It's been a tough few weeks in our two towns. A number of extraordinary curricular missteps regarding slavery (a mock slave auction and runaway slave posters presented in two separate schools' 5th grades) and pathetic racist and anti-Semitic scrawls and scratches on the walls of some of the elementary, middle, and high schools in the area have risen from the ground like a septic spill and gotten everyone all up in their feelings. Myself included. As the black mother of two black girls of mixed heritage, I have become both the sounding board and the rubber wall off of which white friends and acquaintances can bounce their feelings, their fears, and their embarrassment. I have read posts on a town Facebook page and gone down the dangerous, thorny hole of defensiveness, divisiveness made more infuriating by a focus on semantics and description rather than on empathy, connection, and apology.
In navigating my anger and my hurt and the confusion and fear of my girls, I have struggled with what has always been my belief, my truth, and with the hope I have wanted to instill in the hearts of my children. We have paid lip service to the idea of community in these two towns. We have congratulated ourselves for our openness and inclusion, and with a bit of side eye and tongue planted firmly in cheek, I have allowed it, but the truth is, no matter that I am married to a white, French man, I have not ever believed that the collective "white people" are my community. I have always felt that my otherness would never allow me space in "their" communities. That sucks and I hate to admit it. But I have always been prepared to be disappointed by even my allies. I have been prepared to lose them, to let go, to be assaulted, humiliated, abandoned by my white friends and colleagues. I have steeled myself for their indifference, their insensitivity, and their ignorance. The events of these past weeks have triggered that sense.
My otherness, my black, my skin/culture/race has placed me outside for much of my life because I grew up in the mostly white township of a mixed town in which most of the people of color lived in the borough circling the town. Defining and defending my otherness within this community became my job, and one that I was not particularly good at because I was a child and because my parents had grown up with only black people and really had no idea what these white people were getting into. They may have known in theory but had no practical application of growing up and living amongst the very people they'd always expected would not include them. We'd been given no tools other than "do unto others" and watching and studying their white moves on TV and in real life.
Though surrounded for much of my young life by pink and tan little girls and boys, I always marveled at my brown skin. It was coppery and gold when the sun hit it and shiny with oils and lotions after a bath. It amazed me that my mother all butter cream and café au lait could blend with my father's coffee bean and chocolate to make the different browns that covered my siblings and me. My grandparents, save my dad's father, were all fair-complexioned black folks. My mom's mother was often mistaken for white for those not in the know (white people). The skin we were in made us black people, all of us because one drop made it so*, but there was not shame in that, not instinctually. Only one thing could make it immediately so to young me, could blush the brownest cheeks mauve and purple. And that was the dreaded slavery section of American history in social studies.
All the lessons and stories told by our families, the reunions, the family trees, old photos, black church, roof-raising hallelujahs could not inoculate me from the burning eyes of my peers and my teachers who needed me to feel some kind of way, show some kind of reaction to their gaze when they told me that it all began here. With someone with the same coppery skin as mine or dark coffee bean of my father or buttercream meringue of my mother or white coconut of my grandmother sold into or born into slave to toil and suffer abuses named but not discussed, certainly not felt. We'd move past fast enough to keep the pain and the anguish at bay. I'd burn and blush, feeling my cells vibrate with that truth in my body and my classmates would consider it for as long as it took, usually the slowest reader, to get through those two paragraphs.
That the enslavement of my ancestors is abhorrent is not and was not questioned. That my family tree and the stories of my past are filled with tales of horror, rape, assault, abuse, beatings, degrading humiliation, division and separation of families and names never to be traced again (and further receding as each older member of my family, those who kept the stories and the secrets alive, pass on) isn't either. But it is not quite understood either. So hideous is this reality to all of us in these United States, the modern world really, that we refuse to sit longer than a few paragraphs with it. Refuse to share the reality of our foundation, of the roots of this nation with our future. Allow our children to interpret what we as parents can barely discuss with one another.
I asked my girls last night to consider this. We are sitting together in a room, spending time after a long day when we are brought outside to the yard and told by our master, the person who owns us and uses us for his will, who keeps us in this cold house in these horribly tattered clothes, that tomorrow, he will send my oldest daughter to another family where she will work and toil for the rest of her life, and that we will more than likely, never see one another again. I tell the youngest that years later, the same will be done to her. I tell them that we suffer and that we cannot read or write, have no comforts, and cannot escape this truth as our lives, as what we will live and endure as long as we are on the earth. I tell them that the same would have been true for those who came before us and those who came after.
