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A Refuge Among Amazons.

I am always allowed to ease in, a toe-swirl, a finger under a temperamental spigot, a cube of store-sample cheese in a paper cup: trial before the error inherent in commitment.

This has been no different.

The child slides out of you, glittery with water and blood, and that should be that. No slow dawning, no grace period, no casual distance.

Single mothers are typically dropped right into the throes—in medias res. Before the baby, there was languidness, was leisure; now there is chaos and combat.

But this was not the case for me. I’ve had my mother. First, she moved into a home I had other help to make, with its rooms meant for one and its meager resources stretched thin, and when the bough broke there and the cradle did fall, we moved in with her mother, where we remain.

We are a kind of convent, a cloister: three women, one girl, all sequestered. The role of Mother Superior vacillates with the caprice of wind. There is something each needs from the other. An electric support, high voltage and warming but open and crackling, is conducted between us.

This way I am raising the girl is also the way I was raised, generations of doting women, tending her needs in a home absent the filament of fathers.
I am allowed to fail here, allowed to gingerly approach the hot and whirling core most mothers eventually capture. I am not required to run at it, top speed with flailing arms. I need not be singed and disoriented, do not have to isolate my daughter through a series of  miscalculated scoldings, an irreparable tangle of hair, an insomnia born of my inability to sleep-train, a tantrum escalated rather than quelled.

There is always someone here. I am never alone. This is the cure and the curse of it.

Now that she is nearing two, I want more of her, more of the deference to a mother’s voice than I have, more of the adoration she sections and cores and passes in equal share like a snack made of apples in preschool. I want to be the lead matriarch in this as-yet-unfinished play, but often–especially at night, when after I’ve scrubbed her to a lotion-slicked gleam, she scurries away to be rocked into slumber by my mother, or when she awakens irate and our standoff is decided by my grandmother’s anticipation of a need I have yet to recognize (breakfast)–I feel relegated to understudy.

Of course this is vanity, is ego. It’s unimportant who’s on first if she’s healthy and tended, and she most assuredly is. And there is no way to calculate whose voice she heeds first, whose heart she holds dearest, whose arms she’ll seek out before all others when in distress. She is dearest to us all: I passed her into the world; my mother cut her cord; my grandmother shelters us, each one.

I shudder to think what our relationship would be if I’d been left alone with her lo, these 21 months, forced into a crash course in motherhood that wouldn’t have been aided by instinct.

I am not much of a test-taker. And the relationships–their inception, their solidifying, their maintenance–do not come easily to me.

I am grateful for women, for mothers, grateful for her father’s frequent phone calls, grateful for time, for do-overs, for concave nets and cushioned mats into which I can topple, if need be.

And I know that the day will come, as it did for my mother and hers before her, when I will be pushed from the nest, darling girl in tow, and expected to rebuild a residence of my own. There will be no reading a novel while she meanders into other occupied rooms, no writing while my mother braids her hair, no child care without fee while I teach, and no escaping her impatience at my clumsy attempts to pacify her.

Soon, this play at boot camp will be over. And I will be wistful for their graces when the true battles will come.

*The title, “A Refuge Among Amazons,” refers to the matriarchal society revered in Greek mythology.

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It’s Okay to Look: An Excerpt.

Note: I’ve been writing less in the blogosphere–here and in other places where I used to be a more frequent contributor–in part because I’ve started working on a novel. I haven’t tried a novel in several years now. In graduate school (which ended five years ago, next month[!]), I dealt mostly in long-form short stories. Then I wrote the pregnancy/motherhood memoir I began here (no word yet on that, except a bunch of rejections and one pending evaluation). So my fiction’s a bit rusty.

Even so, I found time to write a piece of flash fiction for a contest late last year and something about the characters haunted me. Typically, when that happens, they’re demanding to be fully realized. They want more of my attention. Sometimes, I ignore them in favor of other pursuits. Right now, I’m in the mood to entertain them.

The thing is: I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Just a writer, no other supplemental career necessary. It’s what I do well. Everything else is a serious struggle. And so no matter how many projects I finish and polish, without anyone ever taking the chance to publish, I have to keep trying to write that project that cannot be denied. Maybe this one’s it. Maybe not, but I’m greatly enjoying the process.

This is an excerpt from the middle of the book. (I’m writing non-linearly, as bits of the plot and characters come to me.) Some context: it’s supposed to be in the voice of a precocious seven-year-old conjoined twin. Feel free to weigh in.

