Nina Simone is an American and So Am I (the final installment)

Chicago reintroduced me to Nina Simone the summer of 2013. When I found a best of album (The Very Best of Nina Simone: Sugar in My Bowl 1967-1972), I discovered Nina's contribution to the civil rights movement and, subsequently, her slow disappearance into what I would later learn was bipolar disorder.

I waited tables that first year in the Windy City, and I would come home in the middle of the night, put in my headphones, and take Linus for long walks while I listened to music on Spotify.

I introduced myself to lots of artists that year because I had access, like I was getting away with something. To name a few, I explored the likes of Tupac, revisited the 90s, and stumbled upon Nina Simone's To Be Young Gifted and Black.I was growing up older, colder, and so was she.

I recall one evening hearing Mississippi Goddam for the first time.

Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

In the documentary, What Happened Miss Simone (Netflix 2015), there is footage of Simone asking Dr. Martin Luther King what to do with all her feelings of rage. He, of course, encouraged her to focus energy on the nonviolent protests that would later go down in history as true democracy in action. 

But they killed him. 

So she sang this song, raging in a glorious, vulnerable masterpiece that the time for silent protest was over. That it's taking too long. Moving too slow. 

And they ran her out of the country. She was destroyed politically and publicly. The beautiful black woman with the incredible voice was not singing the songs that everyone wanted to hear. 
She wasn't smiling or trying to be nice.

Today there are so many voices scrambling and screeching to be heard and so many lives lost to alcohol, pills, guns, and violence, corporate violence, that America is not what they told us it would be. Yet, "they," whoever they are, are still trying to tell us that we need to hold on...for freedom? For what America......was?

America enslaved, tortured, raped, and murdered, countless human beings. Take a day and listen to the words to songs like "Strange Fruit," and "Mississippi Goddam." Take a month....take a month that is longer than February, take two months, and listen to the voices of those that have been trying to play by a set of rules that offers them very little.

Just like rage that gets stuffed down for far too long, the urgency of the song builds:

You keep on saying "Go slow!" "Go slow!" But that's just the trouble...

"Do it slow,"
Desegregation
"Do it slow"
Mass participation
"Do it slow"
Reunification
"Do it slow"
Do things gradually
"Do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"Do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know"

The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is impossible in a nation controlled by large corporations.

The lies about black crime told to make white girls afraid. The false masculinity of the disillusioned men who rape and take what they have literally been taught is "rightfully" theirs by design. The white boys and girls that scream "all lives matter" who have been told the lie that the Black Lives Matter movement is a personal attack. It is not.

And the churchgoers that voted for our current president and still try to talk to me about love that surpasses all understanding.

We have all been lied to. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it?

Nina Simone's family found her years later, drowning in depression. It's hard to see the world for what it is as an artist, as a lover of what human beings can create through expression, and keep going.

When you see the lost, the unloved, the broken, and the hated, all marginalized and demonized so that one group of people can say they are better or stronger, so that someone can claim ultimate power and final say, it's hard not to drown in hopelessness because what's the point?

And that is what is happening to this country. It is ignoring the rage that it is due. Because we have all been lied to, been distracted, been in love. The Bible teaches that only the Truth will set you free.

So we are all in prison. Quietly, comfortably, wasting away in a prison that we don't have to accept.

You cannot live a lie. You can try. You can surely try. But it will eat you up, destroy you from the inside out. You can dress it up, buy all the best treatments for gaping wounds, but it will kill you in the end.

It's too slow. The admitting of our sins. It's time to admit them.

How long can we live in the safe notion that if we keep quiet and pray about it, it will work itself out? We are the answer to our prayers. We are the present and the future. What we do...not say....not pray....but what we DO is the only thing that matters.

It's not time to let go and let God. It's time to stand up, and be counted. And it's time to start paying attention. Those who are living are suffering...including you.

I am a terrible vessel.

History is full of prophets that we've chased away because they did what we were terrified to do: be completely vulnerable. Like Nina Simone.

America wanted Nina Simone to pay for her "sins," while it continued to ignore the sins that would bring it...bring all of us....to this point in history.

Maybe an angry black woman isn't the problem.

"Oh but this whole country is full of lies. You're all going to die and die like flies."

She said in an older interview, used in What Happened Miss Simone (Netflix 2015), that her biggest regret is not getting to play classical piano at Carnegie Hall. The interviewer was astonished. Nina Simone had played Carnegie Hall...but not classical piano. That means something to a musician, the dream of creating something beyond words in a space made for that very creation.

