had yet to lose their grip. I was looking for the colors that regularly pop up in my life. The things that define me. Humans are a collection, unlike animals. We have tangibles that we carry and discard or replace. These pictures look like a mess to my mother. They look like who I've always been to me. Neat wasn't my style. I am all about comfort. I knew where my things were, despite what it looks like. I see where I recycled a big plastic jug into a fish bowl. I see where I stole a favorite laden to care for it. The basket of smell goods, purple and pink weavings, centered on my desk. The window sills are a light green. The tie backs are emerald. My favorite things watched over, from a shelf above; a music box, a jewelry box, books, a cat bank, and a mouse, in a blue dress, seated in a rocker.

I also slept with an Elephant. I squished her under my head until it felt just right. She wasn't fleece but warm and grey. She gave me security. My aunt, without children by choice, always gave me stuffed animals that made me feel seen. Being responsible for them was freeing. They didn't expect me to do anything but love them. I was okay in all my emotional states. That silent understanding was far greater than the distant silence between my mother and I. Somedays, it was the only salvage.

My grandmother made me a curtain to hide the papers under my desk. I chose the fabric. It, too, was lilac. Puffy, three petal white flowers with orange shadows repeated. They looked like peacock feathers from a distance. They were just a shaded pattern from the holly hobbie bedspread I used to sleep under. A lil more grown up. Still the same colors. Still the same fields. My window only saw the siding on my great uncle's house. It didn't show me the distance, like other windows in the house. 

Greys, pinks, purples, and greens. In HS, I was happily on the Grey team. Without the historical understanding, I was just happier not to be blue, my mother's favorite color. I didn't know that Grey meant the South, meant an alignment with treason, meant I justified slavery. In undergrad, I was denied the highest award. Suddenly, the provost forgot my name. I would not be a member of the Green and Grey Society. 2 of my favorite colors would deny me on an institutional level. Jesuits are crusaders who financed slavery and used Christianity as the tool to do so. At the same time, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority courted me. I wasn't ready to go pink and green, like my grandmother, aunt, and 2nd cousins. Those colors showed up in my bathroom, when I first bought my house. It was one of the signs I knew where I would live.

I was a founding member of a sorority. The colors are purple and pink. I'd found a way to tie my grandmother and me, again. Purple saturated my life since I discovered Prince. My father's living room is somewhere between lavender and lilac. Mine is only light purple on the bottom. I have room to decide if white walls are going to go grey. I have a turtle tank instead of a fish. The turtle is green.

Elephants belong to Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. They are crimson and cream. They are the only organization my mother ever considered. She didn't join. I never considered myself "black enough" to cross those mighty sands. I was lighter than most of the sisters. I love red cars, but that's about it. It may seem fitting. Some folks call me Red. Luckily, Loyola College didn't have Divine 9. I didn't start the sorority til 20 years later.

Lenoir Rhyne's colors are garnet and black. It's motto is translated "the truth shall set you free". Am I free? What is my truth? Who's telling my story? Garnet was my youngest's color for many years. It's deep rich pigment reminds me of blood when air first hits it. Black absorbs all. Black is the earth and the fullness thereof. I am seen as Black and choose Black. Many years after I'd chosen out of desperation, I chose myself. Private education is a zoo. I paid to be seen. I pay to take up space where I'm assumed to be more like a monkey or a clown. I have been trained to speak, walk, and dress for success. You can still see the sadness in my eyes. I may not remember everything. I'm still more elephant like.

I won't forget the moments when color reduced my existence. I am not and cannot mix. I am the spot in white spaces. The walls are bigger, older, and seemingly wiser than me. They painted themselves. My ancestors' sweat doesn't whelp in the walls, flake the paint, turn it ever so grey. My voice is disposable. I cannot speak for them. I'm only allow to be in space. I'm not of it. I have learned to wait and watch the paint dry. 

 My grandmother's death didn't change the colors we had together. I didn't strip my life of the greens, purples, greys and pinks. These colors show up in the flowers I choose or the clothes I wear. It's subconscious. I am comfortable in my mess. It shows my humanity. It cannot be defined by characterization. Every animal's body grieves differently. Moving them from what they know, not matter what the gain, doesn't erase that. It's the parallels observed that connect us. It's the dominance that divides. 

