What a Time

What a time. What a time. 

Growing up Southern Baptist in Stone Mountain, GA, these words were a common refrain. Pastor would talk about how hard the enemy is working to cause chaos in our world. What a time. Then, Pastor would talk about the world that comes after this one; a kingdom where grace--undeserved merit--and love rule each day. What a time. The same phrase used to describe what is and what will be--the worst of the present and the best of tomorrow. 

Pastor didn’t know that he was giving me a whole word--three in fact--that would help me process the absolute absurdity of the times in which we are presently living. We are experiencing fascism (not its’ rise) as the current administration works actively to suppress democracy in all its forms. Covid-19 is sweeping the globe and we still know so little about it. Black people continue to experience state-sponsored violence and our experiences are the canary in the coal mine for myriad other marginalized people. 

And yet, the largest and longest movement for the affirmation of life in the history of this nation persists. A small town in northern India can see the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years because the pollution is finally starting to clear. Young people, fed up with a world that does not serve them are stepping into their callings as land protectors, innovators, creators, and yes, even, lawyers. 

What a time!

If you’re like me, the last five months have left you hopeful, angry, joyous, depressed, confused, inspired, and altogether-utterly exhausted. Pulling on the wisdom of my ancestors, I rest in this certain knowledge: when this country finally lives up to its ideals of freedom for all, what a time it will be! We are closer than ever. Stay safe. Stay healthy.

Grand Theft Ordinary

White supremacy can steal a lot; our joy, our peace of mind, our humanity. But, perhaps one of white supremacy's stealthiest thefts is

the theft of mediocrity.

By normalizing whiteness as average, white people get to be just that...

...average.

The rest of us (especially women like me) have to be excellent all the time.

Or, as my daddy says,

"You have to be as good as some and better than most.”

We have to be extraordinary to avoid the ordinary course of things (spoiler alert: ordinary for me tends to include enough micro assaults to amount to a macro attack on my very humanity just about every day).

It’s exhausting. I don’t just think, I think ahead. That’s part of what makes me an innovator. I think years ahead about what the world can become, and I work my way backwards to determine what I have to do now to achieve it. But it’s hard to turn that off.

I set huge unreasonable goals so that, when I meet those goals, it can leave no doubt in anyone’s mind as to what I can achieve. Strangely, folks still manage to find plenty of doubts. Go figure.

Because my excellence thrives in my mind and spirit, my body becomes secondary, and the very tools I need to stay in this fight for freedom—balanced body, mind and spirit—drain and weaken at lightning speed.

When that happens, I don’t stop. Excellence won’t let me. Instead, I create energy out of the ether and keep going and going.

But I’m no bunny.

Nor am I a spring chicken. I’m exhausted. Not enough to give up, but just enough to understand that this level of energy output, which defies the law of physics, cannot last.

So, I reclaim average.

I reclaim balance.

The how seems simple. Some days I’ll put energy in. Equal days I’ll take energy out. Equal days I’ll do neither.

A real average Queen—my ordinary rule extraordinary only in its balance and longevity. Queen Rachel of Oakland by way of Gary, Indiana and Stone Mountain, GA. Long may she reign!

Coincidentally

In the new world we will need to find alternative ways to connect.

If, by some chance,

you’re currently making a cup of tea,

Hello. My name is Rachel!

Inevitable

We’ve lived this life.
The indigenous and the ancestors warn us,
Not because of future danger,
But out of past regret.

We know where this ends,
Not because a scientist has done the math,
But because war is not new.
Hubris is not new.
And, when vapid men possess themselves with the two--
As they sometimes do--
The world as we know it
Can cease to exist.

But we don’t cease.
Some of us--a very few, mostly children--
Survive,
And the storytellers among us
Rise up to craft our creation--
A creation meant to preserve and last.
The children learn young,
And teach their children,
And so on,
And so forth,
Until something older than we and the world
Infects a heart,
A mind,
And the infection--greed, anger, distrust, despair--spreads.

And, instead of memories of our last demise,
We begin to create delusions that we are the source of creation--
That we have an unmatched and unstoppable power.
We forget that empires, like all things,
Fall,
And everything,
Todo,
Cambia.