As I talked, we were all in tears. I was choking them back as I described to them this horrific scene. This one horrible moment that does not include epic cruelty, rape, maiming, whipping, torture, starvation, actual breeding of human beings like chattel. I cried into their hair as I hugged them and said, "This is not the story of where black people began. We are and have been so much more. This is how the story of us begins for so many white people. This is slavery and it's not all that we are."
When I heard about the mock slave auction that was to be included in the presentation of a child in my 5th grader's switch class, I at first tried to logically connect the dots that would lead a child to this place. How in the teaching of slavery did going on the auction block seem like a schoolyard game or play? How did kids end up dancing and dabbing while singing Negro spirituals learned during Black History Month while pretending to be slaves? How did children feel compelled to participate in this charade? What had they missed? My daughter was doing a report on the Southern colonies and while she mentioned slavery as it is not possible not to, she and her partner met the topic with the gravity one would expect. To be honest, I could feel their fear around talking about it together. And that's the problem.
It's fear. It is always fear. Looking at one's self directly in the mirror, facing the truth about one's nature, one's motivations, one's soul is incredibly hard work. When it doesn't look pretty, we don't want to be who we are. When I look in the mirror, I cannot deny my brown skin and the history it tells. I can no much cover the blemish of the world's slave trade with concealer and powders as I can the truth of our history that predates that scarring and the advances and re-centering of ourselves in our own narrative rather than in peripheral characters in a white story. I'm looking and I see myself. I see our brown and black and meringue and cocoa and peach and tan skin. I see our tales told on my body, feel them run through my veins, taste their breath in my soul. I stare into my tired, knowing eyes and I refuse to meet this moment with shame. The shame is not mine to claim.
My purple blush at my family's history, my people's story relegated to a 1/2 centimeter on the world's timeline. The story of the soul-crushing, body-breaking, psyche-wounding, intentionally cruel, inhumane centuries of torture on the people of the diaspora told as a Disney tale with singing and dancing and runaway slave posters drawn by 5th graders and then defended as childhood innocence, has knocked the wind from me. That forty years after I was taught this hideous tale as my truth, my children and their white counterparts are learning it as though history lives outside of our bodies, outside of the bodies and lives of real people is a travesty.
Perhaps my anger is getting the better of me. Perhaps it is about time. I have sat idly, quietly, cautiously, listening to mostly white people, but also other minorities, with a different story to tell. I have seen various groups "become" white, claim white, be deemed "model minorities" and turn their heads from the mirror, no longer seeing their otherness in the reflection but a clear, unblemished patina of respectability one foundation shade lighter and rouged lips telling the same stories about black people and the lies of our brown skin. I hear them all describe and define and explain anything and everything but the privilege their white skin, their acceptable otherness has allowed them. I hear them demand that I, that we, promise that we are greater than the story of us that starts with slavery, that their othering of me/us is not my/our fault, that their othering of me/us is not THEIR fault, that we can discuss the man in the mirror but that they cannot be made uncomfortable and even more, that THEIR children cannot be made uncomfortable. So my children look in the mirror and have to ask and I have to tell them every time and yours, only when they get in trouble and we can hope they "learn from it."
And so we sit again discussing slavery, the very root of the systemic racism in the United States of America that has and does threaten our role on the world stage with the rise of Donald Trump and his white throngs terrified of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves clearly. To see that there are many shades of foundation to cover their pain, their blemishes, their scars, their hate, their privilege, their lies, their denial but that we know they are wearing makeup and that the emperor has no clothes. You are too scared to look deeply past your white cheeks, your furrowed brows, your clenched fists, your pursed lips to see that you cannot blur the reflections of the people standing next to you, that no matter how you try to fade us from view, we are still standing next to you.
There were meetings of a coalition on race and there was a town hall meeting. There were "teachable" moments and recordings of bias attacks and petty crimes that were dissected on the towns' Facebook page. There were cries of "not me" and pleas not to "see us as just white people" and reminders that "no one living now was/is a slave owner." And I begin to burn in my own skin, to itch, and to fidget. I am hot, heated, but not from my own shame. It is because I must ask again that you look at your folded hands, bite your tongue ready to lash out with explanation, stare into your eyes in the mirror or those of your children and tell me, again, that we can all learn from standing on the auction block, that white children participated too, that the runaway slave posters really had a purpose, that you have more to say and still no time to listen because your discomfort of confronting our hideous past is worth more than our sustained and repeatedly opened wound. It is because I blush purple with hurt while you do all you can to avoid seeing your cheeks flushed by your complicity in this racist system. It is because we are teaching our children what we learned and what we learned was not good enough. It cannot be that I know this just because of the skin I'm in.
