Christmas hasn’t been a favorite holiday of mine since I was a child. It feels claustrophobic and excessive and so, so impossibly gaudy and red. But the pocket of time between 25th to the 1st has always been hallowed for me. I treat it with seriousness and give myself wholly to reflection: on the Nativity; on the subsequent Massacre of the Innocents; on those who go hungry; on the children who have to square their shoulders, lift their chins, puff their chests, and let their eyes become stones, when they awake on Christmas morn to the same bleak cots in a shelter, to the same loss or absence that claimed a parent near some Christmas past; to the same dearth of gifts or of cheer.
Joy does not always come easily to the world these days. And despite our best efforts to tinsel over everything that ails us and others, there are many who cannot forget their struggles through caroling or office holiday parties or heavily spiked punch and nog.
What is so heartening is how vigorously we try. Every year, we volunteer; purchase that extra unwrapped toy to take to the nearest giveaway station; write checks for international causes; give bonuses to civil servants; reconcile with estranged loved ones; make peace with our long-feuding neighbors; light candles and place them in our windows, as if to alert to all who pass by: Cheer is welcome here. Hope is present here.
If you read this blog often, you know well that I am big proponent of hope. And the last week of a year seems to be when mankind is most open to it. We have suspended our cynicism, in preparation for the swell of possibility every countdown to a new year provides. And suddenly, the world’s ills seem solvable. Galvanization seems sustainable. True love seems well within our grasp. And every dream in default is made current.
The New Year is the Great Equalizer. Even for those for whom the holidays feel unbearable, there is a great sense of relief at their coming and going. It means that there is something we can definitively put behind us. It means there is a mystery. For all we know, this is year we will finally feel at home; we will sail the seas; we will find a job; we will beat a repossession, a foreclosure, an eviction; we will graduate; we will marry.
This is the year that will satisfy some large and persistent longing.
For me, the end of the year is about eradicating regret. It’s about our realization and, perhaps, our relief that we come here, to this earth, in part, to falter. It is the only thing that earns us empathy and humbleness. Whatever the next annum will bring, it will certainly include our mistakes. Often, the mistakes–more than any of the things we get right–are what carry us to the next year’s shore, altered, enlightened, matured.
And that, more than lit trees, wrapped gifts, and a cheery array of confections, is worthy of the effort it may take to rejoice.
The first involves a twenty-year-old, walking down an unfamiliar DC street at dusk. She’s on her way to a concert at a church and fears she may’ve hopped off the Metro at the wrong stop. The street is deserted for about a block, and the young woman feels increasingly vulnerable. Then, about 100 feet ahead, an old man materializes. She’s relieved, hoping to ask him for directions. But as she parts her lips to speak, he cuts in–making lewd references to her mouth and his genitalia, his eyes hungrily sweeping up and down her body. The whole exchange lasts 15 seconds, and years later, she will not remember his exact words, but she will never forget the eerie, demeaning humiliation of being propositioned on a city street.
This is sexual harassment.
Here is the other image: a nine-year-old boy shows up to his fourth-grade classroom and finds a substitute teacher standing at the front of it. His eyes dance with that childhood light our culture seems so intent on prematurely extinguishing, and he feels something small but powerful unfurl inside him. It is the green, translucent sprout of a crush. When he’s older, he will know plenty of phrases that can describe this sensation. Some will be poignant and flowery, others lewd and blue. But at nine, he knows only one word that captures his feeling about this impermanent, pretty presence standing behind his teacher’s desk. He leans over and whispers the word to a friend. The word is “cute.”
The twenty year old in our first portrait is now the 32-year-old author of this article. She has heard many words used to describe herself and the women she knows that were designed to harass and hypersexualize. Those words have been demeaning, pejorative, and explicit. They are familiar to far more women, young and old, than they should be.
“Cute” is not one of them.
In the context of elementary school, cute is often considered the highest compliment a child can give or receive–and in that pre-pubescent environment, it is the also most innocent, the most benign.
