EXCERPTS FROM THE BOLD WORLD
Jodie Patterson is a social activist, entrepreneur, and writer. She has been lauded for her activist work and sits on the board of a number of gender/family/human rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign. Her newly published book, The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation was inspired by her transgender son and explores identity, gender, race, and authenticity to tell the real-life story of a family’s history and transformation.
Who am I in this world? I began to think. What does it mean to be a woman? Is it my body, my mind, or my spirit? Or maybe it is defined by the power I wield.
By the time I entered my senior year, I was fully exploring — crisscrossing barriers and mixing references, pulling from all the women I had read about — Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde — and those I was getting to know at school. I joined an African women’s group and took African studies classes, amassed a collection of ankhs and started writing protest poetry (because, why not?).
I recited my uncle Gil’s lyrics while wrapping my head each morning in African cloth. You will not plug in, turn on and cop out… Because the revolution will not be televised. It was all a little clumsy, as to be expected from a college-age revolutionary. But I was catapulting myself from a silly girl with no big thoughts to someone empowered — whose possibilities were suddenly limitless. This idea of power and purpose was something my dad tried to teach me growing up, but his version lacked what I needed most: the crucial element of feminism — where I, a young woman, could be the king.
It was the women in the stories I read, and the women sitting next to me in class, and the women writers, and that woman I called Grandmother, who imprinted on me. All strong-voiced and strong-willed. All defiantly optimistic. All lovers of the word. All believers in transformation. Those women spoke to my heart and made me feel not only seen but exalted.
This idea of power and purpose was something my dad tried to teach me growing up, but his version lacked what I needed most: the crucial element of feminism — where I, a young woman, could be the king.
During my four years at Spelman, my classmates and I had become sisters, unfolding and waking up in the world. We had been nurtured and groomed by sheroes and kings, and now, sitting in formation in the Atlanta Civic Center, just minutes away from receiving our diplomas, we were Black Girl Magic in the flesh.
Maya Angelou, one of Dr. Cole’s most trusted sister-friends, took to the stage as our commencement speaker. “I belong to you,” she began. “I have given birth to you. You are absolutely mine. Because… I have loved you.” Maya Angelou’s voice was raspy. She didn’t sound professorial or academic. She spoke to us as if we were in her kitchen, sitting around her table, while she cooked us a meal.
“You are already paid for. You do not have to pay for yourselves.” I had no clue what she was talking about — it was way over my head. But I was intrigued, so I shifted to the right a little so I could get a better look at her between my classmates sitting in front of me. What did she mean by “paid for?” Dr. Angelou had sung a slave auction song as we filed into the auditorium before the ceremony began: “Bid ’em in, get ’em in; Bid ’em in, get ’em in.” Maybe she was talking in metaphors, about self-ownership — taking ourselves back from slave owners and now owning ourselves. But I wasn’t sure. She continued — singing, speaking, laughing, reciting poetry she had written years ago. Even dancing a little.
“When you walk into an office you don’t go alone,” she was saying. “Bring your people with you. Bring everybody that has loved you with you: ‘Come on, Grandma, let’s go. Come on, Auntie.’ When you walk in, people don’t know what it is about you. They can’t take their eyes off of you. They say, ‘She has charisma’ — No, what you have is all those people around you.”
I started to understand what Dr. Angelou was telling us. She was talking about family and memory, and the power of both combined. About holding on to collective energy and to a love that surrounds us — and to the blood, sweat, and tears that our mothers and mothers’ mothers spilled for us so that we could attend Spelman. She was talking about the same thing Daddy had been instilling in me with his trips to the Jungle: connection — to all the women and men, relatives and loved ones who have cared for me and worked for me and lived for me, and already paid for me, many times over. Maya Angelou was telling us, 250 Black women — we belong.
I felt every bit of my strength. It surged up through my legs, humming in my belly. I could feel how fortified I was — how fortified I’d always been.
During the course of her speech, my eyes never left hers. I heard every word she spoke and everything she asked. Of us, she asked that we stop and wonder about our great-grandmothers. She asked us to work now, very hard, so that we can pay for our granddaughters. She asked us to always know that we are loved and to always bring our beloveds into every space with us so that we know we are not alone. Each poem she referenced, each spiritual she sang, every validation of my existence, would be with me forever.
“However I am perceived or deceived,” Dr. Angelou said, in closing, “lay aside your fears that I will be undone, for I shall not be moved.”
And then it took hold of me, snatching me faster than the boys and the wild abandon — and even more forcefully than the tug of freedom, I felt in high school: the idea that I could own myself, could be my own anchor. In that moment, in a stadium that dwarfed me in size, surrounded by hundreds of people, I felt every bit of my strength. It surged up through my legs, humming in my belly. I could feel how fortified I was — how fortified I’d always been. “You had it before you earned it,” Dr. Angelou had told us. “Because it is your inheritance.”
I no longer worried that my skinny legs might not make it across the stage. I was not at all scared of strutting past the rows and rows of distinguished guests and faculty, past our ferocious Dr. Cole and our mystical Maya Angelou — past our parents, holding their breath. And past grandmothers and aunties, sisters and friends, all beaming as if our diplomas were their own. When my name was finally called out over the loudspeaker — “Jodie Miishee Patterson” — I took a deep breath and strode, with new confidence, across that long stage. Because at the other end was not just my hard earned diploma — it was the whole world awaiting.
