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Dirty Feet

I want dirty feet. I want summers of cousins and aunts. I want dodge ball and Miss Mary Mack. I want jacks and marbles. I want fishing and eating baloney sandwiches on white bread.

A sweet melancholia visits every summer and punctuates the losses that arrive throughout the year, year after year. We are all in mourning for those moments when freedom and joy didn’t have to be negotiated and when we were ignorant of our own happiness.

I had few obligations. My cousins and I were dropped off at my grandparents’ rural Alabama home and two aunts who were teachers and had summers off would come also and spend three months caring for us. I hate to think of the boredom they endured, but I am grateful.

I worry sometimes that children no longer experience these kinds of mostly unorganized, unscheduled days. My aunts would feed us in the morning and then open the door and unloose us on the world. It was up to us to do the day in whatever way we wanted and up to them to eyeball us often enough to ensure our survival.

Unplan, children. Just for today, maybe, may you have dirty feet.

Being You Is Enough

The context is a little hazy, but I was about 11 or 12 when for some reason I told my schoolmates about my father being a photographer. It might have been one of those “this is what my daddy does” moments. Quite casually, I said that my father worked for Jet magazine.

“You lyin’,” was the response.

Even after viewing his byline underneath articles and photographs in the magazine, often the “Beauty of the Week,” I was told that I had merely chosen to fib about that person because we had the same last name.

But Harmon Griggs Perry was indeed both my father and at that time the Atlanta Bureau chief for Jet, an iconic publication that published news for Black America every week.

Like many other things, I didn’t discover the significance of his hard-won accomplishments until I was a grown up. I rarely spoke to him, after all. The occupation of Daddy Distant was just as mysterious to me as he was. But I do remember feeling quite hurt that I wasn’t believed and surprised that people thought such a thing would be worthy of a lie. It wasn’t as if I had said he was an astronaut or the president or some such.

My father was considered a pioneer in his field, especially in his native Atlanta where he plied his trade. He was the first black reporter hired by The Atlanta Journal in 1968. When I went to work for The Atlanta Journal and Constitution 20 years later, I encountered some of the same men who had worked with my father. They assumed that he had schooled me in the business. He did not, at least not directly. But you better believe that I understand the power of representation, even though I would not have used that term. Because I knew that such an occupation was available, I understood that it was available to me.

The mere reality of Perry doing what he did (and loved doing} was enough. He didn’t have to mentor me or teach me or take me to work on a special day. He was just his own authentic, imperfect self. All any of us have to do is be good at doing good and we have a whole population of casual mentors.

Real Greatness

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.  -Toni Morrison

I see you. No matter how close you draw the veil (or sheet), the sun is shining through. I see you.

Calling yourself a patriot. Twisting innocent words. Teaching your children to fear the truth. Asleep in some pastime paradise when given the opportunity to awaken, to be woke. Yeah, I said it.

That’s the gift of history. The dead hand of the past reaches into the present to give you the key to the white supremacy toolbox.

These diversionary tactics are familiar because they are the progeny of lies born 400 years ago. Easy to recognize.

But I’m not really talking to you. I’m talking to us. Those of us who want historical truth to serve our fractured present.

When people decided to challenge the racial status quo, they did not wage war. They walked. They rode. They sat. They refused to participate in an unjust world at the same time as they were building a just one. That’s what we do.

I know how easy it is to become weary. We wonder why the world is this way and why we have to keep fighting battles that we thought we had already won. But we cannot avoid the truth that every generation has their own struggles in the effort to make the world a harmonious and loving place.

We can’t afford to neglect all our work in the world in order to attend to negativity and hate. I’m not oblivious to what you’re doing or apathetic. I’m busy.

So here is to the patriots, the peacemakers, the creators of truth and beauty.

I see you.

Keep On

Here’s what I know about you. You fell and got up. You wept and wiped your eyes. You did the hard thing. You sob-sang the song. When life was f–ked up you kept going. You faked it. You made it. You are the mystic, swimming.

The grandstands on the ancestral plane are full of souls cheering you on with full-throated roars of amazement and delight.

As you probably have guessed, I say all of that to you as a way of saying it to myself.

There are those who like to make fun of self-affirmation. Maybe you have done that thing where you pep talk to your reflection in a mirror while rinsing your toothbrush. Because we’ve been taught that such practices are ridiculous or some evidence of our weakness, you may do so reluctantly. It’s doubtful then that you will continue the practice long enough to benefit from it.    

That doesn’t mean that you can neglect your needs when it comes to positive self-talk. I’ve always struggled with this. Sadly, I am much more comfortable with tearing myself down than building myself up. Y’all know.

