Treatises for Black Southern Womanhood and Why to Leave It in the South
This is for forgetting that my struggles serve as validation for those who search for my authenticity. This is for the people who search for my life, but can’t find any records and can’t recognize that I’m always around. This is for the South, as I know it, may it live forever and age well.
Estrogen
Emma Fox Leverett (1829-1909) For the woman who the South begot. True daughter of the people of the land and the imported negro, married to a Frenchman’s only son with his mulatta slave. Forged a path that crossed the Savannah River and gave birth to races of people who have refused to be born a slave. For the woman buried in Lincoln County, Georgia. For my great-great-great-great grandmother from whom I write.
1 You and all four of your sisters were raised with the traditional understandings that when you fell, someone would ask to help pick you up, and you were to politely decline and accept no one but dad and mommy. All the women before you told you their stories of falling. Your aunt Bash Ann who fell teaching a high school class in Athens and never got back up. Your grandmother who let her brother hookup his bike to her tricycle when she was four and permanently skinned her knees. In all these instances, they got up on their own. Moving to the north, having your parents drop you off and leave you alone to look at the walls feels like you’re being asked to continue your culture alone. You singlehandedly must become the Southern daughter that comes from all the places that the sun falls upon. You become the women in Louisiana who had to cover their hair and the women in Savannah who told peanuts on the squares. You become the women of Mississippi who were sure they could never run far enough to forget themselves and the women of Alabama who have the most peculiar accents. You become the little girls who sit with their grandmother selling watermelon, yams, and peaches on the side of the road while their mother is at work. You’re doing all of this to feel the red clay in your mouth. You have forgotten how to speak in your native tongues, that are four generations removed so you only hear pieces spoken by old people. You are lucky to have yourself in this room to serve as the encyclopedia of your history. You are the only person in the city who knows about all the different stories of your town that make it special. You know the specific ghosts that walk the streets at night and you know the animals that live beneath the prickly low palms that line the pine forest floor. You remember taming the land as a child to help your grandparents bring in a small yield of collard greens, mustard greens, sweet potatoes, okra, and tomatoes. Your four sisters remember it too, but they’re either too young or too far to remember anything with you. You all need to remember the world you live in is not the one you all were raised in, where we all wore matching clothes and visited the same places. You live in a world where people don’t ask you if you need help. Even though conditioning means you can get up by yourself, it doesn’t mean you don’t want to be respected as a person, a friend, and a woman. Eventually you get tired of reminding people that you are who you are with no qualifiers. You’re the second oldest female cousin not to be married. You’re the only one who wants kids. You’re your mother’s financial advisor and you have been since you were twelve. You don’t like traveling too far away from home because it makes it harder to drive back. You don’t like telling whole truths because you were taught your business belonged to you and your household, so telling it all would make you a stranger. I love my sisters and my mothers and my cousins and my grandmothers and my aunts, but do they love me. They ask you when you’re getting married too often and they ask when they will meet someone you date. However, the happiest day of my life was the day my neighbor brought over raw sugar cane from her grandfather’s small farm and we chewed on the stalk until we tore out of the house and haven’t truly been back since. That’s why I am a traditional Southern woman who scoffs at the north and their ideas of my childhood.
2 Who is informing my parents that I am not getting married. Am I supposed to bring someone who wasn’t raised on my traditions into a joint house? That’s why I look at them like they’re crazy when they ask me to leave my house, because my house is built on the intersection of me. I have my own real negro cotton picking indigo processing nigger hair, skin, clothes, nails, and eyes so I have no reason to search for someone else to take it, when I just began to accept it within my own memory. So, I’m hoping to move further into thought of the non-black people who just read “nigger” and if I’m upset or playing into their own insecurities of avoiding Christian plantation work.
No one has ever dated a drug dealer for their daughter to date a drug dealer. Don’t ask where your private school tuition money came from. Mind your business. If you find yourself at odds with God, you must question yourself. The Lord Jesus was crucified and rose after three days for us. You aren’t worth as much as your sister because you can’t get pregnant. Always keep trade in rotation who can spot you $50 with short notice. Poor trade is a barter and this isn’t a bartering economy. Don’t let anyone hurt your feelings just because they’re yours. Fuck the 912, 404, 678, and the 212. You’re 706. Just because your grandmother is Old Fourth Ward, doesn’t mean you are.
