I have not written anything here for a long time, for various reasons. It started when I had concerns about Substack as a platform, providing sanctuary for racists and transphobes. I decided to keep my archive available but refrain from publishing.
But. As has become even more painfully clear in the last six months, the majority of media platforms are corrupt. I’ve stopped publishing elsewhere, especially at places that seem to boast Black and Brown writers as contributors to their Op-ed pages while happily platforming racists and transphobes (again!) with little oversight and no factchecking.
So. What to do. I had a long intro written to put here, but I think instead I will just say: I am still ambivalent about this space. My relationship to writing personal essays has changed drastically since I won the Substack fellowship in 2020. I also have not written because I do not feel like I can sustain the regular amount of content for a newsletter and also do the type of writing work I wish to do.
I may reactivate this space if I change my mind.
I am going to stop feeling beholden to producing content and look at this as more as a space to hold certain thoughts and questions as they arise.
I’m still thinking a lot about what we mean when we say “exposure”; about what parts of life and what questions are for myself and what are for public consumption.
Given everything that is happening in the world, please consider donating to the Gaza Sunbirds if you have ever used pieces of this newsletter in a class or workshop, or even in reflection for yourself.
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And finally…below are pieces of writing I did to accompany an exhibition by the artist Tavares Strachan.
The prompt I was given was to write about three martyrs of Black liberation—Malcolm X; Steve Biko and Amadou Diallo—and their relationships with their mothers.
I imagined how each of these mothers thought of their sons outside of and beyond the anti-Black violence that would take their lives.
I thought I had bungled the assignment. I wrote it in the midst of a messy divorce; cross-country move and adjusting to truly being a single parent. But the catalogue for this is out now, and I was able to reread these texts with fresh eyes and feel like it was worth it to share.
Again, if you are moved by these pieces, please feel free to donate here:
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Here are the pieces. More soon, perhaps.
—Kaitlyn
Louise Helen Norton Little–Malcolm X
You could not trust mornings in Michigan. This she had learned by hard measure.
Dawn back in Grenada came in loudly, properly like a righteous man after hours of honest labor, proud he had nothing to hide. Standing in Grandpere Jupiter’s front yard, the dust turning her pale yellow feet a turmeric gold, the smell of clove and bay leaves as natural and unremarkable as the scent of sweat on her upper lip, though now she was far enough away to know it as extraordinary and she knew enough to miss it.
Dawn in Lansing was sneaky. Pale fingers that crept across the sky, dragging along gusts of cold air that tried to rob you of your very spirit. She had to get up because she had to wash the baby. Otherwise, she would have stayed in bed, the children– Wilferd, Hilda and Philbert—tucked around her, the next life snug inside her still.
But the baby–he needed the wash. So she left the creaking bedframe with the sleeping future of the Negro race curled up in it and picked up the red headed boy and brought him to the basin for his bath.
How do you grow a man? It was the question of her life’s work, of her and her husband’s life work together. It was what they wrote and sang and held meetings about and why white folks ran them out of this town and that. How do you grow a man in this world that takes pleasure in keeping him small?
She crouched to put the baby down in the old fruit carton stuffed with rags they used as a makeshift bassinet in the kitchen and took water from the bucket to heat on the stove.
The baby, uncertain out of her arms, began to fuss–that crack of a whine, like the sound of a door opening, as a child decides if it’s worth it to cry or not.
“Not, now Malcolm,” she said. It was her job to make sure he settled on not crying.
She began to hum. It was a new song–one Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford had written just this year past for them, for the Garveyites, for the UNIA. “Every great movement needs a great anthem,” he had said.
She liked Rabbi Ford–a West Indian, like her, like so many of them were, though he was a little stuffy. But everyone from Barbados was like that. Rabbi Ford had taken that stiff formality and made something elegant and sturdy, a song to sing to her son of the world coming for him.
“Shine on Eternal Light,’ she sang. “Dispel the gloominess of night and drive our doubts away.” The baby shifted in his seat, seemed to settle, but she knew enough about babies now to keep going. “Our longing eyes prepare, when war and strife shall cease, to view the morn soon to appear, the new era of peace.”
The last note broke. Her voice was not as clear as it had been, before the children.
But the baby was still.
She turned to look out the kitchen window one last time.
The thieving dawn was here.
No matter.
She and the boy would meet it together.
Alice 'Mamcete' Biko and Bantu Stephen Biko
When I come home from a day’s work, I try to keep my face like this–eyes calm, mouth one straight line, hands steady. Anything else upsets him so.
