we are the children of the people who could fly
an unexpected companion to "all god’s chillun got wings and all god’s chillun are Black"
Content Warning: mention of deadly colonial violence against Indigenous people, mentions of sexual violence
I.
my most immediate bloodline knows the feeling of falling into the wind. my parents separately flew from their respective Caribbean countries at the dawn of the nineties, met and fell in love in the "Land of Opportunity," and i chose them as my own not long afterwards. i spent my early years in Canarsie, cutting my baby teeth on the concrete of the big city. i loved the cadence and rush of Brooklyn, and still i wanted my own backyard. for some reason, our superintendent forbade tenants from going into the greenspace behind our building, even though the rent paid to him helped irrigate the grass. because of this, a lot of my outside time at home was enjoyed within the sparse rectangle of our balcony, a stone-and-metal enclosure that felt more like playpen than playground. at some point, i shared my dream of having more space to move around with my parents, and they did something miraculous: they took me seriously. within a year or two, they had closed on a house in Georgia, and we sailed through the air to our next destination.
i spent the rest of my childhood in the South, doing my best to unfurl into the scenery, yet the sense of constriction eventually returned. there i was, a Black girl-becoming-woman in the Bible Belt, around the most white people and religious fervor i'd ever witnessed in my life. we had our own four walls and our own backyard though, so at least there was ample space for me to experiment with cultivating a new sense of home. over the years, i found lifelong friends and i did the clubs and camps and sports and i tried church only to fall out of it soon after and i did the sign of the cross in the mirror repeatedly asking for salvation once the flames visited my dreams. threats of fire and brimstone choked the air around my head while postbellum illusions confused my spirit -- i started calling my town a "comfortable cage." for all the relative stability it offered me, i knew i deserved to extend beyond the reach of the South's sweet-knuckled hospitality, so i appeased the gnawing teeth of my restlessness with aspirations to go far away for school, applying to only one located in Georgia.
once, against my better judgement, i shared my plans to leave the state with a blonde-haired blue-eyed nuisance my age, and she responded by rattling off about how she'd never go out of state for long. she regaled me with all the great great great great great-someones she still had names for, the houses right around each other that had been in her family for years. she had everything she needed there, so why should she ever leave? i was sickened for reasons i couldn't name then, but i now know it's because i could smell the blood in her mouth. something in me sensed the horror of her generational longevity. she spoke with so much blithe assurance in the soil under that property, as if the bodies almost-certainly buried within it soothed her themselves. the fences round them plantation-sized yards can look a lot like buzzard-picked bones if you're paying attention.
Bessie Jones - The Buzzard Lope
II.
resolute, i chose Colorado for college, captivated by the psychology program, yes, but also the snow-capped peaks framing the sandstone-kissed campus buildings. (what can i say? i was seventeen and easily seduced.) the lush enclave promised an oasis of progressivism, so i soared the foot of the Flatirons, naively expecting to find refuge there. naturally, the veneer coating the college town became immediately apparent as i began to navigate both the mundane and life-altering violences of being Black at a PWI. on the latter: i was sexually assaulted twice at CU, once at a Halloween party i attended two months into my first semester, and the next at a party i hosted a year later.
what good did Boulder's beauty do me then? i was no longer able to see the mountains anymore, they were crowded out by the pain i incurred within their bosom. please don't misunderstand me, i supportive people i had in my corner. and still, i had my credit hours and my jobs to juggle on top of my compounded trauma. { it's a wicked twist of irony that alma mater is Latin for "nourishing mother," when i could liken the relationship between myself and the university i attended to the relationship depicted in "Saturn Devouring [Her Child]" }
near the end of my time out west, i learned of Chief Niwot's curse, and the cruelty i experienced against a breathtaking backdrop made a semblance of sense. it is told that upon encountering gold-seeking colonizers in 1858, Chief Niwot of the Arapaho said “People seeing the beauty of [the Boulder valley] will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty.” six years later, hundreds of Cheyennes and Arapahos living in the area were slaughtered en masse by John Chivington's militia during the Sand Creek Massacre. all but sixty people killed were women and children. we are taught that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but rarely do we learn what the beholder's hands do to beauty. how the beholder digs their fingers into the earth of beauty's flesh, leaving divots for bullets to enter and gold to leave.
