A Black History Month Love Note
I have a photo of one of my grandmother’s Kwanzaa celebrations, probably in ‘91 or ‘92. It’s of the cake she had made–a big sheet cake with thick white icing, which she had directed the baker to cover with an outline of Africa, the continent filled in with the pan-African colors of red, black and green.
I still remember the taste of that cake–the thick, sugary paste of the icing, how the black band of central African turned everyone’s tongues purple. In the photograph, I am gazing longingly at that cake. It’s another reason why I love the image; the love of food and celebration and history and pride and also a little bit of shame of chubby childhood I feel when I look at it. I thought I’d lost the photo but I found it again, a few years ago, in a box with all the meeting notes and faded programs and address lists from my grandparents’ time running the Afro-American Society of Arlington, MA.
My grandparents were among the earliest families to integrate that suburb of Boston in the early 1950s. When they moved there, the turnpike hadn’t even been built yet. There was no Alewife station, or Lanes and Games. Their house was on the outskirts of town. They were such an anomaly that other Black families, strangers, would drive out to see the wonder–Black people in the suburbs. As a child, my father drove out to see my mother play in her yard before they’d meet each other in college. A story I was so taken with, I wrote it into my first novel.
But integration, as we all know, is a tricky thing. My grandparents worked in the Afro-American Society of Arlington in the 60s and 70s, through all the various racial imbroglios that suburbs love to go through. They ran it when people said Black people didn’t live in the town; they ran it when the town decided to change the high school mascot from the Indians to the SpyPonders. In 2010, the town put up banners on the streetlights, declaring it a home for diversity and it felt like a bitter irony, this place I know in my bones, that I feel like is one of my homes, and also the first place I ever heard a white person say “nigger.” (She was the mom of a friend, yelling at a group of kids playfully running past the front of her car while me and her daughter sat in the back seat. She caught my eye in the mirror after she said it, and looked away and said nothing, as if it had never happened). A few years after those banners went up, a Black family that moved to town had a swastika painted on their garage. Arlington is, in other words, like any other American suburb. It is a conflicted place to feel belonging. I have sat beside other writers at conferences who say things like “Oh! I love Arlington! It’s so progressive!” and only smiled back. Because how do you explain they know a version of the town that’s only existed for maybe five years? That despite their well-meaning remarks, because you know the other version of it, you feel more comfortable gossiping with the old Irish grandmas about how great Johnny’s Foodmaster used to be than talking about the newest cute restaurant, because the first conversation actually feels like home?
But the cake. It only occurred to me, when I found the photo again, that the cake came from the very old Italian bakery where my grandma ordered all her cakes. And I had to once again applaud my grandma’s audacity, as I do probably every other day over something half-remembered. To order this cake with the continent of Africa blazoned across the front from a place that doesn’t want you is a special kind of pride. I love her for it.
So I look at people's responses to the loss of corporate Black History Month acknowledgements and I am a little conflicted. On the one hand, I understand that America is a country that loves symbolism over substance, and the loss of corporate recognition of these things is very real for those who work in those environments. But another part of me remembers what Black History Month was before the trademarked merchandise and the corporate seal of approval.
I asked my mother once how the Afro-American Society of Arlington found members before social media. “Oh,” she said, “Grandma made business cards and printed a bunch. Whenever she saw a Black person anywhere in town–at the grocery store, at the gas station, in a parking lot–she’d hand one to them or slip one on their windshield. Didn’t matter if they were just passing through. And that’s how she let people know we were here.”
Black History Month began not as a business move or a way to build monetary wealth or a desire for white American understanding or a marketing push. It was an effort of Black librarians and researchers to preserve memory and build self. It was started not by CEOs or “disrupters” but by the people who keep and safeguard our archives. Before the concept of affinity history, before the idea of American counter histories was normalized, those people understood and codified this practice. It’s one many cultures have bitten from us since. The intentions of Black History month have nothing to do with a multinational corporation’s shareholders or a tech CEO who has never been more curious about anything other than himself. It’s reminding us that even when the dominant narrative insists that Blackness is on the outs (an absurd belief) that “DEI” has been eliminated, we keep creating and building and planning and making.
So I do not despair when the latest corporation announces its “rollback” or when the influencer tells me to be terrified that the Google calendar no longer states when Black History Month begins. This month, at its best intentions, cannot be measured by that. This month is the cake so big you can’t ignore it. It’s the note slipped under your door that says, “Come meet us where we’re dreaming.”