When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost Read online

  Praise for

  When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost

  “Without doubt, Black Women had made meaningful interventions into Feminist Thought before the publication of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, but none can claim to have done so wearing three-inch pumps, while bumping Heavy D, and sprinkling enough #BlackGirlMagic to conjure a new generation of Black Feminists who give no ‘f*cks’ to those who dare deny the value of a Black Girl’s life and her desires.”

  —Mark Anthony Neal, author of Looking for Leroy

  “Joan Morgan stripped feminism of its basic Black and Whiteness— redressed it in her own beautiful, badass, complicated, challenging, shades-of-gray couture criticism. Before it was popular to be ‘out’ as an unapologetic, magic, hood-loving, imperfect, sexy-ass, Black feminist, Joan put it down in Chickenheads, validating a whole generation of fierce young women, just waiting for that brave bitch to fire the shot, so we all could just go.”

  —Michaela Angela Davis, CNN and BET correspondent

  “The debt that a generation of writers, thinkers, and activists owe to Joan Morgan is incalculable. Joan gave us permission to ‘fuck with the grays’ and provided the blueprint for an analysis of culture that yields more vibrant and nuanced takes on our humanity. For me, as a man who wants to be challenged to unpack the failures of black men to show up and fight for sisters, the beauty in Joan’s words is that she didn’t stop at their trauma, but allowed us into the world of bountiful, beautiful blackness that black women have lived by. Chickenheads changed the game.”

  —Mychal Denzel Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching

  “In When Chickheads Come to Roost, Joan Morgan began dismantling the one-dimensional ‘strong Black women’ myth. The unapologetic realness in her essays, even today, are a beacon for young women on the journey of accepting—and celebrating—the beautiful complexities of womanhood.”

  —Cori Murray, entertainment director at Essence

  “Definitely not your mother’s guide to the Equal Rights Amendment. . . . Morgan’s reflections are as timely as they are cogent.”

  —Kristal Brent Zook, Vibe

  “Morgan tussles with the perceived contradictions of being black, female, fly, and feminist—from the myth of the strongblackwoman to chickenhead envy . . . a fresh alternative to accepted notions about black womanhood.”

  —Lori L. Tharps, Ms.

  “It’s a bold, cheeky, self-affirming read, and for a black woman in this society, there’s hardly enough affirmation.”

  —Martine Bury, Jane

  “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost . . . is gaining nationwide acclaim for adding a fresh, idiosyncratic point of view—the voice of a new generation—to the oft-debated saga. Painstakingly straddling the line which separates street smarts from book intelligence, Morgan offers 240 pages worth of commentary on what it is like for a Black woman to come of age, Gen-X style. . . . While most Gen-Xers claim to be ‘keepin’ it real,’ Morgan’s new book instead shows that she’s making the conscious choice to ‘keep it right.’ And not only by flipping and bouncing words and phrases that reflect today’s popular culture, this new age feminist shows and proves that the day in which James Brown screams ‘it’s a man’s world’ might be finally coming to a dawn.”

  —Michael J. Rochon, Philadelphia Tribune

  “A debut collection of impassioned essays, written in poetic, flowing prose. . . . Fresh and articulate. Steadily perceptive, shrewdly provocative.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[Morgan] brings a powerful voice to concerns of modern black women.”

  —Vanessa Bush, Booklist

  “As is the case with a lot of Morgan’s work, Chickenheads remains unafraid to ‘go there’ around a few touchy issues. . . . [The book] will definitely engender passionate discussions among readers. . . . Regardless of how interpreted, you gotta give it up to this ‘yardie gyal’ from the Bronx who’s brave enough to put her ideas out there so that the rest of us home-grrrls can all together start climbing toward wholeness.”

  —Honey

  “Whether one agrees with Morgan or not, the sister definitely makes you think.”

