Somebody should have told me. Somebody should have warned me. Somebody should have sat me down and explained that just as your 20s are about basking in the freedom of asserting your independence, your 20s are also about milling around in the muck and drudgery of asserting your independence.
I’ve spent much of my life looking forward to my 20s as though this decade held the keys to the Promised Land, only to get here and wonder, “How in the heyell did I get here?” Paying ENDLESS bills. Struggling to hit my stride in the rat race we call the “job market.” Negotiating salaries. Building a network, but somehow losing a sense of real community. Realizing that the end result is not always determined by how hard you worked. And, oh yes, finding out that while you may be smart, while you may be bright, you need a good amount of shrewdness to make it. Some folk were confronted with all of this before their twenties. But I’m a late bloomer. It hit me around the age of 24, when I suddenly looked around and said to myself, “You ain’t in (Ar)Kansas anymore, Toto.” Being a full time student all of my life has certainly had its advantages: the longer I stayed in school and consumed myself with abstract theory, the more I could prolong a face-off with bottom-line practicality.
When I lamented not being told about the tumultuous twenties to a wise a woman I know, she pointed out that even if I had been told in my late teens about what it would be like in my late twenties, it’s likely that I would not have understood the warning nor would I have taken it seriously. Truth is, she’s right. Somebody probably did tell me. But I was too busy buying the first ticket out of my parents’ house to listen. Some things you just don’t “get” until the rug has been pulled out from under your feet.
Moreover, it occurs to me that no one could have adequately warned me back in the 1980s about what it would be like to be 20something and woman and black in 2007. While paying bills and stumbling through the rat race has wreaked havoc on my sense of comfort and security, what has really knocked me off my feet and left my head spinning is taking on these new responsibilities while also navigating my way through a world that uses mass media, technology, religion, politics, music, violence and the ole’ fashioned good ole’ boy network to demean and dehumanize black women.
Oh, but don’t be fooled. I’m not so naive to think that the dehumanization of black women is anything new. It is so woven into the American historical and cultural tapestry that it is just as American as baseball and apple pie. But what makes the 21st century mass dehumanization of black women so distinctive is that it has become like a staple crash crop within the black community. We feed off of it as uncritical patrons of mainstream media and, at rates unlike any other in history, black folk are participating as purveyors of this dehumanization. We package it in music videos, books, television shows, sermons, movies, clothing lines, etc. We profit from it and give it names like, ”entrepreneurship,” “creativity,” and my personal favorite, “a word from the Holy Ghost.” The dehumanization of black women is so insidious within the black community that we don’t even recognize it when we see it…even when it glares at us in the face (daring us to call it out).
No. No one could have warned me of what it would be like to become a critical thinking, independent, assurred black woman in the midst of all this.
I often find myself searching for an outlet. A way to process, confront (and escape) what I see and experience as a young black woman. As an avid book reader, I naturally turn to books for solace and wisdom, particularly my “sacred texts” written by black women writers. Writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and Pearl Cleage give authentic voice and texture to the complexities of black women’s lives. In their work I find insight, inspiration and… healing. And just as movie buffs have their favorite scenes from their favorite movies, I have favorite “scenes” from books written by these women.
Recently, when I was in a particularly self loathing and defeatist mood, I reread one of my favorite “scenes” from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In this passage she describes what occurs among a community of former slaves in a place called “the Clearing”:
It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got all mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.
She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
For the 19th century former slaves in Beloved, the Clearing was at once a ”wide-open place cut deep in the woods” and a site of community and communion. At the urging of Baby Suggs, an elderly woman who had a Harriet Tubman-like presence, the people gathered at the Clearing to laugh, dance, cry and validate their collective humanity. There, in the midst of an oppressive and dehumanizing existence, they cleared for themselves a space to hear the prophetic words of a wise woman. ”The Clearing” was a space to confront reality and re-imagine a new one. It was a space in which to be made whole.
After reading this passage in Beloved, it dawned on me: That’s it. That’s what I need in the midst of all the responsibilities, craziness and foolishness that characterize my life and social context: a “clearing” spot of some kind in which to respond to and make sense of what it means to be a 20something Black woman. While I have various places and relationships in my life that I consider clearing spots, I wanted a place to ”record” my responses, critiques and laments in a creative way. So here I am. As virtual as it may be, I’ve cleared for myself a spot in the blogosphere in which to not only navigate my way through the joys and pains of newfound independence, but to also actively confront problematic and oppressive realities by re-imagining new and liberating ones. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll stumble upon my own authentic voice in the process… so that I, too, can be made whole.