Instead, at Carnegie, she played what audiences wanted a black woman who could play and sing to play, and when they didn't like what she sang, they threw her in the fire, to burn.

And burn she did.

Before the truth can set you free, you need to know what it means to be free, but, more than that, you have to try to imagine what it means not to be.

Creation

The Wolf

I've been feeling the claws of my wolf tugging at the skin around my heart the past few weeks. She whispers poetry to me as I sit with my legs crossed, my mind humming, words that get lost as the river rushes forward. She wants to speak, to scratch off the sweet facade of my quirky sarcasm, my humor. I'm a dream girl and she's a rabid wolf, but we inhabit the same house.

When we were young, we used to play in an enchanted forest, she and I, dirty hands, dirty knees, a mind racing, in love with everything. Boys chased us, admired us, and we felt no shame, and we loved all of them. We smiled up at the stars every night with hope, no pictures or expectations, just hope that life would always be this close, this immediate and real. 

"One day you'll have to let someone take care of you." He said it to me after church, knowing how I felt about him. The men in my life began to notice me, but shy away from me, to tell me everything, but never speak to me in public. At some point during my adolescence, my focus shifted to the male gaze and away from the wolf, my protector, and I have spent the majority of my life chasing it, like a rabid dog, desperate to be saved, and cared for, to be fed. The Male Gaze. 

As your teachers are attempting to tell you how to see the world around you and decide for yourself what you will do about it all, the rest of your immediate surroundings are drooling over the opportunity to tell you what you must do and how much it will cost. The first thing you learn, as a little girl, is that you must be what you are not, and you are never to be who you really are. "Be yourself" is an idiom that means little to nothing. How am I not myself? When I attempt to live the life I feel I am supposed to live. 

And the fairytale is that someone will save you from the drudgery of a life with no direction...leaving you one direction: attempt to attract and maintain the male gaze. And oh what an occupation it becomes. It consumes you. Look at me. See me. Admire me. 

I hear that I am beautiful but I cannot believe it this morning, staring into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror. The bones in my face are misplaced and misshapen. I am beginning to see lines. I am older than I was even three years ago. Rigid. I don't go out as often as I used to any more, but there are bills to be paid. I while away the hours at work or at home with my dog. I fear the city leaves me feeling trapped.

In so many ways I have become who I am today, who I always needed to be, after roaming the streets of Chicago in the frozen twilight. Yet I struggle to shake the shackles of male attention. How can I exist without it? I wonder. Everything I have ever been taught has projected an image of myself to me as a member of a nuclear family, casting everything I am and always have been as merely a fraction of the whole in holy matrimony. 

I gambled away my life on the idea that my worth could be broken down and placed in a box marked with someone else's name, and that his name would make me free. In my quest to prove that I am smarter than the average white woman, I have spent a lot of money and time just to be able to convince the male gaze that I am worth the attention, the seal of approval.

As a teenager I prayed to God, why did you make me this way if you wanted me to be silent? Why did you make me so loud? I wept, and I begged. I hunched my shoulders and hung my head. I curled up inside of myself until I found that validation...in someone else, and when it ended, I felt the weight of the world crashing down around me. This path of righteousness had led me to a crushing defeat, and I have been desperate to trust myself, much less anyone else, since that day.

How does a romantic recover what is lost when rejection means she herself has fallen short and will continue to struggle until she can prove herself worth it....the male gaze?

Don't be all yourself. There is nothing wrong with you, but maybe don't be yourself entirely right away. Don't put it all on the table. Like a hammer. If I had one...I would hammer in the morning just to piss off the neighbors. 

The girl, the me part of her was tired and sad and scared for a while. She was hungry, starving, screaming at people in traffic, at stop signs, "I am lost! I took the wrong road and now I'm lost! and it's no one's fault and it's everyone's fault, and it hurts like hell." 

And then she wasn't lost. One can only wander so long in the mucky mire of the darkest woods before she is discovered by her wolf half, for if she is half of anything, it is this beast. And then the beast begins to claw away, dragging her fingers through the layers upon layers of delusion, freshening the wounds so that they might heal properly. 