This is what made the suspension of Emanyea Lockett, the boy in our second portrait, so deeply disheartening. Brookside Elementary School in Gastonia, NC barred him from attendance for two days, on the grounds of sexual harassment. In a local news video, Emanyea confessed that he had no idea what sexual harassment meant—nor should he, at nine years old, unless he’s inadvertently committing it.
If his own account of this event is to be believed, he most certainly wasn’t. He wasn’t even skirting an inappropriate line. Sexual harassment involves intimidation, coercion, and unwelcome advances of a sexual or solicitous nature. It can be subtle. It can be unintentional. It can result in misunderstanding. But under no circumstances is the one-time description of a teacher as “cute”—or even as “fine,” as the school’s official letter claims—an example of it.
Now that Emanyea has been told that it is, now that he has been formally accused (and convicted, by way of suspension) of sexual harassment, his elementary school is forcing him to confront language, definitions, and situations from which all nine-year-olds should be insulated. They’ve labeled him a delinquent. And perhaps worst of all, they’ve criminalized that most universal of childhood experiences: a crush.
Post-millennial black boys are having a hard enough time developing healthy and untainted attitudes about love, relationships, and sex. In fact, if the ubiquitous studies and statistics on these matters have any validity, we all are. In an age when, by most accounts, academics, news anchors, and psychologists are routinely stacking the odds against him reaching adulthood with his optimism intact, the last thing Emanyea Lockett needs is his elementary school telling him that it’s dangerous to call someone cute.
Daughter, we are not endangered, but by all accounts, we should be. It is true that there is something hardy coded into us: a kind of eye that can observe the grotesquery of a husband’s flogging without scaling over, without growing dim; a kind of breast that will still produce milk for a mistress’s infant, after it has been forbidden to nurse its own; the kind of womb that manages not to expel a child even as it churns and bumps and wrenches its way through the Middle Passage. But we are not invincible. We are still disproportionately susceptible to ailments that weaken, maim, and kill. Even those of us who live to a ripe old age find themselves accosted, if not by physical ravages, then by bureaucratic ones.
It is no small feat, surviving black womanhood in this country.
But you are not without your powers–and the powers you possess are substantial. This is particularly true, when it comes to HIV/AIDS. Because African American women account for thirty percent of all new cases of HIV/AIDS in this country, and because 85 percent of those cases are the result of heterosexual sex, we can be assured that though few assaults on our bodies are as deadly as this one, there are even fewer that are this preventable.
Today, you are sixteen months old. If all is ideal, the decision to have sex will be entirely yours to make (many, many, many years from now). It will not be thrust upon you by predators. It will not be as the result of a callous boyfriend’s months-long erosion of your self-esteem. And most mercifully of all, it will not be stolen, as it is for so many girls of color abroad, by a man who believes that sex with a virgin will reverse the effects of his own virus.
If all is ideal, you will always retain your autonomy. As your mother, I would be remiss if I did not do everything within my power to ensure this. And so this is what I can tell you about sex: it mystifies. It inspires a wide range of philosophies. It has been known to factor into the collapse of empires. It can create human life; it created you. It is an exchange of bodily fluids, through which a great many infections can be carried. And occasionally, it results in the contraction of HIV which, coupled with other opportunistic infections, has caused the untimely loss of some of the most promising minds this world has ever known.
It is quite likely that you will not remember all of this, under the prom night stars. It may not spring to mind when you have surrendered yourself to a potential lover’s sturdy embrace. You will not recall it as you kiss him, won’t necessarily think of it when you invite him up for coffee. And should you decide to abstain until marriage, your honeymoon suite will not ring with the echoes of my admonitions about AIDS and other infections.
So it is imperative that you do not wait until these moments to broach the subject. And it is equally important that you do not wait for him to. Your health is not his responsibility. Procuring condoms should never cause you shame, nor should vigilance about protecting yourself suggest promiscuity. Any man believes you should be embarrassed about openly discussing any aspect of who you are is not the man that I wish for you, is not the man you should accept for yourself.