after learning this about the land upon which i treaded, i came back to the notion of staying, and who has the power to do it. who dies, who goes through things that makes them wish for death, so that empire and its benefactors can put down roots? of course it wasn't for me to stay there. sexual violence against Black people was part of the beauty that white students could enjoy at my college. relatedly, one of my alma mater's marketable points is that the city experiences over 300 days of sunshine a year; "Everlasting Sunshine" was the scent of the Suave body wash i used around the first time i was assaulted. this coincidence is funny to me in the way where i have to laugh to keep from crying.
the second time someone made carnage of me, i stopped identifying as a woman not long after. i resent the truth of it, but my experiences with sexual violence radicalized me further, especially around my gender politic and embodiment. i was reckoning with the reality that i had very little ability to access the protection that identifying as a woman should provide, because my Blackness is what made me violable. how could i be a "woman" when all i felt like was collateral damage? nothing Human? so was the visceral ungendering of my flesh in real time.
my best friend at the time gifted me Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, i think, in part, because she could sense my vicious and quiet desperation. i was also acutely aware of how the trauma i incurred was inseperable from misogynoir, so my attempts at healing needed to be grounded in a Black feminist ethos that similarly named those dynamics. parting the pages was a quote she pulled from the book, handwritten on brown cardstock:
I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go.
-- bell hooks
i'd already felt in my spirit that Boulder wasn't a place i could stay much longer, and these words cemented the necessity of my departure. i was joined at the hip with my friends in college and still the best gift they gave me, like my mother did before i left Georgia, was the encouragement to spread my wings and start all over again. i hurried to finish my degree in three years, and finally graduation arrived with a sigh, wearily punctuating the endurance test of my college experience. i wouldn't even call what i felt at that time relief, just the steely uneasiness of knowing i survived something that could have killed me.
three months after getting my diploma, i found myself in the wind again, sights set on Central Ohio.
III.
when i first moved here, i didn't anticipate what it would be like to so fully confront myself. objectively, i understood that i was moving to a city where i knew no one, but it was an altogether different experience to actually arrive and find there were no arms outstretched to catch me. i know Ohio seems like a strange choice, especially considering the more-populous cities in the Midwest, but i almost pursued my psychology degree at OSU and decided on CU at the last minute. i held onto the preconceived notions i had about Columbus' "diversity" and affordability, thinking i might breathe easier around more people who look like me. i was right, to a certain extent.
i quickly found out the safety i hoped for would prove elusive as i learned how Columbus police claimed the lives of Henry Green and Ty're King, how Rae'Lynn Thomas met her end at the hands of her stepfather in their living room. all in the months surrounding my arrival. i attended Rae'Lynn's candlelight vigil alone, at the same river that would embrace Amber Evans in her final moments years later. i could count on two hands how many other people were in attendance to honor Rae'Lynn, and that rocked me to my core even further. i was horrified at how Black trans life could be so callously snubbed out and only a ripple of care might move across the surface in the larger wake of Black death. here was no different from the places i left behind. same old shadows, different silhouette.
the weight of all this grief, both personal and collective, was unwieldy in my hands. i'd spread my wings again hoping to ground myself somewhere new, but instead i felt pinned in place. the outcome of the 2016 presidential election shocked me out of my stunned immobility for better or worse. by that time, fellow newcomer Ariana and i were two months into a new friendship (thanks to Tinder!), and we both expressed wanting to know what the local organizing landscape was like. unsurprisingly, the formations that existed here were either actively anti-Black or actively hostile to queer and trans people, so we began putting feelers out to other Black queer, trans, and gender-expansive people who similarly needed a place to focus on our specific issues without compromise or apology. those winter meetings helped keep me busy, but plans thwart Trump's regime were still too intangible to insulate me against my persistent loneliness. unmoored, i let its ravenous ache propel me across the chasm between me and my previously untested limits; i was finally of-age to secure my coping mechanism of choice, so i drank alone often to try and soften out the edges. some days -- usually on the ones i numbly found myself at the end of another bottle -- i couldn't tell if i was chasing after or hoping to outrun myself.
