I know y'all love Soul Train and Beyonce and Jay-Z, Oprah, Barack Obama, and Michelle. I know you would kill for Oprah's giveaways, love Neil Degrasse Tyson, Van Jones, and every and any ball player who does not take a knee. I know you had a cool, wicked best friend/roommate/co-worker who gave you fist bumps, maybe even hugs, and held your hair back when you went all the way in and hurt yourself with the alcohol or the weed that you smoked up and she did only in secret when she was around your other white friends. I know that you know that Naomi Campbell is beautiful and the fiercest walker we've ever known, and that Vanessa Williams was the best Miss America, probably the only one you remember, and that Misty Copeland inspires the hell out of you and all the little dancers who have to "overcome something." Black.
We are the Titubas to your flying around the room foolishness. Listening to your cries, your stories and tall tales, moving the earth to heal your wounds. Standing by you because we've had no other option. When you go to trial, we are there with you. We might even hang first before you get released on appeal. When we go to trial you might bring things to the jailhouse before the lynch mob shows up. You wonder if we might survive it, rise up, come out the other side stronger, more knowledgeable, and still compassionate, softened, kinder, more enlightened.
You've watched the film next to us, in the seventh grade, heads bent low, when you see them hosing down the black people. The black people. Marching peacefully and fighting for their basic rights. I'm struck dumb, maybe you were too, of the older, black church ladies in their pillbox hats and their short strap purses carried delicately on their arms, moving forward with dignity, self-respect, desire, trembling pride, hosed down with water meant to quell a raging fire. Raging. Hell yeah. Inside. Magic. Students, girls and boys, holding on to one another, twisting like vines, never letting go of each others' hands until the torrent is just more than a human body can bear.
You've watched the film next to us, in the seventh grade, heads bent low, when you see them hosing down the black people. The black people. Marching peacefully and fighting for their basic rights. I'm struck dumb, maybe you were too, of the older, black church ladies in their pillbox hats and their short strap purses carried delicately on their arms, moving forward with dignity, self-respect, desire, trembling pride, hosed down with water meant to quell a raging fire. Raging. Hell yeah. Inside. Magic. Students, girls and boys, holding on to one another, twisting like vines, never letting go of each others' hands until the torrent is just more than a human body can bear.
The shit has to seem like witchcraft because the tropes and assaults were meant to take us down and still we rise. I read on a site, in the comments where I should not have trudged, a young white woman demanding of the black hostess, "How are you so strong? Black women are so strong! I wish I could bottle some of your strength and face the world." Now God bless her heart, I know she hit the trip wire with that BS backhanded compliment, but no one on there was up for her tomfoolery or her games. To paraphrase, "Bitch, you kidding me? We been carrying this shit forever. You can't even see us we holding it down so hard. We went in and voted to save the world and y'all still undecided. Take a seat. Ask us how we are so strong....what choice did we have when everyone turned their backs and tried to ride ours, the niggers of the world." We've toiled. Our backs are splitting.
Heads high even when we have nothing or little or a lot, but someone just had to tell us they think we didn't deserve it or got it because of Affirmative Action or a quota system that would surely have seen the mediocre (white) pass but not the exceptional (black). Your mediocre calls out our great with no shame. Maybe you don't know the difference. Go low and we go high and say what you will but still we slay. Calling us ugly and monkeys, animals and devils, heathens, idiots, sexpots and studs. Before the power structure threatened to take the one tool that poor blacks and whites had to find their way to any chance at that American dream, there was education. My grandparents told all of their charges it was all they could give them. They could work the farm or the factory, or they could learn. And there were tests put before them each time they succeeded and excelled. They'd just take the test again. And again. And again until there was no denying their excellence.
The rebirth of cool and slick and funk and style with roots so deep they reach to the core of the earth and out the other sides. We recall that deep, dark, black soil from which we were conjured, all of us, where the seeds of our souls are planted, where we have grown in sealed cages, like hothouses. Outside you see the foggy windows but inside there is a rich world, to which you have little access until you know how to cultivate and grown the most delicate of plants. You may touch the surface, clear the glass outside and peak in and see a world of lush greenery, steamy and hot, ripe with hope and expectation, creativity, drive, a microcosm into which you have never been invited because we are afraid. We have been protective of that space. You must remember that pesticides have been sprayed all over our blooms.
Colorism breaks people in many countries of the diaspora (thank you, colonialism) and in the good old United States of America, just one drop of black blood made you black, a taint you could only hide if you were fair and could "pass" yourself off as white, giving up everything. My aunties recall walking with my great-grandmother and having white people see her with them and think they were her "girls," what might be delicately called, housemaids, were they white, something that burned her up. She held them up, gave them their place, and their names. She tended to their delicate souls.