It is the rare HIV-positive man who knowingly or spitefully exposes the virus to his partners. What is more common is that he does not know he has it. What is more common is that he is afraid to find out. But it is not your responsibility to allay his fears; his ambivalence about his own health should not become your albatross. What is absolutely imperative is that you can confirm that you will not be exposed to a life-threatening illness, should you decide to sleep with him. Occasionally, your insistence on this evidence will result in a relationship-ending row.
This will be for the best–and if I succeed in adequately preparing you for womanhood, you will know this, even as you watch him leave.
Above all, dear heart, in matters of health, be proactive, be preventive, be aggressive, if need be. Remember the parable of the virgins. Five were wise, and five were foolish. The line between them was thin. The line between them was preparation.
Turn 32. Recognize the Day of Birth in ways you did not before. Now that you are a mother, understand that this day, that this life, is not yours alone. There is a debt you must pay to the people who brought you here. There is a debt you must pay to the girl your body opened up–like a whale expelling Jonah–to release.
Know now that the time you have spent convincing yourself of an intrinsic unworthiness was not yours to waste. Those interminable years you whiled away, in conflict with yourself, could well have been spent slaying dragons, climbing Everests, loving deeply and well. Reset your internal clock accordingly.
Recognize that your worries–about the traction of your ability, about the accessibility of your talent, about your value–were the shallow trifles of the bourgeoisie. Women like you cannot afford to laze about on a chaise lounge of loftiness, noshing on the bon-bons of inaction. You–the gypsies, the transients, the intermittently penniless, the debt-laden, the mothers–must walk the length of deserts, must fashion a bridge of rejection letters, must set sail away from inadequacy, tossing overboard inattentive men, and finally, upon a new shore, must drill down to the marrow of your souls and extract the dreams you’ve buried there.
Remind yourself that this painful drilling need never have occurred, if only you’d kept your goals at the fore and tended them the way you do the face you so constantly lament isn’t lovely enough.
Repent of the audacity it has taken to thumb your nose at God. Tell Him what he has given you is potent. Your words evoke tears, evoke action. They occupy hearts, link arms, sit-in, sing songs that overcome. They stir the reader, alert him to the need for revolution, compel him to broaden his capacity for love.
Shame on you for re-enacting the parable of the talents, for burying all that you’ve been given, because it looked too meager to present before kings.
Beg forgiveness. Promise that, should He be gracious enough to let you keep these gifts, you will treat them as gold, not tin. They will no longer be susceptible to tarnish.
Give more to the world. Do not gaze at its magnificent surface, full of the colorful impressions of history’s trillions, and say: there is no space left for me. Leave your you-shaped imprint; none other is like it.
Concede that the artist is a public servant. But never surrender your growth to the public’s expectation. Should you find yourself in a box, obliterate its walls.
Believe those who tell you they cherish your work. You hear this often enough to trust it. Do not dismiss true praise as hype. Question those who would proclaim you the Next Whomever. You hear this often enough to be wary. Do not mistake hype for earnestness.
Finally, in pursuits of love, be kind to yourself. You were never meant to be the girl who pined for disinterested men. You always did, perhaps because it is easier to court rejection than to give all of yourself to the pyres of love. Be no man’s second choice. Be the echo at the end of the cavern into which he yells, in search of interchangeable women’s companionship. Be the voice he longs to hear again, now that he knows he never will. Do not become a salted pillar for him.
Instead, dance wildly at the water’s edge and bring your little girl. She must see what it means to at last be free from desiring far less than you should have.
Be assured: someone will be watching. And a love unlike any you’ve known will ignite itself within him.
But regardless of whether he approaches, regardless of whether he has learned to circumvent self-sabotage, you must slather on your war paint, with the girl on your hip. Begin to deliver your words to the larger space, honor them in ways you haven’t before, and watch them transform: tiny airless things at first, slowly yawning into giants.
Acceptance is a drug: a rock, a vapor, a potion. Some children first feel its rush in the womb, when a mother’s rhythmic, loving touch pulses through skin and blood and fluid. Her voice tunnels down through warmth and darkness. She says: I love you. She says: I can’t wait to meet you. She says: You are mine.
