The Wednesday after the election I woke up to a watery, painful, swollen eye. It was impossible to write; I could barely stumble to the bathroom to see the damage done and boy howdy, was it bad. Bright red; swollen to a slit; glistening with tears. As someone who has worn glasses since I was 7, believe me when I tell you that I am a girl who needs both eyes to function.
As for the eye, it got worse (the pain and swelling leapfrogging over my nose bridge to affect the other eye), but then it did get better as the day wore on. Even so, I had double vision, blurriness, stabbing pain, and the vertigo and unsteadiness that comes with two compromised eyes. Whatever it was in my eye, it was doing its best to cry itself out. Between wiping up tears, bumping over various pieces of furniture and walls that presented themselves as surprises as I gingerly made it from the living room to the bathroom to the kitchen and (finally) back to the safety of the Coronavirus Couch, it was an interesting morning and afternoon.
There was no easy fix. The only action that brought any kind of relief was inaction.
So, readers, that was how I found myself immobile, right eye taped shut, but still leaking, prone and blinded and pained. All there was to do was to think. About Election Day to be sure, but also about the days and weeks and months leading up to that day; about polling and cohorts and wordcraft and videos.
About my mother, who lived through a sea change during the civil rights era of the early 60’s. I imagined Bobbye holding me in her arms in her parent’s home, only ten days after my birth, listening to MLK’s oration at the March on Washington, not sure where her husband was in the West Pacific as he served his country on an aircraft carrier, watching this young man with a novel and clear vision for this young infant, with her own mother (herself only one generation removed from enslavement) looking on.
Lacie Mae, my maternal grandmother, was a maid. Her daughter would go on to become an educator. Her granddaughter, the one whose eyes were only recently opened, fresh from her birth, the one named after the maid from Camden Arkansas would go on to become the woman speaking to you now.
I imagine them, grandmother and mother and granddaughter, in the covered porch that held the newfangled TV, daring to imagine a future for this sickly, preemie child. I imagine myself being held tightly as they heard MLK’s words of promise for me, for my sisters, for all of us. I think of Lacie Mae voting for the very first time; of my mother who did her part in furthering Dr. King’s dream by standing up and showing up throughout my childhood; to protest school inequities in San Diego, spoiled milk and produce in Black neighborhoods. Fighting for me to be allowed into advanced classes. Being both scared for me and proud of me as I continued their legacy of activism.
Neither Lacie Mae nor her daughter Bobbye Jean ever cried in the midst of their own individual and collective struggles. Or, perhaps more accurately said, I never saw them cry. I am sure they did, and I am also sure they held it in, internalizing and suppressing, and sublimating; torquing and pivoting in order to service and live out what we in Lace on Race now call our North Star in order to be as effective as they could be.
Tears–of fatigue, of disappointment, of frustration, as they saw their country lurch and retreat, lurch and retreat, toward the vision and the promise of the March on Washington–I am sure they shed them.
Tears, that is. Internally, never to be seen by me or my sisters and cousins, and never, *never* seen by those who actively oppressed them and the many more who silently watched during that time; who observed and did nothing.
Tears were cracks in the armor. Tears took away from the work. One tear could unleash a torrent, and would erode the armor that made it possible for Black women to do what can only be called heroic work, both on an individual and on a collective level.
The tears leaked out though. In diseases that hit Black women earlier and harder and deadlier.
Lacie Mae died in 1991, barely four months before Bobbye Jean suffered a massive aneurysm and stroke that laid her low and blunted her life at not quite 52. Bobbye Jean hardly had time to even begin to grieve for Lacie Mae before the stroke took her voice, literally for months. But she, like I, leaked.
Bobbye Jean, whom I had never seen cry, had a face–and tear ducts–she could no longer control. She had an almost non existent frustration tolerance; and rightly so. Cups she could no longer hold, words she loved that no longer came; her trademark auburn hair shaved away. Locked in, stuck in a hospital bed for literally months, her thoughts pent up and unarticulated, Bobbye Jean’s body, in that broken down state, finally broke through.
She wept, sometimes just leaking, but oftentimes out of fear and frustration and anger. She howled and moaned. She looked at me with apologetic eyes as she took an hour to eat a half bowl of soup, half of it in her, half of it on her. She cried when she saw my dad. She cried when she saw us girls. She cried when she saw her shaved head. (Only the one side where they clipped the aneurysm. In the months she was in Balboa, it never occurred to them to shave the other side. My mother, who prided herself on her appearance, was devastated. We covered mirrors.) She cried when she found she could not read (that lasted for months). She cried when she learned she would have to learn to walk again.
