When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost Read online

  My obsession with for colored girls . . . carried over well into adulthood, long after I snuck into the adult section of the public library, stole the book, and fell in love with words and images I didn’t quite understand. It remained among my favorites as I grew older and sought balmy remedies for tempestuous emotions about black men, women, and myself. Seeing it performed was always cathartic and I never missed an opportunity —except for that first run on Broadway in 1975.

  I’ve long since forgiven my mother, of course. In my pre-adolescent selfishness I failed to see that she too was a colored girl. The play held crucial parts of her —parts she needed to share with her husband and not her ten-year-old daughter.

  Like so many women of her time, my mother was deeply immersed in the exciting, frightening, and feminist process of becoming herself. Receiving her G.E.D., becoming a full-time college student, and eventually a registered nurse enabled her to shed the restrictive costumes of domestic, mother, and wife. She became, as Ntozake Shange literally means, “a woman who walks through the world with her own things. One who walks like a lion.”

  Such transformation requires new spiritual and emotional attire. Her newfound confidence (not to mention emotional and financial independence from my father) was hard-earned—evidenced by the copious, midnight tears she never knew I saw. But over the years I watched her painfully pull apart and successfully re-stitch the pieces of her life. For my mother and black women like her, Shange’s play gave their experiences a legitimacy and a voice it would take me years to comprehend.

  So many of those women were there, gathered outside the Henry Street Theatre on that glorious early summer day, anxious to witness the twentieth-anniversary run. Like me I suppose they were reminiscing about where this play fit into their lives.

  As the curtain rose and the actresses took their places on stage, I was filled with the same anticipation I felt that night twenty years ago, when I’d waited up long past bedtime for my parents’ return, anxious for the blow-by-blow that would reveal the secrets of black womanhood.

  I didn’t get it back then. Daddy’s response—little more than a grunt—told me nothing. Mom’s response was simply that I was too young to know.

  And I didn’t get it in 1995. I’d come into the theater hoping to finally feel what my mother must have over two decades ago. I wanted Shange’s language to arm me with the awesome power of self-definition. I left realizing this was impossible. As much as I appreciated the artistic, cultural, and historical significance of this moment it wasn’t mine to claim.

  As a child of the post–Civil Rights, post-feminist, post-soul hip-hop generation, my struggle songs consisted of the same notes but they were infused with distinctly different rhythms. What I wanted was a for colored girls . . . of my own. The problem was that I was waiting around for someone else to write it.

  This complacency is typical of my generation. Our ancestors’ struggles, accomplishments, and errors may have blessed us with an acute sense of analysis, but privilege and comfort make us slow to initiate change. It’s up to our elders, we figure, to create a bandwagon fly enough for us to jump on. Unfortunately, the problems don’t go away while we wait. Instead, racism, sexism, poverty, inadequate education, escalating rates of incarceration, piss-poor health conditions, drugs, and violence continue to corrupt the quality of our lives every day. Relying on older heads to redefine the struggle to encompass our generation’s issues is not only lazy but dangerous.

  Mad love and respect to black foremothers (like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Pearl Cleage, Ntozake Shange, and Audre Lorde, to name a few) who passionately articulated their struggles and suggested agendas (imperfect or not) for black female empowerment, but these sistas did their due. The enormous task of saving our lives falls on nobody else’s shoulders but ours. Consider our foremothers’ contributions a bad-ass bolt of cloth. We’ve got to fashion the gear to our own liking.

  This book, in part, was an effort to combat my own complacency. I wrote it because I honestly believe that the only way sistas can begin to experience empowerment on all levels—spiritual, emotional, financial, and political—is to understand who we are. We have to be willing to take an honest look at ourselves—and then tell the truth about it.

  Much of what we’ll see will be fly as hell. A lot will be painful and trifling. Like Langston Hughes said, We are beautiful but we are ugly too. The tom-tom laughs. The tom-tom cries. But only when we’ve told the truth about ourselves—when we’ve faced the fact that we are often complicit in our oppression—will we be able to take full responsibility for our lives. The only way we’ll ever know what to do about 70 percent of our children being born to single mothers,1 the state of mutual disrespect that plagues our intimate relationships, the bitches and hos that live among us, or the chickenhead that lurks inside us all is to “keep it real”—without compromise.