Other children remain unconvinced of acceptance and its potency until they emerge from the birth canal and find a father, beaming and open-palmed, the picture of pride.
And then there are the children whose acceptance has been cut, laced, or diluted. One or both of their parents may be absent or absent-minded; inattentive or attentive to a fault, but only when enforcing discipline or inflicting abuse; or desperately distracted by the pursuit of their own acceptance.
In other cases, parental acceptance, though satisfying, just simply isn’t enough. For these children, the need for notice, for desire, for praise and validation, is all-consuming. They huff high GPAs; snort three-day school suspensions; cook off-handed compliments until they’re concentrated, then inhale them till they swell inside their chests and crackle.
No, for them, simple acceptance isn’t enough. There must be a headier love, love in its pure powder form, love that can be sifted through fingers, run across teeth, licked clean off a surface.
As with any addiction, there is more than enough blame to go around. As with any addiction, blame is futile; it does not yield solutions.
What it begets is shame.
It makes the girl whose chase leads her into the arms of another addict feel mortified when the act she believed to be a private transaction of passion hits the harsh light of day. It makes her feel mercilessly flogged and without safe haven or sanctuary. Criticism stones her in the public square. Men touting themselves at surrogate fathers will screen her one of most intimate, most illegally disseminated moments, then speculate that this has happened to her because her mother is out “being empowered,” rather than providing undivided attention to her child. He will not acknowledge or apologize for his voyeurism, even as he concedes that the exposure and proliferation of the act makes it child pornography.
There will be over-simplification: The addiction suggests a lack of home training. The addiction is everywhere, manifesting itself in children in exactly this way every day; it will work itself out, if only it isn’t exploited, if only we avert our eyes, if only the children grow up. The addiction requires the help of an agency or institution, it belongs to laundry list of drudgery assigned to social workers, court-appointed counselors, and youth pastors.
It is never a personal problem. It does not require self-reflection. Because we didn’t give or receive oral sex at 14. Because our mamas loved us. Because we had the good sense not to compress our mistakes and our flaws, our naivety and experimentation, onto video and upload them to YouTube.
It isn’t our problem because our daughters are 15 and 18 and 21 and they aren’t yet sexually active. Because we parented them “right.” We grounded them, spanked them when they needed it, set content filters on our televisions and laptops, requested them as friends on Facebook.
But as long as this can happen to one girl, succumbing to the throes of thwarted infatuation, as long as one son thinks he will become a hero through sexual conquest, as long as friends will hold a camera and look on, stifling snickers or sitting in silence, as long as a video of children having sex can go viral within hours of upload, there is plenty of work left for us all.
I’ve been seeing a little too much of this Subaru Outback* commercial these days.
I worked in advertising for nine months. It was my first salaried, full-time, post-college job. I was just a proofreader, and I spent more time blogging and working on a manuscript and IM-ing than I did circling typos. Most of the employees forgot I’d been hired; they were used to proofing their own stuff. And needless to say, I wasn’t what you’d call a go-getter back then.
Still, I learned a lot about commercials there. Successful ones sell you an experience, rather than a product. They make you desire a lifestyle you never considered. They make you long for an emotion you didn’t realize you missed, didn’t realize you could even feel. (It’s the same concept around which the entire run of Mad Men is situated.)
For those 30 or 60 seconds, there it is. Right upfront, right in your home, for you to see and feel and want. And as it flickers like a flash of what might be gold in your pan, then ends before you want it to, the advertisers have left you wondering: Now what are you gonna do about it?
If they’re lucky, you connect that call to action to their product. But when I see that Subaru Outback commercial, I want the experience. In any car. This idea of starting a new life with someone, cloistered in the woods, blossoms ringing my hair, drenched and laughing and escaping a collapsed tent… this is an idea worth coveting.