Whether the hair in a natural, long or short, wig, weave, pressed, relaxed, braided, colored, shaved today and down the back tomorrow, don't touch it or any part of me if it is just to dissect, tear apart, explore and navigate like some unfamiliar planet. We are from here. Of this soil. Right here. And our feet touch the ground, wiggle deep. We can put our ear down to it and hear what's coming, taste the air and feel the storm, rub the soil between our palms and know that there will be harvest or famine. We are more than just our bodies, place holders, stand ins for your desires, your whims, your hopes, your gardens. You can't imagine how deep the roots go to the center of the earth. We are in front of you and we are deep down and we are in the air.
Everyone is down when the gettin's good and the get down is low and funky and directed by Baz Luhrmann, but when we're being called out in numbers for the televised firing squads or tell our own stories in our own words, the spoken word hits the white window panes and the anguish gets distorted in the patter of rainfall against the glass. You mouth the words, "I can't hear you," and don't dare open the window to get in as you turn back to familiar pastures. There is a deep patch of forest where everything grows wild and resilient. We are made of that stuff. It is beautiful and awe-inspiring, tenacious, dignified, regal, magical. It is from these roots that we have found our strength, healed ourselves when no doctor was present. Salved our own wounds when you hurt us. Made our own crutches when we were too tired to bear weight.
I'm weary. I've grown so hot and ripe in that hothouse. Angry and violent with vibrant color and personality, wit, humor, and pain. You must come to know this garden. You must come to know what lies in there, to have a curiosity, to learn, to walk silently, to listen. If you come into this garden, you will know why I feel like I have carried so much and want to lie down. In bloom. And for even just a few seconds know a moment of existing just because I am beautiful in my own world before being plucked and studied in yours.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Heads high even when we have nothing or little or a lot, but someone just had to tell us they think we didn't deserve it or got it because of Affirmative Action or a quota system that would surely have seen the mediocre (white) pass but not the exceptional (black). Your mediocre calls out our great with no shame. Maybe you don't know the difference. Go low and we go high and say what you will but still we slay. Calling us ugly and monkeys, animals and devils, heathens, idiots, sexpots and studs. Before the power structure threatened to take the one tool that poor blacks and whites had to find their way to any chance at that American dream, there was education. My grandparents told all of their charges it was all they could give them. They could work the farm or the factory, or they could learn. And there were tests put before them each time they succeeded and excelled. They'd just take the test again. And again. And again until there was no denying their excellence.
The rebirth of cool and slick and funk and style with roots so deep they reach to the core of the earth and out the other sides. We recall that deep, dark, black soil from which we were conjured, all of us, where the seeds of our souls are planted, where we have grown in sealed cages, like hothouses. Outside you see the foggy windows but inside there is a rich world, to which you have little access until you know how to cultivate and grown the most delicate of plants. You may touch the surface, clear the glass outside and peak in and see a world of lush greenery, steamy and hot, ripe with hope and expectation, creativity, drive, a microcosm into which you have never been invited because we are afraid. We have been protective of that space. You must remember that pesticides have been sprayed all over our blooms.
Colorism breaks people in many countries of the diaspora (thank you, colonialism) and in the good old United States of America, just one drop of black blood made you black, a taint you could only hide if you were fair and could "pass" yourself off as white, giving up everything. My aunties recall walking with my great-grandmother and having white people see her with them and think they were her "girls," what might be delicately called, housemaids, were they white, something that burned her up. She held them up, gave them their place, and their names. She tended to their delicate souls.
Whether the hair in a natural, long or short, wig, weave, pressed, relaxed, braided, colored, shaved today and down the back tomorrow, don't touch it or any part of me if it is just to dissect, tear apart, explore and navigate like some unfamiliar planet. We are from here. Of this soil. Right here. And our feet touch the ground, wiggle deep. We can put our ear down to it and hear what's coming, taste the air and feel the storm, rub the soil between our palms and know that there will be harvest or famine. We are more than just our bodies, place holders, stand ins for your desires, your whims, your hopes, your gardens. You can't imagine how deep the roots go to the center of the earth. We are in front of you and we are deep down and we are in the air.
Everyone is down when the gettin's good and the get down is low and funky and directed by Baz Luhrmann, but when we're being called out in numbers for the televised firing squads or tell our own stories in our own words, the spoken word hits the white window panes and the anguish gets distorted in the patter of rainfall against the glass. You mouth the words, "I can't hear you," and don't dare open the window to get in as you turn back to familiar pastures. There is a deep patch of forest where everything grows wild and resilient. We are made of that stuff. It is beautiful and awe-inspiring, tenacious, dignified, regal, magical. It is from these roots that we have found our strength, healed ourselves when no doctor was present. Salved our own wounds when you hurt us. Made our own crutches when we were too tired to bear weight.
I'm weary. I've grown so hot and ripe in that hothouse. Angry and violent with vibrant color and personality, wit, humor, and pain. You must come to know this garden. You must come to know what lies in there, to have a curiosity, to learn, to walk silently, to listen. If you come into this garden, you will know why I feel like I have carried so much and want to lie down. In bloom. And for even just a few seconds know a moment of existing just because I am beautiful in my own world before being plucked and studied in yours.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
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