A Salve for Black Folk Shamed for Resting
A Reckoning
If you’ve ever wronged me, gotten out of pocket, or simply tried it, then nine times out of ten I have receipts. I collect the receipts in the form of screenshots, saved voice memos, PDFs of emails, and meticulous personal journal entries. I guess I’ve always been an archivist in that way. Still, the fact remains that the main reason I have captured your moment(s) of fuckery is the simple fact that it enables me to do my due diligence to ensure that I am understanding your use of language clearly. Language has the power to build cages and break them down.
Unfortunately, most people trap themselves with their own language. Therefore, being the libra that I am, I tend to analyze the linguistic cage they have locked themselves in. Capturing my end of the screen is my way of saying I’ve gotcha in my sight. Preserving my interactions allows me to soften into the transformative beauty of language. In this way, I view language using the words of the late Toni Morrison, language is meditation. Conserving my end of the screen (or journaling) serves as a repellent towards the perceived notions others attempt to place on me. Similar to meditation, a screenshot or saved interaction is a puzzling passive thought that I release so that I may go on with my life. Yet still, I never forget the time I captured the moment of fuckery or how puzzling I found it to be.
This is not a new practice that I happened to have stumbled across at this point in my life. In my lineage, as an African American woman, I can trace back this intuitive need to record/express/document my feelings within every moment of my life to the 18th century in the United States. In the 18th
century, Phillis Wheatley became the first Black woman to publish a collection of poetry in the United States. In the 19th century, Harriet Jacobs wrote her autobiography entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Lastly, also in the 19th century, Ida B. Wells documented the true data that told the whole story of lynching in the Southern region of the United States. All three of these Black women gave their own testimonies because of the need to share their honest experiences using their innate voice. A new Netflix documentary entitled Stamped from the Begining (adapted from Ibram X. Kendi’s book bearing the same title) explores the mythmaking cycle that White people employ out of fear of losing power. The film touches on many threads, but the one that most applies to this piece is the ways in which these three Black women pushed back on the world making assumptions & defining them without any of their input. Phillis, Harriet, & Ida used the power of their pen to define themselves & thus tell their own stories. In the film Jennifer L. Morgan, Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis & History at NYU, makes the assertion that “women like Harriet Jacobs, they know that the archive is trying to eliminate them. They know that their stories are not supposed to be told. So when they tell their story, it is crucial that we pay attention to it” (46:12-46:32). While I didn’t have the advanced vocabulary that Dr. Morgan possessed, I too from a young age relied on my writing to serve as a red document of truth when I was surrounded by people who would try to tell me what I felt.
By continuing to hone the skill of linguistic meditation, I am now able to use language to pinpoint what it was that left me perplexed in the first place. In this situation, it took me five meditative years to pin down what about this text (the image above), to which I never responded, made me question the audacity that encouraged my white southern woman high school magnet program director to send this message to me.
In May 2018, I was finishing up my junior year of high school before heading up to Ithaca for a college summer program at Cornell. The 2017-2018 academic year, was also the time that I decided to take six Advanced Placement (AP) classes. As such, the first couple of weeks in May were even more hectic for me that year due to my back-to-back AP exams. After finishing my AP U.S. history exam I was both physically and mentally exhausted. Although I had my last AP Environmental Science review class immediately following it, my brain was no good without rest. So, I left campus, went to Publix to get lunch, and went back home and took a nap. I’ve always been acutely aware of the fact that the body and mind have limits that when pushed too far will cause you to break.
Moments after waking up from a restorative sleep I read the text message from an unidentified number. I remember having to text one of my friends, whom my magnet director also texted the message to, asking who is this. The line between magnet director and surveillor was non-existent. If anything, I was always made aware that my behavior, speech, and movements were being watched to identify the need for correction. This specific moment in high school was no different. Someone had made my magnet director aware that I left campus after my exam and therefore missed my review session. To utilize the language of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, the matter of who operated power was rendered obsolete because “any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine” (Foucault, 202). Moreover, as a Black Woman, I know that I am surveilled at an increasingly higher rate than other people.
