Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood

Chapter 2. Black Women Remember Black Girls: A Collective and Creative Memory

2 Black Women Remember Black Girls A Collective and Creative Memory “[She] reported that Jhessye’s hair had been pulled out and described Jhessye as not looking alive and that she looked like a zombie,” the document said. “[She] said that the closet where Jhessye had been looked like a grave and smelled like dead people.” (“Search for remains,” 2012) I want you to know and remember Jhessye Shockley. A 14-year-old girl from Tennessee became a trending topic when a video of her performing oral sex behind a school was posted on Facebook, and instantly went viral. (Miller, 2012) I want you to know and remember “Amber Cole.” Scott’s death clearly underscores the need for more awareness and discussion of depression and mental health issues among Black women and less shame and silence. (Williams, 2012) I want you to know and remember Jacqueline Scott. Sakia Gunn, a fifteen-year-old Aggressive-identified African-American from Newark, New Jersey, was fatally stabbed on the morning of May 11th, 2003. Three men were harassing Gunn and two friends while they were waiting at a bus stop, and the three women told the men that they were lesbians in an effort to get the men to leave them alone. (Mazina and DiBrienza , 2008) I want you to know and remember Sakia Gunn. And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own. —June Jordan (2002, p. 5) To go from the idea of Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) to the creation of a practice, labor is required. That is, someone must do the work—the organizing work, the academic work, the personal work, the spiritual work, and the community work—not necessarily in this order. Since SOLHOT requires labor, it is worthwhile to think through issues of process, production, capital, death, survival, and recognition. These issues are often discussed among homegirls, with particular urgency given to questions that help us to explicate how we in SOLHOT resist and unconsciously collude with capitalist exploitation premised on the expedient disposal of Black and Brown bodies. Black girls’ lives, especially when taken too soon and often as a result of violent action, are not typically remembered. The nonexistent global protests, the absence of national rallies, and the missed calls for structural reform, often coupled with victim-blaming headlines, signify a failed connection with those whose lives, Jordan professes, we should honor with our own. Even still, Black girls living in their bodies know the all-too-familiar expectations of premature and slow death, as they are often the first to be sacrificed, the expected carriers of heavy loads, made to feel invisible and inferior in spite of a historical legacy that suggests anything but defeat. In SOLHOT, we remember Black girls. We have made up rituals to remember games we no longer play, and we have a way of commemorating conversations that make room for silence and the speaking of taboos. The “incense circle” is a ritual in SOLHOT where we call the names of those we want known and remembered. Jhessye Shockley, “Amber Cole,” Jacqueline Scott, Sakia Gunn, and June Jordan, you are known and remembered. In SOLHOT, we honor ourselves by remembering those we’ve lost too soon as a way to rehearse what our work is together. SOLHOT requires creating something that has never quite existed, as we’ve known it, and in order to do this, rituals of remembering are required. For a homegirl to be ready to undertake the labor required to accomplish a task as monumental as celebrating Black girlhood in a way that accounts for complexity, remains critical, instructs humanely, and feels like healing, preparation is a must. Homegirls must remember all the ways they are not alone but connected to others, ancestors, kinfolk, spirits, and communities whose honor it is of theirs to recall, respect, and remember as part of the work of doing SOLHOT. To homegirl is to commit to a very sincere practice of remembering Black girlhood as a way to honor oneself and to practice the selflessness necessary to honor someone else, remembered whole. black women remember black girls 47 In this chapter, I explore how homegirls remember SOLHOT as a sacred...