1.

It is almost Throwback Thursday again. I look down at my cracked iPhone that I feel too busy and too lazy to get fixed. I look at photos from this weekend when I was trying to forget The Thing That Made Me Want To Cry and I think I don’t want to share a photo of myself right now. I think about my mother’s scarf that my sister gave me that she never washed that still smells like her that makes me cry and smile at the same time, which is the kind of thing you can never really capture with words or a photograph. I think that I want to tweet about something but hundreds of people are dead in Mexico, Hurricane Maria is terrorizing Puerto Rico and healthcare that has kept a lot of people alive might actually not be around too much longer even if the news keeps up at this pace. I wonder if it is a good thing to forget how to tweet. I think that this could be a clever thing to tweet because it would be meta and then my train comes and I don’t have Wi-Fi anymore and it’s just as well that the moment passed.

2.

Last Thursday, my friend’s husband called me to tell me that the man who took care of my house in Austin was dead. The last time I had emailed Chuck was to ask him how he was, because Hurricane Harvey was terrorizing Texas and I was worried about my little aging house but I was more worried about my friends and I counted him in that number even if I’m not sure he knew it. Chuck wore big glasses like my Dad, and he spoke without inflection or accent, also like my Dad. As it happened, I met Chuck three years after my father died by suicide and a year after my mother died from cervical cancer. I did not believe I had tears left to shed or things left to write or feelings left to feel about possessions. I still felt stuff, emotions — almost. But generally, I just was a walking fog of sad. My problem then was that I could not stop remembering everything. I carried the past in my hair, on my shoulders, on my bookshelves, in my closets. When I spoke to Chuck’s good friend who called everyone that Chuck had taken care of like he had taken care of me — some dozens of people — I remembered meeting him at the house. It smelled like my dead dog, Cleo. My sad self haunted the place like a ghost. I can see us now, me looking at him blinking hard at me while I tried to explain why, exactly, I’d left everything in the house like I was just headed around the corner even though I’d packed most of the things I needed (books, clothes, journals) and driven them to Washington D.C. He was a good man, Chuck. He did not make small talk. He did not beat around the bush. Every once in awhile, he would send me a photo of a beach he was trying to get to know. He struck me as someone who worked diligently at being good in a world that was crooked. This is what will make it hard to forget that he was murdered.

3.

Grief makes me foggy, though I have become more forgetful in general. I worry this will show up in my writing and it has already manifested in some weird misspellings. But where I feel it most is my heart, the part of me that clings to memory, that is so sentimental. I worry that I will forget the beautiful and painful things that shape me, that have shaped me. I worry that I will forget that even when I lose people and I don’t get to say goodbye that there are all these amazing people in my life who love me who make me laugh, who do post several Throwback Thursday selfies unapologetically before it’s even Thursday. One good thing has come from becoming more forgetful, maybe two. Used to be I was so afraid of life and the powerful strangers in it that I figured it was better to act silent and mysterious, to make myself scarce, than to write something like this and just write it on out. The other thing is: Forgetting yourself gives you courage.

This is my latest piece for Bitch Magazine, in its fall Facts issue. The reporting here is frustrating to recount, but there seems to be plenty of evidence to suggest that there is little here to dispute.

“In the aftermath of 45’s decision to exit the Paris Agreement—an accord between dozens of countries to work toward mitigating climate change through cutting carbon emissions—it is notable that the people who will pay the steepest price for climate-change denial and apathy are the world’s poorest women.

I take all of this personally as a word nerd who’s always cared about the environment, though I didn’t have easy access to clean air or green spaces growing up in the Bronx. Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and her poetry deepened my appreciation for nature, along with a strong desire to protect it. Years later, I was honored to work on lessening the impact of climate change as a deputy press secretary at the Department of Energy during the Obama administration.

For all these reasons, I always think about how major policy decisions impact women and the poor. At the intersection of my identities as a journalist, writer, and scholar who grew up in poverty, I am most attuned to the marginalized narratives of women like me, who hold up half the sky even as the atmosphere thins against our palms.”

I’m always surprised when writers or aspiring writers don’t read. Reading was first a coping mechanism and an escape for me, but now it’s both work and joy. I love reading for review purposes but mostly for pleasure. Even if I’m not reviewing a book for a publication, in my brain, I’m doing it anyway, trying to sort out what works and what doesn’t.

The main challenge I have these days is how to find the ideal, public, air conditioned space and time to read comfortably. I have been awkwardly handling the 560+ page Advanced Readers Copy of The Hearts Invisible Furies by John Boyne, a delightful discovery. When I picked it up at Book Expo, one of the women in the booth nodded with vigor and said it was one of the best books she’d read in her life. Even a bookworm like me couldn’t pass on something like that.

I’ll write a proper review soon, but this book is delightfully funny — on each page is some exchange or brilliant dialogue that just cracks me up. The main character, Cyril Avery, is an adopted kid; his birth mother, Catherine Goggin is someone he’s met but doesn’t know it yet & there’s a far richer narrative unfolding now that I’m more than halfway through that I can’t even begin to sum up. The book comes out later this month, though, and I encourage you to read it.

I’m cheating on The Hate U Give with this book. I cheated on it with Aya de Leon’s The Boss, too.  I love the familiarity and humor in Angie Thomas’ debut, too, but I think the heaviness of the subject matter is keeping me from really engaging in it the way I’d like to.

