Month: March 2018

Reflections on Austin for The New York Times

When the bombings started in Austin, I was distracted by other things like a lot of other folks. I saw 17-year-old Draylen Mason’s name and that he had been attacked, but I didn’t register a connection between him and the other people who were being harmed in Austin until too late, until Governor Abbott decided it was time to offer a reward for information for the bomber who was then later described as a nice young man with challenges.

Writing for the Times is something I’ve always wanted to do. I have dreamed of publishing on the Opinion pages there since I was a college student. On Thursday, that became a reality with this piece, What It’s Like to Be Black in Austin.

By now, because the bomber is dead, and there are other things to think about and be outraged about — Stephon Clark’s murder among them — these reflections might seem to be a forgone conclusion, but because we live in a time of increasing racial terror, perhaps they are not. We are just in a different moment than when I wrote at length about leaving Austin in 2013. So I worry that failing to look at some of these thoughts or ideas will mean that fewer things get resolved, fewer conversations are aired.

Whenever I write about race or have conversations about my experience, I inevitably get questions like, “What should we do?” I feel very strongly that my work in the world is to be a witness and to write. My work is not to solve refusal to see biases at play or anything else.

I’ve been amazed by reconnecting with my friends and colleagues across the country in the wake of the piece’s publication. Most of the responses have been positive. Because this is a piece that is about race and racial critiques of well-meaning people tend to bring out defensiveness (underscored in the piece), it won’t surprise you to hear there’s been some of that as well.

In any event, writing this piece made me appreciate even more the wonderful people we meet wherever life takes us who become our community. Our truths are not other people’s truths and they don’t have to be. I hope that folks will take what is useful here and leave the rest.

In Austin, I felt a loneliness that was hard to explain. I wasn’t just a New Yorker in Texas. I was a tall, dark-skinned black woman with natural hair. I was an outsider in a place that is supposed to value weirdness, but I never felt like the right kind of weird.

I did the things everyone does in Austin. I went for runs around Lady Bird Lake. I went to hear live music. But whenever I looked around, I would always notice that there was no one else who looked like me. I tried to talk to some of my well-meaning white friends about this. They would try to “Well, actually …” me. “Well, actually, Austin is better than the rest of Texas.” What else could they say?

So I moved back to the East Coast, but I kept my home in East Austin and still visit when I can. It’s my home away from home.

I learned about the bombings on Twitter, and it was surreal to read these familiar names in the middle of the horror. These were people I wrote about, people I knew, people I shared laughs with: Nelson Linder, the head of the Austin N.A.A.C.P., and Freddie Dixon, a pillar of the community, discussing the deaths of 17-year-old Draylen Mason and 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House.

I worried for the people I knew, and then I felt, again, that deep, lonely sadness. I wasn’t the only one made to feel that I didn’t belong. Someone was targeting black people, but once the bombs appeared in other neighborhoods, the authorities no longer seemed willing to consider the possibility that hate crimes had been committed.

I don’t know what else to call them. When the bombings started, I had been writing about the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, so I knew the faces of martyrs of the civil rights movement. Whenever I hear about bombs and black people, I think of the four little girls murdered in Birmingham, Ala. I have family ties to Philadelphia, too, so I think of the Move bombings. Are there any black people who can separate news of bombs from notions of terror?

We are in an unusual cultural moment. There has been so much truth-telling over the past few months, so much affirmation about speaking truth to power. I hoped that this time, the authorities might acknowledge that, yes, black people were targeted. I thought someone might make the connection — East Austin is the only place in the city where black and brown people still live in large numbers, and they remain vocal. There are people who are afraid of that, and are threatened by that, and that makes East Austin a target. Instead, there was silence, as these concerns disappeared into the broader panic about where a bomb might strike next.

New Short Fiction in Sixfold Journal: Fly

“Fly,” a short story that I’ve been nurturing for some time now, has been published in the Winter 2017 edition of Sixfold Journal. These Bronx girls remind me so much of the girls I grew up with. They are, in a lot of ways, those girls.

This is how it begins:

Everything in the world makes you feel like you are fly or you can fly when you’re a kid. With the right doorknocker earrings and Reebok classics, jeans fitting to your curves like buses speeding down Webster Ave, you feel like gravity is for punks.