You uphold your traditions in the hood, where you developed an aversion to loud sounds because men love shooting guns and fireworks on holidays, so you don’t know who your parents expect you to marry. Girl no one is loving the cracks on your hands or the stretchmarks on your shoulders. You better start loving it before a man tricks you or you trick a man into doing it. Check your ID to remember who you are because the great state of Georgia isn’t trying to help your coon ass get the right passport so you can leave this damn country. You can’t go from two states to stateless, so you being held for now.
3 Black men love white women and I have no idea why they enjoy each other’s company so much. All I know is that in a relationship that lacks a black woman, we somehow become the focal point of how we could never truly understand or deliver any of the original burdens that we held before they became the object of your desires.
“It’s supposed to be Friday night but you just fall asleep on the couch.” But you live close enough to the football stadium to hear every noise that it makes, so you don’t find any attendance necessary. You have a seat reserved in the student section from when you used to try to talk to a football player who had a girlfriend. It’s November and you realized three weeks prior that no man is worth the cold, so you can turn your attention to what you’ve been missing on weekdays. You have the house to yourself with a bottle of cheap wine that every femme in the hood sips on during Saturday lawn parties. You can spend the entire night combing out your hair, going through each section with a detangling comb. No one will love your hair as much as you will, working coconut oil and shea butter into each individual strand to keep the cold from breaking off your hair. It fifty degrees outside and every day you step out shivering, so you have no business outside except for necessity. You wonder if you missed out on seeing some random boy play ashy ass football, but you don’t have a reason to be out there. You tell yourself that if it doesn’t happen then it simply wasn’t mean to happen. You are a calm teenager because before things changed and you left home, you spent Fridays nights laying with no clothes on in your full-sized bed watching TV. You didn’t want anything from anyone. You existed only as an extension of your parents and of yourself.” Mary be a woman. Be woman enough. Eat enough food. Nothing is that tough. These things just happen. You get left behind. You are all the hills, You imagine in your mind. Tuck in your pelvis Mary. So that you can take some in. Keep the amount below 2, If you plan to be pleasant.
4 You might be from the hood but you’re from a respectable family so you don’t need to be out here riding the public bus, but its free with a student ID. So, you know how to transfer at the bus terminal coming from Walton Way and making your way back up Washington Road. That’s how you inch your way to the hair supply store hidden behind the gold pawning shop. In the hair store, there’s so many different colors of hair that you make yourself sick. You almost throw up because you existing in a world of fake Gucci slides, purple eyeliner, and a Korean man who owns the store but doesn’t want to be there. Check the colors on the wall: Purple
Strawberry Blonde
1B
Crimson Red
Don’t let anyone from the bus touch you, because you’re the daughter of 5 different important families, who just happens to be riding the bus. Butler. Peters. Monroe. Lucien. Flannigan. All of these families are the officers in policing if I can ride the bus. They are why my sisters don’t ride the bus or the MARTA. My parents kept asking me if I needed a car when I moved because they don’t trust the train at night. So after 9pm, I am vigilant in the parking lot of the East Point station until my friend pulls up in her Toyota and takes me to Tyrone.
5 You’re a reflection of the man you’re with. That’s why your parents keep taking you out to nice black neighborhoods in the western suburbs under the guise of holiday parties. You know that those people are just their friends and they’re looking for a way to drink and have conversation without paying for anyone to watch you, your cousins, or your cousins’ neighbors, who are all light skinned with curly hair. You feel as though someone is taking advantage of you, but you’re not sure. Yeah, I think we need him. Yeah, I think we need him. Yeah, I think we need him. East Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and both of the Carolinas failed you at sex-ed. They never taught you how a man would put his calloused hands inside you trying to fish out your guts. They didn’t say how it would feel empty and not worth the mental weight of yet another sin. They just showed you a VHS of the Miracle of Birth and taught you abstinence. Shit, that’s why so many of your cousins are pregnant. That’s why the holiday parties are emptied out now. I really don’t know if it was worth it, having a man tell me I’m not pretty. The low subtle sound of a hoe running into the ground, striking loose granite is how pretty I am. The water that trickled down the well and rotted the wooden side is how pretty I am. The slow spoken magic of my county name is how pretty I am. Same pretty the Monarch butterflies take when they arrive in Georgia on migration, making the place too much to take at once.
“Lesbianism is the same as kissing, but with different lips.” Because we’re drunk and we speak wild about our truths and what we do. We need stories to keep us busy because if not we get bored and we start missing stuff. Like I miss my blonde braids. I miss window seat in the sunroom. I miss my Goodnight Moon pillow. I miss my freshman dorm. Mammy is a cookie jar on the counter, Wearing too many rustling skirts, And walking around the kitchen with babies. I hope she doesn’t breastfeed them.