P.S. When I was trying to figure out a title for this, I found an article on the subject of intimate bonds, chronicling two conjoined sisters, with an interesting last line. I borrowed it.

*  *  *

In our bedroom, where all our secret things happen, under the cotton eaves of pink and rotating, stencil-shaped light, Mommy has tucked us in, read us three stories, and left us to find our own way in the night.

She never waits till we sleep, just up and goes when her own eyes grow heavy and her words come out in yawns.

The stars on the walls look nothing like the ones outside, with their perfect pointy sides and the sameness of their shapes. I watch the real ones every night, under the slip of our shades, when the sky is clear of clouds and rain and everyone, even Raydi, is gone.

Tonight, I catch Raydi before she goes.

— You think Mommy loves us?

She grunts, rolls us to the edge of our bed, reaches over the side. We always leave our Raggedy Anns sleeping under us. We tell them they’re in the bottom bunk; they’re too dumb to know they’re on the floor. She wakes them, yanks them up to us, smushes them together. She always, always tries to make them stick.

— How you know?

— She feed us yum-yums.

— Almost anybody’ll give a kid a treat if they ask nice.

Raydi makes a serious face as the dolls drop to the ground, separate, like they always do.

— Glue, she mumbles.

— I’m not gluing my doll to yours. You always ask that. I always say no.

She looks sad, pushes the bald side of her head to mine, starts to hum. She smells like stale cookies, yard-grass, Mama’s Queen Helene lotion. I guess I do, too.

I hate it when she’s sad. Feels too much like I’m sad. And then, before too long, I am. But my doll is nicer, cleaner. Its eyes are still where the should be, black and gleaming; in them, I can see small pieces of my face. Just mine, so that when I play with her, I don’t hear the schoolkids calling me TwoFace or the church kids calling me Legion.

Raydi’s Raggedy Ann really is raggedy. She plucked its eyes off first, said she liked the cool smooth feel of them in her mouth. When she swallowed the first one, I swore I felt it going down, winding through our bodies, lodging itself in our poop.

Mommy said it was just my overactive imagination.

— You’re seven, she said. When you’re seven, very little is real.

I know she’s wrong whenever I see the dolls, mine all factory-fresh, with chalky skin and a triangle nose of red thread, then Raydi’s with its Sharpie-blackened face and cotton gushing out of its side, where she used our safety scissors to stab it over and over.

— We do that, you and me? she said after, and I must’ve looked scared because she clapped her hand on my shoulder.

— Mommy says no.

— The hospital, it fix?

— Maybe, I whispered.

We weren’t supposed to know that hospitals fix. We thought they were where the stork dropped off babies, where grandpas go to die, where you get colored casts for the schoolkids to write on and then, if you’re lucky, they’ll like you.

But kids like us, people tell us things we shouldn’t know, say words we shouldn’t hear, show us quiet, wriggling things in the wet grass at the edge of the schoolyard, by the far fence, where the honeysuckle grows.

And so we saw it, the book with the pictures of babies like us, grown together at the head or the trunk of the body. Ms. Marjorie, the school librarian, pulled us aside weeks ago, after story hour, and showed it to us. It was a book about a black man with small, kind eyes. Mousy eyes, Raydi called them, beady but bright. He’s a doctor who became famous for splitting up twins like us. Sometimes they live, two bodies apart, and you can barely even notice they were ever followed around with cameras, gawked at in grocery stores, pitied in shows on TV.

But sometimes, something else happens. The second baby can’t live without the first. Once they come apart, the one steals all the air and blood from the other. The one is swaddled and carried home, the other dropped down in a casket.

When we asked Mommy about the man and the hospitals he works in, fixing, always fixing glued children like us, we took her the book as proof. I thought she wouldn’t believe us, that she couldn’t have known there was a man like this, that it was possible for me and Raydi to be split and normal and fine.

— Mommy, we said, there’s someone who could fix us!

We waited and waited, while she looked up and her eyes turned swirly and hard like marbles. We waited, while she scribbled stuff down in the book she always carries, till she took a sip of tea, pulled the purple ribbon into the fold of her pages and closed the cover, till she pushed the book onto the edge of the table.

She stood and loomed over us, a tree giving creepy, cold shade. Raydi beamed when she got her kiss, a blossom of lipstick pressed to her cheek. But when Mommy kissed me, I got goosebumps. Fear snuck up and took over, like just before Jason Tynes and his other fifth-grade friends, took up rocks and hurled them at us as we ran toward home.