*The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood)[1][2] is considered black (Negro in historical terms). This concept evolved over the course of the 19th century and became codified into law in the 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" and is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status. (Wikipedia, One-drop rule).
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Showing posts with label black girls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black girls. Show all posts
Friday, April 7, 2017
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
A legacy: Daydreaming, black and full of hope
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.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Thelma and Louise and Me
After the whirlwind week between Christmas Eve and today, I found myself with the first free moments last night. The girls were passed out in my bed, tucked in after having had their first up-'til-midnight celebration of the new year's arrival and the following day's parties and good wishes tour through the neighborhood. Flicking through channels, sitting snuggled up on my couch with a blanket and a glass of wine, the quiet of the house brought the present upon me. I was no longer in my head planning for the next day, reflecting about those passed and things missed or not done, I was right there. And my birthday was coming in a few hours. I got to Thelma and Louise just as they were coming upon J.D., the young, handsome, brand new Brad Pitt, but I knew the story like I know myself. Thelma and Louise, like The Color Purple and Terms of Endearment and The English Patient, is a spot on my timeline, a moment of clarity and insight that I take pleasure in revisiting, no matter the tears and splatter that are sure to come.
And on the eve of my 45th, I looked with new eyes on my story. Every time, every single time, I love the charm, naiveté of Thelma. Her hope, her wonder, her journey (with massive shock and disappointment sure), her young soul charm and adorability. I beg her to see what I see before she gets into trouble, does something stupid, thwarts their chances and every time she does not. She is so cute, so sweet, so shiny. Oh, Thelma.
But I am Louise. Cautious, well-prepared, ordered, organized, playing the cards close to the vest. The thrill I get as this woman tidies her house before going away for what she expects will be a long weekend cannot be understated. The way she keeps herself in check, always on high alert, even when she is having fun is familiar. Her composure, her comportment, her trembling under that reserve is mine. I can be zany and funny and irreverent. I bet Louise was once a long time ago. Sometimes. Before Texas. Which she wants to avoid at all costs, does not want to revisit. It's the past and threatens to tear her wide open again.
Thelma and Louise takes us all on this journey across the gorgeous landscape of this country, showing us the beauty, the majesty, and the shifting contrasts and shadows made from that luminous glow. As these women let their masks fall, revealing themselves, their internal struggles and realizations and their skin, their human skin that they live in every day without make up, naked, we see the terrain change shape, see danger in the shadows, feel the ominous pull of life's magic and mystery as they sort out the mess of their circumstances. I have put myself in their shoes, lived vicariously through them every time. But this time I wondered, what if indeed one of these women were actually me. What if instead of two beautiful white women who find themselves with snowballing legal and emotional problems, Thelma and Louise or Thelma or Louise was a black woman. Was me. Would anyone be willing to take the journey with me? Would anyone want to come to my rescue? Would my choices be seen as heroic or tragic? Could I make that drive through the country, through the Midwest and Southwest of the United States as I tried to figure out how to right the wrongs, the mistakes and the impulses that got me into hot water? Would I go over the canyon or be knocked off long before my soul made that arc, reveled in its evolution and transcendence?
And then the tears fell harder even than usual when I realized that though the archetype, the Everyman (woman) journey, is indeed for everyone, I doubted that most would want to come along on the ride with me. It's where we find ourselves today or at least where I find myself. Deep in my heart, though I love with everything I can, I wonder if my love is reciprocated truly. In our "post-racial" America, I now wonder who wants to hear my story, any of our stories, to really listen to them without trying to place it in a specific genre, a special place, an "other" category. Does anyone believe that though our stories can be and are similar in so many ways, that we'd still like to see ourselves, be seen ourselves as part of the larger tale? That ours are not peripheral, supporting parts but starring roles too? I don't ask the questions to receive knee-jerk, fumbling reassurances. I ask because of how much it hurts me to even have to. Because the doubt has crept in and made me feel that whatever it was I thought I was leaving to my daughters has been eroded and that they will have to fight to be seen too.