Despite that fact, I knew that I did not owe anyone a justified reason as to why I made the choice to prioritize rest. Therefore, she never got a response from me via text or in person. The personal choice I made that day, and the choices I make today, do not have to make sense to anyone else but me. Additionally, I could not explain why the language she chose was intrinsically violent and antithetical to my own theories of life. While I didn’t know it at the time, I was beginning to plant the values I desired to make the assemblage that is my life. The language that took me five years to meditate with starting as a 17-year-old is what follows.
You’re getting a 5 on your AP Environmental Science Exam and can afford to miss?
A five is the highest passing score one can receive on an AP exam to earn college credit. What my magnet director failed to realize is that my prioritization of rest can not be thwarted by igniting false flames of failing to succeed. Only I decide what is a non-negotiable in my budget of how I spend my time and resources. The word choice, afford, is important because it also means what I am willing to spare, give, or exchange. What was I willing to spare, give, or exchange in order to be successful in receiving the highest accolades on my AP exam?
What I could not afford to miss were celebrating the birthdays of loved ones, hours of sleep, mental health days, after-school runs, or feeding my body nutritious meals. These are a few examples of things I can not afford and as such the opinion of others’ success benchmarks bears no influence on me. If a successful life was characterized as missing any of those things then my definition of success was vastly different. There is the imminent expectation of Black Women to exchange what we are willing to afford to enable others to prioritize their own personal benchmarks. Most often, this occurs in an exchange of time and labor spent away from our own desires to uphold the illusion of Unity, Sovereignty, and Autonomy (U.S.A.) belonging to everyone but us in the U.S.A. I can no longer afford to exchange my benchmarks for what leaves me penniless, in poor health, and sleepwalking through life. I refuse to be wilted and left weeping as a result of not advocating for myself. It is this history, that I am consciously aware of and through which I interpolate interactions.
Because I vacuumed my house the day I got home for birthing my first child so tell me how you’re too exhausted to be prepared 👀?
At 22 years old I still am unsure of what I think of motherhood. However, I know that the thoughts I do have are informed by the ways that historically Black mothers were prohibited from caring for their children and themselves fully. Being able to vacuum a dwelling space right after giving birth is not something I could or would desire to afford to do. Because my lineage consists of enslaved people, enslaved Black women, whose value correlated with how productive they could be my magnet director’s statement was not a prize to me. Unfortunately, the measure of productivity for Black Women meant not only how much labor we could perform but how many children could come from us. My definition of success is not measured by how much labor I could potentially perform after pushing through the ring of fire during intense labor. Especially when, according to her conversation with Dahilia Litwhick, renowned reproductive justice scholar Dorothy Roberts states that “the black maternal mortality rate is three to four times higher than for white women.” If I choose motherhood by carrying my children to term and survive my labor I want to be swaddled with rest, care, healing foods, and love. I would imagine the community I have poured into and created chords of connection with would pour into me. I would imagine someone from my community choosing to pick up the vacuum for me so that I may linger in bed a little longer. The last thing I would want is to be expected to cleanse and heal my physical space as I’m healing my own physical body.
At 17 I imagined my pregnant enslaved ancestors working through the blistering Carolina heat, forced to work after giving birth to a child (dead or alive), or simply vanished in the traumatic experience of childbirth. Considering these things, all of which I had never experienced but knew to be true, is the very reason why my magnet director’s text puzzled me. Her words failed to lift up the culturally responsive teaching pedagogy she was lauded for incorporating into her classroom. This pedagogy, a method of teaching, encourages educators to nurture students’ cultural strengths to provide a strong sense of well-being tied to a student’s culture and inform their interaction with the world. And yet, as a Southern White Woman teaching a young Southern Black Woman, she was not able to recognize how her language attempted to cage me in expectations around productivity.
