For Audre and Toni
She gave me anger, glory, goodness, resistance, and love in the tragedies she surmounted. She unfolded my girlhood so that I could be woman today.
The Return of the Lonely Black Girl
This is in part a confession: I’ve called myself lonely and I realized I haven’t been.
Thoughts on Tennis
The capacity and strength to process your way through, allowing yourself to feel all the frustration, all the anger, all the fear to fuel a greater blooming. This is more than finding a silver lining. It’s about accepting the feels as they come, allowing them to wash over you, to consume you, and then finding your consciousness within the emotional climax, channeling it into something new.
On Black Optimism and Other Forms of Magic
Black Optimism that offers an even brighter stain of hope on this grueling exploration of Black/Human. Blackness is “walking in another world while passing through this one.” It is a state of disorientation, of being and unbeing at once.
Origins of Blackness
My summers on Staunton Avenue with my family and Paul Laurence Dunbar socialized attitudes about Blackness that continue to be a source of pride. The performance of Blackness was inextricably linked with intellect, beauty, humor, and (historic and immediate) community. These would be the initial influences of not only the way I viewed myself as Black but also how I viewed other Black people. Eventually, this notion of self would be challenged by encounters with the outside, non-Black world.