Perhaps it is inevitable.
Maybe there is no avoiding the end of the world
As we know it.
If that is so,
We must begin writing our creation story now.
We must teach our children now,
So that those of us who survive
Can survive well.

I will teach my children
That we all begin with LOVE--
An act
That gives way to a force
And a story.

The act--kindness, trust, closeness
Enough for sperm and egg to mingle and meet
Sometimes a lifetime,
Sometimes a split second,
Enough for one person to give to another,
And for the other to want to do the same
For another;
And another.

Creating a force,
A spirit of gift giving.
And what is a gift?
A thing freely given without compensation
Even when compensation is just.
Gift begats gift
Until the spirits of joy and laughter join in;
Until the intangible has real life affect;
Until we are compelled to record its wonder,

And boy
do we record the wonder:
In song, word, film, art.
We create new mediums just to capture
Our beginning.
We write a new story any way we can,
Then we rewrite it
Over and over again.

We rewrite to adjust for change
In language--
Time--
Circumstance.
We rewrite to remember
To join the force again--
Literally REnew our MEMBERship.
We rewrite to reject that old enemy of good
And remember that we are born of love.
An act--
A force--
A story we will tell the survivors
In the hopes of staving off
The inevitable end.

And, in doing so,
We lay the foundation
For the inevitable rebirth.
We become inevitable.

Quarantine Dream

"No more, Isaiah."
My son runs to grab another book:
"Otro libro. Otro libro," he says--determined.
"Okay--okay--one more."

I blink, and a vision appears:
My husband and me
Sleeping with the kids between us;
Books everywhere;
Us, barely covered by the blankets;
Lamps still on.

The next morning--
Wait--it's already afternoon--
We must have stayed up
Reading all night
And slept through the morning.

A vision of my perfect world:

Where we don't have to stop reading
Because there's no place else to be;

Where we have a large enough library
To choose book
after book
after book;

And where we can
Wake up slowly
To a perfect afternoon.

Turtle Riding

I was a Black Girl Scout. Though that term carries inherent contradictions, at the time, all I knew was that Girl Scouts was the thing for Black girls in my church to do. So I did it,and I loved it. On one trip, we went to Sapelo Island off the coast of Georgia.

Sapelo is an unapologetically Black place where some of the first slaves to free themselves settled hundreds of years ago.
My Godfather, Big Harding, went with us because he grew up in Brunswick, GA not too far away.

Sapelo was magic. We farmed for conch and swam and played all day.

Big Harding told us that, when he was a boy, all the kids would wait until the sea turtles laid their eggs and ride them back into the ocean.

Another Black elder told us that sea turtles always...always come to the same beach to lay their eggs. They always come home.

”But lately,” the elder said, “these men with their bulldozers and buildings were destroying the sand dunes where the turtles laid their eggs.” And, without a safe place to put their babies—the whole species was slowly dying. Without the sand dunes, the turtles could never come home again.
It was the saddest thing I’d heard in my young life.

The journey to my adult life taught me to be ashamed of that sadness.
I was mis-educated into believing that environmental justice was a white, hippie issue and that the plight of the sea turtle was not interrelated with my own.

I became a lawyer.
When I had a chance to be a public defender, I chose instead to provide reentry legal services; to make a path home for formerly incarcerated people.

In law, I learned that these men with their violence and virulence were using the law to destroy Black families and homes. And, without a community to receive and love and wrap around someone returning from jail or prison, they could never go home again.

I decided to change the legal system and keep changing it until we can all go home and be at home in the places we live.

They say home is where the heart is. A piece of my heart is with that Beautifully Black, hippie dippie girl scout—

and the turtles—

and the sea.

Morning Coffee

“Mommy,” she says, “you smell like coffee.”

I smile.

She cuts her eyes—just a little—and talks through a kool-aid grin, “I’m gonna drink you all up.”

Should I keep smiling, fear—just a little—for my life, or both?

Ah, the joys of parenthood.