I don’t trust girls with loose ass hair, Because no one told them theirs was nappy. Same way you shouldn’t trust how I was treated well. You need to be questioning me.
6 “Are you really a black trans woman if you don’t walk the streets at night? If you go to bed in your own bed? If you know you could leave the city anytime you needed to in order to go home to see your family that loves you?” I take estrogen pill after estrogen pills for as long as I live. I cannot quantify how many milligram doses I’ll take because to do so would be to quantify my life. I’m a child. I’m unmarried. I don’t have my own house. So, hell yeah I would go stealth if I thought I would live, with one-hundred percent certainty. A Southern woman’s virginity is her most important virtue. That is why it cannot be taken. (Charleston, 1872) My sister and I were kept in the same house with our children. The house is one of many that compromises a row. We had adjacent bedrooms and our children slept downstairs, closer to the noise of the street.. The front door was locked to keep them from meeting the street and the back door was locked to keep them from the outdoor kitchen. I could be a West Indian nanny, When my niece, Nicolette, was six she had unlocked Without the accent, the door and started a fire so high that I swore it would Who picks up your kids, spread to the house and down our street. She cried Five times a week. while I canned her until she was red, then she told her father. I couldn’t have known, The man of my sister was a man who had come That the children are selfish, from further East than either of us had ever imagined And that she doesn’t love me. existing as children, and he had come to Charleston And I brought her here. through a period in Europe. It had been many years since he had been home and he had seen his mother How many times does he cry to me, since. He had been in contact with our family for nine And I say go to the woman of the house. years and in that time, he and my sister had conceived He needs to own the house he runs. four children, three of whom were still with us. The He needs to own the workers. oldest being Sabia, named from his bible, Nicolette, a child who died within its first year, and a small boy He needs to keep them from running. named Cyrus. After nine years, my sister and her man He needs to control his children. did not live together because they knew that they could Because they are both selfish, not marry in the church or in the city and they knew And I’m not paid enough for this. that they wouldn’t cohabitate. So, he came to the house early in the morning for breakfast and then left on business, coming back for his other meals. However, the house knew them as a married couple that simply didn’t sleep together. That is also how they were known by the city.
7 You are on my mind, on my mind. You are on my mind, . You are on my mind, . You are on my mind, . Go tell the white women to go home, . Father’s arms reaching out to me, Only in home, peace we seek. Paternal clay has made my home, That clogs the river meek. No further lands can I be, As moonlight through the pines peek. Bless the land and river of my dreams, That the thrasher marks with its beak. So are her children in Jamaica or are they with her in Atlanta and are we sure they are actually hers because you know niggas loves rumors more than they love the truth. I heard she left them behind while they were asleep at her parents’ house so that they wouldn’t cry when they woke up without her. I heard she didn’t even see them one last time before she left. I head from the girl who does my hair that he wouldn’t even fly them out for the wedding because he wants nothing to do with them. My house looks like: bricks in a field and a tarred roof with a trail of Honda Accords surrounding it. My room looks like: one million pictures taped to furniture to show that I am something attached to something. My church looks like: the scapular of the Holy Family leering over old people and gold leaf asking me for money. My sisters look like: even skinned girls with eczema, gnarled teeth, loose hair, and an aversion to cleaning. One looks like a lesbian. My body looks like: too long arms, too long fingers attached to a too tall body and a too broad frame that my too expensive hormones are trying to correct. My love looks like: too far away, too given, too secret from me, too tragic, too annoying, too quiet, but hopefully the changes of my body will change this as well. Still bleeding for the French.
8 Introduction to the Subject Before the South rose out of the great sea to exist in opposition of the north, there was no land, so there were no women. That is why the water on the coast tastes like limestone and the sand sit deep beneath the brown dirt of the coastal plains. That’s why one is able to cultivate sugar, indigo, and cotton along the sea. That is why one is able to refine the earth into molasses and molasses into rum.
Introduction to the Subject The South rose out of the negligence of the north for not keeping it below. I exist out of the mistake that white men made that created my world directly beneath theirs. I exist because someone believed contraception was out of reach so they continued to have the women who had me. They make me sick to my stomach, experience all the nausea of the sea as if the hold was holding me through my grandmother’s hand. I was transformed into a Christian Catholic. I was transformed into a black soul. I was transformed into the joke. That is why you can’t understand why you love me, but you do and you are responsible for treating me nice. watah fill so gud dat I can’t believe dat I ain’t borne frum it. Black. Mulatta. Quadroon. Grayscale. Octaroon. Septaroon. White. I can’t be born from good belief that the water will try to carry me away to somewhere.