Here’s my challenge to all of us: Increase the self-love without turning into an annoying ass.

Some rules: Don’t try to be super happy all the time. Seek contentment. Satisfaction. Equanimity. I want peace or, at least, manageable excitement.

I know how and so do you. For me, it’s outside – trees, air, water, sky. It’s creativity, words, paper and ink. Every person knows what it is for them.

We’ll start gathering our stories, huh? And we’ll find our peace in each other.

Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

― Zora Neale Hurston

I grew up in a Black town.

Tuskegee, Alabama, is (and always has been, as far as I know) about 90 percent African American. Although I have a distant memory of a time when white people were in charge there, by the time I was old enough to care about such things the Black folk were firmly in control. I was way grown before I understood how important that was.

After venturing into the wider world, there have probably been times when I was being discriminated against and it went right over my head. I thought about this possibility back when I first heard the term microaggression. Not that I didn’t recognize some of the examples that were given. But there were things on those lists that I experienced and remember at the time as just … you know… stuff that happened. Some of them were amusing. Some of them were annoying. And some just didn’t register at all. Probably because the idea of inferiority didn’t register. It’s hard to take affront at something that you don’t believe in.

Yes, people have touched my hair without my permission. Yes, people have called me articulate when I spoke standard English. Yes, some have expressed utter amazement at my intelligence.

But I guess my view was not that “I’m offended” but “these people are idiots.” I think that my early life showed me a whole spectrum of Black life (although in a limited space) and this was very important for me being able to move through the world with some degree of agency and freedom. The cops were Black. The teachers were Black. The doctors were Black. There was a whole college campus full of very Black folk less than a mile from my elementary school.

It’s nearly impossible for me to express the depth of my gratitude to the people who took all the blows that allowed me to stand here. Right there in that little town is a microcosm of Black struggle. Rosa Parks was born there, after all. Read about Tuskegee University or the Tuskegee Airmen or the Tuskegee Boycott if you want some examples.

So ain’t nobody got time for racism, whether intentional or unintentional. We’re going to move through, around and despite the hate. In my family and among my people, you do what you need to and keep going.

Because we have work to do.

My Fellow Americans

Am I an American? No, I am not an American. I am the American. ― Mark Twain

It is my contention that white Americans would be poor citizens without the experiences and history of Black Americans.

Would they be able to even define citizenship? Would they know their rights and their responsibilities? Would they understand the need for activism and agitation to ensure that what is theirs isn’t stolen? Would they understand that sometimes it takes decades or centuries of work to realize even a small measure of progress?

I would say that the average white person in this country does not think in these terms. And many of them (not all, thankfully) operate as if so-called minorities don’t exist as people, but as interlopers who have the audacity to be exactly who they are: Americans with agency and history going back hundreds of years.

Recent movements to suppress the teaching of true black history in public schools and to remove black books from libraries are pitiful and ultimately fruitless attempts to lie about the full story of our past as American people. We are Americans and these are our truths. History doesn’t care about your lies and your screwy reasons for telling them.

Even though our country is a young one, its history is complex and instructive. To contract rather expand our understanding of those complexities is to endorse lying instead of learning. And to assume that young minds are incapable of understanding the truth is ridiculous. Children are not stupid.

Those young minds that today seem too sensitive to handle real history might one day be the adult minds that wonder.why you kept it from them. You had better be ready with an answer.

Copyright 2023 By Phyllis Alesia Perry

God Doesn’t Need Your Prayers

One of the things about being a black, Southern woman is that people expect you to be a true Bible-quoting, church-going sister. I almost hate to disappoint them. It would be a comfort to have such unshakable faith in … all that.

I was certainly subject to religious training in my youth, but I was also fortunate that my family was pretty relaxed about such matters. When I got to my teen years, I was allowed to opt out of churchgoing. So even though I love the radical Jesus of my understanding and was baptized in the Baptist Church AND went to Catholic School for nine years, I am not a Christian.

Jesus is not my savior; Jesus is my teacher.

To believe that I need to be saved is to believe that I came into the world wrong. But the Creator I know doesn’t make mistakes. They order the world and I am part of that order and not the central figure in it. A being of that power doesn’t care whether I worship them.

God doesn’t need your prayers.

But you do. It would be a cruel Creator that required you to stroke their ego. Thankfully, prayer has a more powerful purpose than that. Prayer opens individuals to the divine presence that is always available. It is a conversation that unites you with what Eckard Tolle calls the “totality.”

And if you listen just as much as you talk during that conversation, the quiet certainty of the divine will find you.