The skin I'm in

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.

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.

New Year's Day: Black Eyed Peas and Collard Greens (2)

There is promise and there are promises on the first day. 

I'd promised the girls all break long that I would take them roller skating at the rink.  Truth is, I love that place and it's not a big deal to go unless I am tired and frankly, a holiday break where I am alone with these two cherubs for the entire time is pretty damn tiring, no matter how cute and sweet they are, so heck yeah, I was tired.  Most graciously, my good friend agreed to go with her brood and we wrangled our teams to make it to a 1 o'clock session.  I'd left a pot of black eyed peas to soak in cold water on the stove and cut the collard greens the way I like them (in strips and with the large vein at the middle of the leaf removed, too tough for me).  I'd prepped just enough for me as no one in the house is going to go to town on them other than me, got everyone's gear in order, and locked us out.

We'd already let the new year's air into the house, saged ourselves and the house, thoroughly cleaned, and put away all of the Christmas.  I know my good Catholics and other Western Christians wait until Three Kings Day or Epiphany, the day of the feast that celebrates God's manifestation in human form of his son Jesus Christ, on January 6th, but we ain't doing that.  The falling needles and the wilting tree just weren't doing it anymore for me and I had to toss that tree out the window.  I awaited Janus, Roman god of dates, doorways, transitions, time, passages, and endings, and new beginnings to greet me and lead us into the new year.

After a good skate, I raced home to get that food on the stove.  Black eyed peas were drained and then put back in the pot with a ham hock and some seasoning, while the collard strips were put in a larger pot with some water, a little oil, seasoning, garlic, and a little onion.  I know some folks like the hock in that too, but not this year.  As everything began to heat up, that familiar fragrance began to rise.  I loved that scent.  I could hear the laughter of my grandmother and aunties in the kitchen.  Or my sister and cousins and friends in her kitchen, the party hovering close to the doorway of the kitchen, and then finally settling right in the center.  I vaguely recall our black neighbors coming through on New Year's to get some from my mother's stove or bringing their own to share.  Everyone filled with hope and laughter.  The year so new and full of promise.

I was always told that the black eyed peas and collards would mean good luck for me in the coming year but also learned from other Southern folks, that they also signified wealth.  The black eyed pea journeyed to the Americas with the Africans during slavery and has been connected to my black people and Southern cuisine for centuries.  While it hardly looks like a coin, like say, the lentil which is used in Italian good luck cooking, it is meant to signify the coins in the money equation.  I always thought they looked like googly eyes or funny cartoon faces. 

As with most if not all of traditional Southern cooking, this dish started in the kitchens where slaves and then domestic servants prepped food turning ordinary basics into delicious cuisine.  Black eyed peas were a cheap crop that held up well in winter.  Originally fed to farm animals, the black eyed pea became a staple for the Southern slaves who were often given cheap, scrap, and less desirable parts for their sustenance.  When General Sherman's Union army raided the Confederate food stores, they turned their noses at the black eyed peas and the Confederate troops were able to survive the harsh winter.  The peas became a symbol of luck and good fortune.

It is also said that in January, 1863, the newly freed slaves celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation ate black eyed peas, thus making the food a staple at any celebration of luck and prosperity for generations of Black Americans to follow.  Adding the collard greens to signify wealth or paper money and a side of pork, a rich, fatty cut of meat, promised blessings to come.  You had to eat them all together for the spell to work.  These Southern recipes are steeped in both tradition and superstition and I always loved starting off the year with a little magic.  There are plenty of Black folks who don't follow this tradition because of its connection to slavery and the images and metaphors of promises unkept from a cruel and blatantly racist, punishing system.  I ain't mad at that.

But I personally feel nostalgia for my childhood spent in and out of the kitchen of my Grandma, behind the house, on the farm, out front on the porch, making promises and plans for a future just generations out of slavery.  There was, for me, a real connection to my family tree and my ancestors, the pain and hope that coursed through their veins and now my mine, and blushed my cheeks when I was angry or excited or overjoyed.  This was connection to them. To us.  So I made them for just me after roller skating and gave the girls each one pea and one strip of the greens just to taste.  The little bit of luck, the spells from before they knew themselves or me myself.  Tradition and superstition.  New beginnings.



(c) Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Hothouse flowers in bloom

This is me talking from the wound.  I know all about holding hands across the aisles and all the way we've come.  I know that we want to be color-blind and cast the world open and diverse and accepting of all of our unique qualities.  But I am often a bit player, the confided in best friend, the fringe, the exotic, the unreal.  When I tell you that I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders, that I am tired of carrying this load and you ask, "Why do you feel like you are carrying the load?  Don't you feel that all women do this?" then I know that you don't know.

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.

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.