by Glory Edim
Reading about Gal, about her sisters, her mother, and her grandmother, who all lived this horribly abusive existence, made me think that my mom was right. Women, especially black women, have a hard row to hoe (a super-duper Southern saying my mother always repeats). We seemed to be easily neglected, used, and abused but also made to cater to and clean up after men who hurt us but take little to no responsibility for their actions. In the end of Gal’s story, she is forced to take care of her own family while also caring for a man who killed the only mother she knew without ever going to prison or even being arrested for it, and beat Gal herself until she ran away from home. As dramatic a child as I was, I knew that I had a very different and much better home life than Gal did, but I also knew that my parents, mostly Dad, were grooming me to one day take care of them, as well as any family I would make for myself in my adulthood. Gal seemed to be evidence of what my mother had said to me when I was too young to hear it. My life as a girl would be rough, only of value in relation to the men I would have to either fight off an attack from or take care of until their deaths. My life would actually be about nothing. There were plenty of times as a young girl that I wished that phone call from my grandmother, keeping my mother from aborting me, had never come, and that the appointment to eliminate my existence had been kept.
I hope you’re not crying. You’re not, right? Good. Because while I might’ve been convinced as a child that my life as a black woman somehow invalidated me as a human being, I’m grateful to say that that was some straight-up, country-fried bullshit! Black women gave birth to the planet. Every human being, regardless of race or creed, originated from the womb of a black woman. That’s just science! Not only are we the crust and core of civilization, we are innovative. Brilliant. Beautiful. Forgiving. Tenacious. And yes, MAGIC, among many other adjectives. Black women happen to be the most educated group in America (so far), and every day, there are more and more of us being told we can’t and defiantly showing the world that we can and we will.
It took a while for me to unlearn the bad lessons my parents taught me about my existence by accident, as well as the bad lessons the media has been teaching me on purpose (that’s another story entirely), but I’m glad I have learned. I’m even grateful for the bad lessons I was taught in the first place. As it turns out, I’m pretty stubborn, so teaching me that my life would be bad fueled my ambition to have the best life possible. And I do. Ahmed is still both my parents’ favorite child, and that’s fine. I’m the one who grew up to be rich, so they can all suck it.
I am a rotten egg according to my mother—spoiled, grumpy, and entitled. That was one of my childhood nicknames, because my parents indulged me by making sure I got to eat what I wanted and, more important, that I always had a book to read. As a kid, all I wanted to do was read, dive headfirst into my various craft projects, and hide beneath my grandmother’s mahogany table with a stack of books, perfect pink-frosted animal cookies, and a glass of sun tea—with the right amount of sugar to suit my little girl taste buds. Tiny, puffy-haired, plagued with acne instead of freckles, a misfit loner frustrated by all the unanswered questions I had about this world, I’d found my safe space in stories, away from all the other kids in my school.
My bookworm dad felt like I was a kid sent to this planet just for him. My mother didn’t like to read, but she lied to him about it on one of their initial dates, to a bookstore, and tried to play him, as he tells it. He’d waited for someone who loved to fall into books—and got me. I don’t know who I am without books. Just like I don’t recognize myself in pictures without my glasses on. My father populated my little girl shelves with the great titans of black children’s books—Virginia Hamilton, Julius Lester, Walter Dean Myers, Mildred Taylor, and more.
But one book that I will always remember, the one where I felt seen, was a book called Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair. It tells the story of a young girl growing up in 1960s Chicago as she navigates getting her period and her first kiss and exploring her budding sexuality. Jean “Stevie” Stevenson is trying to figure everything out on her road to becoming popular.
Not much happens in the book. Stevie’s father is a hospital janitor, her mother a bank teller, and her grandma runs a successful chicken stand on the South Side of Chicago. There isn’t some grand adventure to outer space or a trip to Narnia or a year at a magic school.
But when I read it, everything happened for me. It was the right book at the right time. Which, as a former librarian, I can tell you is the most important thing in the entire world.
The way Stevie’s parents spoke to her felt like Sinclair had eavesdropped into my childhood home and put a tape recorder in my mother’s kitchen. Stevie’s mother sounded so much like mine—expecting excellent grades, for me to be a “good girl,” and warning me to stay away from boys so I wouldn’t get pregnant. The character’s questions about sexuality had never been answered, and when I started asking my own questions, my mother had none for me, other than to keep my legs closed. That’s what her mother had told her.
I was so curious about first kisses and coupling, but I never saw black girls in books focused on love and relationships. Most often, in contemporary settings, they were dealing with broken homes and impoverished neighborhoods, or in historical fiction, trying to face down racial discrimination and white terrorism of black communities in the South. Some of the books on my bookshelf from the greats—Myers, Hamilton, Taylor—focused on these painful narratives. Important topics for all kids to have exposure to, but along with those, I craved to read about black girls like me who were navigating the complicated landscape of love and hormones and relationships and sex. I wanted to see girls who looked like me being desired, touched, and most important, kissed.
But Stevie was exploring. And I was exploring through her.