I also just finished reading a review copy of Joanna Scutts’ The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led A Generation of Women To Live Alone and Like It. I always like reading about single women (I loved Rebecca Traister’s Single Ladies; In 2013, I published my first self-published e-Book based on an old blog called Single & Happy: The Party of Ones which emerged out of the — thankfully dead — media narrative that single professional black women were too successful to date their presumed mates, African American men) and how they’ve disrupted history by celebrating themselves in ways that have always just been expected for men. I wrote a review for Bitch that’s coming out in the fall.

What are you reading with what’s left of the summer?

I realized that my hair was considered community property when I was five.

I write about this in The Beautiful Darkness – my mother’s love for long hair, how she believed it was a woman’s glory. My hair has always been a bit like me – hard to miss, stubborn, resilient. I was five when my mother burned me while straightening my hair. Whether it was accidental or intentional didn’t matter; I went to foster care for a year.

I took control of my hair after that, braiding my own extensions starting in third grade. My mother also decided I should get a weave that we couldn’t afford back then, which I hated. Left to my own devices, I tried box perms (terrible mistake) very long braids that I wore to my high school graduation, and eventually decided I wanted my own afro. But I went into a barber shop in the Village that is no longer there and woke up with an inch of hair.

At Camp Mariah Fresh Air Fund, 1997

The reception to the first big chop was not good. I was teaching writing to kids in the Bronx before going to college. When I reported to work the Monday after my run in with the barber, I was informed that I looked like Grace Jones. Eventually, I would take this as a compliment. At the time, I was insulted.

My mother sighed and said, “At least you have a pretty face.” Then she asked me if I was a lesbian. In retrospect, I wish I could have been brave enough to have a more nuanced conversation with her, to at least try.  But she was an old school woman, a woman who wore a wig and never her natural hair, someone who had internalized the notion as a kid in South Carolina and Philly that she would never be beautiful without the illusion of long, straight hair.

My hair was never straight, not all of it. But my locks grew long, down my back. I have always been an admirer of Solomon and believed in the spiritual significance of hair. That hair holds energy, and possibly strength. I was afraid to cut mine because I felt like I needed all the strength I could get.

My hair has also always been one of the sites of my comfort. Yet for years when I touched my hair my wandered to the free section of my hair in the back on that has resisted everything from Jheri Curls to braids. It was the reminder to me of what it would be like to have the whole of my head be a crown of freedom.

I thought about this when I moved back to Texas in 2005, particularly because I moved in the middle of a triple-digit summer. I never said this aloud but even though my locks were thick and a lot to manage, I secretly liked that I had friends who were attached to them, too. I got a lot of affirmation from people around my hair. The community property gaze: “I don’t usually like dreads, but yours are pretty. You know, not everyone keeps them up like that.” I lost count of the hands that reached out to touch without my permission.

After awhile, my locks were my only lasting bridge to the past. When I twisted them, staring back at my face becoming my mother’s with just a hint of my Dad, I still felt like I could climb my way back there somehow. Maybe there would be a day when I could make things different.

At Lady Bird Lake, Austin, 2012 

But the weight of locks, physically and spiritually, got heavier than I could have anticipated. I had always told myself that when my mother died, I would cut my hair. Start new, with hair that just mine to shape and love and judge. But I was too sad to care about my arbitrary aspirations in the service of meaningful transitions. Everything was changing.

I thought, often, of Audre Lorde’s poem, Stations. In part of it she writes:

Some women wait for something

to change and nothing does change

so they change themselves.

I wanted something to stay the same. It would be my hair if nothing else. I was not ready to change that part.

In the middle of a traumatic work situation, I had my locks cut into a short style, hoping to find a middle ground. I felt the impulse, many times, to just shave my head, even though there was stuff I didn’t know about my head shape, a bump at the base of my neck that seemed like it might look weird.

I watched as my fellow writers and friends and homegirls took the plunge with style. I was in awe and envious, but not yet ready.

What it would be like to wear a hat, or use a comb, or feel the pressure of a brush against my scalp? Or workout without worrying about the awkward, uncomfortable ponytail? These sounded like luxuries even though that’s ridiculous.

I just needed to give myself permission.

The thing that tipped me over the edge was a young friend who is not at all attached to her hair. She also had beautiful, long locks. But she just decided it was time for something new (ah, the 20s!) So she went for it. And my heart soared.

I thought, “Wow, I remember when I used to be courageous like that.”

I love courage. Cultivating bravery is the way God and the universe remind you that you don’t have all the time in the world to hesitate. Inspired by our conversation, fixated on changing this old story in my head about hanging on to weight in the service of strength or memory or nostalgia, I went about the work of shedding 20 years grief and heartbreak and heaviness. Even after I combed out my locks, there was more hair coming loose on its own, nosediving to the floor faster than I could get it all up. It felt like all of the transformation, growth, love, and healing was at the roots.

When it was done, my hands in my hair felt like home was the touch of my fingers to my scalp. A simple, amazing, beautiful step back to myself. This hair belongs to me, and no one else. I’m proud to call it mine.

I’m not the best at telling people where I’m going to be, because I’m not that into self-promotion, honestly. But it’s easier when other folks are involved, which is why I love panels, and in this case, really looking forward to being in conversation with these ladies.

If you like the Princeton African American Studies Department Facebook page  I’ve been told they’ll share a livestream.