Funeral Diva

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Funeral Diva Page 8

by Pamela Sneed


  it’s okay because we don’t eat ’em

  LOL

  Anyway, today, TBH I feel like Patsy in Twelve Years a Slave

  Beaten for picking cotton.

  I mean I like someone who is white.

  Their partner is white.

  They have stocks, trust funds, and a retirement plan

  And I feel like fucking Patsy in Twelve Years a Slave

  Alternately known as Mammy.

  TWIZZLERS

  Size color class I was never allowed to be little

  by little I mean innocent

  by little I mean allowed to play

  make mistakes

  If anything occurred in whatever setting

  I was always blamed

  I was mistaken constantly for being older than I was

  At six when my stepmother came she refused to

  allow me alone time with my father

  If a moment occurred she asked

  What were you doing with him?

  As if I at six were molesting my father

  I was caught once through an open bathrobe

  trying to see my father’s penis

  My stepmother never forgot

  You were trying to look at him, she said.

  I was not given toys books anything

  Stuffed animals

  Bows ribbons anything that may be attached to a little girl

  I was also my mother’s sounding board for her adult problems

  with my Dad

  Constantly instructed to call the police

  when he hit her

  The only thing my parents could figure out to do together

  for some small infraction was to give me punishment

  Two weeks

  So I never knew the nurturance

  that girls got

  My adult life has duplicated this

  always to blame

  always outside

  refusing to see my little girl

  On occasion my mother sent me to the store to get candy

  Things that she liked

  Fire balls

  Reese’s peanut butter cups

  Kit Kat bars

  Black licorice

  Sometimes red which I liked

  Twizzlers

  I remember once chewing a pack of red Twizzlers as an adult

  the red stem hung out of my mouth

  A friend at the time exclaimed

  You’re such a little girl …

  And once when I was with a woman

  Someone looked on and said, Oh

  your little girl is out

  In relationships too I was never

  the little girl

  In fact in most of them I rescued radically immature women

  I was their mother caretaker

  the one with all responsibility

  And of course when it ended I was always to blame

  Everything to me lies around class race gender lines

  Even in so-called evolved communities

  Even with POC

  I always know no one would treat a white-skinned woman

  or a man the way I’ve been treated

  In colleges where I teach

  I’m always aware of the hierarchy

  People screaming about diversity

  I moan complain

  How the AIDS narrative only belongs to men

  They never ask women

  Black women

  As if AIDS didn’t happen to us

  Our fathers brothers sons nephews

  cousins acquaintances

  The Black gay boys in the choir

  became our disappeared

  I remember a pair of Black gay men

  who were spiritual

  would act as ministers

  and bury the dead Black boys

  families wouldn’t recognize

  These men showed up as the priests

  and gave last rites

  And what of the women

  A mother nursing a grown son

  returned to a baby

  ravaged by AIDS

  Me being young myself going into sick wards

  like leper colonies

  seeing those abandoned by society

  I never forgot

  Even my era did not allow me to be little

  innocent

  A threat if I spoke up

  A competitor for middle class white girls

  who had the world handed to them

  And resented me/you for surviving

  thriving despite all odds.

  PARABLE OF THE SOWER

  If you want to know the ending

  How it’s all gonna turn out

  The aftermath of Trump’s presidency

  Don’t turn to analysts, Wall Street, or CNN

  For an accurate portrait of where it’s all going

  what it’s gonna look like

  reread Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

  set in California in 2027

  People in fear/behind walls/gated communities

  a woman raped so much

  she can’t stand

  gun violence/addiction/fires that can scarcely

  be put out

  people scavenging for food/trying not to become prey

  compassion is gone

  the main character named Lauren is a hyper-empath

  she can feel others’ pain

  which I think is a metaphor for artists

  whatever you think of Marina Abramovic

  her show title is right

  The Artist is Present

  from the beginning of time until now

  Look again at the Hunger Games, the districts are

  actually concentration camps with gray garb and barbed fences

  that nod to Nazi Germany

  Humans are pitted against each other to survive

  Sometime after Trayvon Martin was shot, I finally understood

  something deep about Star Wars

  I’ve always rooted for good guys/always

  Once I heard a friend at the movies rooting for Poison Ivy/

  Batman and Bat Girl’s nemesis

  I was shocked that anyone could root for a bad girl

  But after Trayvon was killed by George Zimmerman

  who walked free

  I finally understood what could turn a character’s eyes dark

  You could become so disillusioned

  And then I understood in the Star Wars franchise

  what made Darth Vader—Vader

  I felt that again after Trump’s election

  No more green, blue light

  Only gray, dark drab, white bones, war

  Last week, I worked with a class I hadn’t met before

  On the subject of Black Lives Matter

  I repeated something Gregg Bordowitz said to a group of students

  “What if the only justice we have right now is here in this room?”