I had the same experience with this Mitsubishi Outlander commercial in the early aughts. There’s a very brief scene where rose petals are swirling into the face of the driver’s new bride; when I first laid eyes on that in ’03, it was pretty spectacular. (Incidentally, this commercial has some of the best subtle “face-acting” of any I’ve seen to date. And you really get the sense that you’ve watched a character evolve and mature in the minute you spend watching it. I’d enter this commercial as evidence in my argument that a well-executed commercial can provide the same narrative satisfaction as flash fiction.)
The point is: like most unmarried people, there’s a part of me that will always romanticize marriage. If I marry, I will have some minor, irrational expectation that roughly 75% of my marital experience will evoke the emotions these commercials capture. Ideally, I want to be with someone who makes me feel that, regardless of the unforeseen–triumph, tragedy, great gain, profound loss, joy, sickness, treatment, remission–there simply isn’t anyone else with whom I’d rather be.
I haven’t married, in part, because of this. I am expecting something more spectacular than I’ve experienced.
You hear these aphorisms, these “marriage is what you make it”/”it’s a partnership” cliches, and you know there is truth at the heart of them.
So few of us go into a wedded union with any concept of the mundane, of the dying down of euphoria, of the reality that we simply cannot be confident of how our partner will respond to certain of life’s curve balls. We trust that the love we feel in the moment, in the first months or years or even the first decade , will deepen into a mature and constant, if unexciting love, that will guide us into our golden and twilight years, that will end with us at the other’s death bed.
And sometimes, the person with whom we began that journey becomes unrecognizable as the same guy earnestly floundering under a honeymoon tent, willing to soak himself down to the marrow in order to deliver on the promise of a caring, devoted, monogamous, self-sacrificial life.
I find that kind of risk utterly terrifying, and I haven’t found myself in the eye of a relationship that felt worth it.
I just don’t want to marry someone because I long for the 75% these car commercials seem intent on selling me, only to find myself hiding out in a greenhouse, growing increasingly bitter as I mist the potted orchids, until:
Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions. — Joel 2: 28b
There is a dividing line in the lives of the young. On one side is an insular existence, where the elders live and govern, taking us into the folds of their ancient skirts, where they will knit us a history. There, we are fed and told who we are. They distill from their founts of wisdom a pablum we are capable of consuming. We do not understand what we have. We cannot quite fathom how fortunate we are, to hold them, to hear them, to trace their veins with our tiny fingers. But we are no so foolish that we entirely take them for granted. We understand their arms as the haven into which we can run when our parents’ discipline feels more alienating than effectual. We understand their stores as confections to relish, their thunderous or rasping voices a theatre around which we sit riveted.
On this side, they are hearty and hale. Even if their spines curve like parentheses or their fingers are gnarled as twine, we do not note these conditions as anything more than accents embellishing their character. We do not recognize them as lashes left by the cruelest of all overseers: Time.
Cross the line, and your elders are no more. Depending on what you believe, they hover above your life, acting as guardians, or they sit at the sidelines, watching with disappointment or wonderment. Perhaps they are praying. Perhaps their prayers are preventive, and you will never know what calamities you’ve sidestepped as the result of their intercession.
What is more certain is the impact of their absence. Gone are the raised and winding veins, gone the comforting feel of the blood coursing through them. Absent also are the courageous creases, deepened through decades spent awaiting abolition, petitioning for voters’ rights, sharecropping too-small parcels of land; losing homes and children and lovers; then yielding to the technological advances that stole their jobs and divided the attentions of their once-rapt grandchildren.
You miss their certainty, their Gilbraltar-like presence. Without them, your borders feel unprotected. They carried the world so artfully, you were never aware of its weight.
Now, there are days when you can barely square your shoulders. And you are finally beginning to understand.
There are a few years yet, before we return to the other side and become for our children’s children what our parents’ parents were for us. Our work must be thorough and quick. We are left to decipher the glyphs and mosaics stitched into the story quilts they left us. We must apply their epiphanies to the balance of our days, embellishing and righting and multiplying as we see fit.
We may merely be the mint-givers, the switch-wielders, the pipe-smokers rocking under the moonlight on our back porches. It is possible that our most significant impartation will be the secret to baking a perfect pound cake.
