Pictured: My great, great, great grandmother Rebecca, a formerly enslaved woman.
Making plans to visit Mississippi soon, Natchez to be exact. I want to visit this land Rebecca survived when the tornado of 1833—the second most dangerous in American history—that killed 317 “people.” Enslaved people like my grandmother were not considered people by the white power-holders, so it is likely many were carried home by the winds and erased by the violent customs of redaction of Black life.
I want to stand on the land my father’s people come from. I want to walk through the cotton fields my grandmother Annette, and her twin sister Arnette, rose to clear, at 2am until sunset, I want my feet to rearrange the soil of the plantation of her grandfather lived on, until until until, i hear my Ancestors whisper what I’ve always known and always been too untrained to free my young tongue to articulate. I want to feel and re-member and re-collect the old ways, the queer ways, of becoming anew, even in, perhaps especially in, the foreclosure of violences unspeakable and i want to weep at the witness i cannot bear and the testimony that is mine and not mine, that is past and not past, that is now and then, that is here and there, that demandingly Black divinely Queer and I want to take some soil, some cotton and seeds from collard greens, to behold the remnants and the inheritance and the organic renderings and inheritance and alchemy that is Black insistence on something beyond resistance, reaction, response I want to sigh a soul sigh and weave a web Anansi would weep at and that any griot worth their litany would weep in mo(u)rning, in the knowing, in the shared recognition and sharing of the sacred once stolen, once lost, now re-membered and longer amputeed, a once phantom limb of being come home to the body it was stolen from, and and and and I want to know my name, i want to know its texture, how it slicks through and in and across and because the humidity of miss-i-sipp-i wonder whether my wandering has always been about home coming, not to this confederate styled state, not even by the bloody contrast it illustrates with the red record of Kansas routes, but the home in the rupture, the rupture of the home making, of the BlaQueer temple often called me, i will know, i think, i won’t think, I’ll know the old ways, when the libations fall across my toes and make mud prints on the topographical tapestry my Ancestors made, made of my Ancestors, beyond the considered, studied miseducation of white folk, i want to feel and re-collect and re-member, perfect how to bend my tongue in the old ways, so that when i speak to you and i introduce myself and i say my name, i will no longer tell a compulsory lie in my truth, and my face, my flesh, my fulcrum will embody a freedom that glows and grows and groans beyond the fictions of still born perversions of “freedom” and I’ll meet me and you and we and say “thin love ain’t no love at all” (Toni Morrison, Beloved) and “do not choose the lesser life.
do you hear me.
do you hear me.
choose the life that is. yours. the life that is seducing your lungs. that is dripping down your chin” (nayirrah waheed, salt) and then, only then, will i laugh a maya angelou laugh, because the “south got somethin’ to say” (OutKast) and it is heavy, and requires you to breathe (
, ) a breathe that has been waiting ever patiently to be inhaled, an Ancestral release, an Ancestral intake, a method of becoming the old and the new, anew.i’m planning a trip home soon, because i’m convinced there are bits and remnants in the air, in the soil, in the musty breeze of survivance waiting to greet me there, with methods of living otherwise, nevermind the bloodlust of the nation, waiting, waiting, ever so patiently, to hold me still, so that i might learn to “surrender to the air and ride it,” waiting, patience waning, to breathe through my locs and whisper “welcome child, sho’ took you long enough, now come, walk, and let us learn you somethin’ about livin’”