  And I’m not going to lie; the process is often terrifying. While writing this book, I went from sharing our funky, deep woman’s shit with my homegirls to putting it down on paper for general public consumption. Trust me, all my years of writing articles dealing with men’s sexism and racism was easy by comparison. I can’t give enough love to the chorus of sista voices that embarked with me on this journey. Whether they were formal parts of my research groups, or strangers who kicked it with me in coffee shops their exchanges served as beacons, encouraging me to travel to places I would have found too frightening to explore alone in the dark. For that I’m forever thankful.

  Trying to address our diversity was equally as stressful. How in Oshun’s name to capture the nose-ringed/ caesared/weaved up/Gucci-Prada-DKNY down/ultra-Nubian/alternative-bohemian/beats-loving/smooth-jazz-playing magic of us was something I couldn’t begin to fathom. What got me through (besides the unconditional love and support of my mama, godparents, editor, fam, and friends) was remembering some advice I once gave Kim, a former student of mine.

  Kim took an acting class I taught at the predominantly rich, white prep school we’d both attended. She was understandably anxious to find a scene where she could be a black girl (instead of a black girl trying to add her own mocha flava to a role clearly written for someone white, which, given our alma mater’s make-up, happened a lot). She suggested Shange’s poem somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff and asked if I thought she could handle it. Not only did I think she could, I was thrilled by the prospect. Kim was evolving into a fierce young actor and the monologue was one of my favorites.

  Her first rendition attempted to parrot the voice immortalized on the colored girls . . . sound track, replete with her own sassy inflections. She was a veritable eye-rollin’, smart-talkin’, finger-snappin’ Miss Thang, but she wasn’t believable. What I wanted in lieu of the black girl attitude was her truth. Kim was raised on hip-hop, not jazz or the blues, and she didn’t know nothing about Sun-Ra, Dew City, or Mr. Louisiana Hot Link. In order for her to possess the piece and make it hers she was going to have to infuse it with her own voice and experiences.

  I gave her two pieces of advice. The first was to tell her truth and stop worrying about encompassing the entire spectrum of black female identity. The second was to start with what she knew. After a few difficult and teary-eyed attempts, Mr. Louisiana Hot Link became the rapper D-nice; the neck-rollin’, fingersnappin’ anger gave way to the soft-spoken, vulnerable, fearful sound of a sixteen-year-old heart breaking for the very first time. It was both fantastic and powerful.

  Writing this book has given me much compassion for how difficult this was for Kim. In a society of ever-shifting identity politics, I was asking this sixteen-year-old to sift through so many conflicting interpretations of femaleness and blackness and free her voice. In order to do this she was going to have to liberate it from the stranglehold of media stereotypes—the pathetic SheNayNay impersonations of black male comedians, the talk-to-the-hand Superwomen, the video-hos, crackheads, and lazy welfare queens—that obscure so much of who we are. And she was going to have to push her foremoth
ers’ voices far enough away to discover her own.

  I knew that I needed to follow my own advice if I was going to write this book. Trying to capture the voice of all that is young black female was impossible. My goal, instead, was to tell my truth as best I could from my vantage point on the spectrum. And then get you to talk about it. This book by its lonesome won’t give you the truth. Truth is what happens when your cumulative voices fill in the breaks, provide the remixes, and rework the chorus.

  Believe me, I’ll be listening for it.

  In the meantime, I’m kicking it off with what I know.

  the f-word

  On our quests to create ourselves we brown girls play dress up. What is most fascinating about this ritual of imitation is what we choose to mimic—what we reach for in our mothers’ closets. We move right on past the unglamorous garb of our mothers’ day-to-day realities—the worn housedresses or beat-up slippers—and reach instead for the intimates. Slip our sassy little selves into their dressiest of dresses and sexiest of lingerie like being grown is like Christmas or Kwanzaa and can’t come fast enough.