I ended the year struggling to be open and available to people who were more than comfortable telling me how I feel, how people of color are/feel/act/think/behave or who told me they didn't see what I was showing them, telling them, expressing, shouting about, crying about, and were quick to walk away or shut down the dialogue with all sorts of "proof" and "post-racial" mumbo-jumbo. I lost people, let some go and allowed others to let me go when I took off my makeup, my mask, and showed my skin, my human skin, and it was real and pained and flawed, and could not be tidied. When I realized that even I, a friend or a colleague or acquaintance, could not make a convincing argument for recognition or compassion or even dialogue.
After years of trying not to "drive through Texas," not to go back to some painful truths, to reveal the scars I'd covered with my tidy, poised, secretive composure and protective stance, the circumstances had changed. I couldn't get out of this. Though I'd take many roads to try, they all still seem to end at the canyon. So here we are. I am hoping in the new year that we can talk to each other. That the seekers of the shiny and new, the naïve and the fresh can take the hands of the weary and the wary and the jaded and the wounded and forge a direction together. I hope that we are able to step back to think about and consider what each other says rather than react and attack. I hope that I am not met with theorems and postulates in place of real stories and truth and connection. I hope that we can find some kind of common group so that my story is as interesting, as worthy, as real, as true, as archetypal as any other. I want us to see ourselves in each other, longing more for what is similar, rather that foreign or strange. I want us to journey in all senses of the word--physically, emotionally, spiritually.
I love Thelma and Louise and wouldn't want to change their story. I road with them through their map, followed the lines that lead them to themselves and to their realizations and truths. I will again. Their journey has informed mine and they have inspired me to seek out hands to hold, to revisit old places and find undiscovered territory, maybe even some truth. Out there in that wildly powerful and spiritually haunting landscape, we all discover the essence of who we are. If we let ourselves.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
And on the eve of my 45th, I looked with new eyes on my story. Every time, every single time, I love the charm, naiveté of Thelma. Her hope, her wonder, her journey (with massive shock and disappointment sure), her young soul charm and adorability. I beg her to see what I see before she gets into trouble, does something stupid, thwarts their chances and every time she does not. She is so cute, so sweet, so shiny. Oh, Thelma.
But I am Louise. Cautious, well-prepared, ordered, organized, playing the cards close to the vest. The thrill I get as this woman tidies her house before going away for what she expects will be a long weekend cannot be understated. The way she keeps herself in check, always on high alert, even when she is having fun is familiar. Her composure, her comportment, her trembling under that reserve is mine. I can be zany and funny and irreverent. I bet Louise was once a long time ago. Sometimes. Before Texas. Which she wants to avoid at all costs, does not want to revisit. It's the past and threatens to tear her wide open again.
Thelma and Louise takes us all on this journey across the gorgeous landscape of this country, showing us the beauty, the majesty, and the shifting contrasts and shadows made from that luminous glow. As these women let their masks fall, revealing themselves, their internal struggles and realizations and their skin, their human skin that they live in every day without make up, naked, we see the terrain change shape, see danger in the shadows, feel the ominous pull of life's magic and mystery as they sort out the mess of their circumstances. I have put myself in their shoes, lived vicariously through them every time. But this time I wondered, what if indeed one of these women were actually me. What if instead of two beautiful white women who find themselves with snowballing legal and emotional problems, Thelma and Louise or Thelma or Louise was a black woman. Was me. Would anyone be willing to take the journey with me? Would anyone want to come to my rescue? Would my choices be seen as heroic or tragic? Could I make that drive through the country, through the Midwest and Southwest of the United States as I tried to figure out how to right the wrongs, the mistakes and the impulses that got me into hot water? Would I go over the canyon or be knocked off long before my soul made that arc, reveled in its evolution and transcendence?
And then the tears fell harder even than usual when I realized that though the archetype, the Everyman (woman) journey, is indeed for everyone, I doubted that most would want to come along on the ride with me. It's where we find ourselves today or at least where I find myself. Deep in my heart, though I love with everything I can, I wonder if my love is reciprocated truly. In our "post-racial" America, I now wonder who wants to hear my story, any of our stories, to really listen to them without trying to place it in a specific genre, a special place, an "other" category. Does anyone believe that though our stories can be and are similar in so many ways, that we'd still like to see ourselves, be seen ourselves as part of the larger tale? That ours are not peripheral, supporting parts but starring roles too? I don't ask the questions to receive knee-jerk, fumbling reassurances. I ask because of how much it hurts me to even have to. Because the doubt has crept in and made me feel that whatever it was I thought I was leaving to my daughters has been eroded and that they will have to fight to be seen too.