We are just as significant. They will need us all.
That night, our country again became a coliseum, with throngs ascending its risers, teeth bared, demanding blood. At sundown, the gladiator emerged from his pit and presented himself to the lion, emptied and unarmed. He had no steed or chainmail, no sorcery to fell his accusers or hypnotism to convince them of his truth. He had only faith in eternity, only resignation to a likely fate. Death seemed his lot, and he had accepted it, even as a chorus of valorous dissenters railed against it in his stead.
As in so many times before, there were jeers, the drunken sloshing of goblets, hateful epithets sailing through the air on the spittle of onlookers. There were those in whose eyes rabid glee danced in the light of the torches. And I shuddered, remembering those countless clearings in the woods where crowds like this one gathered to string up the bodies of black folks like so many ornaments in their trees.
The same festive bloodlust abided, the same unwillingness to hear reason.
This was no place for children.
But I wanted you here.
You needed to know what we’re up against, what’s worth wailing for, what it means to rend both your heart and your garments in the public square. We are not of a privileged caste, my love, not exempt from the reckoning gaze of an emperor who will never know the acrid tongue of hunger, never find himself so much as grazed by our afflictions. When the life of one of our own sits in the balance, our land condemns to death cavalierly, striking out each fresh crescendo of doubt with the flourish of a 10,000-dollar pen.
The lion pawed at our gladiator who, for his part, remained on his feet, holding his own till the tribunal declared him broken enough for the next round. We tugged the hems of adjudicators’ robes, boxed hundreds of thousands of signatures petitioning our gladiator’s release, fashioned banners decrying injustice, linked arms beyond the iron gates. We sang a song you have heard in your nursery–about igniting our inner light, about bringing the darkness to shame.
As our hymn lulled you to eventual slumber, I thought for just a moment that we would upend the world while you dreamt. We would deconstruct and rearrange the empire, so that when you woke, there would be a remarkable new world, where the cries of the people pricked the hearts of their government, where empathy warmed the cold, long arm of the law.
I thought we would not taste failure, that mercy would fall from the sky like manna and the gladiator, tasting it, would be spared.
I would tell you then that the blight of Jim Crow had finally been scoured clean, that our ancestors’ innocent blood has seeped so far into this soil that it’d begun to yield far less bitter and strange fruit.
I did not know that as I imagined you awakening to find that fairness had swept through our land, the poison had already broken into our gladiator’s veins.
When you woke he would be dead.
The burden of explaining his absence would be mine. Someday, I would need to tell you, as we prepared to protest yet another suspect imprisonment, another battle in the crumbling coliseum, that what we do is not in vain. I will stroke your hair and remind you that in times before either of us were born, we could not protest without being toppled by hoses, could not picket without the attack of dogs. Before that, we could not sleep without the distant crackle of fire against flesh and the terrifying wonder whether the burning father, brother, or aunt was our own.
Beloved, our battles matter. The ground we gain may seem insignificant, but when measured in yards and not inches, you will see how far we have traveled, away from the cotton and cane we once plowed without pay, on threat of torture and death.
We are still without privilege, but there has been progress. We must always believe there will be more. I cannot allow you to live life discouraged, expecting defeat when it’s probable. I have to explain how we hope.
We look at the knights and the lion, at the fattened emperor and the pit. We listen to the gladiator concede.
Humiliation burns. It’s a slow heat, originating in the ankles and creeping with excruciating slowness until it reaches the face and waters in the eyes.
I felt its familiar sting two months into my first semester in college, when I returned from an evening class to find that my roommate had double-bolted our dorm room door to lock me out. I tried the key a second time; like before, it turned easily to the right but the door didn’t budge. Darkness filled the pane of glass above it, and as Luther Vandross wafted under it and into the hall, so did half the girls on our floor.
It was clear that how I handled this situation would be the defining moment of my college social life. I’d be distilled into one of two adjectives: assertive or acquiescent; powerful or pushed-over; confrontational or compliant.