Sinclair’s book was the first that I’d read where a character grappled with crushes on boys—and girls. I didn’t know this was a possibility. Boys dated girls, and girls dated boys. That was all I’d seen and known in my small, sheltered world. But Stevie had crushes on both. I had had crushes on both. It couldn’t be a real thing. This wasn’t the way relationships looked. Not on TV, not in movies, and not in the books I was reading for school and pleasure. I ignored the whisper inside of me. Cast it off as confusion.
So, I never came out as a teen. I didn’t have that vocabulary. I wasn’t sure what that even looked like. Maybe in high school I could’ve gotten on the loudspeaker, or held a family meeting and informed everyone that I was interested in both women and men, or once we got dial-up Internet, sent out an email from my Hotmail account and acknowledged the feelings I’ve always had. But Catholic school in the early 1990s didn’t make room for identity exploration. It didn’t leave space for things aside from homework, rules, battling acne, negotiating what it meant to be one of the few black students at school, and getting to Mass on time. I was sent a negative message about sexuality. One of my religion teachers told me that girls should treat their vaginas like flowers, and we shouldn’t give our petals away. Women were supposed to be sweet-smelling, pretty, and complete, with all their petals intact for their wedding night. That every time we had sex, we’d lose one of our petals. The warning: No man wants to marry a woman with only a nub left over—the ugly part of the flower once the petals are gone.
All these things silenced me about everything related to sexuality.
I grew up with wonderful uncles who I knew were gay. We never spoke about it. Even when Uncle Maurice would bring his “friend” and “roommate” to Thanksgiving dinner or Uncle Ollie would let his effeminate manner shine, the family never addressed it or acknowledged it. Their identities were erased, left unspoken. There was no space for them to be open in the confines of a conservative, religious, and “nosey” black American family full of a myriad of opinions and commentary. No one wanted to talk about it. No one wanted to be open about it.
But the teen m
e knew.
We shared a secret. I learned to stay quiet. I learned to keep secrets. I learned to figure things out in the dark. I learned to hold my breath.
I realized that I needed to see black girls who had crushes on a multitude of people, ones that kissed a plethora of people, ones that had all sorts of positive sexual experiences. Reading for me was a vehicle for self-exploration when real life wasn’t safe. But without seeing that path in the power of story, I didn’t know that it was one that existed for me.
If I could do it over again, I’d want to share April Sinclair’s book with my uncles. I’d want to discuss all the questions she had, and how to find the answers to those questions. All three of my gay uncles are dead now. The HIV and AIDS crisis that swept America while I was in middle and high school took them with it, leaving behind a gaping hole in my family—and my life. Coming out wasn’t an option after the loss of those titans. My childhood memories of them became shattered glass: images of the jagged edges of their shoulders and elbows as the virus destroyed their insides, the scent of hospitals and visitation rooms, the slumped shoulders of their “friends” in the waiting room blocked from being able to make health decisions on their behalf, how the tight curl in their hair straightened from the medication, the prayer circles around their dying bodies, their brothers’ venomous discussions of their life choices, the constellation of pockmarks scarring their skin.
Coming out meant unpacking the little trunk where I’d buried those shards of glass, tucked them away where they couldn’t cut me.
I wish they could’ve seen the world now—marriage equality and the beautiful film Moonlight—and the growing presence of LGBTQIA folks living their lives in the spotlight and writing themselves into books, films, and TV. I wish they could’ve experienced a world where in some places you can feel a little less afraid. I wish I could’ve told them that nothing about their identity—or my identity—is a secret.
I still haven’t officially “come out.” Only because I don’t feel like I am in a closet or the shadows. Just like them, I almost never bring anyone home to meet my very large and rambunctious family. I never let them know who I’m dating, to avoid the usual pestering of questions and tentative excitement that I might “cool my jets” and give my parents a grandson. When I was in my mid-twenties and out shopping with my mother, she casually said, “You know if you wanted to bring home a woman, your dad and I would be okay with it. We would love it if we could meet someone—anyone.” I nodded my head and replied, “Noted.” I thought of Sinclair’s Coffee Will Make You Black in that moment and smiled.
Little fictional Stevie changed my life. She gave me permission to listen to that whisper.
WELL-READ BLACK GIRL RECOMMENDS:
BOOKS ABOUT BLACK GIRLHOOD AND FRIENDSHIP
Copper Sun by Sharon Draper
The Friends by Rosa Guy
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Sula by Toni Morrison
The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips
Disgruntled by Asali Solomon
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Piecing Me Together by Renée Watson
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
Black Girl in Paris by Shay Youngblood
Outside of the Wendy’s burger place in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, two middle-aged women, bundled head to mid-calf in big coats, scarves, and not-beholden-to-fashion woolen hats, stood on either side of a small stand of Watchtower magazines. All fall and winter I’d seen them stationed there on my way to my job at Lehigh University. They were street witnessing to the students and residents passing by.
