Piecing Me Together

by Renée Watson

“Prayer ain’t nothing but the poor man’s drug.”

Can’t quit on me.

Why am I only seen as someone who needs and not someone who can give?” I

I turn to him and make sure I am not raising my voice or talking

with any attitude.

Sometimes I just want to be comfortable in this skin, this body. Want to cock my head back and laugh loud and free, all my teeth showing, and not be told I’m too rowdy, too ghetto. Sometimes I just want to go to school, wearing my hair big like cumulous clouds without getting any special attention, without having to explain why it looks different from the day before. Why it might look different tomorrow. Sometimes I just want to let my tongue speak the way it pleases, let it be untamed and not bound by rules. Want to talk without watchful ears

listening to judge me.

At school I turn on a switch, make sure nothing about...

“We’re fine, we’re fine. Everything’s okay.”

LeeLee is traumatizes by the police brutality events

“I guess it made me feel like blackness needed to be hidden, toned down, and that whiteness was good, more acceptable,”

grew up with parents who believed you should tone down your blackness when in public. I didn’t know how to function when the public came to my private home. I grew up feeling tremendous pride in our culture, what we as a people overcame and accomplished, but at the same time there was this message from my parents telling me not to be too black. At school, with my white friends and teachers, there were all these stereotypes I felt I had to dispel, and, with a lot of my black friends, I had to prove that I was black enough—whatever that means. It was complicated,”

Double consciousness

“But I think it’s ridiculous that you think I could only be getting dressed up for a guy.”

my vision to make beauty out of everyday things, to find beauty in the disregarded.

And isn’t this what the man in the Money Matters workshop was telling us when he was explaining how it is that some are rich and some are poor? Isn’t that how it works? You pass on what you were given. But York, what could he give?

“Wait a minute.” I get my camera and take a photo of the crowd. This one, I will not rip or reconfigure. This one, I will leave whole.

Rising.

Remind me of still I rise pays homage to still arrive by my Angelo