I wasn’t ready, just then, to decide what I’d be for the next four years. Instead, I backed away from the door and went off in search of a pay phone, which I used to tearily call a relative. “You get back up there and stand your ground,” she said.
I didn’t know what standing my ground should entail; I’d rarely, if ever, had to do it.
As an only child, this was my first time having to share a room–share anything, really–with someone else. I’d had very little conflict in life; I’d seen to that, by being as imperceptible as possible in any social situation.
Dominique Frazier, 18, was killed in her dorm at Bowie State University on Sept. 15.Alexis Simpson, 19, confessed to killing Dominique during a heated dormroom argument.
When I heard about the likely accidental homicide of Dominique Frazier at Bowie State last Thursday, then saw her alleged killer Alexis Simpson’s mug shot, and read the quote Alexis reportedly uttered before fleeing the scene, my heart divided its empathies between the needlessly deceased only child and the impossibly young, saddened face of the girl being booked for murder.
Dominique, a freshman, and Alexis, a transfer from Clark Atlanta, were suite-mates. School has only been in session a few weeks. They were already at odds, insomuch that Dominique’s mother offered to help her secure a room change.
Their defining moment came early, the fates of their college lives already decided long before their first midterms. Regarding the particulars, reports conflict; but by most accounts, the row began with an iPod. One powered the other’s off–in front of visiting friends.
A cursory trip to either girl’s Twitter feed suggests that both are strong personalities, unafraid of direct confrontation. For one to assert control over the other’s possessions meant inevitable conflict. Neither would stand for a public humiliation.
Dorm culture is incredibly voyeuristic. Gossip spreads faster than an airborne virus, and all it takes is a peak into a neighboring doorframe to confirm or deny any rumor. As the disagreement between Dominique and Alexis escalated, there were certainly onlookers. There were probably instigators. And soon, there would others gathered in abject terror.
Alexis briefly left the fight scene and returned with a sharp object, which was ultimately transformed from a prop in a dramatic schoolfight to evidence in a murder investigation.
Upon seeing the damage she’d caused in the heat of a humiliating moment, Alexis then reportedly uttered the following to onlookers: “I didn’t mean to do it. You all don’t know what I’ve been thru. You all jumped me.”
No one knows as well as Dominique and Alexis the extent of their contention with one another. Media coverage describes the deceased as an honor student with a full scholarship who was already well-known on Bowie’s campus. Initially, no one seemed to be saying much, one way or another, about the character of the accused. Now, a few friends of the accused have emerged, saying that she was nicer than she let on, an only child known to claim a grittier lifestyle than the one she actually led.
We do know this: hours after leaving campus, where Dominique sat bleeding out in the dorm room hall, Alexis turned herself in to police. To be sure, she had little choice. With a dorm full of witnesses, it was only a matter of time before the authorities tracked her down and arrested her. But her willingness to submit herself to the consequences of her impulsive actions, as well her quote in her charging documents, suggest that she is just a girl who failed to check her anger in a situation that absolutely called for it.
She is a girl much like I was, as I trudged back up to my locked dorm room, trembling at the prospect of a loud confrontation. I passed my roommate and her male guest, as she escorted him out of the dorm. And when she returned, we had it out.
We weren’t loud, but our conversation was certainly heated. Increasingly emboldened by my own righteous indignation, I quietly hissed that it was wrong for her not to discuss her plans to entertain with me, before barring me from my living space. She very calmly responded that I should’ve been cooler about it, should’ve just gone somewhere and hung out until she was finished, should’ve responded “normally,” rather than blowing things out of proportion.
This is where it could’ve gotten real for me. Alexis Simpson real. If our personalities were different, this could’ve been our “sharp object” moment.
We were fortunate for the opportunity to live longer and to learn what it means to respect another person’s space, wishes, and intentions. We were able to refine our communication skills and have civil, amicable, mature differences of opinion–even if other peers were present. We were able to grow up.