Humans are just as nomadic as their animal counterparts, by choice or force. When we realize that no amount of moving can bring us any closer to what we don't have, we will be better off. Zoos aren't humane. Schools don't really educate. Are white folks just that sad that they have to dominate everyone and everything, instead of investing in what they do have? Elephants are indigenous to people of color. We handle them differently. We honor them. They aren't for use or show. Tons of the grey is a beautiful heard or a life threatening rumble. They, too, are everything in between. Nothing is limited to the perceptions of humans. Once we get over ourselves, we will see that colors do more than we give them credit for. 

 

The Busyness of my Literary Legacy

 I spent hours in Barnes and Noble with my 2 sisters. Orland is a 2 hour flight from and 25 miles through varied Chicago suburbs. In order to celebrate a delayed 50th, I gave my sister the freedom to choose books she loved. I chose books that sat in BHM displays. She chose fiction. I chose non-fiction. She chose self-help. I chose Black women writers writing about themselves. My self-help looks different, but is the same. My youngest sister stood and watched. She's not a reader. She's waiting for this to be over.

Before I boarded the plane, I'd already revised sections of my story. I listened to the characters. I delved into their lives. I thought I was an assignment behind. It seems I was far more prepared for this week's class. My classmates didn't understand how I was painting the picture. They had to hear it.

And, then, my other professor lost a mentor. We've no class this week. Mourning take precedence. Another Young, Gifted, and Black Woman Writer has exhausted herself until transition. She wrote with people I've read or admired. She developed an MFA that redefined. In reading the interview between Valerie Boyd and Selaj Shah, I saw myself. I saw my manifested dreams and wishes comfortably chatting in a cadence they both understood. Who you read influences how you write.

Maya, Audre, Nztake, Nikki, Lorraine, James, Martin, Malcolm, Toni, Alice, Cornel, J. California, Langston, LeRoi. If I had to think about the literary lineage, Maya and Martin are more grandparents. I would be the love child of Cornel West and Audre Lorde who spent every holiday at Uncle Jimmy's house, Aunties Toni, Alice, and Nikki did my hair. They dressed me and let me be fly. Great Uncle Malcolm and Great Uncle LeRoi lived on the same block as Auntie Nztake. They popped up whenever. J. California was that cool cousin I hadn't seen since the last family reunion. Lorraine is my favorite big cousin. She lived how I wanted, smoking cigarettes over typewriters. We all understood our existence as political, radical, and a challenge. We provide varied safe spaces where Black is. It's excellence isn't limited to academic expressions. That only validates what we already know. God is all up through here. My pen is merely an extension.

But then, I get to play with Natasha and Kiesi, under the watchful eye of Jackie Shelton Greene. Dasan Ahanu is the brother I never knew I didn't have. Kelly Rae is the sister I adopted on site. Jilly, Erykah, and Laryn are my DJs. Ray Manley teaches me to battle while B-rock brings me back to Bmore. Hip Hop is the cultural evolution of spoken word. Bars show up in museums and on the lake. LB makes the words work until the bag overflows. Main showed me my dance is enough. We are more than curators. We are chosen family. These are play cousins, chosen kin. 

My stories aren't luxuries. They manifest in Chicago cold. They fill pages of books I discover when I'm not bound by text. I pay in the freedom of twitter, following the gifts of Blackness that shine within a few characters. Revising is the work of the Gawds. Editing ain't nothing but Wisdom. To write is a privilege I cherish. It was illegal. I was illegal. And still I rise.

Poetry isn't a microagression

A Gathering of writers

Brady bunch tile squared

looks like a Masters class

wading intersectionality

gasping for craft

inside the cannon

yet outside of familiar

A gathering of writers

examining voices 

they consume and shelve

purchasing bodies

of work

validated by prizes

and not presence.

Yet, I am here.

A gathering of writers

who never had to work twice as hard

to get half as far

they reside in varied privileges

with suburban sunsets

and off grid saviorism

they swill mugs full of words

expansive explanations

wrought with everything wrong.

The room is oozing with assumptions

mediocrity made payable in private loans

baited breathes are frosty

getting that colonialism smear

on class discussions

peer reviewed and praised

The room is oozing with assumptions

usurping stories for the remix

fucking up the cadence

with defiance and defense

stepping over real living

with a bullhorn

painted in by an Adam

who's genes can be traced to Africa's Eve.