You are just now learning how to live, aren't you? The woman I work with, five years my senior, hypothesizes.  She drives me home on the horrible days so I don't have to ride my bike, and we "chill." She is Puerto Rican, familiar with my neighborhood from the days when it was patrolled by rival gangs. I love the folklore, but even folklore is too safe. 

Retired gang bangers have shown me their battle scars in hopes that I might provide them the comfort they felt certain my respect in conversation truly communicated, bullet wounds. But my wounds are just the same. We fight the absence of choice, carry the rage of our mothers before us whose choices were fewer and voices were ignored or forgotten. We are all the same, the oppressed, and we are all completely different. 

I cannot imagine a world where I fear the pain of a bullet on a daily basis. I cannot imagine what it is like to be intelligent yet marginalized and stereotyped twice as much as even I am, that your sugar and spice must be extra sweet to cover up the chains of an earned collective rage. Black women have the right to be angrier than anyone else every day of their lives. I don't know a lot of things, but I do know that.

And I too own my anger, such as it is, close to my heart, where it is warm. I used to weep for my capacity to love. A burning energy in the pit of my stomach, wasted on my failure to matriculate.

But not failure. Oh no. There is so much use in the world for the love that compels me. There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole, and Gilead is my heart.

You can heal yourself. It is not easy, but it is within you. 

The wolf is in front now, and she roves, and hunts, and warms my feet at night. She doesn't want to bite, but nature compels her toward self preservation. Her language is truth.

I am thankful that we found each other.

Over the Hump

Wednesday was exhausting. It was my route day, the day I traipse around River North, Chicago with a little green bag on my back, an apron, shears, loppers, leaf bits and stems, a towel, a spray bottle containing mild castile soap, mint alcohol, and leaf shine (so calming), a copy of Clarissa Pinkola Estès’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, a water bottle, ibuprofen, and a two gallon water bucket.

At the end of every Wednesday, I am sore, I am hungry, insatiably, and I am content. For the most part. I love working with my hands.

It’s hard to be away from social media on this day because it can be a bit of a lonely day. Despite the sweetness of the little fellas (plants), they don’t say much. I tried listening to music in between my accounts, and that helped a bit, but all in all, I felt a lot more connected with my surroundings and at peace. Dangit.

I felt a little grateful too. Sometimes I dread this day because I’m tired, or stressed, but today I soaked it up. It helped that it was about 75 in the sun with no humidity with a pleasant wind by the river. I took bigger mental pictures of the towering shrines to corporate America. It’s such a remarkable panorama from 57, but the buildings are so close, I feel I could wrap my arms around them on 43. On 25, I’m inside a photograph, surrounded by mirrors, flashing in the sun, and beneath them, there is a river, and on the river, there are boats and kayaks, trees and tables under umbrellas, buses and cars, cyclists and pedestrians, but on the other side of the double paned window, it is silent and still.

A lady at the front desk of a hotel I service asked if I would like a bottle of water, and I responded with wide-eyed disbelief, a pause, and, “yes.” “Well, get one,” she said, “you deserve it.” Well done, front desk lady. I totally did deserve it. I gulped it down on my way to my last stop, this company that edits media: commercials, film, lots of commercials, all sorts of different people on computers. It’s probably my favorite stop. Mostly because I have a crush on every boy at that office.

They all have beards and tattoos and stare at computer screens watching the same millisecond over and over again until it’s perfect. Hello? I mean, even the guy with the ponytail is hot, especially the guy with the ponytail. It’s work, y’all, so I gotta just enjoy it for what it is, but I’d marry any one of those nerds if they asked.  

The woman that produced the “like a girl” ad campaign...I think, also works there. She introduced herself to me on the elevator one cold day back in March, said she admired that I worked with plants. She was everything a powerful creative woman should be, mostly because she told me to eat whatever I wanted when I was there in front of the interns, who then had to hound me to eat waffles every day after that. I treated a pest problem in one of her plants and revived her Jade.

Then there’s the office manager, who has a desk in a closet and dresses like a QUEEN. She is fierce. She’s got this 1950s pinup girl thing going on, and her hair is almost always done up. Sometimes she’s got a killer face on too, and she’s lovely without makeup.

It’s the fun stop.

Then I hopped on the Grand bus heading west and squeezed myself into my spot amongst the sardines. Look. I’m not railing on babies and kids and stuff. I love em. But I hate...with a passion reserved for very few…those giant SUV strollers. At 5:30 P.M. on a Wednesday going OUT of downtown Chicago. The front half of the Grand bus was overtaken by a slew of precious children, a wagon, and an SUV.