I was 28 that year. Half my life ago. Acutely aware of the legacies of both of these quietly remarkable women, I assumed their mantles of relentless freedom making.
That led me to last Wednesday, with the votes still being counted, not sure of the fate of the man who systematically worked to strip both of their legacies away. Flat on my back, unable to use the tools of these two women; no reading or writing or speaking or walking; for a full day immobile.
After being on duty, writing, reading, researching, watching for almost four days straight, I could literally do nothing. I thought of my mother, again immobile in a bed after another stroke even as I was experiencing this, and my tears of frustration mixed with my leaky eyes.
The only thing that brought relief was dozing, and my mind took me back to Arkansas, then to 1991, then to waving to my mother in a hospital bed in a room I could not enter because of Covid, to my body breaking down without warning or permission in the throes of the most important election of my life. In the solitude, that day in the confines of the Coronavirus Couch, I wept, I howled, I moaned.
Like Bobbye Jean in 1991, words failed me. I could not decipher the words on the screens. All the tools that I had been given by Lacie Mae and Bobbye Jean were, that day, impotent. But I had their tears.
And, after a while, I stopped trying to contain them. I let them roll off my face. My camisole was soaked. I vocalized. Not with words but with something that transcended words. It was intergenerational; it was collective; it spanned the Atlantic.
My howls were for every Black woman who had struggled for freedom since we first touched shore here 401 years ago.
Which is to say, my howls were for every Black woman ever.
So, ten days later. I have my sight back. I can care for my mother and father. I can trip my namesake’s name off of my tongue and sing her name: Lacie Mae, Lacie Mae, Lacie Mae. We did it. We will keep walking, she and Bobbye Jean and I. My legs are their legs; my words their words; my fingers are theirs as I type. My voice is infused with theirs; Bobbye Jean’s pre-stroke precision, laced with Lacie Mae’s exuberant, profane wisdom.
I’ve been thinking about these last few days. And these last few days have made me think about the last 4 years. I did not cry 4 years ago on Election night. I have not cried very much at all over these last four years, not through some fairly significant losses.
I have not cried over my mother.
I have not cried over Tikka.
I’m not crying very much at all really. I’ve never felt I had the luxury of tears. I have always felt that weeping was something reserved for people in big houses with European cars; lives my grandmother made clean as a maid. I have not thought my pain was worth a pause. We don’t pause, not the likes of me, the progeny of Lacie and Bobbye. We put shoulder to stone, and we push.
Push. Push. Push. That’s how we do. “Keep It Pushing” was a phrase I heard almost on the daily during my childhood. It’s what we say after setbacks, after disappointments, when systems and institutions oppressed and suppressed; we were to continue to press on the stone. There was (and is) no carveout; no exception. Tears were self indulgent and self serving. So no tears, and if you do cry, make sure you are sweating enough so that no one will notice. So you can cry through your pores, through your calluses, through your hypertension and diabetes and heart disease and strokes that will kill you faster and harder and for which you will be blamed for your ‘lifestyle choices’
My body thinks otherwise, however. My body wants to cry, and if it needs to give me swollen eyes and watery tear ducts, so be it. My body knew that Wednesday after the bruising night and early morning, that I needed rest and reflection and catharsis; something this society never affords Black women. So my body took over. And I am grateful that it did. I needed to spend time with Lacie Mae and with Bobbye Jean. I needed to pause. I needed to acknowledge the hugeness, the magnitude of the endeavor I undertook three short weeks ago, as I laced up new walking shoes to lead you here as my only vocation.
I’ve thought a lot about what I want to say about these last 11 days. As I write this, Biden has won; sometimes by razor thin margins.
However, the dynamics that were in play here are still extant. They still need to be confronted regardless of who winds up in the White House in January.
Even as I need to be able to do several things at once, so do you.
I have a lot to do. I have to stay engaged with you, oh, I have to do the administrative work here, including the ask, including incorporation, including managing a staff and volunteers, including doing the work, and it is indeed work, of setting up my retirement life with the Retirement Board, wrapping up with the county, making sure that my Kaiser card still works. I also have to deal with the impending loss of my mother and how that exponentiates the urgency of my work here. I have to deal with living in a world without Tikka.
And I have to face you all. Eye to eye.
Y’all need to hold me. In New Ways.
When I showed my intense pain and wrote about Tikka, people were all too willing to give me a carve out. If ever there was a time to walk away from your stated ethos, you all told me, this is the time. There’s so much on your plate, Lace. You are to be absolved and given grace if you slosh. It’s okay if your kind candor is sharper than usual. Put another way, oh, a less generous way, there were a lot of you giving me permission to renege on being the person that I have worked incredibly hard to be.