Things My Kids Teach Me

My children keep on teaching me.
My daughter just ran crying into the kitchen.
“My brother bit me when I tried to…” her four-year-old speech became garbled as she posited
thoughts on why her little brother, age 2, bit her.

My husband is grabbing ice.
I look at her wound and apologize that she’s hurting. I ask her how we can help? She says she wants ice, an apology, and, for her little brother, a teether because his teeth are probably hurting.

My children are teaching me today!

When someone is hurting, you hold them first. You help them first. Then you acknowledge the pain caused. Her little brother had to apologize for his actions.

Then you focus on healing. She’s four, and she can see through her pain to think about what her little brother--whom she loves dearly--might need.
She assumes the following: because I love him and he loves me, he would not hurt me for no reason.

Surely there is something hurting him if he hurt me this way. She assumes this much and asks if we can heal him too,
As if she knows that addressing his pain is the best way to ensure that he doesn’t hurt her again.

If a four-year-old knows this so intrinsically, could it be that love and empathy and healing and diffusing hurt is our very nature?

Coursing Through Chaos

I’m experiencing intermittent paralysis.
One moment I’m ready for the fight at our feet, and the next I’m unable to think at all.

The more conversations I’m having with white people, the more I am convinced that the time for talking is over. What is left to discuss?

I sit in the living room with my husband after the kids have gone to sleep.
Only the glare of the television-flashing with each loud bang-lights our night.
Protesters are running everywhere.
Journalists are being targeted.
Peace seems to be the enemy in this war.

I look at my husband—we know what this is.

He is not Black, but he has heard and seen countless big men kill indiscriminately to preserve
their image of toxic masculinity throughout Latin America.
My mother-in-law fled civil war in El Salvador in the mid ‘80’s to create a life for herself because a big man would’ve rather seen her dead than free.
The war on my Black people here in the U.S. looks a little different,

but it has a lot of similar hallmarks:
economic depression, mass incarceration, and police murder with impunity.

We watch the news not for updates, but for signs that the moment has finally come where we have to flee our home--faithful that we will recognize that moment when it comes.

And every moment before that moment is a mix of the most amazing highs and the lowest lows. Highs in which I’m present and grateful for each breath

Because the weak man in the white house has the nuclear codes and may just blast California
to oblivion so I might as well enjoy each day.

Lows where I seek falsehood in the statement I just made and searching--searching, find none.

I reach heights unknown because I know that inevitable death gives way to inevitable birth,

And this nation’s rebirth—under a new constitution—could be a shining light for humanity.
And, in the next moment, I weep uncontrollably because the beauty I see when I close my eyes Seems so far away when I open them again. I feel as if I’ve finally internalized
the wisdom of the caged bird singing.

After the news, we look up places we can go where our Afro-Latino children can be safer.
The borders are closed to all but essential travel. We may have to fly.
But there’s a pandemic, and our two-year-old won’t keep his mask on for more than two minutes.

Which countries have control of covid? If we risked it, where would we go?
Are there visa requirements? Could we work in the new place?

Well, between us, we speak Spanish, French, German, and a little Arabic.

Would we have to get an embassy job to travel?

Can we afford it?

If not, what do we have to give up/cash in/crowd source to make it happen? Will we ever see our families again?

It’s not just tonight, but every night and most days that we try to navigate an uncertain future.

When the "big man" in the white house holds the Bible upside down—a prop in the devil’s latest
production—I look at my husband and our eyes agree that the moment to flee may come sooner than we thought.

In a glance, we decide that we don’t have to tell the kids yet. They are four and two. If we tell them now it will just scare them, and there’s no need to scare them until there’s a need to scare them. So we agree to smile and be as present as possible. But they know. They don’t want us to be separated from them for a single moment because they sense our fear, and they hear pieces of our conversations.

So we try to distract them.

We build a fort in the living room and make cakes from scratch.
We water the plants and watch them grow.

All the while, we keep a tent, sleeping bags, plates, an emergency kit, and enough cash to get out of town nearby.
Ready. Always ready.