Every time the bus pulls aside to pick up new riders, everyone looks around desperately for a way to squeeze five more people, and they all look butt hurt the whole time, as do I. We were surrounded by a sea of traffic as well, so it took a good half hour to get the half mile out of the center of town.

I finally acquired a seat, after watching a little girl try to pretend she knew how to tie her shoes until a standing woman helped her, and she hugged her knees to her chest with a satisfied grin. I took out the huge book I’d been lugging around with just enough time to read about three pages before pulling the “let me off” chord. It’s a dense book.

I listened to music the whole time, too. Billie Holiday and Fiona Apple, Sinead O’Connor and Tori Amos.

This morning, there are dark grey clouds in the distance, and I am going to a Cubs game tonight, so I hope they clear up.

I'm starting to think that maybe taking a week long break from social media is a good idea once a month. After all, who am I beholden to on the internet? Who am I beholden to in the world?

Those Days You Just Remember

I decided to pay close attention to my day, three days ago, so as to write it down and share it with you, today, three days later. I decided before anything happened that day, before even getting out of bed.

My room was bright when NPR popped on and my brain clicked in. I was a little sweaty, too, which meant the temperature had jumped about ten degrees. I was going to ride my bike to work. I decided. 

It was a one bucket day. I work as a horticultural technician for a local company that puts plants in office buildings. It doesn't require a lot of pomp and circumstance. You don't need a degree to do it. You just have to care and want to care for plants. As cliché as it sounds, the plants do the rest. 

There's not a lot of money in it. Sometimes you have to let those things go and trust that you will do what you have to do to get by, and you will. 

Coffee, breakfast, helmet, supplies. Kiss my dog and chuckle at his pouting face, laying it on thick so that maybe I'll be persuaded to stay or, better yet, take him with me. 

Then I'm on the road, coasting the flat hills, avoiding the potholes. The 606 is mostly empty, and everything is in bloom, but I'm not allergic to it, for some reason. I can go as fast as I want...on my hot pink 1989 Schwinn Caliente ten speed. It is super sweet.

Caliente

I'm heading closer to the city on Milwaukee Ave, and a tall, gorgeous blonde girl stalks angrily across the street ahead of me. She is yelling into her phone with a thick slovak accent, "Dude, I am so pissed right now," at ten a.m. 

Then I'm at the Merchandise Mart, and I'm at my first client, no idea what they do, but I've got to call outside of reception to be let in. The receptionist is a squat asian girl with the sunniest disposition, in a midwestern sort of way, which is complex I think. She speaks in one of those kid voices that normally make me want to punch walls, but it works for her. It's endearing. She always offers me a coke or something. Today she offers water because she can tell I've ridden my bike...because I'm sweating and still wearing my helmet. She cringes at how "hot" it is today. It's about 64.

Then I bounce from office to office, feeling, actually, literally, like a weird human kind of happiness that I'm not accustomed to. 

At another account, I show a dying plant to a different receptionist, a small hispanic girl, adorable, even more-so than I am, and I've got my hair in french braid pigtails. Because that's how I roll. 

Someone at the office is attempting to "help" me by watering one of the Dracaena Lisas when I'm not there. The plant's tips are turning from yellow to brown very quickly. It wants to dry out, just like I've been doing for the past few months. 

I'm walking her through a few more plants that don't need the amount of attention they're getting, and she suddenly turns to face me, "Prince died." 

It doesn't register at first. Then, a man in a cubicle just ahead of us stands up and repeats, "Guys, prince died." 

Later, at another account that probably does stuff with lots of money (because I arrived at the same time as the company masseuse arrived) and computers, the handsome male receptionist stops me as I explain to him that I need a signature, "Girl, where you from?" 

"Oh, Memphis, Tennessee. Can you hear it?"

"Mmmm. Hmmm. My boyfriend, well, my Ex-boyfriend was from Tennessee, and some of his family was from Arkansas." 

"Oh, yuck. Arkansas." 

"I know, but they say it's beautiful."

"Oh, yeah, it actually is absolutely gorgeous in the Ozarks. Can you believe Prince died?"

"No. I don't acknowledge it."

Then I had lunch: Espresso, tiny Caprese salad, and a chocolate chip cookie. Water. Water. Water. 