Let’s pivot to race. Let’s pivot to the race.
Four years ago white people were gnashing their teeth and tearing their clothes at an outcome they did not want (or so they said; newer, more concerning polling numbers suggest differently); they lamented Trump and then the friday potluck happened, and their car note came due, and they fought with their husband about the trash, and then there was Amazon Day and the lament was forgotten. I can understand that. There’s only so much anybody can run up to the redline on their personal tachometers, as their stress load is so high they need to bring it back by any means necessary. I get it. Some people escape into a flurry of activity. That’s me. There’s always something to do around this house, there’s always something to write, there’s always someone to engage with, there’s always some sort of crisis that needs to get managed, whether or not I tell you all about it.
I can busy myself into a stupor. I can functionally dissociate; that is, I can function quite well even as I dissociate. I can compartmentalize like nobody else.
Is that healthy? It is not. That is why I need to hold many things in my one hand. I need to not let this election, and the necessary work after it, preclude my grief over my mother and Tikka, and I cannot allow that grief to derail me from my North Star. No matter how many of you want to give me permission. I, and you, need to be able to hold two imperatives at once.
There are reasons for that. I need to live out what I’ve taught all of you, and what Lacie Mae and Bobbye Jean taught me: that Praxis, reliability, and congruence are not optional. If those things are marrow deep for me, I cannot just shake them off like a moldy coat. I need to hold on to my convictions even in grief, even in despair, even with deep anger. I am not going to allow this election to dictate the woman I have worked incredibly hard to become.
And neither should you. That’s why in the coming days, I’m going to talk about congruence and what it means to walk through very lumpy crossings, particularly when you thought there would be a smooth road. It’s like all of us were driving along in sports cars, and instead of a smoothed out highway, we found ourselves in rocky terrain needing a Jeep. We have felt every jolt, we have heard rattling, we have felt our engines whine. The car we have built was not meant for this level of punishment. So we need to do some retrofitting. We need to soup-up our sports car.
I’m going to talk about this later in a video now that the swelling from my eyes have gone down and I feel less dreadful, but still nostalgic and pensive.
I have spent these last ten days thinking about who I am going to be with you. Staff and leadership team have been working very closely with me on long-range planning. I have to admit that part of that long-range planning assumed a Democrat leading this country, and by a wider margin than a micron. That hasn’t happened. So now we have to look at different ways of long-range planning, different ways of being with each other, different ways of my being with you.
We are still going to focus on internal work. I absolutely believe the internal work drives external action.
We are going to have to start working on multiple tracks. Some of you all have been with me for two days, some for two weeks or two months, some for almost three years. We need to re-remember what we have learned.
We have to look at the tenets again, and one of the tenets that we are going to have to look at with intense focus is how we grow up. There are so many of you who have been here for a very long time who still talk about how, “I have so much to learn, I know I’m not doing enough, I know there’s more to do, I’m still a baby in this.” Y’all are going to have to grow up and grow up fast.
Part of the problem of the last four years has been that white people have remained perpetual toddlers. Three years is enough time to get a Master’s degree or Ph.D. Why are you all still clinging to relative incompetence? Why do so few of you feel equipped to do this work reliably and well? And I’m speaking here to the 200 to 400 of you who are actively here, *for now*. Because people cycle in and out, it’s never been a reliable, dedicated cohort.
But to the other 9,800 of you, who have never so much as backed your car out of the garage and don’t know how lumpy the terrain is at all, you all need to buckle up and start driving. You need to lace up and start walking. That you never do is a big reason why we are where we are.
I don’t want to talk too much about blame. I did a lot of self-blame last night. If I had taught you better, if I had taught you faster, would more of you have embarked, truly embarked, on this walk? Perhaps, but you know what? That’s not my problem.
We have given you good resources. We have given you a sustainable community; that 9,800 of you have decided not to partake of it, it’s not on me. I refuse to take the blame for that, even as I refuse to take the blame for this painfully narrow win. I will hold myself accountable to leading you differently over terrain that is rockier than I thought it would be.
You need to be able to walk with me. It has been very gratifying to see a few new faces commenting in these last months and weeks, and particularly during election coverage. But the questions beg for all of us- where have you been? Who are we going to be individually and collectively? And how can we not slip into self-blaming or externalization or self-flagellation?
How we answer these questions will inform our practice and our praxis beyond this election, to the midterms of 2022, to our individual mandates to lessen and mitigate harm and also for the health of this community.
Lacie Mae and Bobbye Jean heaved their shoulders to the stone, and that is why we are where we are.
I can do no less.
Neither can you.
Keep walking.
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