never too far from my religious-adjacent upbringing, i fancied the Parable of the Prodigal Son a funhouse mirror of my own experience. i didn't know the full story, just that it was about someone who encountered a fair amount of anguish after making the decision to travel to a distant land, and there i was, far away and holding pain i couldn't quite confess. i might have googled the parable, or maybe i wanted to know if bell hooks specifically had any words on how to cope with the loneliness that comes after the leaving, but i somehow landed on a 1998 interview between her and Maya Angelou. citing the titular essay from the compilation Even the Stars Look Lonesome, hooks effervesces about the magnificent weight that one of Angelou's lines carries:
bell hooks: ...I was writing in my journal last night, just writing down sentences from your work that I liked so much. I feel that often your writing is deceptively simple. One might think, "Oh, this is just easy reading," and then there'll be a line that makes you sit and ponder for a long time. For me, one of those is where you're talking about the need for solitude and the need to stay away from company that betrays you, that corrupts you, and you have that wonderful line, "It's never lonesome in Babylon." I read this line to so many people, and I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.
that line wasn't simply wonderful to me, it hit and settled under my skin like a bruise, it throbbed like it had a pulse. a childhood saturated with reggae music taught me that Babylon was an oppressive land of "wicked intention," and in one fell swoop, Maya Angelou's words revealed to me that i had swapped out towering, snow-capped mountains for the bone-paved Babylonian walls of Central Ohio. only thing was all i felt was lonesome, no matter how many strangers' beds or open mics or dance nights or drunken stupors i found myself in. i devoured the rest of the interview, finding nourishment in the entire conversation, all the while knowing i needed the original context for the quote to satiate my appetite. it took me a while, but i eventually found the passage containing the truism online:
... In the biblical story, the prodigal son risked and for a time lost everything he had because of an uncontrollable hunger for company. First, he asked for and received his inheritance, not caring that his father, from whom he would normally inherit, was still alive; not considering that by demanding his portion, he might be endangering the family’s financial position. The parable relates that after he took his fortune, he went off into a far country and there he found company. Wasteful living conquered his loneliness and riotous company conquered his restlessness. For a while he was fulfilled, but he lost favor in the eyes of his friends. As his money began to disappear he began to slip down that steep road to social oblivion.
His condition became so reduced that he began to have to feed the hogs. Then it further worsened until he began to eat with the hogs. It is never lonesome in Babylon. Of course, one needs to examine who – or in the prodigal son’s case, what – he has for company.
Many people remind me of the journey of the prodigal son. Many believe that they need company at any cost, and certainly if a thing is desired at any cost, it will be obtained at any cost.
We need to remember and to teach our children that solitude can be a much-to-be-desired condition. Not only is it acceptable to be alone, at times is is positively to be wished for.
It is in the interludes between being in company that we talk to ourselves. In the silence we listen to ourselves. Then we ask questions of ourselves. We describe ourselves to ourselves, and in the quietude we may even hear the voice of God.
-- Maya Angelou, "Even the Stars Look Lonesome" (pulled from Angeline Tan's blog)
there it was. she wasn't saying that there were any shortages of people in whatever wicked city the reader projects onto the parable, she was saying that it would never be lonesome in Babylon particularly if i found no company more pleasant than my own. it's not like the feelings of alienation dissipated overnight once i read the full essay, but the story served as a concrete reminder to treat myself with more patience and kindness in my quiet moments. as the days went by, especially as BQIC started to materialize, i began to feel less like an interloper and more like someone who had a legitimate stake in my surroundings. we announced our arrival in March 2017 and excitedly worked towards the debut zine release party we had slated for June. beyond that, we had talked about small initiatives like packing books for incarcerated people or creating programming with local Black queer youth, but U know what they say about plans and God. a mere week after we released Obsidian, the #BlackPride4 were arrested for disrupting the 2017 Columbus Pride Parade, and we dove headfirst into leading the grassroots defense efforts for our comrades. the rest is quite literally history.