  Then we practice the deadly art of attitude—rollin’ eyes, necks, and hips in mesmerizing synchronization, takin’ out imaginary violators with razor-sharp tongues. Perhaps to our ingenuous eyes transforming ourselves into invincible Miss Thangs is the black woman’s only armature against the evils of the world.

  Interestingly enough, we do not imitate our mothers at their weakest or most vulnerable. Shedding silent midnight tears, alone and afraid. That we don’t do until much later, when we are fully grown, occasionally trippin’ and oblivious to our behavior’s origins.

  It took years to realize that the same process was true of my feminism. For a very long time I was a black woman completely unaware that I faced the world in my mother’s clothes . . .

  I became a black feminist writer in the least feminist of ways. It happened one night in Harlem, up on Sugar Hill with a man the goddess had thrown in my path to grant me the sufferice I thought I needed to become a real woman. I was the young lover of a celebrated griot of black post-modernism, an icon of eighties black bohemia. He was a seductively brilliant brother with limited emotional skills, a penchant for younger women, and a Pygmalion obsession of legendary notoriety.

  At twenty-four, I’d already been an assistant manager at a major retail store, an aspiring actress, and a very good teacher, but I still had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I stepped into my lover’s life like I arrived in Harlem—willing and pliable—fresh outta lockdown in South Bronx soul prisons and armed with fly-girl attitude and wanna-be bohemian desire. In short, I was as ghetto a Galatea as you could get.

  The night I became a black feminist writer was so like every other night that the details are rendered indiscernible. For poetry’s sake I would like to say it started with one of those tender post-coital moments, brown limb entwined with brown limb, discussing the implications of wildin’, race, and rape in the Central Park Jogger case. This is unlikely. My lover was not tender and we were not particularly compatible.

  More likely than not, the conversation took place over the phone, with him in his space and me in mine, enjoying the magic of an unobstructed Sugar Hill view. To my right, Yankee Stadium and the rest of the Boogie-Down served as backdrop for the nocturnal adventures of the Polo Grounds. On the left was Amsterdam, then Broadway, painted colorful and loud by the nonstop traffic of an ever-growing Dominican presence. But I was probably looking straight ahead, down the block, past my lover’s building, past Harlem, Central Park, the Empire State Building, and somewhere past that— the rest of the world. And that’s when I told him that writing an article about the racial implications of the Central Park Jogger case without discussing gender was, like, bananas ’cause yes the coverage was racist, but that doesn’t change the fact that the woman was raped and probably by some brown boys. I mean damn, wasn’t anybody gonna say she wasn’t a victim becuz she was white, she was a victim becuz she was a woman and what did he think, that if I was a black investment banker who happened to be in the park that night I wouldn’t be raped ’cause homeboys woulda been like, “Naw we can’t hit it ’cuz she a sista”? And if it was a sista lying there where would we be ’cuz talking about niggas and sexism is like, mad taboo. So maybe, just maybe while we’re busy being mad at the white folks we could also take a minute to acknowledge that sexism and violence against women occurs in our community too and our men are no better or worse than anybody else’s.

  My lover’s kindness lay in the generosity of his talent, his unfailing ability to pull out diamonds where others see only coal. He called his editor early that morning and told her about my midnight rave. When she asked if I could write, he doggedly ignored my lack of experience, cast aside the fact that I’d never expressed as much as passing desire, and said simply, “Yes. She can.” Thirty-six hours later I turned in my first feature for a national weekly paper.

  The piece got considerable play and I was rechristened Joan Morgan—Black Feminist Writer. It took a year of being published before I would call myself a writer. It took that long to figure out I had something valuable to say. My lover’s work was done when I did, and we went our separate ways.

  Coming out as a black feminist, however, was another matter entirely.

