Hot Oil and Gold or, How We Got Here By Lapis Luxxxury
I Making fried chicken is a gift and legacy that is handed to a few. My grandmother Iris Simpson was a nurse, and owned her own apartment building in Brooklyn. Whenever I visited, there was always fried chicken, rice and beans [a thoroughly cooked bean, mind you {a bean shouldn’t fight back at you in your mouth when you bite down on it}]. I was taught by the best though; Markiss Sagee, LoveLee Day, Mothersistedaddy Queen, and Oborion. We have all made the love together, that is frying chicken. I have also fried chicken with a dear beloved friend now, Mother Ruth, Troy Clark. Mother Ruth told me to brine the chicken overnight in a salt from not around here. This is when you put your love and incantations and prayers for the coming times. It helps to create high tones in your food so your food can and will be in high vibrations. As we learned in the beautiful novel, Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel, “Sometimes she would cry for no reason at all, like when Nancha chopped onions, but since they both knew the cause of those tears, they didn’t pay them much mind. They made them a source of entertainment, so that during her childhood Tita didn’t distinguish between tears of laughter and tears of sorrow. For her laughing was a form of crying.” I am here to claim black, all the way through; myself, my story and what has happened to me; just so there is no deceit or twists as to how this journey is gonna go for us all. You may get confused, but center in yourself and hold to the ground that is beneath you. If things are unsettling, ground in your breath and move forward into a new understanding and growth, because now is the time for growth and understanding, and I am one your guides. You may be angry that it is me, not being the best writer on the face of the scenarios, but I am the one that made the effort, has the patience, and wisdom to offer to you what I know and have experienced directly in my 20 years with Radical Faeries in many different woods and communities.
II I got here because of Gryphon Blackswan. Grand diva who had the brilliance, who is an 14 RFD 182 Summer 2020
ancestor, and had the bravery of gender non-binaries and opulence that is a gift bestowed upon myself. They laid this ground before I stepped on it. As a baby shamyn, Jesse Kessel summed it plumly: The truth is trouble. She is a beautiful dancer, a chameleon. She may be lapis in this queen’s eye and turquoise in another. Truth is a funny thing when most folks don’t want it, banned and formed into a palatability suitable for the marketplace. When the truth is banned by the government you know you are in trouble. We are way past trouble, we are in the bubble hubble of the trouble now, hun. I actually can’t believe I’m the one to write to you about it. In my life truth ain’t come easy. I have found sometimes there is inherent understanding that happens inside yourself with your body, gut and soul. Folks work with it. Living in a truth one has to balance what one understands with what folks can handle and that is often a very uncomfortable place to be, and yet isn’t this often the case for POCs in our lives? Being brave is what is called for these days. Have courage. Allow one to understand that days are going to be tougher, but that in the process we must allow ourselves to get and become better. Lately on my feed I have had to come out about how angry I am, understanding that the undue deaths of black people seem to be never ending.
III I got here because a beautiful man one night loved me and shook me like I had never been and have yet to again—thanks Kencarl aka Everritt Wilde. That is how most gay beings get to where they are going, through love and sex. In mountains far off I watch my sex not be centered, cherished and honored. I watched my words and imagination be fracked for a movement and not given in reciprocity; the way that my words and other black folks’ words made a middle passage through. In our full linguistic abilities we taught beings how to channel, how to actualize, how to train. Others helped, but Jupiter, she reigned. Now a whole court of empresses must hold the space she wielded so grandly. So grand. I’m here to celebrate living here while we can, because we don’t do that enough: in writing, in action, and in care.