— Sweeties, she said, not unkindly, you don’t need to be fixed.

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Reconsidering Mary, Mother of Jesus.

My mind can finally fathom Mary. Not her bypassed virginity nor the angel that quelled her fear, not her courage, her confidence in God’s peerless, perfect will nor the charm it must’ve taken to cajole her husband into journeys and mystery and a cessation of questioning.

It is in but one way that I can access her—finally, after all these years of believing her to be beyond my grasp—and this way seems the most significant of all.

I know her by her surrogacy, by the way it feels to give birth to a child to whom she believes she can never stake full claim. I recognize the oddness of feeling a strangulating sense of impermanence, even as I bathe her, feed her, infuse her language with manners, even as she becomes a warm somersault in her sleep, her tiny hard-heeled feet using my body as her gymnast’s mat. Even then, in her sleep, when she feels closest, if only by proximity, I never settle into an impression that she is entirely mine.

Instead, there’s a strangeness, an isolation, in loving a small, breathing parcel who feels so unfamiliar, so separate, so intended for a purpose that sits apart my own, so certainly on loan, and so expected to grow impatient with my heart as her holding pattern, as a velvet-lined cage with a door that will surely stick.

I cannot imagine raising Jesus. This is where Mary seems preternatural. This is our point of departure, for I know that even with a husband who loved me enough to completely overlook that his firstborn is a changeling whose presence is owing to a God he’s never actually seen, and even with the other, more normal children I could pin to the ho-hum, incontestable work of biology, I would not have known how to behave like a mother to him. I wouldn’t have known how to chastise him, wouldn’t have believed I needed to, him understanding God and thus understanding His expectations far more fluently than I. I wouldn’t have known how to love him with reckless abandon.

This is difficult enough with my daughter, who came to me in the most undramatic of ways. No tangible angel preceded her. No voice from heaven boomed. She is not the Son (or Daughter, as it were) of Man and so I can’t possibly feel the pressure Mary must’ve felt to get raising her “right.”

But I feel pressure just the same, not to smother her or to grow too dependent on her company or to make myself her barnacle. She is happy and well-loved; of this I make certain. And she cannot know how motherhood feels, not like an all-encompassing state, not like an eclipse of the light that shone before it, but at times, like only a sliver, like a condition that constantly moves so that it is difficult to pin down, to apprehend, to treat.

And so, I suspect that I do what Mary must’ve done. As often as I can, I abandon the morrow and ignore, for now, the woman I see in the eyes of the girl. I listen to her, noting the cadence and questions that lift at the ends of her prattle. I listen, so that I might know her and, in knowing her, earn her lifelong confidence. When she is ready to flit off into a life I cannot imagine, I believe I will understand why. This is far more important than feeling like she is a wind that I can possess.

I invest, for even my shortcomings have something to teach her. I warn her of the world that awaits beyond my arms and our door. And more than a daughter, I interpret her as an ally–for this is a relation that can remain unwavering. This is a kinship we are never meant to outgrow.

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Get Real, Get Right.

Like Truman, I had walked to the end of a soundstage, expansive and domed, a manmade construct where I’d dwelled since the day I was born. I followed a once-holy script, so weighted with rewrites the original text seemed illegible, and in its appendix, a map of circuitous arrows. This was a province governed by a trumped-up paranoia, a place where God watched like a hawk with the imperative to smite at any time. He sat high and looked low and, though he was love, He was also a wielder of swords; just the threat of one’s wing or the promise of another sword’s knighthood, whole lives could be held in check. Though the God they’d confined to this land necessitated lifelong service to the poor, the men and women who believed themselves His ambassadors amassed wealth at the people’s expense and boasted often of their riches to impoverished congregations.

These leaders were not like John the Baptist, wild-eyed eccentrics momentarily stricken with doubt but ultimately willing to die for their gospel. They were not like Moses, weary and at times uncertain but obedient even after 40 years of wilderness.

They were more akin to Ananais and Sapphira, apportioning unto themselves not just money, but truth and hope, compassion and power, which belonged to an uncompromised God and, in turn, to an underserved people.

At the edge of the world, at the age of 25, I clawed free, broke through an uncharted dimension. On the journey, many people passed by, headed into the land that I’d left.

