Notes from a Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs
Womanist Time Travel
I’ve Felt My Multitudes in a Succession of Days
In Cary, Raleigh, Old Oxford Highway, and Durham, North Carolina I was left breathless and full. I was restored back to my senses and renewed on a Palm Sunday weekend. I wondered if this was intentional – everything else appeared to be just so. I smiled so hard that my cheeks hurt, even when I was unmoored.
We gathered at dinner. My fears of who all gone be there abolished by the first course, I recognized that we were invited into a place where you will have a friend. I was surrounded by allies, champions, believers. New faces I could trust. And some ambivalence too. The nervous tension easing away with robust laughter, big questions, and growing smiles. And wine. We laughed – made homes of our seats. We were greeted by our generous hosts and reminded that we each have a mission and that collectively we are working towards something greater. Before dessert we roam around the dining room in our delicate fabrics, especially chosen materials and fragrant aromas – the lighting warming us on the outside as the fancy victuals warmed our insides. I came back to the table at the promise of a lil something sweet – and was met with familiarity and excitement – we all wanted that confection. As we sat and closed out the meal – the citrus sauce reminded me that tartness is just fine when it’s well balanced and textured. I forgave myself – for doubting that I should hide that part of myself. Then the room found us again with one another.
Those of us in the womanist vanguard are tracing a legacy, with our forms. Bequeathed with a responsibility that has been established long before the contractions and machinations of Germanic, Romantic and other colonial languages crippled our mother tongues. We tell stories with our hands, our hips. There is a message in our whispers and on our sighs. Our kisses and long embraces. Our gaze, winks, eyerolls, squints, and stares hold infinities. We are “limitless beneficiaries of Harriet Jacobs; story…”
The Harriet Jacobs Project Gave Us Landscapes
We ride together everywhere – we become fledging family “rooted by the land and waters of Edenton.”
Sensuality was our opportunity to redirect the energy towards
- Liberation
- Song
- Breath and Breathing
- Stillness
- Luxuriation
- Agency and Options
- Softness
- Tenderness
- Delicate Touches
- Whispers
- Giggles
- Salt & Spice
- Tears
I am a Black woman. For all that it means and all that it has the potential to be – I am more than what I earn, and I am all that I have come from. We are endowed with a name and a face, and we have the risky fortune to do what we will with these options. We make offerings after circling the resting places of those who set the stage for our imaginations.
All 70 of us move together like a body of water. Mounds of supple flesh just below the eyes gather to make mountains. Lips rollick. Chins become great plains. Foreheads glisten, ashen, move with the wind. We cry or hold back tears – we think. My face becomes a beach.
After we eat we make ourselves more comfortable with one another as we roam historic Edenton. At the courthouse, where Harriet’s Grandmother enacted the procession that led to her granddaughter’s belabored freedom. Letitia Huckaby’s photography, portraits, black silhouettes of Black legacy on floral backgrounds printed onto woven materials that are used to make flags – billow in the lights of the windows of this place older than America yet still younger than the violent forces that initiated its construction.
Then we step on to the paved site of young Harriet – the memory of her cramped quarters dueling with the hot sun as we listened together about her life. I am spent by the time Michelle finishes the oral history and the speculative conditions of the life of a woman who watched her children play while they miss her , as she lay mere steps aways.
We cramp together on a small bench on the pier – watching the waves of the brackish dark waters – and listen to one another. The wind reminds of us of its power, and we shiver when the sun goes back into hiding. We talk shop, then talk life. Then we look at our watches. Then we realize it is time to leave. Then two of us decide in lieu of filling our embossed mason jars with soil, that we will bring the flowers near the courthouse with us instead. The Carolina Jessamine are magically gold and they hold on to water from this place. We rush back to our coaches.
The Threat of Recapture
“The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.” It is important to remember as Ntozake Shange does so deftly in her novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (a book lent to me while I Sojourned) this phrasing she uses to collapse Black time in the Americas. The slaves who were ourselves. Our history is nothing to be ashamed of. We are still living it. Yet, still something to mourn, to grieve – to press our rage upon, to capture like a dried flower in the pages of a yellowing scrapbook, never to forget – but also so much more. The humanity and invention of the lives of those who built the wealth of this uneven nation – also had ordinary days and dynamics that mirror our day-to-day mundanity. We worked. We had ceremony, gentleness – picked flowers, boiled water, plaited hair and tied it up, scolded children, gossiped, and fashioned wreathes on holidays. We fought and tended to one another. This is beauty. They lived under the threat of violence. We live under the threat of violence. Though many escaped – not unlike now, our many Black proximities to the State live under “the threat of recapture.” [1] Why not make my intentions known then? Why waste this smart mouth on silences that will not serve me? Why not say the thing?
