The Coming of the One-Eyed Babies
I was spit onto the planet: eye opening, eye closed. Exhausted and new. Weary and wary of the ways of the world and I hadn’t even seen the sun. It was not alright. My mother recalls that I didn’t cry from regenerated onto this new (to me) Earth. Numb.
In college, I wanted to die. My gaze now required both pupils to read the world bent on bending me into incompetency, profiting from my interior war. as I soaked up the question of my humanity from the people begging the question. I was a Black, southern woman. I would not possess a traditional type of beauty — the kind that perpetuates ruling, hegemonic paleness, and ousts girls like me from the treasured body politic. My ancestors couldn’t participate in white folks’ reparations, Roosevelt’s New Deal, securing them Gatsby-like upward mobility. I was not attending an elite educational institution. I went to an endangered historically Black college in my hometown. And again, I was black, both in theory and in praxis. I was without capital, and that is to say, I was void of currency. I could not barter for a living. I was barred from participating in a world propped on the preferences of capitalism. I was a prophecy pointing to the embrace of a white planet, trepidation of a Black one. Which is to say, fear of the future. I was, existentially, broke. Little tiny coffins bellowed and hidden in the corners of my bones cried out I just wanted to give up the ghost.
Growing up a black girl in the South, you are quickened to understand what you lack. It is a political fact. The world needs it to be. Even quicker, you are taught to normalize exhaustion. It’s in stacked on the floor beside your bed, in the thick, foggy plastic of your grandmother’s couch, in the smell of your scalp, in knowing not what to do with your hands. There are so many guidelines for being a successful black girl in the South. So many guidelines for staying a living Black girl in the South. So many threats against your body masquerading as day-to-day routines. These rules did not need to be spoken. They were canonized, especially because of their silence of sermon. The worst kind of rules went down easy. And eventually, I started editing my life in real-time. You can do that you’ve been branded by the sermon. My off performance of girlhood (I was not hyper-feminine) was acceptable for a short period of time. I found pleasure in sports and being dirty. It gave me a sort of rare autonomy. For a while, I was agentic, at last. being: Heaven. When Black women get to that safe-place of the afterlife, that great-getting-up-moring, wings will be an afterthought. We will check, instead, to make sure that we’ve been given back the rights to our bodies.
Real womanhood loomed and bubbled up like my own personalized health crisis, threatening to raise the premiums on the control I would have over my black girl ligaments. My family pointed at it with wide grins, rising up from the horizon. It did not carry light. Capitalism made the exile from ourselves ceremonial and sweet as a public display. Girls in dresses parading in front of a society of bones. We carry it ceremoniously in our mouths, a bitter candy tucked away near the back of the tongue. We learn to chew with our mouths closed so no one can tell we are chewing. No one can tell we are perpetually choking.
The woman that carried me into the world would tell me not to sit on the laps of people who had a penis. “Not even men you know”, she used to say. Those words whispered that time had forgotten us and our ache. Black girls were flattened into an ever-expanding echo chamber floating through time. The same violence erected across space + time. The same words in sheepish response to it. Hypermasculinity bred on patriarchy didn’t render girls like us beautiful, but that didn’t mean we were safe from their gaze. Not even from the gaze of the men that ate from my grandma’s dishes and sat on her couches. “You’re getting like your mom now”, he said. “You may need to go change”, motioning his hands to show which area was starting to resembling her. I understand now that the world hates women, but it has special hate reserved for women with no capital, nothing with which they can barter a living. Black Womanhood becomes a caste system by strategic design.
In college, I wanted to die, but that was synonymous with wanting to rest. To release my angst and stretch out into my limbs and into myself. Too often it seems death is more promising than rest when you possess a vagina and a black body. I wanted to set myself free into that promise of liberation. Maybe my choice would have been a construct of scarcity and fear, but the entire world is a culmination of those strains of the act, executed routinely. Such a world created a caste of babies born with one eye closed.
When my mom tells the story of my birth, she says my older sibling screamed, “Mommy, is she gonna be ok?”, clearly worried that a child born looking like me would be doomed. But I was born with what I needed to survive. The safety that I require commands a specific type of wariness of the world, indicative of the lack of trust in the social contract as it has been extended, abbreviated, to me. I read the contract differently than I did when I was a young black girl. I’ve etched a grander one for myself founded on the unabated necessity to know myself and decide the expression of my personhood from day to day. It is non-negotiable that I possess many lives ahead of me, many lives presently. They are all the righteous way forward. The terrain of my body has boundaries marked by my hands. The boundaries are ever-expanding, only beholden to the names I am making for me. I have saved all my tears for now. The one-eyed babies are coming.