  —Ronda Racha Penrice, Rap Pages

  “A journalist by trade and outspoken black feminist by inclination, Joan Morgan has style to burn. . . . When Morgan brings it, she’s funny, fierce, and yes feminist. . . . Morgan insists that the hip-hop generation can set its own goals—emotional, spiritual, social and political. Time to move on, and Morgan’s leading the way.”

  —Cindy Fuchs, Philadelphia City Paper

  “It’s refreshing to see Morgan add racial dynamics to the gender-politics debate. . . . This book is a postmodern Waiting to Exhale—a romantic melodrama for all the black women who are beautiful, smart, accomplished and not apologizing for any man who can’t get his act together. . . . Morgan is a credible independent spirit and autonomous woman.”

  —Caille Millner, San Jose Mercury News

  “Joan Morgan has undertaken the necessary and painstaking task of navigating the world of Black Male/Female relationships. You go Joan! I saw myself in this book. Thank you for making me stop and think and reciprocate love.”

  —Ananda Lewis, television personality

  “Everything you want to know about the sisters—and then some.”

  —Sean “Puffy” Combs

  “Joan Morgan writes with passion, pain, and a charming playfulness about the fun and games of African-American life in the nineties.”

  —Nelson George, author of Hip Hop America

  “Strong, soft, wise, and right on the beat with much flava to savor.”

  —Fab 5 Freddy

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  contents

  acknowledgments

  epigraph

  foreword

  intro.: dress up

  the f-word

  hip-hop feminist

  from fly-girls to bitches and hos

  strongblackwomen

  strongblackwomen -n- endangeredblackmen . . . this is not a love story

  lovenote

  babymother

  chickenhead envy

  beyoncé, black feminist art, and this oshun bidness

  afterword

  one last thing before I go

  reading group guide

  about the author

  source notes

  index

  For my mother, Maud Morgan.

  The wind beneath my wings.

  acknowledgments

  Thanks and praises to God for love unconditional and my ancestors whose shoulders I stand on. Grandma Emily, Grandma Rachel, Great-grandma Jane, Grandpa Frank, Aunt Amy, Uncle Leroy walked close by and reminded me what I was made of. Maferefun Eggun. Maferefun Yemoja for giving me a crown at the beginning of this journey and the courage to wear it by the end. Modupues Iya Mi. Okun Shina. Maferefun Gbogbo Orisa for not only the love and strength you gave but the angels you sent to assist me: My editor, Sarah Baker, whose belief in this project was admirably unwavering—especially in the face of my self-doubt. I could not have done this without you. My agent, Sarah Lazin, who knew long before I did that there was a book inside me—waiting. The
Morgan and Lawson families, who taught me how to fight and loved me through my battles. I love you immensely. My godmothers Judith Brabham and Stephanie Weaver for their continued support and examples of good character and dignity. My Ocha Family, for their prayers.

  Special thanks to Social Text, Essence, and Vibe magazines; Ozzie’s Coffee Shop in Park Slope (for current and caffeine); Marc and Jenny Baptiste, Jeffrey Woodley, Terrie Williams, Kim Hendrickson, and April Barton.

  Mad love to the host of kind folk who fed me creatively, emotionally, and literally: Zahara and Malik Abdur-Razzaq, Mrs. Genevieve Hall Duncan, Keith Clinkscales, Alan Ferguson, Sophia Chang, Orgyln Clarke, Rebecca Williams, Charles Stone, Lisa Leone, Jac Benson, Chris Lighty, Raquel Cepeda, Fab 5 Freddy, Beth Ann Hardison, Carolyn Jones, Akissi Britton, Ed Lovelace, Kevin Powell, Audrey Edwards, Yvette Russell, Nelson George, Nadine Sutherland, and Gingi.

  Malcolm love, I thank you for making the light at the end of the tunnel shine brighter than ever before.

  Finally my eternal gratitude to all of the sistas I interviewed for this book. Your courage and generosity fortifies and inspires me. I will never stop telling our stories.

  “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, . . . at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.”

