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?