HALF//Full
Or, LOVING//Surveilled PT.I: Fragments On Loving
I.
On Loving Day I sent a message to my Black, Brown, and Indigenous homies and aspirational cousins making meaning and magic in the mixed space. I said I see them, the stories and/of love allowed, legalized “triple consciousness” animating unlimited hues—Langton, DuBois, Fanon, Toni, Césaire sentiments braiding resistance into the dreams of our helixes like beads on the heads of Serenas and Venuses. I love myself. Full. My history, my Blackness, being mixed and my white mama comma but I am under no illusion that the world loves the same, that my whiteness is benign—as there is no such thing. ‘Cause there is no such thing. These tones are political, embodied praxis of love and resistance, Audre’s offspring rising from the earth where our ancestors stepped, Mildred and Richard slept—sweat, running down our backs to our roots as we grow futures where monsters once watered weeds and my grandmother wept.
II.
She told me her family “tolerated the blacks.” When she was growing up. I bet she thought that made them sound enlightened or Christian or loving. I bet she loves me deeply, the way a god might love “all” lives. I love my grandmother and her pancakes, the melted margarine sliding over margins like her belief that she can partition my Blackness from her whiteness handbrake I bet… when the cops followed my dad out of their sundown town after dropping my mom off on date nights, that my grandmother prayed for broken brake lights. I bet my grandfather shook his hand, said something like, “you’re a good man. You take care of my daughter.” Bet his father’s fathers lynched my father’s fathers. Progress. Bet my father loved his escort. I bet he and my mother loved each other, that they yelled, “Virginia is for LOVERS!!!,” when their first brown child was born in Portsmouth. I bet my grandmother cried in her West Virginia garden, the scent of juniper warming her tears. Round one. I bet her sorrow burned like bathtub gin when my dad poured Crown and cracked beers for three brown sons.
III.
Mine is 3. I’m wondering if he’ll be a wordsmith like me, what worlds his words will paint, how much love he’ll walk with from his four-continent-roots. If his pen name will be Nishant, or her stage name will be Roxanne NiShanté. I’m looking forward to loving them, their orange-ish/copper/auburn curly hair coiled like a stranger’s questions at a farmer’s market, interracial inquiry cocktails of curiosity and concern mixed beneath maple while waiting with well-meaning white women for tamales and bao. How? Because Black & white + Indian & white = orange. Even Daniel Tigey knows that one, silly. Really? Leash your mut. You should know that I carry razors for folks whose fingers feint forward to touch. So you best go about your way, and have a nice day… Don’t get cut.