I didn’t warn them of the sanctimony that would meet them there, did not tell them that though its pew-sprinting, alter-fainting, frothed-mouthing practices may seem the height of religious freedom, they were not headed for liberty but instead a new snare.

Beyond the only world I’d known, I met many obstacles. Uncharted terrain is always treacherous. I stumbled through jungles, nearly missing the garroting vines. I fielded the unbidden questions, the doubts, the stalking of betrayals so intense I longed for amnesia. And eventually, it came.

I forgot the kind of God I used to worship, a deity diluted and delivered on tin trays through the slats of a confined life. I forgot how it felt to be shackled.

There were seven years of vertigo. Mostly silence. Neither God nor I seemed angry, but we made little effort to connect.

I emerged with a girl, tiny and worshipful in ways that reignited memory. She sways at the lilt of a hymn, lifts her eyes toward a heaven she recognizes, stretches her lithe little arms at the crooning of cantors, opens a door.

I know that, in order to effectively mother her, I must talk to the God she knows, must engage in a faith like hers, must love without suspicion.

So I take her to–of all places–a VFW hall, where men in robes make the sign of the cross over their hearts and minds. A jazz guitarist and his wife lead songs that initiate conversations with God, rather than discussions with each other about how they should converse with God–or how they should feel while doing so. The holy eucharist is shared every week, and questioning is welcome. It is an entirely unfamiliar place. I approach it as the refugee I am, with guardedness and more than a little fear. But louder than the din of my doubt is the prospect of hope.

I am learning unabashed belief from the little girl, whose eyes grow wide during worship, who ceases her busy tinkering during prayer, who smiles at the priest who crosses her before I partake of the sacrament.

These days, I follow her lead. Later, she will follow mine. And someday, she will walk to the edge of the world and feel confident she knows the God who is beyond it.

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Bunkers: A Meditation on Post-Obama Parenting.

The president’s daughters look like you.

Malia, the oldest, is remarkably tall for a thirteen-year-old. She’s reserved and is said to have her father’s measured, pensive temperament. Perhaps as a rite into adolescence, she has taken to wearing silk blouses with built-in neckties, like a miniature executive. The youngest, Sasha, has been called the firebrand. Her smiles are grander, freer. Candid photographs of her suggest that she’s not above giving her father last minute tips on his stump speeches and the occasional State of the Union address. They attend school in a city with one of the most embattled, economically depressed systems in the country.

But, as students at one of the capitol area’s most prestigious private institutions, they will never be touched by that affliction.

Should their father win a second term, they will be nearly-grown women when you are six. One will have selected a college–painstakingly and likely with attention to public opinion. The other will be visiting drought-stricken villages and delivering assembly speeches at foreign academies and orphanages where the children’s faces—but not their experiences—seem familiar to her.

Like their mother, both will be conducting this business in couture fashion.

Their second term will find them at the fore more often than this first. As they grow, their doings will become increasingly difficult to keep hidden from our collective gaze.

In this way, you will be fortunate. You will spend your formative years observing two prominent black girls become prominent black women, observing two prominent black parents govern our country. You have a fleeting vantage, one to which no generation before yours has been privy and, if the nation’s reception of this family is any indication, one that is unlikely to be granted to our immediate successors.

And here is where it becomes critical for me to adjust your lens.

Since, at six, you won’t fully grasp the import of what you’re witnessing, it will be left to me to interpret the times. And the times are, above all, perilous.

Concurrent with the ascendancy of the first black first family, the country has entered a regressive twilight. The hellhounds we thought we’d outrun–hooded menaces turning our loved ones from rib and rising lung to conjecture and corpse; the Great Blue Shield with its selective sight and hearing, with its billy clubs and snarling dogs, its hoses; the branding and the lash—have circled back, baring the fangs that the progress of polite society had been keeping muzzled.

No one’s holding back anymore. The lip service paid to past injustice is reduced to little more than a murmur. The governmental apologies for the African blood soaked into this country’s crop-bearing soil: for the thousands of charred, swinging bodies, for centuries of suppressing literacy, wage-earning, the vote, have all but ceased. And the so-called corrective measures that policymakers swore were being implemented to “level the playing field” are constantly circumvented.

