Queenie

by Candice Carty-Williams

All of my grandmother’s responses come with a Caribbean frame of reference that forces me to accept that my problems are trivial.

“Yuh tink suffering discriminate against time?”

He’d gone to boarding school with James and was adopted by white parents, which I think you can tell quite quickly by the way he publicly ridicules anything resembling black culture and carries his mute blond girlfriend around like she’s some sort of symbolic rite of whiteness.

“What’s the girlfriend drop?” Darcy always needed to be clued in on these things. “It’s when a guy, even if he’s the one who approached you to, say, ask what the time is, needs you to know that he’s attached,” Cassandra explained, rolling her eyes. “Like last week, I was in a café, and there was a guy at the table next to mine who had a smear of ketchup on his face. I was so distracted by it that I kept looking over and staring, wondering how acceptable it was to go and wipe it off. He eventually turned to me and said, ‘Cool laptop. My girlfriend has the same one.’ It’s their way of telling themselves that, a) they’re irresistible to women, and b) they’re in control of all of their interactions.”

“Being brave isn’t the same as being okay,” my mum said quietly.

It’s not a riot, it’s an uprising. And we will continue with our uprising until we get the justice we deserve.”

When had this happened? When had the space that I had known like the back of my hand, the only area I’d ever been to that I felt like I could be myself in, the place where so many people looked like me, talked like my family—when had it gone?

“So what if something is wrong with you? There’s something wrong with all of us,” Darcy said gently.

“You’re damaged goods, so you self-destruct,”

“Maybe if all ah we had learned to talk about our troubles, we wouldn’t carry so much on our shoulders all the way to the grave.” He

When you walked into my office, I saw both the person that you are currently, and the person that you could be.

And I looked at her, and I realized that she was more powerful than any delicate princess I’d read about. I’d just given birth to a queen. A girl who would grow up to

“It’s a long story that I’m not going to go into,” I said, “but what I will tell you is that I had a great job and I’m pretty sure I’ve thrown it, and my whole life, away.” “No such thing,” my mum said. “You’ve just turned twenty-six, your life hasn’t even begun. I had you just after I turned twenty-six. Best year of my life.” She chewed another forkful of food, smiling.

My grandmother turned me by the shoulders and pushed me out the door gently. “Don’t overthink things. What’s the word the therapy woman say? Catastrophize. Nah badda catastrophize.”

“Anyway, well done, you! One of these days we’ll have a whole week of conversation where we can pass the Bechdel test!”