Me and my sister Carole were cleaning stalls on this chilly January morning. It was so cold that she had to hammer the ice in the trough so the cows could drink. There is something about shoveling shit...for me its a glutinous metaphor, representing life in the Diaspora. Tonight after African American Art class, Selina walked me to my office and told me she was @%$*@%# disgusted--couldn't believe the foolishness of Fat Tuesday, not in the Mardi Gras sense but in the sense that black women voted for Hillary because she was a woman. What can I say about platforms--shoes or stages where we don masks for all the world to see? I have issues with a woman who doesn't know what's going on in her own backyard, trying to run a country, yet breaking down in public; or at least seemingly breaking down when its convenient and on various occasions to garner the symp vote. But symp rhymes with pimp and somehow I feel like we been played. I could be wrong, but I come from a long line of African female farmers, teachers, thinkers, doers who can't really afford to shed tears at the drop of a chignon. Like Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, when Dr. Norcom stalks her, Mrs. Norcom turns her head the other way or blames the victim-- young slave women whose children were fathered by her husband, the good doctor. At one point in the slave narrative, Jacob's writes that Mrs. Norcom sold some of the babies fathered by her husband because she wanted new furniture. How easily we forget the relationship between ourselves and white women who find it convenient to stand with Daughters of Africa only when it suits them. Mama uses to say, "It's terrible when it suits." And to quote Public Enemy, "Can't Trus' It" when it comes to old girls tears. My sister Carole, our family matriarch, has tremendous weight on her shoulders. When I'm back home I share the weight cleaning stalls,
burning brush, chopping cedars, recycling, mowing grass, planting the garden during the day and writing at night, which she scolds me for like mama, who warned me about burning the candle at both ends. But a woman's gotta write what a woman's gotta write when a woman's gotta write it.
Selina wrote a brilliant journal about double consciousness and masking, which she read in class tonight. The question is... what lies behind the mask? Paul Laurence Dunbar referred to the double consciousness of African people in the Diaspora and the mask "...that grins and lies/that hides our cheeks and shades our eyes/ this debt we pay to human guile/with torn and bleeding hearts we smile/ and mouth with myriad subtlties/ we wear the mask"...still. And Gwendolyn Brooks writes, I've stayed in the front yard all my life/ I want a peek at the back/Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. Take off your mask, pay attention to your own back yard...then holla back.
