Piecing Me Together

by Renée Watson

You told me that knowing how to read words and knowing when to speak them is the most valuable commodity a person can have.

ever since then I’ve wanted to be a black girl who could read and write in many languages, because I know there was a time when that seemed impossible.”

If a person is making you the brunt of the joke all the time, or if they are dismissive of your feelings, then you need to stop wasting your time.”

Whenever Mom’s cooking is simmering on the stove and E.J.’s music is filling every inch of the house and I am making my art, I believe everything these women are saying about being worthy of good things. Those are the times I feel secure, feel just fine. I look in the mirror and see my dad’s eyes looking back at me, my mom’s thick hair, thick everything. And that’s when I believe my dark skin isn’t a curse, that my lips and hips, hair and nose don’t need fixing. That my dream of being an artist and traveling the world isn’t foolish.

this makes me wonder if a black girl’s life is only about being stitched together and coming undone, being stitched together and coming undone. I wonder if there’s ever a way for a girl like me to feel whole.

I wonder if any of these boys ever sit in a room for boys’ talk night and discuss how to treat women. Who teaches them how to call out to a girl when she’s walking by, minding her own business? Who teaches them that girls are parts—butts, breasts, legs—not whole beings?

Those girls are not the opposite of me. We are perpendicular. We may be on different paths, yes. But there’s a place where we touch, where we connect and are just the same.

I walk out of the store, right past all the other women who heard this lady ask me for my bag while they are still holding on to theirs. None of them say anything. Most look away, like they are trying not to witness this. Others stare and shake their heads in disappointment. I’m not sure if the gesture is geared toward me or the clerk.

Say something.

I don’t know what’s worse. Being mistreated because of the color of your skin, your size, or having to prove that it really happened.

I cannot imagine.

I think white people can handle black sadness better than black anger. I feel both. But sadness gets sympathy, so I stick with that.

I didn’t realize how much I was holding in. How many cries I’ve buried. I have no more room. So I let it all out. Tears for every name of unarmed black men and women I know of who’ve been assaulted or murdered by the police are inked on the page. Their names whole and vibrant against the backdrop of black sadness. Their names. So many, they spill off the page.

“But I think what my grandmother was saying is that it feels good to know someone knows your story, that someone took you in,” Maxine says. “She’d tell me, it’s how we heal.”

I am with York, both of us with maps in our hands. Both of us black and traveling. Black and exploring. Both of us discovering what we are really capable of.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” –Toni Morrison, Beloved