At least I think we were. At the end of our first term, after exchanging less than ten full sentences between that fateful night and winter break, my roommate and I parted ways. I chose to move home and commute to campus until sophomore year, when I got my first of many single-occupant dorm rooms. It wasn’t the most practical of decisions. It wasn’t exactly standing my ground. But at the time, it was what was necessary to ensure that I didn’t become a version of version of myself that I and others feared.
These young women at Bowie were not granted that opportunity. Perhaps their lives will become part of a larger discourse on what it means to live peaceably in a fishbowl. This is the message that tends to escape incoming freshmen amid all the fliers and fanfare of orientation: it is never the iPod. It is never the male guest, the lock-out, snicker and jeer of your peers. In the end, it is two or more vulnerable strangers alone in a room who must learn, with little mediation or supervision, to respect each other’s privacy, property, and personhood or face a complex system of consequences.
Like a widower, like a prisoner, like an acolyte new to a nunnery, the mother who splits with her lover during pregnancy–or more acutely, because of it–is expected to sustain an extended season of mourning–of mourning and reverence and soberness. She will be watched, her next actions weighed and measured. If she returns to the fray too soon, she is a bad mother, dodging her new role as diaperer, doter, and dairy in order to don peep-toe stilettos and hit the stroll, wielding a clutch full of condoms.
It’s tricky.
When the casual observer spots this woman with an infant, he conjures a domestic life for her that includes a shared bed, nightly lower back rubs, a partner, because this early on–while the baby is still dewy and wordless, while the mother is still bathed in her miraculous life-bearing aura, while the father is still awed by his heir–this is simply implied. There is no uncomplicated way to explain the echoing loneliness, the cavernous absence, the awkward near-daily phone updates on their daughter’s development. At a time when her most intimate moments should be spent with her ex, at the rail of a crib, whispering over the shared triumph of getting their colicky infant to rest, the last thing anyone suspects is that she’s calculating the appropriate time to wriggle free of her billowy blouses and pull on the form-fitting regalia attendant to getting back Out There.
Out There, with its speed dates and hookups and earnest longterm courtships, is no longer her scene–or if she is me, it never was. If she is me, she is practically hermetic, all her previous relationships casual, unconsummated, or in the case of this last, the result of happenstance, fondness, and, later, inertia. Every man she’s dated–and there have been less than a handful–was found in the places she most regularly frequents: school, work, church.
She doesn’t know to meet them, otherwise.
Regardless, an unbidden desire to meet them has risen, like decomposing Lazarus improbably exiting his tomb.
She knows there is a link between this pining and her heart’s recently enlarged capacity for love. Love is emanating from her pores, insomuch that she runs the risk of becoming an unrepentant helicopter, hovering over her increasingly independent child, lifting her for hugs and kisses before she ever has the chance to offer them. She needs a reservoir for the runoff; a dreamcatcher for the excess; a man who makes more sense within the context of a world that has reimagined her as someone’s mother.
And, there–there is the other rub: she is someone’s mother now. This necessarily changes everything.
If dating was a house of mirrors before, filled with misshapen images of herself and her possible suitors, dating with a child is a house of cards, full of false starts and toppled attempts to balance a new identity with an old one.
She will need to reconfigure her banter, curtail her nervous laughter, meet eyes and match their fervor, infuse all conversation with clarity. She can no longer be one for ambling. There is no time.
It has become apparent to her, in these twenty months she’s spent alone, that as the mother of a one-year-old, she will be treated as though she is unavailable. And in so many ways, she is. The best part of herself has been claimed, the bulk of her time accounted for.
What can she offer a prospective paramour, other than leftover love, the slivers of time per day that her daughter spends sleeping, the occasional phone call at dawn?
She must grow more.
It is impractical to desire a garden she has no space or time to tend. But what is life without the wildness of flowers, the sustenance of fruit and grain, the lushness and full spice of the herbs? And what will she do with the love overflowing these buckets, if not use it to water a series of promising seeds?
Her season of mourning has ended. A partner is not so readily implied of a mother with toddler, as the one who conjures images of the madonna when she holds her swaddled babe.
Now, the wind has turned. The soil will yield to tilling.
stacia l. brown 
