My father’s mother is the only woman who I have ever called my grandmother. She passed away a few years ago but I think of her always and talk to her often in my dreams. As I get older, I see the intentionality that guided her life in renewed ways.
My grandmother wasn’t someone who you could call talkative. She said what she meant and meant what she said. I don’t recall any moment in my life when I ever saw her get upset and say something that she regretted later. If she called you out your name, then that was your deserved name and unless you made a character change, that was the name that stayed with you. Words were not things you took lightly and they were not things you could take back. This is how most black folk I am close to think. Language shapes you and everything around you; it must always be intentional and it always was for my grandmother. It is such an anomaly as an academic where talk-talk-talking-nonstop is what folk do. There’s lotsa talking in these spaces— the arrogance and psychoses of always dominating the space by runnin your mouf— but not a whole lot of thinking and listening. At best, I am usually bored and, at worst, I am often offended. Strangely enough, I have read scholarship for years that indicates that my grandmother’s working class roots and vocabulary are a detriment to my language skills and yet the intentionality of her ways with words is the only one based in any deeply philosophical thought that I can see and hear for miles around me, despite all this middle class social capital folk have.
My grandmother (center, in pearls) with her 15 children and 60+ grandchildren & greatgrandchidren
I don’t have any memory of my grandfather, my grandmother’s husband, because he died when I was very young. My grandmother was in her early 50s and never dated again. I never even sensed from her, the way I do with many of the women around me as a child and now, that she wished she had a man or was ever interested in a man’s help or nurture. Male attention was never the center of her life nor did she think it should be central to any other woman’s life. At 50, after birthing 15 children, she was still very fly, always looking at least 10-15 years younger, tall, slender but very curved, with skin so smooth it looked like she woke up wearing foundation. Even when she wore the family picnic T-shirt at 70+ years old, she adorned herself with pearls and shoes to match. She was, quite simply, content with who and where she was. It’s a feeling that I can’t quite describe but one that I just don’t sense from many folks. Most people I see are always trying to climb higher, become famous/known/seen, get to a more prestigious university (or pretend that the place where they work is Hahvahd), buy more things, have more clout. There was never a time when I felt my grandmother was looking for something, for someone, for some place else, as if something was missing inside of her. My father and his 14 siblings have often talked about how she would get mad at them for just staring too long at the Sears catalog which she called a Wish Book, something that she considered very dangerous. You didn’t worship things outside of yourself that way, especially if it was connected to whiteness.
My grandmother would never have called herself a black feminist or womanist, those are academic labels that wouldn’t have done much for her life. But when I heard Audre Lorde say things like “Who I am is what fulfills me and what fulfills the vision I have of a world,” I could gather those words into my being because of my grandmother. Why would I ever be desperate for an alternative role model when I can clearly see and value the blackness from which I already emanate? For me, my grandmother is one of the most radical black women/black people/intellectuals I know. She lived her life never wanting to be somewhere else, never wanting to be something else, never wanting to be with someone else, never aspiring to be a social climber and insomuch that those projects/desires are always dictated by whiteness, she lived a life few of us today seem able to even imagine, much less achieve.
I might be the last hold-out, but I finally watched 
I needed to see what this genre is actually doing so I self-hosted my own personal movie night. I started with the movie, Lincoln, and I was amazed. Here we have a film that displays just how pro-slavery and anti-black the North really was but yet and still casts the white men of that era and location as the heroes. We see with our own eyes that many voted in favor of abolishing slavery simply because of the monetary/status/job favors they received because hardly no white man wanted to see slavery end. It takes some real cinematic orchestration to make it look like progressive thinking triumphs in the end. 
Next was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. It is actually a good follow-up to Lincoln because in both films, Abe is the sole location of humanity, progress, and radicalism. And once again, white violence gets minimized, but this time not by a dramatization of white property owners in Congress. 
Watch these three movies and then play the “Harriet Tubman Sex Tape” skit. It all fits together. I really do believe Russell Simmons thought this video would be subversive and funny and that he really never meant to offend. Black people are not at a place where they can create a good, sellable, laughable fantasy story about slavery though, even when we think we are recreating Django Unchained, part two. We WERE the auction block, not the auctioneers. That’s the only history we have in the context of slavery and it ain’t re-inventable or fantasizable. White property today may not mean explicit ownership of black bodies like in slavery, but white property today certainly means an unequivocal control of the ways the histories and legacies of slavery get told.
I haven’t made any final decisions yet, it’s still all coming together. I tend to get side-tracked when I do syllabus planning. I start taking notes for other projects or I make notes of new realizations. This moment is no different. 
It ended the same way it started… that’s another one of those expressions that I grew up hearing. There was no way that my mother, aunties, and older cousins would ever let any woman get away with saying, for instance, that a relationship ended because a man changed from the first moment you met. There is no True Side or Dark Side that emerges in the later stages of a relationship. Just so that it’s clear that I don’t associate doggishness with men only, I’ll offer advice based on a personal observation instigated by a woman. If you are the aggressively-pursued mister/mistress to a married woman, maintain “contact” while she is married, and then get back with her years later when she is still legally married but newly separated (but still creepin with her not-yet-ex-spouse and many others while her school-age son is in full tow), you can’t get mad when she brings all kinda lovers into your home and hearth. When the Isley Brothers crooned “Choosey Lover,” they didn’t have your lil honey EVER in mind and that evidence was always right there. I ain’t knocking the woman (no, this story ain’t about a sista— we wouldn’t get away with this and still keep our job/title/status as college professors) since men don’t lose dignity or respect for such lifestyles, I am just saying that you can’t ever expect monogamy in such an open system. The problems at the end were the same problems at the very beginning.
For my own part, I have been in the early stages of a relationship where Partner-Potentials (PPs) hurry me off the phone in order to go for breakfast, drinks, coffee, or conversation with “friends,” without nary a worry about whether or not I was receiving the support, attention, or nurture that I needed. That PP is, plain and simple, a playa, so I treat them accordingly. If a PP like that cheats on you later, you most certainly cannot be surprised. That’s just what playas do so you can’t expect otherwise. Let’s not make it so extreme and let’s say this isn’t really a playa, just a smooth operator, so there is nothing “sexual” or flirtatious between your PP and all of these “friends,” present and past, who are obviously more valuable than you since you got hurried off. If you actually believe in such “innocence,” it still ain’t gon work. When hanging at lounges, bars, coffee shops, etc— all these bourgeois-chic performances— is the priority then financial stability, actual completion of a goal, and the ability to be dedicated to something real or to a relationship will not be soon forthcoming. 
In professional settings, I may not be able to necessarily get up and leave right away like I have with PPs, but I benefit from the clear reading of my environment early on. 