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  foreword

  by brittney cooper

  The first graduate seminar I ever taught was on hiphop feminism. I was able to teach that class because of this book, this gift, that those of us brown girls in the know call Chickenheads for short. I first bought Chickenheads when I was a college student at Howard, long before I ever proclaimed myself to be a feminist. I still have my original copy of the book. It has lived with me in four cities and states, and countless states of emotional being. Heartbreak, joy, laughter, confusion, outrage, resolution. This book has been a part of my journey from young womanhood to grown womanhood. It was the first book I rushed home to in graduate school, when I started to feel like being a feminist and loving the most ratchet, crunk kinds of hip-hop just wouldn’t work anymore. Joan’s book told me that it could work——that I could work. That I didn’t have to give up the things I loved to pursue my passions and politics. Thank God, I believed her. Then I went to class and told my Black feminist professors emphatically that I wasn’t giving up hip-hop. No matter what they said. This book has been joy on pleasure-filled days and medicine on painful ones. They balked. They critiqued. They relented. This book has that kind of magic.

  The history of generational Black feminism might be seen as a history of sunbursts of artistic and political synergy, as artists and activists call back and forth to each other, perhaps while they turn a double-dutch rope, snapping and clapping out a rhythm, designed exactly for a Black girl to jump in, right in the middle, hit that rhythm, and make her mark. The 1970s was one such sunburst, bringing us Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Michele Wallace, and the advent of hip-hop.

  1999 was another sunburst moment, a Prince-prophesied moment, a turn-of-the-century commencement, ushered in by all that Joan offered to us in Chickenheads. In that moment, a new generation of Black women stood up, demanding a new idiom, a new language, a new set of frameworks in which to articulate Black girlhood, Black womanhood, and Black feminism. The year 1999 was a pivotal one for Black women in hip-hop to begin to articulate their own sense of what grown Black womanhood meant. Sister Souljah published what is widely considered to be the first piece of hip-hop or street literature, The Coldest Winter Ever. Rachel Raimist released Nobody Knows My Name, the first documentary about women in hip-hop, and Joan published the now-iconic Chickenheads. Not yet in the twenty-first century, they began to push toward more expansive ideas of Black womanhood, ones tailor-made for the twenty-first century. This forward-looking sensibility is the reason that I can still teach this book today, and have women who were just toddlers when it was written tell me how thankful they are for a writer “from their generation,” articulating their needs, feelings, and desires.

  Chickenheads is important for many reasons. One of them is that in her unapologetic and willful assertion that hip-hop and feminist could and should go together, Joan wove together the Black girls reared and raised on Toni Morrison and bell hooks and Gayl Jones and Audre Lorde, and those reared on Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, Beastie Boys, and Doug E. Fresh, choosing to imbue them with a fierce blackgirltude, as yet unmatched. Chickenheads also stands out among a paltry few memoirs of young Black womanhood not written in slavery and not written by a celebrity. Seriously, how many memoirs of young Black women in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century can you name or do you teach?

  Because Joan had the courage to put her whole self on the page, she made space for each and every one of us. And in so doing, she unwittingly created a movement of crunk-ass Black women showing up in the academy, much perhaps to her dismay, challenging professors to let us bring our whole ratchet, working class, outwardly polished, inwardly jagged, crying loving turnt-up selves into the room. Because she had courage to see the inherent ways that hip-hop and Black feminist epistemologies showed up in her own sense of Jamaican-Bronx girl embodiment, she created a whole new field of study for those of us latter-day Black feminist sistren, those of us like me, raised on ’Pac and Big, Kim and Foxy, Lauryn and Missy. Still though, this book speaks truth to power for young women who bump Nicki Minaj, Kanye, Drake, Rihanna, and Beyoncé. Because she was visionary, young sisters now write doctoral dissertations on hip-hop feminism.