the main thing that anchored me amid the frenetic pace of organizing was the ecstasy and warmth that i shared with the community within BQIC. co-creating a political home for myself and similarly principled niggas is a large part of how i survived here; i'd located the arms that could hold me and hold me down. of course, the anti-Blackness, homphobia, and transphobia that pushed us to establish the collective persisted, and we came up against it constantly from other organizers. it was never easy to deal with, but we knew what to expect. it just broke my heart most when organizers who i considered very close friends behaved the same way. i share a matching ACAB tattoo with these same ex-comrades. we'd all gotten arrested at some point while in coalition with each other, so we got tattooed last February as a testament to the deepened bond we shared. months after we got the tattoo -- right around this time of year, actually -- these same people made it abundantly clear they had yet to kill the cops (pigs) in their head. i didn't realize i was breaking bread with swine until it was too late, i had unknowingly invited Babylon into my home.
the breaking of my heart created an opening into a life i had convinced myself wasn't available to me; i realized didn't have to serve as both "the breath of the community politic, and the corpse that keeps the soil nourished"* if i didn't want to. the city's landscape is far too hostile to sustain Black life; in fact, it has more martyrs than i would like to count. i think especially of Amber Evans again as i write this, how heavy and overburdened she must have felt to choose flight for the final time. i understand the feeling completely. it's reasonable to refuse the weight of the World, to surrender to the air (or water) in hopes that you'll come out more whole on the other side. there's a Mereba song that reminds me of this tragically sensible choice to get free in another form. i tear up whenever i hear it.
We'd rather bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of, when in truth the place where one is standing may be untenable, it may be dangerous, it may be stultifying, and it's better to just step on. You know, you have to move.
-- Maya Angelou, Shambhala Sun interview with bell hooks (1998)
where i took bell hooks' advice before coming to Ohio, i will take the wisdom dispensed by Maya Angelou on my way out. as much as i loved organizing, and as much as i had hoped Columbus could hold me for longer than five years, i suffered far too many insults and injuries within "community" to stay here, so i'll be living in Georgia by the end of next month. there's so much in my home state that i have yet to explore, starting first with discovering who i want to be in the next phase of my life. i know that Babylon will be wherever i go, but i'm leaving Ohio equipped with far more self-trust and comfort with solitude than i was when i first showed up here.
IV.
this issue of R2TS will reach U when the last full moon of summer does. full moons are for acknowledging how one's intentions have come to fruition, and autumn will soon provide the prolonged opportunity to pick the fruits that our labors have borne forth. we're also straddling the threshold between Virgo season and Libra season, and this sequence is very fascinating to me from a tarot standpoint (who's surprised?). Virgo is associated with The Hermit (a Major Arcana card symbolizing introspection, reflection, inner knowledge), and Libra has correspondence with the Justice (a Major Arcana card symbolizing truth, accountability, integrity), but the card that bridges the two is one of my favorites in the deck: the Wheel of Fortune. when this card appears in a reading, it is usually to signify that a critical turning point is underway, and the best approach to the moment is by allowing Spirit to lead the way. if God is change, then resisting change is futile. after all, who are we to defy God?
rife with symbolism, this card depicts a lion, ox, person, and eagle, simultaneously representing the four fixed signs of the Zodiac (Leo, Taurus, Aquarius, Scorpio) and their associated elements. the unpronounceable name of God (YHVH) is also written in Hebrew on the wheel's face. as i've embedded my tarot practice within a Blackened consciousness over time, i noticed the visual similarities between the Wheel of Fortune and the dikenga cosmogram, which prompted me to research if there was a stronger link between the two. i learned of an instance where archaeologists encountered physical representations of the symbols at the site of a former plantation in Maryland; this syncretic ovelrlap illustrates that, though they come from drastically different contexts, the dikenga and Wheel of Fortune both represent the karmic cycles that we are expected to move through.