  One student said, “Nothing ever changes.”

  So I responded by asking, “Are you telling me then

  you can’t change?”

  They were all surprised, shocked by my question.

  At the end, I asked the class, “What have you learned today?”

  A Black girl answered as if she were channeling Octavia herself,

  “Change,

  is up to us.”

  PARABLE OF THE SOWER 2

  Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler is a dystopian science fiction novel

  set in Los Angeles 2027

  the protagonist is a sixteen-year-old Black girl named Lauren Olmeeda.

  She is a hyper-empath who amongst war, hunger, gun violence, rape, and addiction,

  builds a new faith called Earthseed where she reinvents God,

  says God is change.

  I’ve taught this book for many semesters at college

  I think it’s profound and prophetic and the students, mainly students of color

  aren’t used to Black gi
rl protagonists.

  I ask my students how they feel about a Black girl protagonist

  who creates and practices her own religion,

  which I think is sheer genius.

  I ask, “Is anyone allowed to create their own religion, why or why not?”

  The students are always puzzled by these questions as it’s nothing they

  are used to.

  Somehow, in all of my readings and discussions of this work,

  I missed something obvious about a Black girl building her own religion

  amidst war, isolation, and gun violence.

  Although, I did understand that Octavia Butler was forewarning us about

  issues that would plague us in a not so far away future.

  Also, in the novel she warns of a water crisis and in one of her

  books she warns of a character/a politician who would come to power

  with the rhetoric of “Make America Great Again”

  she wrote this over twenty years ago.

  She not only warned us but in the same seed/breath

  gave an answer

  Told us in the midst of chaos and destruction, to create something new.

  “God,” she said through Lauren Olmeeda, “is change.”

  Since the election and this new year I’ve been mulling over this epiphany

  as I contemplate change in my own life asking myself

  what am I willing to do differently

  I’m tired of the schizophrenia of activism, two lives

  living separate and opposite

  people who say Black Lives Matter but secretly or openly attack Black women

  and Black women and Women of Color are the biggest perpetrators of this

  Then there are those who say they love queers, but are ashamed/

  value straights/anyone over other queers.

  Trans peoples lives are not the only lives at stake here.

  I have never been safe.

  I got a text recently after the New Year from a former student

  of mine.

  She is a Black lesbian. She invited me to a show.

  I had worked with and helped her.

  In an act of what I can only guess was self-hatred, as I once watched her

  adore white men regardless of what they gave,

  she and another Black woman led students in an elite school

  to attack me.

  It was brutal and I won’t recall the gory details.

  For the most part, until now, I’ve stayed publicly silent,

  but the results and repercussions in my life were long-lasting.

  I was so stressed after the event occurred, a few years ago,

  I fell down in my apartment and needed six stitches over my eye.

  I never had stitches before.

  I fell on a sharp plastic object that just missed my eyeball.

  For her fear, hatred, and slander, I could have lost my eyesight.

  Even the doctor who stitched me up said

  “You’ll never get rid of the scar, it will last a lifetime,”

  and it has.

  I saw another woman/an ex-lover this past New Year’s day.

  She’s a poet.

  I saw her at an event and she was smiling at me.

  Twenty years later, you could see she’d forgiven herself.

  She looked so happy and at peace.

  Everybody I believe should be happy and let go,

  but I couldn’t go and say to her

  like the scar over my eye, the wounds from our relationship

  were long-lasting/that for years she and all of her friends

  all white women who I don’t even know/harassed me

  and spread wild rumors and gossip

  because I am a tall Black dark lesbian from the working class

  they all assumed like Susan Smith, a white woman who accused a

  random Black man of killing her kids when she herself was culpable

  They all said I did it.

  For years I grieved, lost weight, and more.

  One of the games some former friends played is they’d

  invite me to parties

  then pretend they couldn’t see me,

  though I was the tallest, darkest there.

  I will never forget one of my ex-lover’s exes who used to try to sleep

  with me, helped my ex in a vicious campaign,

  sat a dinner table with me just recently and pretended we’d never met.

  She stuck her hand out and said, “Hi, I’m …”

  I said, “I know who you are,” and laughed.