Productivity: Pushing through labor or pushing to produce more labor
For some White Women this definition may be a worthwhile benchmark of success to strive for. However, I am too exhausted to invest in systems and institutions whose goal is to rush me to the grave earlier than others. I was not too exhausted to be prepared, I was too exhausted to let life prepare me for an early grave. The latter sentiment is not an overdramatization because the ancestral lineage I carry is exhausted in a way that my magnet director would never understand. I never want to be too exhausted to fight to live a holistically balanced life on my own terms. I hope I never become too exhausted to care for myself so that I can prepare to meet a new day.
Roberts continues to emphasize the importance of understanding the exploitative link between Black Women and labor. It is important to “go back to the institution of slavery to look at the connection between reproduction and bondage. The experiences of the enslaved Black woman and the exploitation of Black women’s labor were foundational to the state regulation of reproduction in America” said Roberts.
In Chapter Two, of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, “Black Women’s Experiences in Slavery and Medicine” Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens excavates how Pregnant Black Women were treated as bodies of productive exploration while living and in death. On page 45 Dr. Owens describes how two pregnant Black women who were enslaved on a Georgetown County, South Carolina plantation were forced to continue working as the overseer made “no allowance…for sickness.”
As De Biuew suggested, pregnant enslaved women were not only at grave risk to sustain prenatal conditions but to also a higher maternal mortality rate. Unfortunately, the high maternal mortality rate has not changed in the 21st century. Roberts told Slate Magazine that the maternal mortality rate is three to four times higher for Black Women on July 5th, 2022.
Additionally, if the mother did survive their ability to care for their child was hindered by the physical toll forced labor had on their body until the delivery date. Dr. Owens utilizes primary sources from an elderly enslaved woman, referred to as Aunt Philis, in Port Royal South Carolina to explore the potential effects that forced intense labor had on newborns. Philis shared her thoughts on why a child may be born “lean, like buzzard” on pages 67-68.
So, when my high school magnet director dares to ask me how is it that I am too exhausted to be prepared and boast of her ability to perform labor soon after childbirth, it is clear that we walk with vastly different haints. I am clothed in spirits who whisper of not being able to afford to keep their time. My spirits whisper about their desires to assert unity, sovereignty, and autonomy in regard to kinship; instead, of being Spanish moss cast across different limbs of angel oak trees. The spirits, my spirits, know of the power of imagination to envision a life where the angel’s wingspans create a cloak of protection. These spirits know what it means to resist in spite of the risks and the risks were always high. My spirits ran the risk of becoming
Unuseful
Unproductive &
Unsuccessful
all of which could and perhaps did cost them their lives.
What I hope to have expressed in this salve, and to my 17-year-old self, is that these three terms starting with u are rooted in the attempt to regulate your life. “Unuseful,” “unproductive,” and “unsuccessful” center everyone but you in order to prove your value to a society that has already decided you are too poor to be prepared for this life. Or that you are too poor to be prepared for this life on your own. And thus the abhorrent false notion that the institution of slavery benefited enslaved people was started. There are people who wrongly hold the belief that without the rigid structure of slavery, Black people would be of no value.
Take for instance a fellow Black woman writer, now ancestor, Phillis Wheatley. According to Dr. Morgan in Stamped from the Begining (film), “in the 18th century, European & American philosophers are arguing that Black people should only be working” (24:23-25:21). Morgan continues to express Westen philosopher’s sentiments in the following quote that starts with their belief:
“That Black Bodies are only good for brute labor because the highest form of human expression is European, & the lowest form is African. That the only place where good art & higher thinking is happening, is in Europe or among people of European descent. They are so accustomed to the stories that they have been telling about Black people, that they literally cannot imagine that a Black woman could produce art” (24:23-25:21).