Years ago now, I was also a Jehovah’s Witness and went door-to-door to houses in rural North Carolina. Though I was an active minister and sometimes even witnessed full-time in the summers, I never did street witnessing. I am from a mountainous, small-town area of North Carolina, and in the eighties and nineties, street witnessing was not something we did. There was no bustling town square to speak of and very little foot traffic on the main street—or any street, for that matter. That suited me fine. The idea of street witnessing terrified me. Standing and waiting like a beggar for someone to speak to you. Trying to engage busy people on their way somewhere to make eye contact, looking like a carnival barker or hated salesman. It isn’t really like that, I know. Jehovah’s Witnesses are respectful and make conversation if they can and don’t hurl sales pitches or threats about damnation or getting right with the Lord at unsuspecting citizens. I know that street witnessing is a way to reach people you might never find at home. There is no begging really, but it felt that way for me—public, exposed, pleading.
I went door-to-door many, many times and for many years. I saw my share of mean people, mocking people, but also people surprised and maybe a little impressed with our commitment to the preaching work. But what I remember most were the lonely people, and there were many of them. These people opened the door with great suspicion that quickly dissipated when they saw you: young, modestly dressed, and Bible toting. Some of these householders were aggressively lonely and invited you in immediately, offered you food or drink and opened up too soon and too much, their fire hose of information blasting at you. One of the people I met in the field agreed to a weekly Bible study meeting with me. She told me, a twenty-one-year-old kid myself, of her longing for her boyfriend, the great hopes she had for their child, her smothering poverty. When I returned the following week, she had moved out of her trailer, completely disappeared. Now you see her, and now you don’t. If there is a better way to dodge a visit from a Jehovah’s Witness, I can’t imagine it. I never saw or heard from her again.
Most people were more guarded than that young woman was. They asked gentle questions, waited for any sign of your interest in their lives, inserted themselves into any sliver of the conversation, their losses and heartbreaks cracked open in the room. They were quiet until they slipped in a fragment of information almost accidentally. They told about a lost love, a lost child, the mother who was never happy with them for long. They were shy with their loneliness because they expected indifference, but with you at the door, a listening stranger, you had given them a space just big enough for a story to leak through. So they told it. The relief of not having to harbor the story anymore showed like a lightness, a brightness on their faces. Tell me a secret, and I will give you my trust.
Either way, whether the speaker was slowly trickling or gushing information, all of these people wanted to tell. You might think that they try to hide themselves from others; that’s what I thought, at least. You might think that they are eager to obscure the real stories, the awful truth of their pasts and their lives. But the opposite is true. People are desperate to explain themselves, reveal themselves, and have another person take testimony of their experiences. Thank God for someone, anyone, coming who will listen. They are grateful for those bringing good news. We are all desperate for some.
Being a Jehovah’s Witness taught me early and forcefully about the power of story. People need to hear their stories. That doesn’t mean they have to be happy ones—not at all. Just think about almost any story you know from the Bible. Those were hardly upbeat or all-is-well-that-ends-well tales, but I was hooked by them. What kid isn’t enthralled by Jonah, the runaway prophet sitting in the belly of a whale because he refused the call to preach? The miracle of that story is not only that Jonah got trapped in a place no else has lived to tell about, but also that there is no running from God. He will find you. That finding might make you the object of wrath, or you might be the recipient of His particularly absurd sense of humor. Either way, there is no hiding place. I l
oved Ruth and Naomi, war survivors without their men, carrying on as people do in an epic story of female empowerment. This was a narrative of love without romance, but deep and abiding love nonetheless.
I could go on and on with examples, but whether the story was about Mary, the brave mother of Jesus, or Mary, the kind but reviled prostitute, these were stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Even more important than that, these Bible characters all understood about living for the future. God’s chosen people suffered from every indignity and took on every sacrifice with the clear understanding that whatever full and complete life was on the horizon, they would not experience it. People on the margins understand this kind of thinking. “I might not get there, but you must. I might not make it, but you will.” Minorities, religious and racial, understand that the past is not just prologue, but is the present, and the life you lead is not ever fully your own. There are chapters and chapters in the Old Testament section of the Bible devoted to recording long lines of lineage. The begetting chapters. There are several reasons for this record, but one of them must be to reinforce the idea of your place in time, your name in the continuous wave of living. Your family matters. Your life matters. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
These are the first stories that inspired the telling of the stories of my own life. I don’t mean that I wanted to write religious tales or parables, but I wanted to write stories that spoke to my time in the world and the people I know. I wanted to tell about their extraordinary lives, their attempts to maintain dignity in a hostile world, their dreams for the children and grandchildren that would come after them. The stories of the people I lived with, was related to by blood and law, knew in the neighborhoods and communities of the new South, sounded much like those stories I loved from Scripture. I didn’t live the stories that I write, but they speak to my emotional experience about being country, isolated, and too often lonely. These stories are set in the post-integration South, post Jim Crow (though he is still not dead). They are full of the trials of being poor and trying not to be poor, and of carrying the past on your back, in your heart, and on your face.