A swell of pride. A surge of belonging. A swift and certain belief in a futurity affixed to an errant and indeterminate past.
At Historic Stagville my sadness animated into rage. Still I smiled, disoriented, as time collapsed around me. Fellowship anchored me with sisters, all of us reckoning with grief in the quiet birdsong of the green lawns and trees our age, the age of our mothers, grandmothers, and their mothers. And the largest of them all, their mother “Mama Walnut,” who only a great-great-grand might remember. I shuddered. In the stillness a natural pathway sensed me, and I crept towards it – filled with too many emotions. The sun burning past the thick rain clouds shone down on two skinny trees that illuminated an escape from my anxiety. The path leading me away from the homes of those who toiled – decorated by the birdsong of a dozen of sparrows. I do not hear the sobs or the shouts of those who came before me, so I suspect the ease in which my designer sneakers lurch on to the soft moss – suggest I am welcome and for me to relax. I do so reluctantly. When I exit, I meet a new face, Dani – I suggest she follow the silence, the sparrows jumping and flitting – maybe she’ll find something where I could not.
Michelle Lanier’s red lips catch my gaze, over and over again. She has made herself available to all of us, I lean on her – to help me make sense of the frenzy of feelings, because I am confused by how I can find such solace in a place of chaos – of such harm – of the kind of suffering that breaks my mind when I try to imagine what it could be like. Diffused anger can be fuel or become an accelerant. She coaxes me to challenge that impulse, to remember the intentional manipulation my ancestral memory with erroneous and partitioned narratives. Johnica Rivers prefaced our journey during opening remarks two days before we land on to this AfroCarolina[2] site of remembrance – with a quick gaze and a freckled smirk – “Land as source material.” This will become an ethos – maybe it has always been, but I haven’t been able to name it.
With the offering of a cowrie shell, I engraved onto myself a promise. Then in an act of conjure was called (in a group of three) to cross into a sacred threshold (the ruins of an ancestors homes, quarters) and we hide the remaining shells that have journeyed from unknown shores – for them to be found later – powering the continuum established in ritual – by the gift of secrecy – sustaining acts of our ancestors indentured into a cruel captivity.
Drunk up and high off pure elation.
I don’t know what was in that fish, those shrimp, hushpuppies, or half and half’s (or as I was reminded gently to call them down south Arnold Palmers…the racist so-and-so) but as I sat and chat and watched and wished and witnessed a room full of homegirls sweeping and sliding and spinning and gliding and winding and wailing back and forth across the threshold of the Saltbox Juke Joint – I knew something special was happening. The sustenance to match a day spent out in the sun, walking the grounds where those who came before us - who imagined a life bigger than even the so-called freedom we have now - is one that is improvisational. The totem of Anna Julia Cooper’s resting place, and her work occupying my mind. The slur of accents, the blur of hair styles, textures, the blending of the the deepest darkest shining browns, to the richest ochres and faintest freckled high yellow – AND THE BODIES MY GOD. How we have survived some of the most calamitous attempts of miscegenation and erasures – I felt so sure in something that I’m trying so hard to name. Spontaneous jubilation. It was contagious too. We squoze together – a group lurching forth into the archive – us in the back on tippy toes (well me really – thinking I’m tall) making an inlet for the late comers (and their to-go boxes) to the photo session to find their place in our history. I don’t know what was in that fish, but it primed me – readied us.
We were greeted by applause – have the four of us tell it, as we made our entrance into the white silence of our 5-star hotel’s bar and lounge. Stevie – girlfriend you are quick with it. Thank you thank you – far too kind. Them folks was clapping modestly for some sports action on the tv – but then when they recognized the grace behind that humor (and our pageant waves) – they applauded again! To quote Zora Neale, “COLORSTRUCK!” Me Stevie, Shanika, Darian, all cracking up. This is when I knew we were going to end the night the right way. No formal plenary – with performative goodbyes – this is how ritual is remembered. It is enacted. We are responding. Plus – we’ve just gotten together, there was no need for elaborate farewells, just yet. Calling bodies here and there – making room – finding space – seeing what is just there on the margins. Matching tones and tempos. We sat at a table that just kept growing, first Vic, then Shefon, then Lauren, and Mercedes. A regular profusion of certain unidentified roses[3]. The man who had the ridiculous task of being the night’s entertainment was put on notice that his light rock adult contemporary covers would be no match nor background music for the symphony that was starting, we, the orchestra tuning our instruments. Me, I still had to ask folks names – sneaking glances at golden nameplates, reading the lips of the girls sitting the closets to one another. Still, I knew everyone in the room. As far as I was concerned, they knew me too.
