Juliet Takes a Breath

by Gabby Rivera

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.

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 women of color have a workshop and have decided to open it up to us, we should be fucking grateful and not whining about how we’re not the most important or equally as important. Our entire existence is constantly being validated and yeah, we have lots of shit to deal with because of the patriarchy. But for goddess sake, check your privilege. We’re the ones that need to give women of color space for their voices.”

“After years of workshops and endless conversations about race, you still manage to center whiteness,” Maxine said finally, eyes on the road.

“You said, ‘We’re the ones that need to give women of color space for their voices,’” Maxine replied, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. “Y’all don’t need to give us anything.”

“Harlowe made it seem like those white girls had to give us something,” I replied, turning my head up a little. “Like, as if we couldn’t do our thing without them?” “See, you get it,” she said. “Space isn’t theirs to give to us. Nor is Harlowe separate from those girls. They are her. She is them. White allies need to keep that distance out of their community education.” “Damn but, like, at least she said something, right?” I asked. Maxine raised an eyebrow, shaking her head. Her rich full laugh wrapped me up. These sweet potatoes and mushrooms weren’t chorizo and a side of tostones, but they were love. I joined in with my wheeze laugh. Her shoulders heaved up and down with each breath. She’d fit right in at the breakfast table back home. Maxine dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. In all love and seriousness, she slowed down and looked me square in the eye. “You know just saying something is good enough until it isn’t. At all.”

Libraries had zero tolerance for bullshit. Their walls protected us and kept us safe from all the bastards that never read a book for fun.

I was suspicious of the Bible. It had never been particularly forthcoming when it came to stories about women. Mary Magdalene wasn’t really a hooker, and Eve didn’t force Adam to eat that apple. What did painting women as untrustworthy or whorish have to do with God’s love anyway? Those stories weren’t even about women directly. They were stories about men in which women had side roles as the mother or the second wife or the daughter-for-sale. The fact that I grew up in a religious household and had never heard of Sophia further proved to me that the people interpreting the Bible were misogynists and didn’t care about anything a wise woman had to say. Christianity wasn’t budging an inch on this quest of mine.

It was 1954 and the US government was treating Puerto Rico like its own private island: gouging it for sugar, using its shores for military purposes, and passing laws that made it illegal to display Puerto Rican flags or to fight for Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States. Apparently, the US didn’t ask the people of Puerto Rico if they wanted to be a protectorate or not; they didn’t ask the people anything. They just swooped in and took control after the Spanish American War. Lolita wasn’t having any of it. She was a nacionalista on the island and when she moved to the US in the late 1930s, she saw how her people were being discriminated against and how they were pushed into obscene poverty. Lolita Lebrón took an order from Pedro Albizu Campos, leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, and made sure it succeeded. She led the coup d’état into the House of Representatives. She fired the first shots. She shouted, ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre! My United States did this to Puerto Rico? The country I pledged allegiance to all through school, this country where allegedly anyone could just pull themselves up out of poverty and make something of themselves; this country decimated an entire island? And I thought banana republics were the worst of it. How could I not know this history? How could I walk around my block with a boricua bandanna wrapped around my head or march down Fifth Avenue next to the Goya float in the Puerto Rican Day Parade but not have even one clue tha...

Why was a musical more important to have on a loop in our home but not an act of bravery in the name of a free Puerto Rico? 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.

“Whatever pronouns a person chooses, if they choose any at all, are their right. Not a fucking preference,” she said.

“Your one job is to just accept what a person feels comfortable sharing about themselves. No one owes you info on their gender, body parts, or sexuality.”

“So then why does it feel like you’re trying to separate them?” I asked, lathering up my legs. Ava turned, like stopped in mid-pluck, and looked at me. “Because that’s how you unlearn the fuckshit,” she said. “We are so much more than Harlowe can even comprehend. Her consistent linking of genitals to gender as an absolute is violent as hell. It’s a closed fist instead of open arms, you know? And besides,” she added, staring at herself unflinching in the mirror, “womanhood is radical enough for anyone who dares to claim it.”

You said reading would make me brilliant, but writing would make me infinite.”

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.