I ended the year struggling to be open and available to people who were more than comfortable telling me how I feel, how people of color are/feel/act/think/behave or who told me they didn't see what I was showing them, telling them, expressing, shouting about, crying about, and were quick to walk away or shut down the dialogue with all sorts of "proof" and "post-racial" mumbo-jumbo. I lost people, let some go and allowed others to let me go when I took off my makeup, my mask, and showed my skin, my human skin, and it was real and pained and flawed, and could not be tidied. When I realized that even I, a friend or a colleague or acquaintance, could not make a convincing argument for recognition or compassion or even dialogue.
After years of trying not to "drive through Texas," not to go back to some painful truths, to reveal the scars I'd covered with my tidy, poised, secretive composure and protective stance, the circumstances had changed. I couldn't get out of this. Though I'd take many roads to try, they all still seem to end at the canyon. So here we are. I am hoping in the new year that we can talk to each other. That the seekers of the shiny and new, the naïve and the fresh can take the hands of the weary and the wary and the jaded and the wounded and forge a direction together. I hope that we are able to step back to think about and consider what each other says rather than react and attack. I hope that I am not met with theorems and postulates in place of real stories and truth and connection. I hope that we can find some kind of common group so that my story is as interesting, as worthy, as real, as true, as archetypal as any other. I want us to see ourselves in each other, longing more for what is similar, rather that foreign or strange. I want us to journey in all senses of the word--physically, emotionally, spiritually.
I love Thelma and Louise and wouldn't want to change their story. I road with them through their map, followed the lines that lead them to themselves and to their realizations and truths. I will again. Their journey has informed mine and they have inspired me to seek out hands to hold, to revisit old places and find undiscovered territory, maybe even some truth. Out there in that wildly powerful and spiritually haunting landscape, we all discover the essence of who we are. If we let ourselves.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Monday, June 2, 2014
Black Magic Woman
A friend of mine shared a post on the Book of a video of Carlos Santana's "Black Magic Woman". As I sat in front of my computer listening, taking myself back to my childhood, I recalled how I loved that song. Loved that song because I believed that he was singing, "black, magic woman." When I listened carefully to the words, I felt stirring inside myself a truth, a truth because I heard it sung, called out, pleaded on the radio. It was the promise, the proof that there was such a thing as a "BLACK, MAGIC WOMAN" and that maybe, as I suspected, I might be magic too.
When I discovered the black, female writers--Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni, Jamaica Kincaid, Maya Angelou--to start, I discovered a world that for me had been just a secret. I heard and saw and read things about myself that I'd never heard or seen. I did not grow up in the company of black folks. Yes, we had family and many close friends, but our community, what surrounded was white. I read these books with a longing, a desire, but also a realization of a hidden truth about me. These authors, along with many other artists (of music, visual art, dance, poetry, fiction writing) from all different backgrounds taught me the power of myself and that in the face of my every day loneliness, deep down there was magic.
I was loved by my grandmothers and my aunties, was held in their care. But it was the arts, from the creative spirits, seekers, seers, and black magic women and men that I first heard the call. My ballet teacher gave me the techniques, but when she asked me to feel it, to dance it with passion, I'd close my eyes and trust my magic to lead my body. When Marvin Gaye sang, "What's going on?" I heard something I'd never considered before and heard it like a rush of adrenaline in my veins. I saw Judith Jamison with Alvin Ailey as a girl because she'd to college with my mother and invited us to watch her and meet the dancers. She is a presence to anyone, but to a small girl chasing the muse, she was a giant in every sense of the word. I sat at the knee of any performer on television and closed my eyes listening to orchestration, composition, lyricists who said what my heart believed it was dreaming all on its own.
What I loved as a child was that though I found all of these people beautiful, otherworldly, and "gifted by God" (an expression I heard so often with the church ladies and aunties) they were not all traditionally beautiful; they were more. Their beauty came from another world. They were not charmed as much as possessed. Possessed of spirit, talent, direction, and passion. The light and energy radiated. Navigating the mainstream and the shadow world was done in secret and done every day. I could not articulate the how and the why, I just felt it.
When Maya Angelou passed this week, I was left with a sensation similar to the moments I'd learned of my grandmothers' passings. Maya Angelou I'd come upon quietly. No one handed me a book and told me there were secrets in there. But I'd heard her speak with that deep, knowing drawl resonating and vibrating with the power of a lion's roar but as direct and sharp as a crossbow, as humble and loving as a whisper that tickles the tiny hairs on one's ear, and as sure a voice I'd ever known. I believed her and trusted her. I loved her and everything she brought to me. Everything she promised me just by existing and not surviving, but thriving. She was BLACK. MAGIC. WOMAN. And she told me I was too. I could hardly believe her so she reminded me again and again.