Regardless of era, we’re used to broken promises, to freedoms dangled then yanked out of view. In fact, in more recent decades, this is the type of racism to which we’ve grown most accustomed, this covert, institutional variety that’s so easy to pretend away. We are all too acquainted with accusations of hypersensitivity, of an unwillingness to relinquish the phantom limbs of our past. We are told we are making things up. We are told that we should be grateful for our biracial president and his gorgeous Afrocentric wife—both of whom were educated in institutions that once would’ve barred them (“Just look how far you’ve come!”)—and for their daughters with their natural hairstyles, their crosscontinental jaunts and their Sidwell Friends pedigree.

As a result, my generation is used to swallowing the bulk of its protest. Before Obama, there was, after all, no refuting the gains of society’s gradual progress. Hate crimes were still occurring, but our culture had the good sense to at least pretend a unified moral outrage and a class-based or regional distance: surely, the perpetrators were deep Southern caricatures whose slurs were in no way representative of a whole.

Things felt safer then, with everyone feigning progressive attitudes, and easier, with no one believing those attitudes would be put to the most improbable litmus test of all: a black presidency.

Now, I feel like I’m raising you amid steaming rubble and broken mirrors. Every time some newly emboldened racist verbally attacks a little black girl, I resist the urge to build us a bunker and go underground until I’m able to build us a second skin thick enough to combat all this toxicity. This is not the world to which I’d grown cautiously less guarded and grudgingly accustomed. This is an unfamiliar place, where people are so unabashed in their hatred for women who look like us that they’re using the First Lady and her children as proxies for their vitriol.

You are twenty months old and I am already so exhausted. Outrage is costly. But so is apathy. Neither will equip you with what you need to thrive in a world where people feel this way about you.

What will help you is love.

At the library, there is a children’s room where a dish runs away with a spoon on its low walls and sunlight flooding in on a cushioned rocking chair. In one corner, there are buckets of toys. The last time we went, a father sat in the rocking chair, reading with his eldest daughter while the younger–just a few months older than you–played in the toy bucket corner. When you sauntered up to her, she shared her toy with you and you chatted her up in that indecipherable way you do almost everyone. Her father smiled politely as I sat with the two of you, and though I bristled, hoping he wasn’t regarding me with suspicion, I smiled without reservation at the abandon with which you cheered whenever she pushed a plastic shape into the right space in the sorter.

At the church we’ve been visiting, where we are two of six black attendees, you toddle indiscriminately into every set of arms that opens to you—and there are many. You let them lift you and feed you treats and hug you close, and there, in the sanctuary of their guilelessness, I get a weekly respite from cynicism.

Perhaps, dear child, these are our bunkers.

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Do Something (for Trayvon Martin).

I stand with ForHarriet.com today, and blog-in for Trayvon Martin.

Like a baseball from a neighbor’s yard, the ballad of Trayvon Martin has rolled, unbidden,  into my consciousness. Like that unwanted ball, I claim it, turn it over, hear the cries for its return–with commentary attached: Don’t you want justice? Aren’t you outraged? Volley this narrative. Lend it support.

I consider keeping the ball for my collection.

I am that elusive town elder, that crotchety, aloof, possibly mad woman down the block. I’ve heard too much. I’ve darkened my windows, shuttered out light. I’ve locked my doors.

Yes. This is an outrage. I can almost feel his downy chin in the palm of my hand. I can clearly see his smile, read his mind. I remember the corner-store runs of my youth, the one-dollar bills in pockets that may as well have been fortunes. I can taste the Skittles, sandpapery sweet, and feel the swell of pride, divvying up these spoils among summer friends, among younger siblings.

I know what it is to be a giver, a gatherer.

I know the misplaced confidence we give to gates and how easy it is to forget we are caged, until we find ourselves becoming prey.

I know suspicion: the cop car that flips its lights and sirens just to f–k with us, that follows so closely behind our cars in the night that we can no longer see its headlights, that pulls us over to trump up a violation or issue a pointless citation or to do absolutely nothing at all but stare and pull off with a peal of chilling laughter. I know the unshakeable gaze of the sales clerk, the involuntary cringe as I pass through a department store’s security sensors, even though I know I’ve paid for my purchases, even though I know that I’m no thief.

But here, Trayvon Martin and I part ways, for I do not know what it is to be gunned down at 17. I do not know what it is to be a doe-eyed boy whose soft, unscowling features become wolfish in the eyes of the wrong white man.

I do not know what it is to be hunted.

