Many mornings I will catch the girls staring off in to space, looking wistfully at nothing, and I will gently call out their names. Their eyes focus on mine and they smile. "Oops. I was just daydreaming," they'll say. The moments are so quiet and so lovely. They know I will spare them a moment to dream, to hope, to wonder, to ponder before the sound and the fury of our lives sweeps us back up. I envy them those moments.
Sometimes I dream of a life of excess, fame, riches, and wonder. That's fantasy and it's fun. Other times I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else. And then I wake up and remember that I am black. That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life. That my life is meant to define, describe, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives.
I did not grow up in poverty of any kind and I have my parents to thank for that. Both of my parents went to college and got advanced degrees and had good, well paying jobs. And they will tell you that it was part hard work and part opportunity and part luck that got them there. They raised us in a community that had a good school system, new homes, nice parks, a community pool, after-school and recreational activities, and decent values. There were not a lot of us (black folks) but there were some and save for the occasional asshole, we did not face full on, in-your-face-racist cross burnings, scrawled "nigger" or "blackie" on our home or property (though I was called "brown sugar" at 14 by a carload full of white teenaged boys when I walked home from a friend's house which scared the bee-jeezus out of me) like many of our friends in other communities did, and my parents were pin-pricked with microaggressions like having an asshole neighbor give their dog the same name as my father, and white ladies driving up to our corner lot asking my mother how "they" keep their landscaping so neat, implying that she was not one of the "they" who might live in that house. I'd never been in a city except to see Broadway shows or visit an art museum or having lunch at Windows on the World at the top of the Twin Towers. Only once do I recall going into Brooklyn as a young girl to see my grandfather's sister and being overwhelmed by all the electricity in the air and on the streets. (It is funny to even say that now.)
I know the sensation of meandering through my neighborhood picking dandelions from my neighbors' lawns, riding my bike down the middle of the street to go play or spend an afternoon at the swim club. I remember visits from the local police and fire departments at our school as fun and enlightening, seeing these civil servants as town celebrities. My sister once won a contest at the Fun Fair and the mayor of our town delivered a pizza to our house while riding on the back of a fire engine. I believe she got her picture in the paper.
The blessing of opportunity, of privilege, of wealth, and of achievement were often frayed on the ends by what I knew to be my history. I knew that my paternal grandparents were not educated past 12 and that they married in their early teens and started a family at an age when I was stressing about pimples, boys (mostly how none of them seemed interested in me), and advanced algebra. They'd lived in the Jim Crow, rural south in Virginia and their relations with white folks, though infrequent were strained and fraught with terror. My grandmother told me often that she wanted better for me, for all of us, was grateful for what she'd seen us achieve in such a short amount of time, hoped that "white people were fair and good" to us. There was palpable fear and doubt, but also hope.
It was the 70s and 80s. I watched all the shows kids watched then--Saturday morning cartoons, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island. We watched Good Times and What's Happening, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, The Muppet Show, Solid Gold. I took my cues from television and movies, longed for the toys and games and new electronics that were advertised, put posters of Matt Dillon and then Duran Duran and Depeche Mode on my walls. I walked the hallways of my school with a comb in my back pocket even though my hair was in French braids and then later too short to do much with. I met with my guidance counselor about options for my future and took SAT prep. I knew and understood all the cliques, high school groups and their status symbols, paid great attention to how each group defined itself and how it was seen or judged by the others. I learned the spoken and code language of this society. The symbols, signs, and words were all around me. It was popular culture. It was American life and it was all there was.
I didn't expect to see signs of me except maybe the one good dancer in a teen film or the one football player without dialogue standing in the crowd. I didn't believe that I even really existed. I didn't on film. I didn't on television. And I didn't in real life. I didn't exist at home because I was being seen and not heard. I was not being nurtured or caressed or prepared. I knew I didn't see myself anywhere and I was not told I was meant for this world either. It was all in shadow. In secret. I was invisible to my parents and unseen by the world. When I took the time to daydream, I knew those dreams would never come true. They couldn't because I could not figure out how to make them so on my own.
I put my girls to bed each night, climb in with them and whisper what I hope will be part of their inner dialogue when I am not with them, when I am gone. They will not know that there was no space made for them on the screen because they will hear in their heads, feel it swirling in their hearts, that they are so crazy valuable and important that their wild, talented, loving, and gorgeous mother said it was so. They will know it when everything else tells them that their hair and their skin and their butts and their nipples and their dreams and their desires and their needs and their ancestral pain and their fears and their massive, undulating auras are not quite right. They will know that their mother's wounds are not theirs to bear but to know, to avoid. They will know that things that I did not know. Because in the middle of all this bullshit, if I cannot give them that, then I cannot do anything and my day dreams will not be true.
What I knew, what wove through my family tree, and ran through my veins was that it might not be with me, but with my children....or theirs. The world was as crazy as it had been and each day it took more than it should have towards progress but there was my president. There he was with his own story and his family tree, with roots as deep as ours and branches that reached toward hope. He said we could. He shared his family, his daughters, and let us watch a black family rise and dream and live a fantasy and the every day at once. He is a good father, a good husband, a good man who did not ever let the slings and arrows, the insults and assaults from cruel and vicious fools lead him from his path. He made me believe we could and that we were and that the daydreams, the hopes, and the tiny moments that draw my beautiful brown girls into outer space, into other dimensions for just a fleeting second before we get into the day, could come true. That they can.
And they will, as I have, and my ancestors before me, stare into space, daydream, about a life that is just for them. Not a lesson, not an example or something to criticize, analyze, or discuss. They will remember that they lived when Barack Obama was the President of these United States of America and that there was promise and there were possibilities and there was hope. And when they come to and find that the pendulum has swung the other way, that they are back in a space where fear has weighted all of our dreams, stuck it in black tar, and threatened their flight, they'll remember that it has happened before and can happen again. There'll be no going backwards, no matter how hard the shadows pull at their dreams ,no matter how much fear is stirred. Their beautiful brown eyes have already seen the future.
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Drawing, charcoal on paper. Stephanie Penn-Virot.
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