Cross-posted on Medium.
I bought my first pair of Bamboo earrings last week. I’m 32. Throughout my childhood, I’ve admired them in the glass cases of the neighborhood corner store or beauty supply.
I want to talk about a time when I smelled of pink lotion and Blue Magic. A time when I sat between my grandmother’s legs as she parted my hair. When walking to the corner store meant seeing every version of Black girl there is. To me, bamboo earrings adorned the bodies of girls who walked themselves out into the world proudly. My older cousins wore them. Older girls I went to church with, sang with, danced with wore them. But I couldn’t. Born near the projects but not of them — a distinction my mother made sure to press upon me growing up, we were hood, but not hood. Hood-adjacent. Hood Lite. I went to private schools but couldn’t go to the swimming pool across the street. I went to dances at Blackwell Elementary School in middle school looking like a pilgrim who just learned how to twerk. I ran to my mom after kids at church called me and my younger cousin ghetto because of where we lived and how we acted. “You are ghetto”, my aunt and mother quipped. But what did that mean? What about this dichotomy made one simpler than the other?
Black is free.
Black is sheltered.
Black is celebrated.
Black is vilified.
I had a name ring from the kiosk at Cloverleaf Mall in South Richmond. I cherished it and wore it until I turned my finger green. I had a silver tooth before my braces because my mom gave me the choice of capping my baby teeth as they fell out. I had traces of ghetto following me wherever I roamed while still being told we aren’t that version of ghetto. That ghetto meant overlined lips, long nails, those big earrings and everything that came with the aesthetic. I don't know if I couldn’t because I was too young or that the look wasn’t becoming of how they saw me to be. They being the elders who took it upon themselves to train up this child in the ways of respectability.
The double-mindedness of being moved by this thing and being told that this thing is nothing to be moved by. An elder church thing — watching the women in white chastise the “fast-tail” girls that looked like me but weren’t. I didn’t understand why. Why the hatred. Why the words dripping with disdain through furrowed lips. Have you ever died on the altar by look alone? All these girls did was show up to the place you claimed they needed to be. And here they were — judged ragged.
A guest preacher at a revival once proclaimed that the children were “doing it and doing it and doing it wildly!” My older friends and cousins cracked up. I had only heard parts of the song and was still reckoning with why I liked it so much. The thing about being Black is sharing nearly-identical experiences from different vantage points. All our parents went to the same schools and churches, so we emerged from the quagmires of Black life with stories old and new. Similar paces with different doses. I don’t want to do the thing where you cry about not being “Black” enough. That wasn’t my core experience. It was more being propped up to exceed what Blackness entailed without fully knowing its roots. Like being told this isn’t the important stuff. Here *gestures wildly* is the important stuff. When I’m left to my own grown-ass devices, my Black, Womanist veils flow freely. It’s taken a ton of unlearning to get here. The respectability tirades projected upon me had me out here in my formative years ashy, pick-me and miserable, seeking to uphold the novelty of being one of the Good Ones™. Performing Black vs allowing my Blackness to pour forward organically how it wanted to flow.
Black isn’t synonymous with struggle. Black Excellence isn’t solely degrees and LLCs. We make fruit out of the inedible, yes, but sometimes the poison is in the core and we need to excavate this particular tree. Truth be told, I was terrified to write this. I was worried about how it would be received. The elements of trying to grasp hold of something being viewed as performing Blackness vs exploring what I missed.
Grabbing those earrings from behind the counter: a glimmer of backpaid rebellion against the toxic ideologies ladled into my psyche. We love it when a woman ain’t scared to do her thing.
