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What I now know is that kind of certainty, dire as it may be, is a gift.
Parting the hair, line after line, this shared geography of scalp like an ancestral road map, bound us Black girls.
“Now, you know how some white folks feel about Black bodies. They think we can tolerate pain better than them. According to some of these documents I’m about to show you, some of them even thought syphilis couldn’t kill us. It was as much an experiment about the effects of the disease as it was a crazy white man’s idea of a laboratory game with Black bodies.”
“Sometimes love can kill you, just like hate. You love too hard and you can lose yourself in other folks’ sorrow. You hate too hard and you know the rest of that story. Take care of yourself. You can’t help others if you’re down and out. I have to remind myself of that all the time.”
We are at the center of our own destiny. Always have been. Yes, there have been times this country has tried to destroy us. But we have not been doormats. No, ma’am. We have fought and used every resource.
The power of art to speak to you sometimes lay in its unwillingness to be penned into one thing.
I needed to talk to her, to tell her I understood how a person could get so caught up in doing good that they forgot that the people they served had lives of their own.