A gathering of writers

waves a brave flag

contains safety in the exchanges

Lowering the ickiness

to taste like a sour patch kid

or a mouthful of poprocks

A gathering of writers

crackles and pops

wrestling with perception

roping the steer

bred to forget it's girth 

and weight;

ink and soil and bull's skin is Black.

Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey

 Imagine reading parts of your story in a book, by a woman you've never met. The idea of community shifts from geography to culture to space and time. I grew up in the shadows of iconic death. Malcolm and Martin were martyrs. Their words were etched into TV reruns. I couldn't escape their cadence. It was the same way teachers taught me. These teachers were deacons and ushers. On Sundays, I saw them in different suits. I learned how to take up collection and how to sing from them. I thought this tangible authority was limited to my little 5 mile town. It seems that many small Southern towns had streets where children safely walked. It seems that too many teachers couldn't afford department store clothing. I thought my grandmother learned to sew beyond necessity. Butterick became the next best thing to Thalhimer's or Miller and Rhodes. Being underweight might have been a blessing in disguise. I never knew how ideas became pants. I just listened to the hum of the sewing machine. All the ladies knew how to sew. Until I turned those pages, I didn't understand the limited freedoms that came with Civil Rights. How my grandmother was able to do so much more with me. Her eye for great clothing construction made discount shopping fun. I rarely shop retail. I invest in good pieces. Atlanta and Mississippi are a far cry from Virginia. I'll bet if I go down there, I'll feel almost at home. That's an eeriness. I'm not eager to drive to just about. I need the 2 blocks from my front door to the Fabric Shop. I need the comfort of running across the street and counting the cracks. I need my grandmother's guidance in the flesh and not memory. I'm not sure I like seeing myself in a different font. It stirs up what I worked to forget.

Nonfiction and not creative

 There's a familiarity that white women have. It assumes the breadth of the room and feels like they are stroking your shoulders. The ones that touch your hair. Even spaces celebrated for their safety aren't for me. Spaces I pay for. Spaces that remind me of who I am. Spaces where a select group becomes more than a cohort. In the moment when I want to take up space, I am silent. I have shrunken back into the forgotten, the last to be called upon. Why tease me? Why attempt to center yourself so crudely? Why not just apologize without the drama? Then, I wouldn't remain in the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Your vulnerability always comes at my expense. Tears are too expensive to waste. Steaming mad and hurt tears hid behind my lower lids. I can't let you see me cry. You can't win. My humanity is on the line. My existence is only adjacent or after you. 

This makes me question the group. Makes me ask if they really love James Baldwin or if his name sounds that good. Have they really read Jesmyne Ward or is she another New York Times best seller? I know, we have a way with words. Black folks whiddle them down to fine tip pens and write ourselves back into history. We are so gifted, so educated, so grand reading us is merely an introduction. My bravado is keeping me. I'm not sure if I belong.

While I find the rules good, I know that certain folks don't like discomfort. They don't want to examine. They just want to be validated. I'm scared. Again. I cannot get lost in someone else's story. I question if I can be more than another Black face. I question why I enrolled in such violence? Am I so desperate to be myself that I will let women, without agency, find a way to wield it over me? It's my degree, too. Tonight, I didn't feel like it was worth it.

proximity ain't perfection

 In reading old books, I get lost. Old becomes withered and stiff book covers. Old is more about possession that publication date. I'd chosen this book or it chose me. I don't remember when. The pages screamed that they heard the stories I'd only told to my students. The women wrote for me without being too personal. I guess they were preparing me for what I thought I wanted to be: a writer.

How many people grow up idolizing writers? How many read and reread their books looking for a map? I dreamed of late nights filled with typewiters and arguments over gin. Loud conversations draped in progressive fear and mild distrust. Degreed and educated men and women who grown from colored to Negro to Black by planting themselves in the fertile grounds of Harlem or Chicago's Southside. My childhood friends didn't dream of these types of salons. The only way to write like that was outside the public school system. I had to sit in classrooms designed to protect the delicacy of white womanhood. I had to fit my frame into a dress code not made for me.