The rest of the day goes smoothly. I've learned that some mascara, cute little earrings, and a smile goes a long way to making each receptionist love little me with my apron and pigtails. 

I pass an investment banker from a super fancy office full of plants that I visit every wednesday, and he smiles in recognition. I'm also already wearing my helmet for some reason. Why did I put my helmet on so early? 

Despite the fact that the temperature is incredible, I can still muster the rage to scream "SERIOUSLY?!?!" at the rich dude in the shiny Tesla barely missing me as he uses the bike lane to get around a slower car, but then it makes me laugh at myself. Cyclist outrage is one of my favorite parts of biking in the city. 

I'm leading the pack of rush hour peddlers up Milwaukee, and I stop at a red light. A biker from the peloton gives an annoyed grunt and pedals past me into traffic, where he loses his balance trying to stop for a car that almost hits him. There's a pause, and I can't resist saying with a smile, "Don't worry. You're still going to win."

Then, I involuntarily wink at him, like what used to happen when I waited tables. Only, when I waited tables, I'd kick out my hip along with the wink to make the customer feel the kind of comfort only southern charm can provide.

Talk to ya soon, frands!

I'm actually really glad I can't see myself when I wink. 

The Blues is Just a Cicada in Your Beer

The sound of the singing cicadas begins in the morning and grows stronger and louder as the summer sun reaches it's place, first in the noon sky, and finally again as it reaches the horizon in the west. It doesn't matter where I am when I hear them, their song instantly takes me back to Memphis.

It took a while for me to understand how it felt to have a nationality, but it took me no time at all to know what it felt like to come from a place. I realized where I was from, and the part it would play in my life, the first time I crossed the bridge over the Mississippi River into Arkansas. I sat up on my knees in the back seat of my parents' car and watched the skyline rise and fall as we disappeared into the west. 

When I left for the first time to live in another place, all I could think of was the river and the Mississippi Delta, the slow gate of the inhabitants of area code 901, the bitter idealism, the weeping of the music, and the mysticism on every street corner. 

Memphis took me in, although she was not my birth home. She raised me and sent me on my way. When I came back to her, broken and lost, she took me in, put me back together, and made me see who I was, maybe for the first time in my life. 

It was most certainly the people that colored my life in the bluff city, but we were all under the spell of her dark magic. 

A few days ago the Cicadas in Chicago stopped singing; however, they are still present. I see their shells lying along the grass in small, neatly trimmed lawns. They leave them, their old selves, behind as they continue to migrate.

Go back in time and find the shells I have left behind, those I continually leave in my wake. I don't know why, but I keep moving, running once I've found it too difficult to keep singing.

When I returned home to Memphis after learning to teach English in Europe, meeting Liam, falling in love with the world outside my home, the Cicadas were in full force, flinging their bodies into violent flights, and singing at the top of their...lungs(?).

One found its way into my beer at a house party in midtown. I was drinking someone's home brew. It was sweet and malty. Not the Cicada, the beer. The Cicada leapt from the shadows and into my beer. Just as quickly as its body landed in my beverage, it had flung itself out and on to the next Solo cup. I kept drinking the beer. My friends made that beer, which means they put their passion into it.

The times when the Blues have come into my life have seemed like little lifetimes within themselves. I feel like I'm walking down a dark tunnel, tense and certain with a twinge of doubt that the light will appear...eventually? The darkness always seems relentless, like the song of the Cicadas.

I know that it isn't. I know that life is difficult, that it doesn't really get better or easier. But I also know that I can handle it because I am stronger than even I realize...or will probably ever admit to myself. It's easier to make friends when I'm weak than it is to keep them. I can chase everyone I know away in a matter of minutes when that particular bad dream shows its face (The Blues...stay with me, guys). The ones that don't run are infinitely amazing to me. The ones that stay with me and hold my hand when I am THE WORST at holding hands, those are the people I hope I never lose.

I know I can't keep flinging my body from one beer to the next; thus, as I continue my travels, I have stopped running home. I would love to return more than I can say, but I will never rise from the ashes if I keep packing them up and dragging them to Memphis with me. I know that phoenix metaphor is pretty dramatic, and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but it sounds kinda cool too, and I don't want to be afraid of the overly sentimental if it gets the point across...or just...like...affects someone.

I'm in a tough spot right now, but I'm not alone, and despite my urge to continue to run, I've got to stay here and finish this beer. I'm pretty sure my friends made it, which means...

Oh, HI!