  There has never been a time in the years since I bought this book that I haven’t gone back to it and seen a new thing there that I hadn’t seen before. Always, I feel affirmed and reminded that I ain’t crazy, because this legacy she left us is full of the sharpest knives, the most piercing bullets, and that kind of soul-hugging, I see you, hear you, feel you love that only a black girl can give. I have opened this book when I needed to make sense to myself. I have opened this book when yet another macktivist brother, of the chocolate genius boy variety, became more disappointment than dream fulfilled. I have opened this book to try to understand my journey to become a writer. I have opened this book to give myself permission to be the feminist I have always been.

  I don’t do hugs. Everyone who knows me knows this. But when I read this book, it feels like I am sitting simultaneously at the feet of, and on the sofa of, the big sister I never had but always wanted, wrapped in a warm embrace. So many generations of Black women didn’t have these kinds of stories. I know. I looked. So when I read this work, I am reminded of the incomparable gift of being able to sit down and read a book and know that a Black girl who came before us knew what we would need, and had enough foresight and generosity to write it in these pages. And to leave it here for me, for us, and for all the fierce Black and Brown girl geniuses to come.

  intro.

  dress up

  It started with a dress. A hot little thing. A spaghetti-strapped Armani number, with a skintight bodice and a long flowing skirt, in that shade of orange that black girls do the most justice. I bought it in La-La Land precisely because it reminded me of New York in the seventies, with its sexy sistas (girls with names like Pokie, Nay-Nay, Angela, and Robin) and those leotard and dance skirt sets they used to rock back in the day. This was back when I was a shorty with cherries for breasts and absolutely no ass to speak of. I used to sit on our tenement stoop mesmerized by the way those flimsy little tops knew how to hug a tittie in all the right places, or the way a proper Bronx Girl Switch (two parts Switch to one part Bop) could make the skirts move like waves. Wide-eyed, I watched regla project girls transform into Black Moseses capable of parting seas of otherwise idle Negros.

  And I couldn’t wait to be one.

  The opportunity presented itself two decades later. The Crayola-colored ladies of Ntozake Shange’s famous choreopoem for colored gi
rls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf had just turned twenty and various factions of black New York turned out to help them celebrate. The sight of the Niggerati, R-n-B weave divas, church ladies, bohemians, and ultra-Nubians milling about outside the theater made for a delectable pretheater aperitif. And folks showed up early—in complete defiance of C.P. Time—in order to fully imbibe.

  The dress was my personal tribute. So when Dude called out an appreciative, “Heeyyy lady in orange,” flashing all thirty-two of his pearly whites, I couldn’t help it. I had to slay him. Fancying myself to be none other than Shange’s Sechita, the deliberate coquette with orange butterflies and aqua sequins floating between her breasts, I threw a little more hip in the switch than usual, and smiled back half as long but just as hard. Dramatic yes, but hey, the day had been a long time coming.

  Few hissy fits can compare to the one I threw twenty years ago when my mom announced she was taking her husband and not her precocious woman-child to see Shange’s play. I’d been transfixed by the poster since the first day it went up on our community center’s wall. Afro-puffed and arms akimbo, I’d stare at it every day, struck by the poster-woman’s sad, sad eyes and the eeriness of the title scribbled in child-like graffiti across an imaginary tenement wall.

  It didn’t matter that I didn’t know a damn thing about suicide. Death, yes—since departed colored girls are part of the ghetto’s given—but none of them had left in ways as exotic as checking out on their own volition. But I reasoned that the play had something to do with being black, female, and surviving—and those were intuitive if not conscious concerns for any ten-year-old colored girl growing up in the South Bronx ’round 1975.

  So convinced was I that this play held some crucial part of me, my moms’s decision to take my father constituted high gender treason. I acted out accordingly. I pleaded and cajoled, bawled and whined, and when that proved to be of no avail, I employed the pouty silent treatment. Even when my moms firmly reminded me that no one in our house believed the rod spoiled the child, I refused to let it go. I sang the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h child things are going to get easier” over and over again—attitudinal and loud—until I was two seconds shy of an ass-whooping.