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To the round brown girls who are told they aren’t enough, who move in the world uncertain if there’s room for their bodies, selves, and hearts. Take all the room you need, camarada. Make no apologies. Fight hard. Love on each other. You are a miracle.
PALANTE * PA’LANTE (adverb) Puerto Rican slang, also used in Latin America and other parts of the Caribbean. Contraction of para adelante, meaning to move forward. A call out into the world for our people to always keep it moving.
When boys talked, it sounded like feral dogs barking. They fiended for attention, were always aggressive, and made me wish I could put them down.
Reading helped me gather myself, reminded me that I had a right to be mad. It felt like my body was both overexposed and an unsolved mystery.
“You must walk in this world with the spirit of a ferocious cunt. Express your emotions. Believe that the universe came from your flesh. Own your power, own your connection to Mother Earth. Howl at the moon, bare your teeth, and be a goddamn wolf.”
My shame seeped into a frothing rage. The type of rage that can’t be let out because then you’d be that crazy chick that killed three dudes in the bodega and no one would even light a damn candle for you. I wondered what dudes like them really expected of girls like me in those situations. Like, did they want me to drop to my knees in the middle of the supermarket and orally worship their Ds? And damn, was it really so wrong to wear something that made me feel confident and sexy-ish? I prayed that la Virgen would get me out of the hood forever.
My head seemed like the safest place to be most of the time.
This was how we said good-bye. We ate Puerto Rican food and used outdoor voices to tell perfectly exaggerated stories while loving so hard it hurt.
I set free the elephant, the falcon, or whatever kind of animal spilled its truth onto dining room tables. Was this what ferocious cunts did? I didn’t feel ferocious. The smoldering discomfort that rose in my chest was humidity—thick, oppressive humidity.
Her heart felt far away from mine, like they were beating in different time zones or different dimensions of love.
Where could our type of love grow anyway?
She smelled like all the reasons I didn’t want to say good-bye, not even for a summer.
I know we’re gonna change the world. Like on some fuck-the-patriarchy-forever type of love revolution.
“Yes, no moon, which means that you’ve brought in a new lunar phase,” Harlowe said, navigating the twisting lanes of airport road. She drove stick shift while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. “Like, at this very moment, the sun is shining so bright that it keeps us from seeing the moon. You must be the sun, Juliet.”
“Breathe, girl,” she said, her palm once again on my shoulder. “New moon means you get a fresh chance.”
She said, “Your mixtape is all songs by women. All women come from faeries, goddesses, warriors, and witches, Juliet. But we don’t know anything about the women who birthed those women. We don’t know who our ancestral mothers are. I want you to help me find them. We have to tell their stories before they disappear forever amid all the violent and whitewashed history of men. My next book is all about reclaiming our mystical and political lineage. And you, Juliet, you’re going to be the faerie hunter, minus the guns or actual hunting.”
“Anytime I read something about a fierce woman I’d never heard of or came across a bold woman I wanted to know more about, I either wrote down her name or ripped out whatever pages mentioned her,” Harlowe answered. “I stuffed all my findings into this box. I knew one day it would come together. I didn’t know how, but I knew it would. And here you are.”
I was laid back on the outside but a nervous, asthmatic panic baby on the inside.
Titi Wepa could always love-bully me into being calm. She and my mom existed in this polar opposite energy field. Wepa was the fire starter, the one who stood in your face and pounded her fists on the table until her truth was heard and her love was felt. Mom rubbed worried heads, found nervous hands under blankets, and held them while she cooked pots of rice and beans. I should have called Mom, but I was afraid that her bedroom door would still be closed.
All the moments where I was made to feel like an outsider in a group that was supposed to have room for me added up and left me feeling so much shame.
As if I ever said things to people’s faces in the moment. All the right words found me later, much later, sometimes just in my dreams. In the moment, I have always gone blank and felt scared, like guts clamping shut, mouth filling with pre-vomit bile. A complete mess.
I wanted my mother to come here to know what a quiet neighborhood could sound like, what peace sounded like. Mom and I might even be able to hear each other speak and really listen. We could set our words on these sun-drenched branches and let the breeze guide us to resolution. For a split second, I wondered if there was a price to pay for this type of peace.
I have the freedom to create any type of relationship model that works for me. And what’s sexier than abolishing heteronormativity while I do it? That radical power lives within every single one of us.”
My God and my understanding of God are centered on who I am as a person and what I need to continue my connection to the divine,”
But Harlowe spun around and addressed them. “It’s not about having a ‘dominant voice.’ It’s about women of color owning their own space and their voices being treated with dignity and respect. It’s about women of color not having to shout over white voices to be heard. We are the dominant force almost all the time. White women are the stars of all the movies. White women are the lead speakers in feminist debates, and it’s little white girls that send the nation into a frenzy when they’ve been kidnapped. So if for, like, one or two hours in a small classroom somewhere in Oregon, a group of
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Sophia is the feminine representation of the wisdom of God.
Maybe America just swallowed all of us, including our histories, and spat out whatever it wanted us to remember in the form of something flashy, cinematic, and full of catchy songs. And the rest of us, without that firsthand knowledge of civil unrest and political acts of disobedience, just inhaled what they gave us.
“The thing is, Juliet, I’ve never appreciated someone else’s unrequested guidance on my identity. I don’t want their interpretation of who I am or where they think my politics should lie. My Blackness, my queerness, my theological inclinations, what I’m like at a family reunion, who I am in the classroom or in a relationship, all of that is mine,”
For me, everything was internal. I had all the what-if words and fuck-yous in my heart, but they didn’t ever come out.
I existed in this strange purgatory of love and doubt.
You said reading would make me brilliant, but writing would make me infinite.”
I sat on the bench for a long time, taking in the sunlight. The thought of being infinite swelled all around me.
I could change the world. Right? Like, if Mom pressed infinity into my palms via purple notebook, then maybe I could push change into the world around me. But change it into what . . . ?
Man, moms are wild creatures. They got like this spidey sense about your whole entire self and it’s all mixed up with their fears and preconceived notions. And then you’re all like daydreaming about this other self, this super great, take-on-the-world self, and the purple notebook comes out. And there you are writing do...
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Real like velvet sunsets and all the ways you adore yourself when no one else is watching.
But it was August and what does love mean at the end of a summer?
“It was just me praying in another space until a stillness settled over my body. Peace and warmth like I’d never experienced washed over the room and I knew God was with me. I opened my eyes and all I saw was the golden light, but I knew it was God. And I could hear God speaking to me from inside my chest and I was all crying and stuff. It had to be God, right?
“People you love fuck up,” Zaira said, she touched my knee. “You weed out the assholes from the warriors. Pick up on folks who aren’t soft spaces for your heart. Move with forgiveness but listen to your instincts when it comes to eradicating the unworthy from your spirit.
That adoration, that way we elevate folks and can’t hold them accountable. We get so caught up in the easy glow of them that we forget to do the same for ourselves.”
All the women in my life were telling me the same thing. My story, my truth, my life, my voice, all of that had to be protected and put out into the world by me. No one else. No one could take that from me. I had to let go of my fear. I didn’t know what I was afraid of. I wondered if I’d ever speak my truth.
womanhood was radical enough for anyone who dared claim it.
“This is a moment of reckoning. I love you, but I refuse to continue loving someone who won’t be real about their shit and change up their actions to match.”
Fear had fucked up my flow. It had flipped me over. I let go of everything I was afraid of and concentrated on my body.