With her passing, the breath was knocked from me and tears fell involuntarily and uncontrollably. I felt strongly that I should absorb her faith in me, in all of the black magic women. Women who need to give themselves permission to do their magic, to try their wares, to release their tethered souls, to soar. By her example and her wisdom and her guidance, there was no way for me to deny the possibilities. I see her dancing to that song, giving in with abandon, being so remarkably human and otherworldly at the same time. Dare I do it too?
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
When I discovered the black, female writers--Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni, Jamaica Kincaid, Maya Angelou--to start, I discovered a world that for me had been just a secret. I heard and saw and read things about myself that I'd never heard or seen. I did not grow up in the company of black folks. Yes, we had family and many close friends, but our community, what surrounded was white. I read these books with a longing, a desire, but also a realization of a hidden truth about me. These authors, along with many other artists (of music, visual art, dance, poetry, fiction writing) from all different backgrounds taught me the power of myself and that in the face of my every day loneliness, deep down there was magic.
I was loved by my grandmothers and my aunties, was held in their care. But it was the arts, from the creative spirits, seekers, seers, and black magic women and men that I first heard the call. My ballet teacher gave me the techniques, but when she asked me to feel it, to dance it with passion, I'd close my eyes and trust my magic to lead my body. When Marvin Gaye sang, "What's going on?" I heard something I'd never considered before and heard it like a rush of adrenaline in my veins. I saw Judith Jamison with Alvin Ailey as a girl because she'd to college with my mother and invited us to watch her and meet the dancers. She is a presence to anyone, but to a small girl chasing the muse, she was a giant in every sense of the word. I sat at the knee of any performer on television and closed my eyes listening to orchestration, composition, lyricists who said what my heart believed it was dreaming all on its own.
What I loved as a child was that though I found all of these people beautiful, otherworldly, and "gifted by God" (an expression I heard so often with the church ladies and aunties) they were not all traditionally beautiful; they were more. Their beauty came from another world. They were not charmed as much as possessed. Possessed of spirit, talent, direction, and passion. The light and energy radiated. Navigating the mainstream and the shadow world was done in secret and done every day. I could not articulate the how and the why, I just felt it.
When Maya Angelou passed this week, I was left with a sensation similar to the moments I'd learned of my grandmothers' passings. Maya Angelou I'd come upon quietly. No one handed me a book and told me there were secrets in there. But I'd heard her speak with that deep, knowing drawl resonating and vibrating with the power of a lion's roar but as direct and sharp as a crossbow, as humble and loving as a whisper that tickles the tiny hairs on one's ear, and as sure a voice I'd ever known. I believed her and trusted her. I loved her and everything she brought to me. Everything she promised me just by existing and not surviving, but thriving. She was BLACK. MAGIC. WOMAN. And she told me I was too. I could hardly believe her so she reminded me again and again.
With her passing, the breath was knocked from me and tears fell involuntarily and uncontrollably. I felt strongly that I should absorb her faith in me, in all of the black magic women. Women who need to give themselves permission to do their magic, to try their wares, to release their tethered souls, to soar. By her example and her wisdom and her guidance, there was no way for me to deny the possibilities. I see her dancing to that song, giving in with abandon, being so remarkably human and otherworldly at the same time. Dare I do it too?
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Monday, May 12, 2014
The Lost Black Girls
I always have something to say. Even when I am not saying anything I still have something to say. But there are times, like now, when the thought of opening my mouth threatens to release the hiccuping, sniveling, water running in the mouth torrent of tears and screams that I hear only in my dream state because I don't dare care or feel as much as all that in my real life. Not if I can help it. Not if I want to survive.
I am a woman of color (WOC) until I am black, really black. A little black girl does not often find herself with a voice, with the protection of everything and everyone. A little black girl is scared and only sometimes believes that anyone gives a damn. At least this little black girl. We know that very early on. Even when the people who love us tell us we are important and special and valuable (and that does not always happen), we can see. We can hear. We listen. We sense. We're low on the totem pole. A woman of color gets to talk about her perspective, share the stories of her time as a little black or brown or yellow girl, as she developed into a woman who took control of her destiny or found herself crushed by the weight of its reality. When I am a woman of color, people who want to, who dare to, listen to my perspective, want to know what I think or believe, hope they want to know my story, what I have lived, what I experience. As a woman of color I feel expert in my experience, strong, protective, prepared. But deep down, I am still a little black girl. Scared, tired, fragile, strong, endlessly hopeful, and both shamelessly fearful and fearless.