But time tells you the truth. And life, I guess.

My best friend Trudy reads everything. Her hair is a black cotton ball forever reaching for the clouds. We are both the youngest in our families, which are like trees with tangled branches: Older siblings, different daddies, irritated mothers. She wears boys’ clothes from the Goodwill—trousers that her skinny legs peek out of at the ankle, white button-down shirts with suit vests. My mother says she’s odd. I figure she’s just creative. I asked her once why she dressed that way and first she said I like doing things different from everybody else. I nodded and looked in her face. She was staring at a distant plane overhead when she added I can’t really afford anything else.

That’s why we’re friends. Trudy tells the truth, even when it makes her feel bad. Only poor people spend all their money trying not to look poor, I told her. She pulled her eyes from the sky then and smiled at me like we had the juiciest secret ever.

Anyway, it was Trudy who said Toni Morrison wrote that if you want to fly you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

How you figure out what that is, I asked her.

Practice letting go of shit, probably.

But we ain’t got shit. What’s to let go of?

She didn’t answer at first. We sat on the cracked cement steps outside the cafeteria after lunch during thirty-minute recess.

Finally, she said, Easier for us to fly, then.

You can read the whole story online, as part of the full journal’s free PDF or old-school like, in print.

‘A life of spectacular promise undone by demons’

Trigger warning for the trauma of homelessness and mental illness 

This beautiful New York Times profile of Nakesha Williams, a Williams College graduate who died homeless on the street at the age of 46, was the first thing I read yesterday. My friend Amy sent it to me, saying it reminded her of the story I tell in my memoir, The Beautiful Darkness. Maybe I should have waited, knowing that, but I’m glad I didn’t.

I have written about the poverty and homelessness I experienced as a child — mostly as a result of my mother’s untreated bipolar and borderline personality disorders — mainly because for much of my life, and much of my mother’s, no one else wrote these stories. I imagined that I was alone in my experience. That made it all the more painful, lonely and difficult.

I had books, and writing, and education. I have been lucky, I have worked extremely hard, I have been writing my heart out for so many years. And yet, it feels like reading this story was reading my story, or the possibility of a future to my story yet to come. That is the legacy of experiencing the trauma of homelessness or being exposed to these adverse childhood experiences as a kid. They never leave you.

There are so many parallels between Nakesha and I, but more between her and my mother. We both love books and reading, we both sang in gospel choirs. I nearly went to Williams instead of Vassar.

I chose the latter because when my mother was still alive, I decided on college the way I decided on everything else: Based on its proximity to her. Attending Vassar meant I could get to Grand Central more quickly (and for less money) in case Marguerite had a manic episode. In case she ended up in a psych ward. In case she got evicted again, as she did my sophomore year, and I needed to drop everything and go to where she was and try to fix things that were beyond my years to fix.

Nakesha’s story is my worst fear for my life, though I am far from the little girl who had to watch my mother refuse medication, or fail to pay the water bill or negotiate not having enough money to buy food for days any more. Grace has kept me — along with writing — sane. But the kind of trauma that mental illness and then homelessness can inflict will never leave my body. It is a battle scar. A deep wound I am learning to befriend.

When I read Nakesha’s story, I was reading about my mother again. I kept, and still have, the lipstick imprinted letters of my mother, along with the emails that she sent me (like Nakesha) from libraries in New York and Philly. Because her life had so much potential, had so much life and joy and darkness that also taught me about beauty, I included some of these emails in my book.

At the core of this story about Nakesha, though, is the mystery of how the love, attention, resources poured out from others somehow failed to reach her. This is the part that resonated with me about the unknowables on the journey with someone who is mentally ill. This was my greatest heartbreak, the title of this blog, a line from the story about the realities of there not being a simple solution to the complex realities of homelessness and in particular, not a simple answer to the question of what happened to Nakesha.

There is no accounting for the demons, the silences, that can overtake us. All we can do is try to avoid them, try to keep going, try not to let them take us under. But maybe this story was so deeply moving for me and disturbing because this means there will continue to be many people like her and many women like my mother, and not as many people like me, who can profess, with not just a little bit of remaining survivor’s guilt, that we were spared somehow.