It isn't so much the escape. It's the exchange. I left parts of myself in every step I took to get to campus. It's weird how I shrunk, how I fell in love with the story and forgot the writer had to live, too. This writer lived in ways none of her classmates understood. I picked up the mantle that integration had dropped at my feet. I had to be better than good. I was learning the corporate fight. I was in the ring with the next generation. They could sponsor me, promote me, lift me even further away from the comforting hues of Black folks. These girls knew wealth. I could only write about it. It's not enough to study in these spaces. 

"To be Young, Gifted, and Black" doesn't slide like a trombone. It's the linger of the cymbals and feathery drum. It's 16 bars. It's asking the rivah how many of us drowned to get free? Writing seemed to be the only way to document my story without being polite. Grammar ain't political. How I speak sounds like jazz, but you ain't neva heard it before, so your ears hurt. Why do I need to make myself that uncomfortable for you? I've learned that words are free. Publishing them has a price. My price was an extraordinary tuition oozing with saviorism and light-skinned privilege. My price was guilt, so heavy I needed to give it to an unsuspecting Black girl. My price was too high.

Why invest in systems that lie to you? Stories and poems write themselves. They aren't limited to stanza and paragraph. They carried lessons before parables became a thing. Repackaging what I already know doesn't make you any closer to me or me to you. I'm still Black. I'm still other. I'm still here closely listening to what you left out. Paint flakes when you repaint too much. 

I thought I was pushing the dreams of my people forward. I thought the closer I got and the more words I learned, the more perfect I'd become. 5 years in HS. 4 years in college. 1 year teaching. 5.5 years serving. 3.5 years in non-profits. That's almost 20 years of whiteness. I'm almost 50. I thought I was being a more perfect Black Woman. Turns out, we will never be if we keep letting other people's words define us. Ain't nobody getting close enough to me to take my words. 

Unlearning hurts

 In a random and private conversation, my former students and I, yet again, grapple with the effects of our education. We weigh what it costs us. I have this exchange after driving an hour to see my primary care, after waiting in a room full of disabled veterans. 153 lbs doesn't take up enough space. The only person to see me is another woman. The eye contact is brief. I sink into my peacoat and hide in my headphones. I'm acutely aware of being outnumbered. My anxiety is higher than it was the whole 45 min drive down. My mind wants to leave. My body is already in a battle to heal from a car accident. The muscles and joints on my right side refuse to move. Walking hurts. Driving hurts. My knees need warmth. My shoulders get cold. All I can do is wait. It would seem that 5.5 years in the Coast Guard would prepare me. This isn't a new space, but it is. I was young. I believed that rank and education erased racism. I believed I was a likeable human being, despite my conditional experiences. None of these partially mobile, old white men wanted to see me, let alone sit in a room with me. Getting help costs me my blood pressure. Slow death ain't a price I want to pay.

I often wonder if the lies are worth it? If elite education only teaches us, Black women, to hate ourselves even more than before? If walking away from our culture makes us less Black? If the whole mantle of progress should rest on somebody else's shoulders? I never wanted to be white. I wanted to be. I needed to be loved, accepted, nurtured, and cared for. Education doesn't do that. These things come from the community. What happens when you spend so much time in another community that you are afraid of your own? Who are you when you can only identify with actors and not real people? Tuition doesn't justify how we signify nothing. We've had to study while being studied only to teach others how to do the same. Did I do myself and my students a disservice? Why do I need to teach anyone how to hate themselves? I don't even know what I'm built for anymore.

I've been questioning who I am, as a light-skinned Black woman, since I can remember. My likeability was definitely related to my lack of melanin. My acceptance was predicated on my proximity to whiteness. All I ever wanted was to be around Black women who understood me and Black men who supported me. I started a sorority with that in mind. It wasn't enough. I attended all kinds of Black centered functions. I show up alone. My safety is tenuous. It's tethered to a situation. Without safety, I can't get free. Will I ever be safe enough to say I'm in so much pain I can't cry? Will I be vulnerable enough to let the  failing system support me? Time and again, I've relied on the system. I've jumped through hoops to make it work for me. I'm tired.

I'm unlearning. I'm peeling back the layers and admitting fears I was taught to swallow. Survival is a generational curse. I still live on the edge of poverty, a lil better than I grew up. I live some 4 hours away. Time and space teach you the same lessons, no matter where you go, huh?