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.
As a little girl, I cut my mother’s hair once…when she was sleeping. Not much, just a little trim, but not really having a conception of time, I imagine that I thought it would grow back right away. Needless to say, that experiment was not appreciated so I turned my attention to my next, unsuspecting victim: my father. At the time, my father had a very large afro. If I said I would grease his scalp, he would pretty much let me do what I wanted with his hair. While he was watching the game or something on television, I would grease his scalp and then braid his whole head of hair in tiny braids, put colorful barrettes on each end, then dress up my dolls and do their hair to match. That could take the better half of an afternoon or evening (it was a slow graduation from two-strand twisting to three-strand braiding). My father is also a pretty chill person (and pretty funny) so if he needed to go outside for something, he would go out, just like that, with a head full of barrettes— take out the trash, help the elderly couple down the street, go to the co’ner sto’, you name it. I would often be by his side, excited for everyone to see my creation. And I was always very encouraged by my audience who told me to keep doing that to my father’s hair because he was lookin realllll good; it never once occurred to me that them folks was teasing. My father once took his license photo like that after I agreed to tone down some of the barrettes; it was just too time-consuming to undo all of the braids and pick out his afro. Let me tell you, that license picture got a whole lot of views, it was like the 1970s version of going viral. Again, I assumed it was my hairdressing talent that was so intriguing. I smile when I think about it: all of these people who made sure to never squash who I was. I remember it as a community that always found humor and celebration in the everyday. Though my father was haunted by the many demons that squashed the fullness of working-class/working-poor black men who had just come home from the army in the 70s, I always remember my father as a comrade in my aesthetic creations and I took full advantage of it.
Stories of Uncle Bay’s sense wiseness abound in my family. Uncle Bay was a manager at the factory where my father worked when I was a small child (until the factory closed and moved overseas). On one occasion, my father was apparently SHOWIN OUT (and let me attest to the fact that Pops can be good at THAT!) because his paycheck wasn’t accurate and significantly slighted. When my father’s anger didn’t seem as if it could be “contained,” my uncle was called for assistance. Uncle Bay, however, did not oblige and did not intervene: “if you want him to stop actin out, just pay the man. Ain’t nuthin I can do for you.” I know very few black folk like Uncle Bay. Catering to white comfort, fearing white power, or being mesmerized by/chasing whiteness were never part of the game for him. Uncle Bay did not try to placate my father or ask him to forego his righteous indignation and he did not try and explain/domesticate my father’s behavior to his white bosses who knew they were in the wrong. “Just pay the man. Ain’t nuthin I can do for you.” I think of Uncle Bay’s example in the context of my profession often. Time and time and time again (
Here’s what I mean. At my first tenure-track job, I designed a college-credit-bearing course for high school students that would use the history of African American literacies and education within an intensive, rigorous reading and writing curriculum. The idea was to get students so caught up in what they were learning that I would take that momentum and build in intensive college-readiness reading and writing competencies. I had an elaborate multimedia, project-based curriculum with tutor trainings fully planned out. The upper level administration offered full support while my lazy chair and disaffected colleagues offered, at best, lip-support and questions on how I would incorporate math (Yes, math, even though I am a literacies and composition researcher; even though no one else was expected to cover materials outside of their expertise). On one occasion, I was supposed to meet with my chair to go over the project details before my presentation to the vice provost. She straight didn’t show up because her dog was sick and so couldn’t bark and wake her up in time… yes, this is what $160,000-per-year for a chair can look like (
Here’s an example. At a recent interview, I was asked repeatedly if I could teach something other than African American content. In my eight years as a tenure track professor, the majority of classes I have taught have been broad and in the seven years before that, still broader. So in 15 years of college teaching, I have, unfortunately, taught very few Africana-centered classes as clearly shown on my CV. Given these obvious facts, I saw this as a request to de-blacken myself in an incredibly lily-white faculty space. I was also asked questions about whether or not I could accommodate the specificity of their curriculum and yet no classroom that I visited was doing something that I saw as challenging for the 21st century or to my own teaching abilities. I was questioned about whether or not I would actually do the commute but why would I go to the interview if I weren’t interested? (I suspect a white male colleague in my field told some of the interviewers these things, but if those interviewers thought this white man could ever know ANYTHING about me or any black woman, then that’s just even more offensive and stupid). I was the first choice candidate and the offer was amazing but in the end, it IS like a relationship: you can’t be with someone who does not see who you are, does not really want YOU, and squashes the fullness of who and what you are/do/think. They seemed to need someone like me to forward their specific agendas, but they never really wanted me. Don’t be fooled by people and spaces that seem to be saying the right thing, but not meaning it.
Put most simply, there comes a time when you need to just get up and leave a bad situation whether that is a relationship or a university position and you gotta be ready to leave it all behind. After the abuse and neglect, don’t expect apologies or acknowledgement from these folk, that’s not who they are. If they had valued you, were interested in doin you right, you wouldn’t have raised on up out of there in the first place. Cull a lesson from my past mistakes: I left my first job very angry. I had every intention of taking a photo of my naked behind and mailing it to everyone in the department with a detailed description of what they could kiss. A friend, however, explained that this could qualify as some kind of punishable crime so the photos were never mailed. Banned from that possibility, I never really healed and landed at a second job that I grew to hate even more. This time though, I am getting my own closure otherwise I will miss new opportunities in front of me. If you don’t know what I am talking about, just go to youtube and read the comments section on love songs (I visit these uploads often to get music that is not mainstream) and you will see grownass people begging for the return of their babymommas/babydaddies/ex-lovers (with Maury Povitch-styled paternity issues in full tow). After getting dropped on their heads (and wallets), these stupid fools be out here publicly professing a never-ending, undying love…online… youtube-dedicating or posting various renditions of “Don’t Leave Me” or “Lost Love” about an ex-partner’s “Dark side” who, in fact, was nothing but an affront to all humankind anyway (“you are my heart, my soul, my inspiration… I will miss the passion… you were the one… my guiding light” ). Why would anyone say these things to their predator/oppressor? The same goes for the new job: you can’t hang on to old abuses as something that was ever real or ever about you or ever about real intellectual work or social change.
