Hey, Girl: Life for Me Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair
I am the Age Now, My Mother was Then
Remembering the chitter-chatter of my mother, Bigmomma, and aunts throughout childhood has always been soothing, a place for laughter and timeless history lessons. I loved being all up in “grown folks business” when I was a snotty-nosed kid. Someone in the room would always notice a ghostlike movement behind the curtains or crackling sound from behind the plastic-covered white couch. When you’re younger, you really think you’ve got it all figured out — but my invisible cloak was always snatched away, disposing the child beneath. “Aw, man!” I’d mutter. I always thought the grown folks were too distracted from the boisterous laughter or Betty Wright on the tape player blasting “No Pain (No Gain)” in the background talking about, “In order to be something you’ve gotta go through something!” Soon after a mild scolding, I’d be sent back outside to play with my more age-appropriate cousins or escorted back to the den to watch the television. Before getting the boot, I always overhead a few gems though, “Girl, let me tell you!” And of course the ubiquitous, “Girl!” — stopping one another in the conversation mid-sentence because something was said that was wholeheartedly agreed with, or rather someone didn’t agree with — depending on the vocal cadence. And when Bigmomma really got going, if there were any men or boys around they were not off limits from being accidentally referred to as “girl,” either! When you’re in the pocket, you’re just in the pocket. One of my aunts studied cosmetology, so the beauty shop was often in the kitchen or living room. My aunt would be at work clad with flatirons hinging on the colloquial phrase day in and day out. Girl. Whether I was watching my aunt press, set, or flatiron her sister’s or mother’s hair, it still hits as a nostalgic joy to me. At times I was either getting my hair cornrowed on the porch, or begging my mother to braid my hair like Menace II Society’s O-Dog or Marques Houston. But, “Girl!” was always flying around, powerfully, in conversation on feminism — and it’s always had that history for me.
Even though fatherhood was something my father did not take seriously, my cousins later became fathers and showed me it was possible. For what it’s worth, and all the grief, I do believe in many ways I had the fortune of coming into my identity growing up in a single-mother household because I was surrounded by strong, black matriarchs. And I cannot decipher a more estimable way to expound on that experience because Nina Simone has already done the task of doing that for me when she sang “Four Women”: “Strong enough to take the pain, inflicted again and again.”
We often talk about that burden on black women in society and in popular culture, but the fact of the matter, is that in so many families that is who raised us. And while we should never let them shoulder that burden alone, they have unequivocally earned it. They were there because systemic oppression and racism pushed fathers away, broke homes, and tried to break the soul. But, J. Cole reminds us, “there ain’t no gun they make that can kill my soul.” But this monstrous intimacy plagues mothers, and yet, they all still get up and rise another day. I watched that rising when I was kid, how my mother fought tooth and nail to keep food in the fridge and in our bellies, a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, and a hand upside our heads — because we were poppin’ off at the mouth a little too much at times.
I am the age now, my mother was then, when we parted ways. Those very distant and discomforting years in between have shown me a greater understanding of her plight, a varied or more nuanced empathy, and an affirmed knowledge of her endurance as a working class, single, black mother. But ultimately, as a single mother. Tupac asks, “Tell me how you did it?” in “Dear Mama.” But, the thing about age, the more it gets on you like white on rice, you develop your own stories, your own endurance, your own trauma, and because I now have my own, I understand.
Currently, I do not have children, but the relationship to my childhood, oddly enough, is still hyper-visible— the dichotomy of fighting for your own life, fighting to keep a job, fighting to raise your children, and fighting to survive — and mothers are expected to do it all with a smile. As a child, I wish my mother had sat me down like Langston Hughes writes in “Mother to Son.” I wish she had just said this isn’t easy, not because I can’t do it, but because it just ain’t easy, and I might not always have the strength to do it the way I want, or how you think I should, because I have lived a life.
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor —
Bare.
My homelife was not filled to the brim with I Love Yous and all this and that, not because love wasn’t there, but because love had no airway in expressing itself, fully. And in truth, I don’t think my mother liked the word very much. I think it had failed her enough times by the time I was an outspoken, curious, and questioning teenager that it was always at odds with the tension and interplay of rearing a teenage man. And now that I am the age my mother was then, I believe it was quite possible to stop believing that love held the mystical power we are taught it should carry when we speak it.
