Two weeks ago today, I returned from a magical writer’s retreat where I was invited by a literary luminary and creative collaborator. It was a restoration I never knew I needed. Named for the iconoclast, Zora Neale Hurston, the writing group serves to foster community between Black Women Writers. I was the youngest person present and to be honest, (whispers) I much prefer it that way. I always relished being around elders, eavesdropping on tea I shouldn’t be sipping or being of service to the aunties.Whether it’s cleaning up after dinner, or making fresh brewed coffee, I am here unyieldingly. I think a toxic lesson acquired from childhood that “Children should be seen not heard”, is tacit in my engagement with older folk. But it doesn’t undergird it. My father is the most unsuspecting silent creature one would ever meet. An enlightening lesson from childhood acquired from him, is to study people. Emulated by his Scorpio moon, when he slithers into a room, he would find a degree where he would sit perched, observing people, their gestures, wondering about their facticity, and dispositions.
In many, if not all, civic engagements, or novel environments, I am incessant on listening and watching. I’m usually an observer, silent and eager to understand. So to understand, truly does require stillness and silence. My disposition, in accompanying this, is to connect. But this was different. I felt comfortable. IMMEDIATELY. I felt like I could be myself. It was an array for artistically inclined and quirky women, with ravenous delights.
The weekend first began with a settling in for some of the cohort, followed by a staged reading to which was open to the public. It was packed. A number of folk, particularly young folk shared pieces they were working on. I commend them for being audacious and courageous in their creations and performance. It was marvelous to witness. But a significant number of the pieces were marred by the stereotype of Blackness. It was despondent, cliche, tragic and Black. It was strifed by violence, death and the hegemony of white power structure. Not a lot of the pieces were actually happy or told a tale just being.
BUT! There was this one piece that had me floored. The poet in question was majestic in her appearance. Her stature was that of a child’s wish. Her hair was slicked back in a thick bun and her eyes were wide like a gaping hole of a Mandarinfish’s mouth. She had suns bedazzling her ears. She looked like a gardener who always had surplus harvest. Her tomatoes would make the sweetest soup. Her poem did just that for me. It was invigorating and empowering. It was very Ntozake Shangé-esque, ritual poetics like. I couldn’t stop umphing- & oohing at the delivery of her lines.
I read a piece, the first I’ve ever read aloud, which was about my first time having sex at 18, which wasn’t a pleasurable moment. It was a peculiar experience reading something so deep to me, with a microphone to an audience. Even breaking the fourth wall, doing a call and response to count the amount of thrusts (which were all by eight) the first penis in my vagina had. After I was finished, I felt mortified. I wanted to scurry and hide somewhere. I felt exposed. Since I quit cigarettes, my socially acceptable mechanism for escape didn’t exist anymore. So I ran to the bathroom afterwards instead. I came out to a number of people coming up to me, saying they enjoyed my piece and they related to it. Some even furthermore had the same experience. The woman with the suns in her ears being one of them. She came up to me to affirm me, (which I was gagged by )and I did the same cause I was smitten by her piece. She was older, wiser, gifted.
“You?!” I thought in my head.
“You look like you have it all figured out! You’re this mystic healer whose body movements look aromatic.”
But then, I realized for her to be so piquant, she had to be familiar with things that are flagrant. She was a trained actor who lived in NYC for 20 years, studied the healing creative arts as a way of therapy, travelled around the world and is now a Reiki healer and yoga practitioner.
“So on brand. I love her”. I thought.
The following day, at the residence, we did a sound bath, which was peaceful and serene. Afterwards, we took a group photo where she wore this velvet Black catsuit, her hair slicked in a long cascading ponytail with a silk orange scarf wrapped around her waist. She was spell ready and I was spellbound.
During dinner, I proposed we play Question of the Day, during Saturday dinner. It is one of my favorite games. I acquired it as a canvasser in college taking long rides upstate to fundraise to put a ban on Hydrofracking in New York State, which we successfully did! It’s a great way to learn about people and their world sense. It begins with the proposer, Person 1, asking any question in the world, then the next person, Person 2 answering Person 1’s question and then creating a question, and then Person 3, would answer Person 1’s and 2’s and create a question. Then it would go around till everyone has gone and every question is answered. It sparked riveting conversations with women who were the same age as my mother, but didn’t have the same constitution as her. Sharing the role of Black pain in art, freedom and postulations of romance. People shared intimate parts of themselves in the group discourse or in xylos. Divorce, Kinks, BDSM and bartering power. The woman with the suns in her ears shared she’d never been in love. Many of the women tacitly agreed. I was stunned. Here I was surrounded by women I truly, truly admired. I was awe inspired by. They were hilarious, cunning, witty, charming, classy. How could they not? You are all women that have LIVED! Grabbed life by the balls and squeezed it into submission. But that’s what the lovers wanted her to do, to surrender to the chimerical idea they have of her and she ultimately couldn’t. To be loved, as she espoused to be seen and heard and furthermore accepted; an ethos I share with her deeply.
I thought that everyone falls in love and has at least one cantankerous romance that leaves them forever fried, in all the best ways. I thought about my mother and the romantic Hollywood films she loved. Crying with the protagonist or breaking the fourth wall to curse out the useless guy intent on shattering the woman’s heart. I love rom coms. I love LOVE .I thought everyone experienced love the way they wanted to. I was wrong. Then it made me think, when do you get what you want?
I thought the more you older you get, the more life gets philanthropic with alacrity. I thought the older you get, the closer you are to figuring things out; that with age comes answers. I recall another mother-like figure in my life, Mama Yaa, when I was in (and still in) a process of transformation, saying “Girl, there’s never going to be a moment where every single thing is together. Even at my age of 70 something, I’m still figuring shit out”. I realized in that space rooted in love with those women under the definition shared by the woman with suns in her ears, that though our bodies age, like children we are always learning. Life is always shifting.
We are always in a constant state of becoming and nothing is ever truly absolute. There is no definitive end. The only definitive is change.
I loved being enclosed by this cohort of Black women being vulnerable and valorous. It was a profound level of intimacy in a intergenerational exchange I’ve never known. I was mothered in so many nuanced ways. They shared the shameful, the seemingly repugnant, with grace and embrace. It was like these women, especially the woman with suns in her ears were parts of me, reflected back to me, in such a luminous way. They legitimized me in an existential way. It was one of the best moments of my life.
Simply gorgeous, this story and you.