And what worries me most, what keeps me from wrapping this metaphoric baseball in a venomous screed against all the George Zimmermans of the world and lobbing it through the glass halls of justice and commerce, is this:

I also do not know what it is to send my child to visit her father—to entrust her to his sunny, soundless suburb—only to have her returned to me in a body bag.

It’s enough to leave me curled against all discourse.

It’s enough to render me catatonic.

It’s enough to make breathing difficult, labored, nigh unto impossible, when I really think about it.

We have seen more than our share of Trayvon Martins. So have our ancestors. I still speak the names of Amadou and Sean and Oscar, still conjure them from their desolate places, willing them unforgotten. I pull their memory around me like a shroud. Like our parents did for Bobby Hutton and our grandparents did for Emmett Till.

We never have time to stop mourning.

We are never safe.

We are surveilled. We are followed. We are stopped. We are dead.

It seems as senseless to demand fair retribution as it is that these men and boys were murdered in the first place.

Trayvon Martin’s face, floating up to me as I cower over sudsy dishwater, as I hold my 19-month-old too tightly, as I try to coax sleep from its hiding place, cuts me down to the marrow. I am numb.

But in this silent place, I know that no one who remains here ever ends up on the right side of history. No one who has pulled her curtains to shut out the world has ever escaped its ravenous grasp.

Injustice assails us all. Whether it merely grazes or impales us, we will never wholly forgo it.

Who are we if we allow resignation to unseat our outrage? What kind of mother am I if I, upon hearing of tale after suspicious tale of black boys lost, can only sigh relief that I’m raising a girl?

We cannot believe the odds are unbeatable, cannot keep our heads low, our mouths closed, our God thanked that, yet again, our own child was passed over, that yet again, it isn’t our blouse stained with blood.

If we do, we were spared without purpose. We’re as impeachable as every trigger-puller.

Do something:

Sign the petition at Change.org to prosecute the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin

Contact Bill Lee, Chief of Police, and ask why George Zimmerman hasn’t been charged in Trayvon’s shooting death. Ask what evidence their department’s withholding. Ask if Trayvon’s parents will ever hear Zimmerman’s taped 911 call  (edited to add: the 911 tapes were released last night, to heartbreaking, but revelatory results):

Sanford Police Department
815 W. 13th Street
Sanford , Florida 32771
Phone: 407.688.5070
Fax: 407.688.5071
Dispatch: 407.688.5199

Contact Norman Wolfinger, Florida’s 18th District State’s Attorney

State Attorney’s Office
Criminal Justice Center
101 Bush Boulevard
PO Box 8006
Sanford, Florida  32772-8006
(407) 665-6000

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Me. You. Summer Writing.

summerwriting
Tentative start date for first teen/adult summer sessions: Monday, June 11

Here is the vision: a circle. At its center, you. You are holding a notebook. The words on its pages are yours, lovingly, imaginatively crafted, full of surprising turns and ironies, full of carefully constructed sentences. There are lines; there are strike-throughs. Imperfections, bold choices, incalculable risks.

I ask you to read from that page: Read its nonfiction, its metaphors, its fictive phrasings, its poetry. Read it and feel emptied, feel absolved. Read it and find nimble listeners.

And you do. You lay the words bare, leave them on the floor to be read, to foretell your future.

The listeners wait, let them linger and breathe in a quiet air, let their full weight and bloom be underscored by silence.

And then we commend you, rush through breathless praise and tactful criticism, give you pages lined with hand-scrawled commentary. We compare your work to the others we’ve read by diverse and lovely writers within and without the literary canon, within and without the diaspora.

You leave feeling more confident in the timbre of your voice, in your command of the ideas borne out on the page.

I’m teaching writing this summer. Six-week courses. Join me.

Send your kids between summer camps. Or enroll yourself. You won’t regret it.

A more official, specific announcement is forthcoming. In the meantime, if you’re interested in enrollment, please email me at wingstowrite@gmail.com or post a comment below stating your interest.

Posted on by slb

Psalm 37:25.

I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.

On occasion, I imagine myself as a woman of wisdom and means. I am 56 or 64 or 73 and several ebony strands still assert themselves in my cirrocumulous hair. During my nightly constitutional, I pretend I live near the Ganges. I imagine myself standing open-palmed under Victoria Falls. I let my mind drift to places eternities away from where I’ve settled. Gauzy, hand-dyed fabrics drape my body; the wind whips through them and I feel at peace with a fast-approaching future wherein I, too, will exist as little more than wind, whipping though another woman’s sails.