Don’t you fall now —
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Maybe my mother didn’t sit me down then because youth was on her side, but she was still climbing, as I am now. She was only just out of high school when she birthed me that April morning. She was my age now when our relationship arrived at a fever pitch. In the tumultuous weeks following my high school graduation, I came home one summer evening to find my entire bedroom packed up — in black trash bags. Every single, solitary item. I walked past her, took one look in my bedroom to verify it was empty — and it was. She didn’t expect me to react like I did. I didn’t fight it this time. I came back into the living room and began grabbing the bags, made an about-face, and took the rustling garbage down the stairs of our apartment building and back to my car. At one point, she stood at the back of my car and wouldn’t move as we both yelled at one another. I believe in my heart, she didn’t really want me to leave. I could see it her in face, even through the cacophonic screams. But mostly, I felt it in my heart. But, it was too late. I was gone. We were gone. And she knew it. We were both sad about it, but it was already in motion careening from the elusive hill that bore mother and son.
Even today on Mother’s Day, we haven’t moved past that long ago moment, but that story no longer belongs to me — in the way it once did. I understand more than ever, at my age now, some of what she may have been experiencing emotionally and spiritually and I think that puts her and our relationship in a new light. It doesn’t mend much because that’s far too many years to grapple in within an essay — but now I understand. What is the inner turmoil of a young mother, a black mother, trying to raise three children with no father around to help in Southern Los Angeles where the odds are against you, including the man who once laid with you? It took two, but now it’s you, and your children. In my later years she gave me a peak into her rocky understanding with the word “love,” but even still, in our greatest fights and her misunderstandings of my gay identity and rage towards my outspoken nature — I knew she still loved me. It’s funny how you can be in the midst of someone’s flames and still see their humanity.
Using and Bridging the Past
If you happen upon a group of queer men, and it is rather imminent that you might, at some point, someone will be referred to as “girl,” “she” or “queen” at any given moment — evoking a symbolic sisterhood.
A poignant scene in Paris is Burning depicts two disenfranchised queer youth on the streets of an 80s Times Square in New York City, and one smiles, “That’s my sista,” to explain the compulsory bonds and community built among queer youth of color. “Girl,” has become embedded within and outside of queer vernacular, yet as society men are afraid to use “girl” in jest, but more importantly, to signify kinship and deference to women. There is a fear that retracts men, both heterosexual and within the gay community from using the word among one another. The fear imbibes emasculation and disavowal of the association with the term due to antiquated gender binaries. Womanhood is always in connection to manhood, thus deeming feminine knowledge and power as co-dependent — a social commentary on today’s modernity.
And furthermore, our media can be so vile and so fraught with dissidence that women are continually attacked and held to standards that men do not endure. I’ve witnessed frowning co-workers who question a woman’s work ethic because she’s leaving one job “early”, simply to begin another — raising her children. Media scrutiny is heightened when famous women are relentlessly depicted as “whales” and “overblown”, when they are simply — pregnant. But, what is more disheartening is that the mark has been missed, forgetting the spellbinding fact that women who have the ability to carry children occupy a substantial majesty, even through adoption, so where is that celebration, instead?
Oprah Winfrey’s Legends Ball aired in 2006 marking a significant historical moment. The ball itself was less a moment of pomp circumstance, but it cemented a history and lineage that acknowledged the role of black women as marshals in American culture and beyond. It was a ball fit for Hattie McDaniel, Josephine Baker, Ida B. Wells, and Zora Neale Hurston had they’d been alive to experience it. Pearl Cleage’s “We Speak Your Names,” explained the weekend’s spirit through a specially authored poem. Cleage stood tall in front of weeping eyes:
“We know that we are walking in footprints made / Deep by confident strides / Of women who parted the air before them like the forces of nature that you are”
The deepness of the footprint and the confidence of the stride exude a remembrance of the women who have continually inspired my life, both outside and in. Strength is too often measured in terms of a physical fortitude under a patriarchal paradigm, or the scale of one’s frame, with a continued irreverence toward women. But, strength is deep like the strides in Cleage’s poem and Nina’s “Four Women.” It is the humility and composure that Josephine Baker displayed when, even as an established performer liberated from blackface and minstrelsy, she walked out of her American hotel and was spit on by a white woman, yet decided to raise a “rainbow coalition” of her own adopted children even though she could not personally have her own. It is my own mother, finding the will to pave a way, when there was no way.
Using, “Hey, girl!” or “Sis!” or “Gurl” in queer vernacular is so misread at times. But, it’s more of an act of homage to matriarchy than an affront on someone’s identity — a shift in cultural mores. We use “Hey, Guys!” to signify the whole, so why not, “Hey, Sis?”
This Mother’s Day, let us all recognize the strength of women who have transformed us, and who we have admired working hard for the money, nine to five, and in the midnight hour. So, in this moment, I am presently still, and reflecting on an all-encompassing and powerful image of what Mother’s Day signifies from our biological, adoptive, transgender sisters, and teen mothers who have blossomed. The women I have known are not shaken, they are not broken, but rather rise triumphantly in the wake of adversity.
So when we say, “Hey, girl,” we are in fact saying thank you. Ashé.
