Sharpening Your Saw: Mentally
This month I kicked off Black History Month with author readings by Black women writers. These women are award-winning writers: Caldecott, Newberry, and Booker Award Finalist. Since these women were making appearances in driving distance of my home, I had to find time to hear them speak for several reasons. I’m a Black women writer and it’s important for me to support other Black women writers as often as possible. Black women can pour wisdom into other Black women based on a shared black experience despite economic status, education, and geography. When I think of Black women writers, I am reminded of two things: Alice Walker’s quote in The Third Life of Grange Copeland: “Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.” And in 1772 a group of influential thinkers and politicians did not believe the enslaved young Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) authored a book of poems titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Thus, they put her on trial. She passed whatever questions they hurled at her, and her book was published the following year. Ironically, Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer and philosopher, sent word that “Phillis Wheatley had proved blacks could write poetry.” Do I need to say it, or can you see it, the fifteen-year-old Wheatly illustrated those white men were not as powerful as they thought?
Therefore, on Tuesday, February 5, 2019, I bolted up fifty flights of stairs to hear the writerly wisdom of the award-winning young adult novelist Renee Watson. I had not yet read, Watson’s young adult novels, but had been inspired by her activism with the restoration of Langston Hughes’ home in Harlem, known as the i, Too, Arts Collective. I entered the crowded room on the college campus and found an empty seat. Watson stepped up to the podium and narrated the origins of her literary life that sprouted from her black experience in northeast Portland Oregon. She was dynamic, prolific, and authentic.
Watson’s literary life began with poetry, because that’s where she found herself more than fiction. In the anthology Well Read Black Girl, Watson writes the importance of recognition in literature in her essay “The Space to Move Around.” At the podium, Watson said, she read poems that named her experience: African American and Caribbean foods and cultures. Even though Watson writes poetry, she’s not ready to publish her poems. She told us that her poems are personal; she doesn’t want to share the lives of her family and friends. Her comment reminded me of Rita Dove’s definition of poetry when named Poet Laureate. In the article “Laureate for a New Age,” Dove defines poetry as “language at its most distilled and most powerful. It’s like a bouillon cube: You carry it around and then it nourishes you when you need it.” From the voice of Watson, “With poetry you can talk back to something.” Watson talked back to the hate crime against Mulugeta Seraw in Oregon in 1998 to nourish her anger, her silence, and her fear. The writing of this poem kickstarted Watson’s writing purpose: to heal and to spark conversation.
Additionally, Watson revealed she kept a journal then and now. Then she had been keeping a notebook “feeling lonely because adults didn’t talk a lot about what was going on around them.” Writing in a notebook, journal or diary also serves as a safe place to talk back to something and nourish the soul as the writer pieces together the life that surrounds her. I am a diary keeper and to hear another Black woman talk about keeping a notebook to talk to herself affirms the significance of Black women keeping diaries: to create a space for themselves that affirms what they believe. Our foremothers have not been privileged as knowingly keeping diaries, notebooks and journals. But they did. When Black women talk about keeping a journal; I celebrate the legacy of black women diarists who risked their lives to write their secrets in notebooks like Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-1897). The very act of writing for Jacobs was a dangerous act. When Mr. Flint, her slave owner, caught Jacobs teaching herself to write he used her literacy against her and fostered his own scheme of sexual advances by slipping notes into Harriet’s hand. Jacobs told him she couldn’t read to protect herself from abuse.
I imagine that within Watson’s notebook pages, stories and poems were created and imagined. After all, Watson has published six young adult novels. Realistic fiction about what happens in “our neighborhood,” joy, men working to take care of their families and mothers who love their children. Watson told us, in her younger days when the media came into “the hood” they were told the good news but on the nightly news they only reported the bad. Watson stressed that her words are used “to help bring feeling to the situation of hate or love” like the poem she wrote about Seraw.
She writes about where she’s from because people try to speak for her, a Black girl, low economic status from northeast Portland, Oregon. Her goal is to write about what’s going in the world making sure there is hope and reminding us “we are not the tragedy we see.” In What Momma Left Me, Watson illustrates the power of rising above tragedy through the character Serenity who first lives with a father who sells drugs and kills her mother to a home with a grandfather who is vulnerable, washes dishes, and cares for his family.
Speaking for the Black girl from Portland, Jade, Watson’s character in Piecing Me Together says, “And this makes me wonder if a black girl’s life is only about being stitched together and coming undone, being stitched together and coming undone. I wonder if there’s ever a way for a girl like me to feel whole. Wonder”
Like Watson, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a historian and professor, also gives voice to a young black girl whose “life is being stitched together and coming undone, being stitched together and coming undone” in her the young readers edition Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge. The young reader edition is a compliment Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. After her awe-inspiring talk, at the Boardman Library, I bought both books.
Dunbar set the stage telling us, without giving away too much information about the book for those of us who had not read it, that in 1700 Blacks were free. In Philadelphia, slave owners could come with their slaves but if they stayed longer than six months the slave was then emancipated. Black freedom included Black people selling their wares, working in taverns, preaching in churches. But there was a loophole, which president George Washington used to avoid freeing his slaves, especially Ona Judge. He shuttled his slaves back and forth between Virginia and Delaware. Ona Judge (1773-1848) was a free slave who didn’t know she was free.
So, imagine the young Ona Judge looking out of her window to see Black people moving about freely. Then visualize her discovering she was to be sold to Washington’s step granddaughter Eliza Parke Cutis Law. According to Dunbar, Ona Judge realized she would never get her liberty if she remained with the Washingtons, so she packed her bags while they were eating dinner.
Sadly, Washington pursued Ona Judge for fifty years as a result she remained a fugitive even though she was free. While president Washington used his political power and means to hunt for her return. Why? Martha Washington’s desired to have her back. Why? Ona Judge lived in their household and she knew all things—good and bad— about the Washingtons.
Dunbar told us she set out to illustrate Washington was not the president history has painted him to be: chopping down a cherry tree, wearing wooden teeth, and never telling a lie. Yes, he was the first general and he served the nation but he was a slaveholder. His teeth were not wooden, his teeth were a combination of slave and animal teeth. It seems as though Washington was not as powerful as history made him out to be.