My mother said, and I think it’s true, that no one loves you more than a son. I used to hate when she said that–couldn’t she see how much I loved her? But even I, a greedy child, did not watch my mother’s face the way my son now watches mine.
I am the weather to him. Or a swift running river. Or the last little trickle of water that comes from the spigot in the toilet after our neighbor Miss Cowerie’s comes out. He watches me to gauge what comes next, to make plans, to make sense of something–of what, I am not sure yet.
He was always like this. “This baby is watching me,” I told my mother when she came to visit after he was born. “Not like the first two. This one watches.” Little bright eyes fixed on my face, staring at me. Sometimes, I would stare back to see how long he could hold the gaze–minutes passed while the two older children laughed and played around us. Then I would squeeze my eyes shut, quick quick quick, and open one just a seam to see that he would have closed his eyes in return.
He did not want to see the world if he couldn’t see me in it.
The first time I came home from work crying–the head cook at the hospital had dashed a pot of hot porridge at me because, she said, I had used up too much grain to make it. I barely moved out of the way in time, some of the hot grains flicked on to my arms and burned me but still I had to stay behind and wipe down the wall while the head cook pretended as if nothing had happened and docked my pay for the waste of food.
I came home still sobbing. Normally I would not have cried in front of the children but my friends had left work without me–they could not stay to help, the head cook would have yelled at them too. And besides, they had children of their own at home.
So I had walked home alone and friendless, knowing that there were only children in my house, not even a man to comfort me, since my man had been dead for two years.
I came to our house crying and the older two children asked “Mama what’s wrong?”
And I made the mistake of telling them.
Bukela and Khaya are good children. They said “do not cry, Mama.” They held my hand and kissed it and then they were distracted, as all children are, and left me to play.
Some children believe forever the lie that their mother is a kind of god.
But Xwaku-Xwaku only watched me, like he’d always done.
He waited for the older two to leave.
Then he came and sat in my lap and touched his tongue to my sore skin, where the porridge had burned me. He licked with the steady diligence of a cat.
“Come now, stop Bantu,” I said. “You are being goofy.”
I tried to push him off but little boys are strong when they are determined.
And truthfully, I did not want him to leave me. I would take this comfort from this boy who loved me so, even if it was so strange and sad it made my heart burst.
After a bit he lifted his head and settled it against my chest.
He did not say anything. But what passed between us was a kind of ferocious promise.
And in that moment, I believed it.
Kadiatou ‘Kadi’ Diallo and Amadou Diallo
You think you loved him best in Thailand. He was almost a man then–close to the age you were when you gave birth to him. Fourteen and free. You had been fourteen once, but never free. At fourteen, you were one year married, in a strange land with a strange man, certain that your life was over. You’re free now, though.
At fourteen, he had already reached a place you had never been, a place his grandfather, your own father, could only dream about. Before that, you and he and your family had lived in Liberia and Togo and Guinea, of course. Travelers already. What they do not tell you is that even the most stubborn of souls becomes a voyager, if they are forced to move often enough. Maybe your soul was a little stubborn but his never was. He relished the wide wide world.
In Bangkok, came home from the French International School each day and teased you with the slang he’d picked up from the other boys, words that had taken a year to travel from Paris.
“Those words are not real words,” you told him, laughingly.
“You just don’t know them yet, Maman,” he said. “You’re too old.”
You pretended to be mad. You reached to swat him and he danced away.
He was always like that. He wanted to know the words that would break open the world. Fulani, Spanish, French, English, Thai. The language that machines whispered back and forth to each other, to build this new world all around you as you entered the new millennium. He wanted to know them all.
He really thought the words were enough. He already knew the world was big enough, wide enough for him. He was not like your father–clinging hard to the old world of tradition, terrified of the new. Not your boy. He believed this world was his, all its delights were his, its words melting in his mouth as easily as a spoonful of I-dtim Ma Prao, the sounds to be licked and savored and crunched alongside the bite of peanut.
Words were what made the world a place worth living.
His favorite book was called Guidelines for Dialogues Between Christians and Muslims. He studied that as surely as he did any book about computer programming, or how the space shuttle was made.
And if all the trees in the earth were pens, and the sea, with seven more seas to help it, were ink, the words of Allah could not be exhausted.
Maybe, you realize now, to him they were the same thing. Maybe he understood that words were as powerful and mystifying as a rocket. As likely to breach a stratosphere.
His last words to you were “I’m going to college.” His last words were “I’m going to make you proud”.
There is a comfort, there, that this child you saw become a man, just become a man, lives forever in the near future, in the life that is just to come.
The life that is promised when you draw a breath to say a word.