  Actually, I was in shock.

  I was in a museum the other day seeing the work of Kerry James Marshall

  and I passed by Ralph Ellison’s classic, The Invisible Man

  There was an article going around the internet about high schools

  and they said the most discriminated against,

  the persons falling through the cracks, the most unseen,

  most unlikely to have needs met,

  most likely sent to detention were Black girls.

  I know I’m not a girl/I’m a woman

  A friend of mine recently

  told me to grow up/stand up/fight for myself/she’s right

  but there are repercussions for me as a Black woman making myself

  visible that she could never know

  that my entire upbringing and society silences me

  I’ll put my friend’s comments in the category of

  another white woman with a trust fund/has never been to therapy

  rarely has had a job/takes recreational pictures all day and told

  me once flippantly, “You should work harder.”

  I won’t say how old I am but at this age

  I feel like Benazir Bhutto emerging from exile

  I’ve been thinking about taking art classes and driving lessons

  Things I’ve never done

  And I feel like Dorothy Allison said about when she chose to write

  I am just beginning to live.

  BEY

  I have to say I envy Beyoncé

  That she gets to show up after the fact in New Orleans

  With her hair and make-up did

  Going down on a police car

  That she epitomizes Black cool

  With a voice-over from Messy Mya and Big Freedia

  The Queen of sissy bounce

  I envy her Lemonade when she got to have Serena twerking

  A few frames before the mothers of sons lost to police violence

  And no one called her out on that

  I envy her Black Panther and feminist garb in Formation

  That she is a declared feminist

  It’s like being the first wife or something

  The one who bore the kids

  Whose body got stretched out

  Didn’t care for herself

  Got tired and too caught up

  Disillusioned

  Had needs

  The one who got left for a glamorous other

  Because real life activism isn’t that glam

  There’s lots of loss and invisibility

  And it’s just incredulous you hear people saying things like

  She’s so beautiful

  Admiring her hair and make-up

  And will pay anything to hear her sing

  And relish in the Bey and Jay soap opera

  Talk about how abused she is

  While there are still so many real-life Black women

  Standing right next to you

  Who are also beautiful

  Whose lives got used up paving the way

  And you wouldn’t pay ten dollars or a dime to hear

  The people of New Orleans are still struggling

  Lost their homes

  Their city

  I always teach the work of Safiya Bukhari, a Black Panther

  Who died in prison at fifty-three years old

  Advocating for
the rights of political prisoners

  It’s a simple book

  It always calls out to me.

  UPRISING

  Sixteen years old

  from the suburbs, Boston

  I’d go into the city shopping

  with my cousin and friends

  we’d venture into Boston Commons, the Park.

  There were hustlers there, I didn’t know then

  with a set-up table.

  They played some sort of game with shells

  hid money under a shell or a plastic cup

  moved their hands real quick

  made it purposefully look so easy

  naïve sixteen years old, I bet

  fifty dollars, a lot of money for me then.

  They made it look so easy.

  You just had to pick the right one.

  Of course, it was rigged

  I lost

  felt dizzy,

  sick to my stomach

  lost my gaze.

  On Tuesday night after the election I felt the same way

  heisted in a shell game.

  Walking outside on Wednesday, in my neighborhood

  a white woman who barely ever speaks was crying

  asked, “What do we do?”

  I answered earnestly, a teacher, an artist, professor

  who always tries, “I don’t know.”

  Later, I walked up the street, a white man in an SUV

  with the window down drove by.

  He wore an expensive business suit

  had a big brown cigar

  like when babies are born

  expensive like in gangsta films

  like Goodfellas

  or on

  The Sopranos after a kill.

  He looked happy, smug,

  that’s when I realized the Trump Presidency is a hustler’s game

  Ballers club

  Players only

  Pimp paradise

  Wives with teased hair and lots of plastic surgery

  on the white BET.

  They made it all look so easy

  like a choice

  Who knew

  The American Dream was a side hustle for big businessmen

  with all their ugly red white blue striped flag merchandising

  available at Walmart and Target, I’ll never buy into again

  Who knew

  Freedom was a marketing idea/consumer product

  Hallucinatory drug cooked up in some Rove-ian as in Karl type of

  laboratory sweatshop

  Maintained by the architects of apartheid

  Freedom like air if you’re white and male and rich enough

  to keep breathing

  Today, I started to cry as I wrote

  to my students

  knowing that in everything so far, I’ve tried to protect them

  and realizing there are places in this world

 

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