No Applause
To My Girls
I was dumb. I stood in front of a class of white people in central Illinois and gave a speech about the need for Black people to have and patronize Black-owned businesses in their Black neighborhoods. I thought I understood the assignment: “Write a 3-5 minute speech about something you’re passionate about.” I did not believe in, or even know about, all the iterations or tenets of Black Nationalism. I was eighteen, after all, and new to college and new to playing the game my dad always reminded me to play on a stage two and a half hours away from the five-mile radius I was used to inhabiting.
But I knew what it felt like to walk into that convenience store and have all sixteen years and ninety pounds of my Black flesh ogled as I tried to purchase ground beef for the spaghetti my mama wanted to cook for dinner. I knew what it felt like to have the Black butcher drop his head because defending my humanity meant threatening his. I knew what it felt like to draw every bit of the fear and disgust inside of my Black body into a fiery ball of profanity, intense neck slanging, and eye rolling just to make a scene big enough to compel the other people in the store, people like me, to stop and watch. And I knew what it felt like to have relief flood into every orifice of my Black being because I had change enough to slam dramatically on the counter instead of having to wait for the proprietor to make it and, by extension, make me pluck it coin by coin out of his gross, all too eager hands.
They didn’t know that, so there was no applause. Not even the obligatory I-wasn’t-even-really-listening-but-it’s-apparently-over kind. The silence was all the more piercing because for a moment even the professor did not know what to do with it or me. I stood there one second past completely mortified before she had decency enough to say, “Thank you, Marilyn.”
All these years later, I sit back and listen to you, and I laugh. You tickle me for all the reasons moms are amused by their daughters. I love your willingness to formulate your own opinions and speak your mind. I love that you demand to be heard. And even when our collective Black girl energy is bordering on WWIII, you inspire me. You remind me of that time before an insincere thanks ushered me unceremoniously to my seat. Before the silence told me that I was offensive. Before playing the game became a necessity.
I see how dope you are! You walk tall in that big afro or those messy twists under that fitted cap. You write poetry in the middle of the night or teach yourself physics in the basement during your summer vacation because “Imma need that ‘A’ my junior year.” And you still fight over who gets to place her head in my lap first so that you can tell me more about what’s rattling around in that magnificent brain as I run my hands gently over that soft, natural crown.
I see you and remember that my Black mama saw me. She’s the reason why I was dumb enough to stand up as the only Black somebody in that class and give an impassioned speech that mattered to nobody but me. She’s the reason why I did not know that my words had the power the suck all noise from the atmosphere. She’s the reason why I know how to allow you, too, to grow into the fullness of you, no matter how offensive or off putting the truth of you will be.
And like me, like her, on some level you’re going to learn how to play the game, but when you’re tired and the reward no longer satisfies like the promise of it can delude us into thinking, you’re going to take that lesson and the ones you learned laying across your mama’s lap and blow stuff up on your terms because while you were learning to play their game, they never bothered to learn yours. And that makes you a force to be reckoned with. You don’t need their applause. You’ll find that out, and when you do….
Memos from the Middle 