In my pockets, there are many keys.

I live without regret, save for a mild but persistent pining for days long past. Youth, as is often said, is useless to the young. I do not wish to see this foregone squandering in you.

When you visit, we curl into the hammock on my screened porch, tittering like sandbox girls as we teeter. I allow you this levity, this feathery love that daughters so seldom get to feel with their worried mothers. Then, I pull you close, two thin and veiny fingers ’round your wrist, like a cuff, like the strong arm of law, meant to warn you: This is serious. I look at you, curled and soft as a mollusk—at 27 or 35 or 44—and your face has made strides toward solace, awareness and confidence that mine did not, until I was much older. But there is still the residue of self-questioning there, an uncertainty skulking along the brow, a sadness in the sanguine rim of the eye.

These are unfortunate inheritances.

I tell you first that I wish you had taken the part of me that is feral. I wish that after all these years it no longer made sense to hide the wildness inside us, that our culture had come to terms with the ferocity women must hold onto in order to survive. I wish it were freeing, rather than ignominious to lay oneself bare in the open. I wish that, for us, there were no triple consciousness, no necessary switching of codes for white, for black, for patriarchy.

But this will never be so. There are too many men who siphon power by depleting ours. It is too tempting to spend scarce and precious time convincing them that, though society often seems a soundproof room, we have voices. They echoing in corners, through caverns: We deserve… We deserve… We deserve…

But stalactites have no ears, and we winnow centuries at this war.

The hour is late. And the light of your youth has grown dim. Have you listened to the men, to your father, to me, to everyone who’s admonished you to, “Be a good girl?” Oh, how I wish you hadn’t, I lament, lifting your chin.

We always expect more for our daughters than for ourselves.

I tell you to dive and note the beauty of the bottom. I urge you to annually step into the baskets of hot air balloons and remind yourself how small it all seems when you’re soaring. I implore you to marry the man who compels you, whose interests swim in synchrony with your own, who hears you, understands you are not a caged thing. Tell him, “This lioness has no need for taming.” Tell him, “If I am to answer to you, then we are to answer to each other.”

For the sake of your God and your country, do not accept the hand of the man who prefers you porcelain and pirouetting in a music box of his making. You will find yourself pining for days long past, imagining the Ganges, the Falls.

When I am gone, I whisper, I will leave you all the keys in my pockets. I will leave you the possibilities beyond each door.

You whisper, In the meantime, just use them. Mother, you were meant for much more.

Posted on by slb · 1 Comment

Leap.

By manipulating the shape of the body in freefall, a skydiver can generate turns, forward motion, backwards motion, and even lift.

A wounded deer leaps highest. — Emily Dickinson

On its surface, this day is no different than others. It adheres to the same 24 hours as all the rest. The sun rises and sets at hours consistent with those in the days surrounding it. It does not break from established weather patterns, does not undo the laws of gravity, does not defy velocity. It is but a day.

But I tell you of a truth: we are made for risk. We are made for the meticulous building of traditions and for the very sudden breaking from them. Listen, feel the hard gallop of blood through the veins to the heart through the veins. This is how were meant to move through this, the only life we’re given: quick, but with deliberation, forceful and regenerative.

We were meant for leaps, for freefalls–and just in case our fears make us forget, just in case the trappings of acquired finery cause a kind of amnesia, God occasionally grants us this: an extra revolution of earth ’round sun, a 366th opportunity to do what should be done daily.

Leap.

You will not perish. You will kiss lovers you would not have known, if not for the casting off of cynicism. You will break ground that, undoubtedly, would’ve been colonized later, by someone else who understood what it meant to manipulate a fall, a failure, in ways that become strengths. You will triumph where others see only defeat. You will tilt your head, close an eye, squint, make viewfinders of your fingers and gaze at the figure before you in the glass, gaze until she becomes someone to be revered, someone different than she was in years, in days, in moments before and who will be different still in the days to come. You will finish a thought, a deep, a pursuit once discarded–reconcile with a decision long past.

You will take your children–biological, imagined, mentored–and pull them close with the sound of your lowered voice. Say, you may feel fixed as stone, but you have the freedom of vapor. Say, I have heard that, in the air, we become zephyrs. But this can only be confirmed though the leap. Say, I love you. This should matter. This should be a propulsion. When you feel yourself sinking, spread your arms, let your heart unfurl like a bolt of raw silk, and trust that love’s current will carry you.