  Feminism claimed me long before I claimed it. The foundation was laid by women who had little use for the word. Among them the three country women— mother, daughter, and sister—who brought me into this world sans hospital, electricity, or running water. (My father was off doing whatever it is island men do while their women give birth to girl children.) Shortly after, my mother left Jamaica to see for herself that the streets of the Bronx were not paved with gold. They were paved with things more frightening than she could have imagined. So she armed her children with the King’s English, good character, and explicit instructions to kick the ass of any knucklehead stupid enough to come for us. In the meantime, she cleaned white folks’ homes, put herself and two kids through college, and proceeded to travel the world.

  There were others. The mothers of friends. The grande dame Genevieve survived burying a husband, three children, and a daughter-in-law and taught us a woman commands a great deal of power when she remains, above all else, a lady. Sassy Aunt ClaireI kicked a drug addiction square in the ass to resume her perpetual love affair with life. Lois’s fierce spirit was the harness that held her child back from the grave, until cancer caused her to slip and fall into her own.

  And of course, Marvelous Melba aka Grand Diva Emeritus who loved magic and flowers and sensual things and was always down to share a few secrets over a good cappuccino. I did not know that feminism is what you called it when black warrior women moved mountains and walked on water. Growing up in their company, I considered these things ordinary.

  The spirits of these women were nowhere to be found in the feminism I discovered in college. Feminists on our New England campus came in two flavas—both variations of vanilla. The most visible were the braless, butch-cut, anti-babes, who seemed to think the solution to sexism was reviling all things male (except, oddly enough, their clothing and mannerisms) and sleeping with each other. They used made up words like “womyn,” “femynists,” and threw mad shade if you asked them directions to the “Ladies’ Room.” The others—straight and more femme—were all for the liberation of women as long as it did not infringe on their sense of entitlement. They felt their men should share the power to oppress. They were the spiritual descendants of the early suffragettes and absolutely not to be trusted.

  This is not to say that our differences were so great that the wave of feminist activism on campus left me totally unaffected. I stuck my toes in the water. I was adamantly pro-choice, attended speak-outs against rape and domestic violence, and made sure to vote for candidates who paid lip-service to equal pay for equal work, protecting planned parenthood, legalized abortion, and quality child care. But feminism definitely felt like white women’s shit.


  White girls don’t call their men “brothers” and that made their struggle enviably simpler than mine. Racism and the will to survive it creates a sense of intra-racial loyalty that makes it impossible for black women to turn our backs on black men—even in their ugliest and most sexist of moments. I needed a feminism that would allow us to continue loving ourselves and the brothers who hurt us without letting race loyalty buy us early tombstones.

  Being the bastion of liberal education it was, the university’s curriculum did expose me to feminists of color. (Unfortunately this happened far more frequently in African-American Studies courses than it did in Women’s Studies). Dedicated professors—male and female—exhumed the voices of Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Frances Harper, and Mary Church Terrell and let me know that black women had been making it their bidness to speak out against sexism and racism for over 250 years. (That it took almost twelve years of formal education to find out our contribution to African-American history was more than Harriet Tubman or Coretta Scott King made me seriously question if only white folks were guilty of revisionist history.) Discovering the works of Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Paula Giddings, and bell hooks—black women who claimed the f-word boldly—not only enabled me to understand the complex and often complicit relationship between both isms; it empowered me with language to express the unique oppression that comes with being colored and a woman.

  I was eternally grateful, but I was not a feminist. When I thought about feminism—women who were living and breathing it daily—I thought of white women or black female intellectuals. Academics. Historians. Authors. Women who had little to do with my everyday life. The sistas in my immediate proximity grew up in the ’hood, summered in the Hamptons, swapped spit on brightly lit Harlem corners, and gave up more than a li’l booty in Ivy League dorms. They were ghetto princesses with a predilection for ex–drug dealers. They got their caesars cut at the barbershop and perms at the Dominican’s uptown. They were mack divas who rolled wit posses fifteen bitches deep and lived for Kappa beach parties, the Garage, the Roxy, and all things hip-hop. Black feminists were some dope sistas, respected elders most def, but they were not my contemporaries. They were not crew. And for most of my twenties, crew was what mattered.