Confession Tuesday: Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Ms. Walker and happy birthday to me, too!
February 9th, 1944

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
~Alice Walker

Today is Confession Tuesday and today I am confessing and celebrating. Today Ms. Walker turns 66 and I turn 45. I confess I feel special for a lot of reasons including sharing a birthday with a beloved writer, an amazing woman.

I chose this image because I swear she and my mother look a lot a like here. They're born the same year. While many people are colorstruck, I grew up during the "I'm Black and I'm proud" era. My mother is the same lovely brown Ms. Walker is and I coveted my mother's complexion and her smile. Like Ms. Walker, my mother is also fierce. Growing up, I was daddy's girl but it is clear to me as adult, I am my mother's daughter.

My mother and I have had a challenging relationship but I have always loved her and I've never doubted her love for me. Like my mother and Ms. Walker, I have had my challenges with my own daughters. I am grateful that my girls love me despite my flaws.

While I don't have Ms. Walker's talent, I am equally passionate. I feel connected to her. I know she's not perfect and knowing that helped me come to terms with accepting myself. Because of Ms. Walker's work, I discovered I could love myself and accept my shortcomings.

I know it's easy to worship the accomplished but for me, it's not worship, it's identification that draws me to the writer. What I've learned about her life and from her work is that our life's work comes at price, that we cannot be everything and do everything well. To me, Ms. Walker is beautifully flawed and I don't mean to romanticize that at all.

Ms. Walker, if you saw this, I'd fall over with joy. You probably won't but if you did, I'd want you to know I am grateful you chose the path you did, that you helped me find my own and I am unabashedly proud to share my birthday with you. Happy birthday and many, many more.

Little Lov'n Monday

Little Lov'n Monday is a day we celebrate the work of fellow bloggers. Between now and Wednesday, post a link to an article, contest, interview, poem- anything you think deserves a little lov'n.

Leave comments here, too. Let us know what you checked out. Commit to reading and commenting to 5 posts this week.

Drop those links and check these out:

Mother Writer T-shirts to support Doctors without Borders in Haiti
Spotlight on Bao Phi, Activist & Spoke Word Artist at Racebender
Monday Shout Outs at 58 Inches
Lesotho Blues by Rethabile Masilo at Poefrika
More on Forbidden Language at LaBloga
Diversity Roll Call: Paradigm Shift at Worducopia
Meet LaVora at Fledgling

Children of The Waters: Love, Family and Reconciliation

We’re currently having a discussion about Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice at Color Online. It’s a story about a young, educated black woman who despite having Lupus has a pretty good life. Then her half-sister shows up and Billie discovers not only that she was adopted, but also that she’s half white. Now Billie is a sister who prides herself on been culturally and spiritually grounded. She is a sister who relishes her blackness. She is an African dance teaching, ancestor altar praising and holistic-living sister. Then she finds out she’s not who she thought she was.

Billie has a great family. She has proud, accomplished parents and a loving older brother. She’s involved with a good man and she’s just found out she’s pregnant. Her health is a real concern with her pregnancy and her great man doesn’t respond to the pregnancy like she had hoped. Then this chunky, too friendly, white woman shows up. And the drama begins.

Let me tell you what works for me in the contemporary fiction. The socioeconomic element works. I don’t think we talk enough about class and socioeconomics in this country. We try to have the race discussion but we rarely include how socioeconomics weighs in the mix. Brice inserts it without screaming LESSON. It would have been easy and predictably boring to have made Billie a poor black girl discovering she was rejected by her white wealthy family. Instead the main character is smart, educated, comes from a solid economic background and her family is happy and functional.

The dynamics between men and women in relationships works here. Brice gives us love that works. Nick’s parents’ relationship is ugly and Trish is divorced from a cheating husband but even her relationship with her son’s father had been good at one time. But these relationships don’t dominate the story. Billie’s parents and her brother’s marriages are solid and while Billie and Nick hit a rough patch, they work through it.

The conflict between Trish and Billie feels real. Their reunion is rocky. There is race and the rejection they have to confront and they do, and like in real life it’s not easy. The delivery works. The tone in Children of the Waters has the same comfortable and natural feel of Brice’s successful Orange Mint and Honey (watch Lifetime premier of the tv adapted movie 2/21)

What doesn’t work? I can’t say. I suggest you read the book, join the discussion and honestly tell us what worked and what concerned you. Let’s have a good sistergirl talk about what family, love and reconciliation looks like.

A Readers Response: Black History Month

I’ve been here 350 years but you’ve never seen me.
~James Baldwin

Black History month has provided an opportunity for another reader response. Today, I wrote the following reply to a review of The Listeners by Gloria Whelan at Rhapsody in Books:

Teachers and librarians,

While this book looks lovely please remember that children need contemporary and fun books about black people. Black History should encompass more than slavery.

You say Black History Month and most kids think slavery and school lessons. The last thing they think is fun. We’ve made plenty of history since the Civil War.

And while I don’t want to scare children, I’m not sure I want children focusing on happy times during slavery. If we’re going to talk about slavery as a way to teach a lesson then we need to be clear why it was ugly and I think we can do that without playing up slaves laughing and dancing.

Yes, February is Black History Month and like many of my friends, I have ambivalent feelings about the month. I didn’t plan any special events or columns for either blog. I’m black 365 days a year. I invite readers all year long to recognize the contributions of black folks and at the tender age of forty-five this year (2/9 in case anyone is wondering) I’ve grown weary of the rehashing of the usual suspects. Before you say my remark is blasphemous or irreverent let me explain.

Black history doesn’t start and end with slavery or Civil Rights but every child in public school at least is indoctrinated with tales of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Mary McCloud Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver, Madame C.J. Walker and W.E.B DuBois during the month of February.

What would happen if we asked the average child if they knew who Mae Jemison, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Carol Ann-Marie Gist or Dr. Ben Carson is? Could you answer me if I asked you who Dr. Charles Drew, Clara Howard, Bessie Smith or Dudley Randall was?

Okay, so you’re thinking, “Well educate us.” I did think about writing a post about why we need to educate children and adults about recent historical black figures and relevant contemporary figures and then I opted not to. Why? I’m going to call it
minority fatigue. I’m tired. I’m tired of being the default spokesperson. I’m tired of the task of teaching folks about black people and other POC issues that they could very well learn on their own if they’re interested. I didn’t wait for someone else to sound a clarion call for me to recognize the world is larger than my own backyard. I sought out what I think matters. I asked questions and made it my responsibility to learn.

It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life.
~James Baldwin

Those who went before us didn’t struggle and die for us to revere them but for us to continue to achieve and to build a legacy for future generations so I’m doing what I can and my work doesn’t begin and end in February so when I read the umpteenth book review about slavery, I groan. I don’t want us to forget. But it’s been more than 300 years, people. It’s time to update what you know about your fellow Americans.

What does Black History Month mean to you? Do you only revisit slave narratives and Civil Rights? Can you name any iconic figures not associated with these standard time periods?