And we are still working: still taking meetings and supervising students; still answering questions about the present climate. In my capacity as a leader, people are still looking to me to lead when all I want to do is hold my babies and rest before each moment—which could be the last moment—ends. I thank God that we still have income but query if the work we do is the work that really matters? One line of work feeds my soul, but the present climate drains me such that
the things that used to fill my soul are no longer sufficient.

As the militarized police gain, I see genuine shock on white people’s faces.

Is this the police brutality Black people have been telling us about? Can it really be this bad?
I see the realization and the sadness and the desire to help. And then I get a call asking for more conversation. And I wonder if they are going through any semblance of what I am going through.
Are they paralyzed with depression and fear?

Do they know where this nation is headed and how bloody it can get it?

Are they envisioning that moment when they have to take a loyalty pledge or risk disappearance or termination? If they were even close to where my husband and I are, wouldn’t they also know that the time for talking is over?

It has taken me about three months to fix my mind to sit down and start writing--
three months to even begin processing the pain and turn silent cries into words.
But I never stopped working for change. I feel as though I can’t until I can be confident that the next wave to take up this fight is motivated by the same things that I am.
If not, they may settle for something less than freedom.

I try to empathize—I know these things can take time.

But, as the events leading up to our world’s most awful conflicts repeat themselves, mere conversations until we vote seem certain to ensure that history will indeed repeat itself.

The time is now for change.
And I’m not talking anything radical.
I’m talking about a new constitution with housing, education, healthcare, family unity, free speech and basic income guaranteed.
I’m talking about human rights as the foundation for all our rights.

Black lives have always mattered.

Black people have always fought to make this nation live up to its ideals.

I’m beyond exhausted.

I’m ready to let go of the burden of carrying and maintaining this nation and will instead place my energy into building a new America for our children.

If you’re at where I’m at, let’s write a new constitution for a new America.

Let’s use all of our creative energy to turn this nation from chaos and darkness to focused light. Let’s find opportunity in this democratic experiment that failed when it’s founding documents excluded humanity for Black people.
Let’s turn our failure into triumph and show every enemy of peace that they will not prosper.

My faith calls me to this task for, if I want to be like God, I must first make light.

We can re-birth a nation.
Mothers of the world, let’s unite and do what mamas do best:
Build a better world for our babies.
Orale,
Yella,
Let’s get it, let’s go!

Katrina

Until Now
I read about it, but I didn’t feel it
It’s a virus
There’s a risk
But the real risk is over there
Away
Then I remembered her
A woman
A mother
Who has changed my life for the better
Who has taught me about bees
And other foundations of life
Who’s child played with my child
And they played
Uproarious laughter and dancing all night long
Enough for a three year old to carry memories two years later
Enough for my daughter to ask
Is my friend ok?
A woman
A wife
Who’s husband has the most gifted hands
Touched by God
Rare, even among the gifted
His process:
wait for divine inspiration then paint until it is done
He taught me to wait on God
Because the outcome will be more beautiful and precise
Than...anything I could do on my own.
I don’t know the rest of their family
But they have a rest of their family
And they are apart
Father and son quarantined on an island
With land all around it
She,on an island surrounded by sea, can move freely
But she cannot be free
Not without her seed and her soulmate
Nothing human can change the circumstance
Not now
Only heaven can move the earth
It should not take knowing one person
To empathize with their situation
To understand that a risk
Even far and away
Should be treated as if it’s happening to me
To humble oneself at the magnitude of God’s grace
But
If that’s what it takes
Her name is Katrina
Now you know her
Please Pray

The Many

There may be one of me, but

The parents are many—and we want our children to be fed, housed, safe, educated, and healthy

There may be one of me, but

The spouses and partners are many—and we want our collective income to be sufficient to support a comfortable life. We are done with worrying whether the next time our spouses and partners leave the house will be the last time because of a militarized police force that targets them.

There may be one of me, but

The daughters are many—and we want our parents lives to be dignified and healthy. We want our parents not to have to work so hard anymore.

There may be one of me, but

The drama queens—and we are ready for all the drama of creating a new world order rooted in humanity.

There may be one of me, but

The proprietors of peace and unity are many —and we will win the war for this world.

There may be one of me, but

The people are many. The people are many. The people are many.

Many more than the few.