Wait, you cannot be serious. Who the hell do they think they’re talking to? For a moment, you don’t know how to respond. You’re too busy trying not to trip over your feet. Your friend means well. She’s smart. She walks fast. She listens, but in her world seeing is believing. You start to explain that it was just the average week for you and the incredulous look on her wind-blushed face trips you up more than the uneven Providence sidewalks. You laugh it off. It’s new but it’s not. It’s fact and it’s fiction. It’s still hard to remember the time when this was new. Growing up Black in private Primarily White Institutions oftentimes made you feel socially awkward. It even more often made you feel crazy, made photos crunchy and distorted upon development. You remember the day of the eighth grade class trip. In a group photo, one of the boys who liked to pick on you told his mom you were throwing up gang signs in the photos she was taking. You got yelled at in front of everyone. Nevermind the fact that the V peace sign was created by a Victor de Laveleye in 1941 and quickly popularized by Winston Churchhill as a symbol for victory, later evolving in the 1960’s as a symbol for peace. Nevermind the fact that a forty-year-old woman in 2014 should’ve known that. You wanted to laugh back then, but you couldn’t. You can now.
Since then, you’ve met more people like you. In late-night talks, in pages, in a nod or quick smile. People who remind you that your reality exists and that the you that exists in your interiority is authentic. People on the same side of the glass. Zora Neale Hurston, a mother of afrofuturism, was one of these people for you. Obviously you’ve never met her but in another time, under a certain light, when the conditions were right, you did. You read her essay, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) and – I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop… You recognize the other world in her eyes, the being living freely inside while white birds circle overhead outside, in an effort to turn you into something different, digestible.
They want to know exactly who you are while simultaneously speaking loudly over you, telling you that you’re from Honduras when you clearly just said you were from Jersey. It doesn’t matter how much you practice your diction. It almost doesn’t matter if you speak at all. But you continue to hear her.
HURSTON: I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
You remember the day you tried to teach your college roommate how to roller skate. After she slipped and hit her elbow on the sidewalk, you met someone who swore up and down that she knew you. She called you the Orange Juice Girl, the one who spilled orange juice on her from the second floor of one of the academic buildings. You told her it’s a mistake. You don’t drink orange juice. You never met her. She laughed and tossed her glossy blonde hair. She insisted that it was you and called up her friend nearby as a witness to the incident. He walked up and told her it was a different black girl. You knew her. You looked nothing alike. She told you it was her mistake, that she wasn’t wearing her glasses that day, after all. You laugh, hard.
HURSTON: There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.
Your right to unknowability is intertwined with the fantastical makeup of your black existence. The second you share your experience you blur their line between fact and fiction. You were in two places at once. In so many white realities, all their assumptions are true. Their unflinching belief creates a new canon, an alternative reality categorized by guilt-fueled theorization and wonder. But what they see and when they see it has almost nothing to do with you.
HURSTON: The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
You are asked if you’re magic, if you can be in two places at once. An unfamiliar face tells you they’ve met you before. Thinking about it now, you’re inclined to say yes, just a little bit. If what they see is what they believe, then to some degree you are a little magic. How else can you explain what they’re seeing? After all, why else would they continue to ask and insist on the extraordinary? You know that the Black personhood is a shifting infinite, unknown to probability and prone to possibility. You know that the Orange Juice Girl is a character of fact and fiction. You are a character in and outside of their one reality.
HURSTON: The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
Because they built their identity in relation to you, in relation to the gross and widespread historical misrepresentation of your character, they desperately cling to the hem of your garment to preserve their own sense of selves. If they know you, they can know themselves – a delicate and flimsy foundation but one that leads to spatial and temporal dissonance between realities. It’s a foggy filter that distorts some more than others but because of this, white perceptions of Black identity tend to be so wrong it’s almost unreal – almost. The product is a life of speculative fiction. But you have no great sorrow. You’ve been too busy sharpening your oyster knife, choosing to embrace the multiplicity, the nuance, and the space granted by accepting that Black life in America is itself full of speculative fiction. There is more than one version of the story, more than one timeline or dimension, but getting it all, there is only one cosmic you. •
Photo of author in 8th grade