in the companion issue to this one, i connected the biblical story of Elijah's deliverance into heaven by chariot to the omnipresent orientation towards freedom within the Black radical tradition. i do still believe that we still deserve heaven in our present lives as Black people, but we must be careful to notice that the way capitalism markets Paradise obscures the reality of exploitation. for example, consider tourists flooding Hawaii for a divine escape while native Hawaiians, overwhelmed by the pandemic, are pleading for people to stay away. if there's anything that my time out west taught me, it's that beauty has a body count.
this year, we have borne witness to numerous climate disasters, mounting political instability manufactured by Western neocolonial interests, skyrocketing COVID-19 deaths, not to mention the expected mundane and life-altering violences of an anti-Black world. the waning light of this time of year asks us to articulate, but not poeticize, our limitations, and honestly? we aren't ready to put up a formidable fight against our oppressors. amid all the global uncertainty, the only thing clear to me right now is that our freedom will require sacrifices far greater than what we're currently prepared to make, not just because we're missing the collective militancy and consciousness, but because we're also missing the collective care.
the other day, i semi-jokingly tweeted that i was disobeying Audre Lorde and temporarily succumbing to despair in reference to this quote from her address "Learning from the 60s":
We who are Black are at an extraordinary point of choice within our lives. To refuse to participate in the shaping our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don't mean me) or by despair (there's nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.
the nature of our ever-changing conditions asks that we "take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, [and] revolutionary relationships." while i know my work is out there waiting for me to find it, i can't take it up alone, and certainly not before more seriously healing from the trauma i incurred over the last eight years. while i can't predict when i'll be ready to fully open myself back up to the work of getting free, i can plan to tend to the sites, spirits, and stewards of Black and Indigenous struggle that are near me. for starters, i'm going to pay a visit to St. Simon's Island after i move back home so that i can leave offerings for the ancestors who marched into the waters of Dunbar Creek, choosing physical death over captivity at Igbo Landing. even though i was reintroduced to the tale over the last couple of years, the enduring tradition of the people who could fly has never left me. no matter what the World throws my way, my wings are unclippable.
you'll find me in the wind,
d.
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post script
the title of this newsletter issue comes from a song that Juju Bae sang on the most recent episode of her podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0q3kJGKN8sPyrmo4rvGZ7t?si=CECJq9vGSH2ZL6WcD_GQmQ&dl_branch=1
*the breath of the community politic, and the corpse that keeps the soil nourished = Hunter Shackleford specifically frames the Abolition Mammy as a "fat-bodied freedom fighter who has named themselves to be committed to dismantling white supremacist patriarchy and is confined to their communities’ expectations of allegiance that sacrifices their individual freedom for the collective." as a thin person, it is not my intent to re-appropriate the experiences of fat people by quoting from their article. i cited this article because i deeply resonate with the experience of being disposed of and uncared for while i actively organized in abolitionist circles as a Black trans person.
a YouTube playlist compiled by K.D. Wilson containing videos all related to the myth of the flying Africans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QERrdEiUnDo&list=PLFnare8dbbdzrSCNS4Q3bSFXi3lHehGfh
a spell for finding a future (in case U are feeling untethered):
heartbreak is a weed: everywhere around us, seeds scattered & green bodies pushing toward the light. its gift and its curse is its tenacity.
climate crisis is upon us. we needto learn how to grieve and to move:not a burned out straining against the clock, but a rhythmic, honest, heartbroken lope. steady toward an uncertain future. picking up the next piece of work and the next because we want to be able to say and to know with our whole bodies that we tried.
white supremacy and imperialism and global capital have no such grief, because they have no heart. endless profit only wants transactions and baseless supremacy only wants dominance.
what our grief teaches us to see - every horror we turn to face, every moment of rebellious joy - is exactly what can save us all.
-- from Radical Emprints