Short Intro to the Assemblage: Baby’s Breath Newsletter
This newsletter was founded to make an intentional community, share writing, and continue to explore my senior thesis “Zone Zero: Black Womxn Assemblaging an Artful Life.” One of the conclusions my thesis reached is that we don’t have a critical language to discuss contemporary black subjectivity because the language is rooted in the vernacular. The vernacular being found, gathered, intuitive artful making of a life. Some examples of the vernacular include quilting and gardening.
After successfully defending my thesis and graduating from Mount Holyoke in May 2023, this baby is desperately trying to learn how to breathe all over again. However, unlike Baby in Dirty Dancing, I did not come from an upper-middle-class white family who summered at resorts. Although I did start at Mount Holyoke in the fall, attaining that formal education cost me in more ways than just financially. I was never free, white, and 21 in the way Baby would’ve been in Western Massachusetts.
Now, I am a college graduate putting my senior thesis theory into praxis (as is the Black Feminist Tradition). This baby is trying to breathe and gather sustainability, holistic healing, art, and beauty, into my day-to-day life. The term Assemblage is the altar I used to defend my thesis. The flower baby’s breath came later. Baby’s breath is a flower I wear in my locs for any special occasion, when I need a reminder to breathe, and is the lineage I am situating Assemblage within. It brings to mind images of Minnie Riperton, Donna Sumemrs, Solange, Cicely Tyson, and more with the flower speckled in their hair; an image of divine respite.
Who is Kay Brown?
I am descended from the onyx seeds of healers, embedded in, the Carolina gold rice fields.
I am the storyteller of how the bee helped the honeysuckle to grow.
I am the descended of long-limbed distanced lovers, stretching through the cloud-covered Combahee river,
steeling away suckled kisses steeling away suckled kisses
with sap to salve their cardinal hearts. I am a long distance runner racing with the strength of a cavern of wind.
I am a lady with opal teeth, clenched yet free. My heart whispered weeping willows, as I praise the ancestral sounds, rattling the honeycomb chambers of my heart.
I am my mothers garden, descended of onyx seeds.
Why Become a Paid Subscriber?
I am a Southern Black Woman assemblaging my own life with a fierce dedication to quilt a masterpiece from bountiful pieces of beauty around me. As a born and raised Southerner I have witnessed the first-hand powerful experience of stories. Additionally, I have been witness to activists, artists, and loved ones who have continuously shown up for others and no one has ever returned the favor. While my inclination to write is innate to me the right to healthcare, access to whole foods, therapy, and many more resources are not.
I come from a Black Feminist Tradition deeply rooted in the importance of community. And yet, so many of the activists and writers I adore had limited access to financial support while they were alive. Despite their work consistently conjuring true liberation their lives, as are all of ours, were still bounded by capitalism. I am proud to be of a lineage of freedom dreamers who have enabled me to prioritize sleepwalking, meaning the power of maneuvering this realm while actualizing my dreams. In this regard, I am walking in the footprints of Angela Davis when she stated “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” In my dreams, I imagine a transformative world where Fannie Lou Hammer lived past the age of 59. I imagine a world where Mrs. Hammer’s daughter could have lived after being accepted to a hospital that would have kept her earthside. In my transformative world, I imagine a world where Mrs. Hammer would have never gotten cancer and heart disease as a result of being a poor Black woman from Mississippi.
I imagine a world where Zora Neale Hurston, daughter of Eatonville, lived out her last days at home resting not as a maid working to support herself. I imagine a world that financially acknowledged the profound ways she gave Black voices freedom to exist as is on the page. So that when Zora faced medical problems as a result of heart disease she would have the means to take care of them. I imagine a world where her spirit propelled her heart to continue, not freeze in a stroke and take her vessel away from her at 69. I imagine a world where we take care of our living and dead so that Zora would have reached a marked grave much later.
I imagine a world where our poet of the people had a more sustainable and consistent way of supporting her and her son other than fickle freelance journalism. I imagine a world where June Jordan received her roses while she was alive. I Imagine a world where June could have a room of her own, in a house of her own, earlier in her life instead of living in public housing projects for the majority of it. I imagine a world that held and empowered her as she has done the same for so many others. I imagine a world where after living a life based on non-negotiable ethics, at 65, June Jordan didn’t die of breast cancer.
The list of Black Women whose lives are spent advocating for others ended by disease and without the financial resources needed to care for themselves as they desire is endless. I name a few here to illustrate that this Substack provides an equitable sustainable way to grow an intimate community to support me in assemblage the life I desire. Which is that I desire a life where my work creates community and pours into me spiritually and financially. This is why the Assemblage can only be accessed by paid subscriptions. I imagine a world where I can share my writing on my own terms and care for myself, as I would like for my writing to care for/counsel you. I simply cannot afford to accept anything else, not only because of Fannie, Zora, June, and more but because I deserve to be paid for my work. The Writers Guild of America just ended a five-month-long hard-fought strike to increase payments. Writers and poets are one of society’s rare gems that deserve to be paid and respected more than we currently are.
Lastly, when you subscribe to the Assemblage Newsletter you are not subscribing to a content creator. My writing is not content, it is my life’s work that takes time, openness, and the will to face myself. As such, I will post as frequently as I can granting that it aligns with what feels intuitive. If you expect content rolled out to engage you multiple times a week like your favorite influencer, this is not the space for you because I am not a machine. When you become a paid subscriber to the Assemblage Newsletter you are supporting me, a Southern Black Woman crafting a wayward, vernacular, assemblage to call my life and that alone is more than enough reason to financially support the journey.
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