Western philosophers, moved by the new theories of the Enlightenment era, could not fathom that a Black woman could create art on her own or out of her own life. Similarly to how I could only reference Mattie by her first name in my last post the same goes for Phillis. I turn away from the academic notion of referring to her as Wheatley because she too is a kin to me. I see a lot of myself as a Black woman writer trying to produce an artful & bountiful life in a world that unfortunately still only views me for my labor.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of many books including my favorite The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, shares in the film that “there was something about poetry, which was a fine art, which meant Africans could experience emotions beyond the trifling” (26:32-26:57). The fact that a Black woman actively participated in fine art was baffling to the White elite because it challenged the myth of simple-mindedness they tried so hard to solidify. In the 18th century, and even now, many find it difficult to take Black woman in their own word (verbal or written). As such, Phillis had to appear before several White men to prove that she was capable of writing these poems herself. The following is an excerpt of what the all-white & male committee found.
“We whose names are underwritten, do assure the world that the poems specified on the following page, were, as we believe, written by Phillis, a young Negro girl, who was but a few years since, bought an uncultivated barbarian from Africa” (29:23-29:35).
When it became evident that Phillis did in fact write the poem, the committee founded a new myth to take credit for Phillis’ innate knowledge/gifts. This new myth the committee founded was that had it not been for Phillis being enslaved, touched by the bright light of enlightenment far away from the African continent, then she would never have been capable of participating in the high art that is poetry. In a succinct statement, the committee managed to give Philis autonomy of her pen & simultaneously claim that her intelligence was due to proximity to whiteness. This myth is exactly that, it’s a false story made up by people fearful of one day losing power & thus their hold on history’s narrative to certify the violent choices they have made.
What it means to be successful, productive, and prepared are all rooted in the system of capitalism that Black people were forced to participate in (racial capitalism). Therefore, when I dared to assert my own right to sovereignty and autonomy by prioritizing myself, it went against everything I was supposed to have been reared to fear — becoming unuseful. The idea of adopting one or all three of the u characterizations goes back to the colloquial saying that Black children must be twice as good. Furthermore, my choice to go home after a long exam went against everything my magnet director was reared to expect of me. She was reared to expect to witness the constant exertion of Black Women exchanging labor in the hopes of one day being able to afford a quality life. It can become easy to become enraptured in disproving these three factors by always showing up when you really need to say no.
If my small moment of resistance tilted my magnet director’s axis of expectation then she would hate to see me now. I am a 22-year-old Mount Holyoke College alumna writing a substack and running a digital archive deeply devoted to Black Southerners. Six months after my graduation I fused with my bed. My oak limbs thrashed and twisted as they stretched over my mattress as I slept for days. I rooted in place after graduation instead of choosing a productive pace. I eased back into an intuitive slower pace that I craved during college. I have spent time cooking meals, binge-watching TV, taking long showers, and trying to find ways to grow with my family. I’ve also gotten to rediscover old hobbies that I didn’t have time for and to also learn new ones. So when my limbs start to creak from staying in one place I move and do a hobby. Sometimes I do yoga, dance, play viola or piano, do watercolor paintings, or stretch in the scattered sunspots around my house with my cats. Some may say that this time has been very unproductive and I am not a successful college graduate (especially not a successful Seven Sister college graduate). However, I get to decide how much stretching is too strenuous for me. Mapping a life, not a job/career, is my priority right now, and like in high school—there are some things that I simply can not afford to divulge. Like Phillis, there are people who were a part of my journey who would love to make the claim that if it wasn’t for their light filtering into my life I would not be where I am today. While I will always give credit when it is due, my voice & knowledge was something I was already in possession of. I am not interested in being branded by a single institution or person. Especially when those institutions and/or people tried to inhibit my growth & sense of self-belief.
There is nothing to prove and a good life is of your own making. As James Baldwin said, “Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.'' If you’re wondering, no, I did not pass my AP Environmental Science exam. Unsurprisingly, the earth kept spinning, the moon kept pulling the sea, and the tree died and came back again in the spring. In the end, I got a little degree and managed to do it in three years during a pandemic. Furthermore, I’m positive graduating in three years was only possible because I took a restful gap year after high school to do precisely what I’m doing now. If I could go back, I would still skip my review session and take an even longer nap with my spirits resting joyously around me. As for my former high school magnet director, I hope she has risen to the culturally component pedagogy she proclaims to love and has begun to invest in the hue Haint Blue. I always have.