9 (Charleston, 1872) And I had a man too at this time, who had been with me for five years. And for these five years I wasn’t truly alone because even when he wasn’t with me, I had the children that he had given me. He had come from Belgium with ruddy cheeks and thick hair. He claimed to be from an Italian family, but I knew the first time I was able to see his face intimately that he was hiding a history of negritude in his family. It had been carefully breeded out of direct viewpoint, but was still present to those who kept him close. He had come to me to one night while he was passing through to New York on the business of banking. And I had him one week of the month where he would sit with me and have sex with me and bring our children gifts from New York. He loved us and we loved him. We knew no need when he was present and when he was not we filled our days with the passing of town business, my sister’s family, and the ongoing education of our children. There was no worry, because I knew peace within myself, and I knew it within him. You charging thirty dollars for a book, Like people want to hear you speak. You all the things that shouldn’t speak. You’re a personified stutter. It’s just paper with some words on it, And it doesn’t talk back, Because it feels your hair on its cover. The book despises you. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail of cotton. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail a day. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail of cotton. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail a day. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail of cotton. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail a day. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail of cotton. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail a day. Jump down, turn
around, pick a bail of cotton. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail a day. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail of cotton. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail a day. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail of cotton. Jump down, turn around, pick a bail a day.
We are only in love because we can’t leave. We are only in love because we have curfew. We are only in love because they watch us. We are only in love because I can’t run away. Belle Tara because the Earth is beautiful and we aren’t sure if you’re completely black but we know you’re not completely white. You’re somewhere in the middle beyond just what your blood is. You speak like a white woman no matter where you speak, because you don’t own anything. You will never own anything unless they give you the land for your labor because a life wasted is wasted forever and land is the only thing that last forever, but God is the only thing that is eternal. He stretches throughout time beyond our conception of time.
10 Double digits resting on me like I’m dying soon. You gone put me in the ground soon. Below the ground I’ve rooted, made it past the sea and now they will never remove me. I will never be removed from my land. Even God has promised it to me. It has been promised and his promises are always kept. I hate kissing someone who just finished smoking. I hate men with gold teeth. Things are changing now.
Old Fourth Ward to the recreation of a fifth because things aren’t the same anymore. You can go to Grady and sit down for an appointment. We make our money, do our hair, raise our babies, and cook our greens out of the same damn pot. We making something more now. The Principal Street O N C E D E LEON
11 (Charleston 1873) So before he left, when he announced his plans to go back to Europe without me, I was frantic. I ran around the house, packing an overnight bag to run from my house and leave my children with their aunt. Then when the bag was packed, I felt the calm. I felt the reality that I was to be alone, saddled with children of a man who would forget about me, so I stopped. No matter where I went I would be a mother to his children. I was marked by him. So before he left I asked him to fuck me like we had just met. Like he had done one evening on my porch hiding from passer byers on the street. I asked him to fuck me on my back, until I was out of breath. Until he was tired. Until I thought my muscles would snap and I would be unmovable on the bed. And he died when we were done, and knowing what had happened I hid him, under the foundation of the house, so that to this day I think I hear French in my footsteps. And he belonged to Belgium and I belonged to him, and I was not left.
He has come to us and risen, but he has himself been incubated in a woman. The church is beautiful in many ways, but the building has a basement and the basement has been shelled. He came up to me. He came up to my black ass. He came up to me knowing that I was less than. He knew. I didn’t trick him, but that’s why I didn’t want him. Take me to the priest to give me my last rites because if I die away from home I want the chance to return to my home. Rushing to the river, falling down the stairs, until they put the levee to keep the Atlantic from backing upon my street and destroying the colony.
Leave this portion knowing that the final change is the beginning of the eternal reality.
12
I put him in the ground, Where he tried to leave me. I never looked back, Because he was not me.* I have become a new woman. I take pills. My breasts hurt now. My hips hurt now. I am a new woman. I want to exist as a woman, Alone and by myself, Without need for comparison. That is how he died.
*And when I say he is not me, he truly is not. Not metaphorically, academically, physically, or spiritually. He is what left me behind, and I am not leaving me.