I have been unable to write or speak or even utter a gasp about the girls, kidnapped, stolen in Nigeria by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram. I knew, even as a young girl, that if I went missing, no one would come looking for me. And every time I tried to disappear, ran away, hid in the closet or the attic, even my parents did not stop what they were doing to find me. Everything I have ever known about my status did nothing to reinforce my sense of worth or value. Little black girls were not searched for, missed when they were gone. Yes, this was a child's perspective, and yes, they, we are valuable to many, but consider that the stories that really got the public moved to action were those of pretty little white girls stolen in the night. Rarely did I see a story about a small black child that raised everyone's consciousness, concern, pulled the community together to talk about the sanctity of childhood or innocence. I knew inside, just knew that the general population was not concerned for my virtue, my safety, or my innocence. No one who looked like me starred in the rescue story.
So when I learned they were gone, my heart sank. I felt as if I'd been kicked in the gut. And then my thoughts turned to them. Taken in the dark, scared to death, wondering what would become of them, how would the people who loved them find them, where were they going. I imagined them looking for clues on the path, a way to remember to find their way back, probably knowing they would not go back. At least not the way they came. I thought of the fucking cowardice it took to punish people, communities by raging assaults on young girls and women. I thought of the absolutely sickness of that kind of power play and how the eyes of those girls and their minds and their hearts and their bodies will be changed forever. And then I learned that I was late to the Intel. They'd been gone days when I first heard about the abduction. Many tuned in later to find that the girls had been missing for weeks.
I could not conjure up in the recesses of my mind, the most horrible fear, most alienating, soul crushing, dream stealing terror that is happening right now. They were gone for days before the world got enraged, got upset, was called to action. Taken in the night at their school by a group that rejects Westernization and education of girls and women. Their response to this affront was to kidnap the girls and, depending on who you are asking, sell them into marriage, lead them through the brutal terrain of the forest, or torment and repeatedly rape them, traumatizing and terrorizing them and leaving their families in complete anguish. Each possibility more horrifying than the next. That the possibilities are more than likely probabilities has left me supremely enraged.
Their mothers and families left to imagine the unimaginable, crying in the night, feeling the psychic pull of their children and having no idea how or where to find them. There is talk of international aid, perhaps a trade with Boko Haram for militants being held as prisoners. There are rallies and writing campaigns, and calls for action. I support those. But what I cannot get out of my mind, even when I close my eyes, are the faces I have conjured of those girls, their eyes staring at me, making our connection real. It is so easy, especially in the modern world, when the threats are not immediate or put one in imminent danger, to turn one's head. But I feel their presence and their fear and their life force.
There but by the grace of God go I. I see myself in their faces. Read my own name next to theirs. The horror lies in the absolute randomness of being unfortunate to be chosen for such violence and assault. A girl in the world learns these things. That upon her body and to her mind will be done great damage and violence in the name of anything and nothing. How I wish I could make them feel safe, secure, complete after this. Some have escaped and I have read that some may have died on the journey but many will have an "after this." What that is, where that is, how that is, we don't yet know. What serves as a metaphor for so many of us, girls in the world, lost in the dark, stolen innocence, is the reality for many more.
Hiding in the closet or in the attic, I remember my pounding heart. Its steady thunder keeping me tethered to the present, kept me from fleeing to my mind, my dreams, my outer space, disappearing place. I feel their hearts beat. All of ours. And I hope these girls are reunited with their families and brought home soon. Say their names out loud so you believe that they are as real as you are. Call out to them so they feel your hope and your rage and their strength and your love. The little black girl inside of me is screaming out, clawing at the walls, begging to be heard, to be rescued, to be healed. The WOC is prepared to be steely and strong enough to support others, to hold them up in body and spirit, to live in a place where being a girl in the world, a black girl in the world can again be wondrous and awesome, not dangerous and threatening.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
I am a woman of color (WOC) until I am black, really black. A little black girl does not often find herself with a voice, with the protection of everything and everyone. A little black girl is scared and only sometimes believes that anyone gives a damn. At least this little black girl. We know that very early on. Even when the people who love us tell us we are important and special and valuable (and that does not always happen), we can see. We can hear. We listen. We sense. We're low on the totem pole. A woman of color gets to talk about her perspective, share the stories of her time as a little black or brown or yellow girl, as she developed into a woman who took control of her destiny or found herself crushed by the weight of its reality. When I am a woman of color, people who want to, who dare to, listen to my perspective, want to know what I think or believe, hope they want to know my story, what I have lived, what I experience. As a woman of color I feel expert in my experience, strong, protective, prepared. But deep down, I am still a little black girl. Scared, tired, fragile, strong, endlessly hopeful, and both shamelessly fearful and fearless.