If you’ve ever sat in a circle with a group of sisters lifted by the intentions of a collaboration meant to hold them – then you’ll know that the moment they order themselves some stylish cocktails, it’s on. I ached for my girls who, in all of their responsibilities returned to their rooms. Jessica Lynne, Diamond Sharp. The cost of a missed flight is both a strain on budget and the even more limited resource, time. I glanced across the room – knowing I would in fact see them later – hopeful because our conversations have just started. These women made me a home to myself.
The lighting was low enough to take ease, bright enough not to miss a glance – my excitement grew as more Sojourners materialized in the space coming to our table – making their own – moving from one to the next. We were the loudest though, the rowdiest, and I loved it. I giggled. I bossed around our server a little, I asked questions to the group like “what your relationship to pleasure?” dodged questions like “what is something we might not know about you?” – maybe had one drink too many.
Oh my god the queer energy was a perfume – some of us with lovers, other with pasts and hidden lives – and the newest of us with queer futures – all of us inhabiting the politick (not just in whom we’re bedding) – knowing that it is this discourse that gives us ease of access into the creativity that guides our work. We all love women, girls and all of the complications assigned to those definitions. Mother’s, lovers, sisters, daughters, aunties, and cousins. Fly girls, poets, artists, writers, thinkers, doers, foodies, curators, critics, educators, fundraisers, activists, troublemakers, influencers, photographers, and filmmakers. To quote Shanika, “Intellectual Playmates.” My heart and mind were in competition for which could expand the farthest – I think it might have been a tie. I think this might be an access point for the euphoria I felt – this was definitely pleasure. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to name the sweetness of euphoria in real time.
In 1974 Alice Walker attended the National Black Feminist Organizing Conference, where the great Shirley Chisholm was the keynote, in a letter to Ms. Magazine[4] she writes, “We must work as if we are the last generation capable of work – for it is true that the view we have of the significance of the past will undoubtedly die with us, and our future generations will have to stumble in the dark, over ground we should have covered.” And work we will. And work we have. And work we do. Walking into the emotional-intellectual-spiritual feast that is Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs (present tense because it is a living breathing effort of the Harriet Jacobs Project), I felt that urgent call to action. To venerate the life of our Harriet Ann Jacobs’ struggle for freedom, organizing and liberation – was an answer to these questions of legacies. Who gets to the paint the story of our pasts? Who is writing and keeping the treasure of experiences now? What does an intentional strategy of future look like?
We do. It looks like us.
Not just because we answered the call and gathered and relished in the complexity of our refracted images – heritages smashing against one another – but we have followed our instincts listening to the whispers of our impulses to create for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of those who are in favor of our survival.
[1] Alexis Pauline Gumbs in consideration of the audacity of Harriet Jacobs’ existence in the north as an abolitionist. A Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs, 2024
[2] Term coined by folklorist and womanist cartographer (among other incredible callings), Michelle Lanier, assigning measure, reverence and boundaries of inheritance and stewardship to the Black culture that shapes the regions of North & South Carolina.
[3] From June Jordan’s Letter To The Local Police
[4] In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens, Letter to the Editor of Ms.
Happy Two Year Anniversary to Tiny Violences! My field notes from this place based exhibition, an offering to the life and work of Writer-Abolitionist Harriet Ann Jacobs, curated by Johnica Rivers and Michelle Lanier, felt like an apt dedication. My work here is often a place holder for larger/longer works - and experiments in style and form. My emergence as a writer (who is a grown woman) has been a public one, and being held by so many gifted thinkers reinforced a belief in myself that, frankly had begun to wane. I don’t know if I will make that mistake anymore, mistrusting this literary task - because I know FOR SURE it’s a response to an ancestral call. Thankful for the reminder. Thank you for all of my subscribers and a special thanks to those who share your hard earned coin by being paid subscribers. Leave me a comment or a 🥂 emoji to celebrate with me!
4/14/2024 - Previous versions of this newsletter included the misspelling of the names of Jessica Lynne and Harriet Ann Jacobs - as well the citing the mis-designation of the tree “Mama Walnut". The flowers mentioned, though sharing a similar resemblance are Carolina Jessamine. The term AfroCarolina has been updated to reflect its current usage. Special thanks to Michelle for generously fact checking.
🥂 🥂 🥂 !!!!!!
A beautiful piece. Congratulations on two years!🥂