I have been unable to write or speak or even utter a gasp about the girls, kidnapped, stolen in Nigeria by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram. I knew, even as a young girl, that if I went missing, no one would come looking for me. And every time I tried to disappear, ran away, hid in the closet or the attic, even my parents did not stop what they were doing to find me. Everything I have ever known about my status did nothing to reinforce my sense of worth or value. Little black girls were not searched for, missed when they were gone. Yes, this was a child's perspective, and yes, they, we are valuable to many, but consider that the stories that really got the public moved to action were those of pretty little white girls stolen in the night. Rarely did I see a story about a small black child that raised everyone's consciousness, concern, pulled the community together to talk about the sanctity of childhood or innocence. I knew inside, just knew that the general population was not concerned for my virtue, my safety, or my innocence. No one who looked like me starred in the rescue story.
So when I learned they were gone, my heart sank. I felt as if I'd been kicked in the gut. And then my thoughts turned to them. Taken in the dark, scared to death, wondering what would become of them, how would the people who loved them find them, where were they going. I imagined them looking for clues on the path, a way to remember to find their way back, probably knowing they would not go back. At least not the way they came. I thought of the fucking cowardice it took to punish people, communities by raging assaults on young girls and women. I thought of the absolutely sickness of that kind of power play and how the eyes of those girls and their minds and their hearts and their bodies will be changed forever. And then I learned that I was late to the Intel. They'd been gone days when I first heard about the abduction. Many tuned in later to find that the girls had been missing for weeks.
I could not conjure up in the recesses of my mind, the most horrible fear, most alienating, soul crushing, dream stealing terror that is happening right now. They were gone for days before the world got enraged, got upset, was called to action. Taken in the night at their school by a group that rejects Westernization and education of girls and women. Their response to this affront was to kidnap the girls and, depending on who you are asking, sell them into marriage, lead them through the brutal terrain of the forest, or torment and repeatedly rape them, traumatizing and terrorizing them and leaving their families in complete anguish. Each possibility more horrifying than the next. That the possibilities are more than likely probabilities has left me supremely enraged.
Their mothers and families left to imagine the unimaginable, crying in the night, feeling the psychic pull of their children and having no idea how or where to find them. There is talk of international aid, perhaps a trade with Boko Haram for militants being held as prisoners. There are rallies and writing campaigns, and calls for action. I support those. But what I cannot get out of my mind, even when I close my eyes, are the faces I have conjured of those girls, their eyes staring at me, making our connection real. It is so easy, especially in the modern world, when the threats are not immediate or put one in imminent danger, to turn one's head. But I feel their presence and their fear and their life force.
There but by the grace of God go I. I see myself in their faces. Read my own name next to theirs. The horror lies in the absolute randomness of being unfortunate to be chosen for such violence and assault. A girl in the world learns these things. That upon her body and to her mind will be done great damage and violence in the name of anything and nothing. How I wish I could make them feel safe, secure, complete after this. Some have escaped and I have read that some may have died on the journey but many will have an "after this." What that is, where that is, how that is, we don't yet know. What serves as a metaphor for so many of us, girls in the world, lost in the dark, stolen innocence, is the reality for many more.
Hiding in the closet or in the attic, I remember my pounding heart. Its steady thunder keeping me tethered to the present, kept me from fleeing to my mind, my dreams, my outer space, disappearing place. I feel their hearts beat. All of ours. And I hope these girls are reunited with their families and brought home soon. Say their names out loud so you believe that they are as real as you are. Call out to them so they feel your hope and your rage and their strength and your love. The little black girl inside of me is screaming out, clawing at the walls, begging to be heard, to be rescued, to be healed. The WOC is prepared to be steely and strong enough to support others, to hold them up in body and spirit, to live in a place where being a girl in the world, a black girl in the world can again be wondrous and awesome, not dangerous and threatening.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
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