Salty

A Black Eyed Story

Don’t be discouraged. Don’t throw the towel in.
Don’t you dare give in. Darling, you are not alone. 

Sault - 5am, Aiir 2022

What if the good news is that nobody knows what’s going to happen to us? Don’t take me as some kind of pollyanna. I’m only wondering if the unknowing might be necessary for our survival. Perhaps we need this space to wonder. A blank canvas might just be the best possible beginning to something new – if not new, perhaps, something newish? Maybe we are at the edge of a world stuffed with all we know for sure and a new world empty except for all that we have yet to imagine? 

What if we took these lemons fallen from the tree of life, scrubbed them clean and instead of making lemonade put them in a bowl, covered them in salt, sprinkled in a little sugar, added a few peppercorns, nestled in a bay leaf and packed them into jars? What if we concentrated this bitterness and turned it into edible sunlight? 

If Newton’s Third Law of Motion is true and for every action, every force in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction, instead of meeting outrage with outrage and fear with fear, what if we resisted resistance and rested? 

And if our every action will be compacted by their equal and opposite reaction, what if we went limp as a child? What if we went boneless to the floor? What if we remained in corpse pose? What if we made them drag our ponderous souls into their dark corners? Instead of going kicking and screaming, what if we let our knees buckle? 

---

Find an Audio Recording of This Black Eyed Story Above

For the past nine days I’ve been convalescing, trying to heal a wound in this dark and violent wood where menacing trees grow thicker and denser. It’s finally sinking in – we’ve made a wrong turn. We’ve seen this tree, this rock, this fork in the road before. We’ve gotten absolutely nowhere. We’re miles from our destination. We’ve wasted daylight walking around in a big circle, landing right back where we started.

When I think of true healing, I think of the acclaimed yoga teacher Matthew Sanford. How does a body paralyzed from the chest down move? How does it feel? In his book, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, he teaches us: 

I accept that I will never walk again. But the ability to voluntarily move my paralyzed legs is not the only measure of success. There are others. For starters, it is important for me to experience any kind of connection to my paralyzed body that I can. 

This marked the beginning of perhaps my most important realization—that there is healing other than healing to walk again… Healing is still possible…

During Matthew’s rehabilitation, he would sometimes fall back into “the clutches of an old healing story” that insisted movement was the marker of success. This made his rehabilitation an act of resistance. It became a sprint of endurance – a grievous willfulness. “I pushed when I needed to soften. The result was unintended violence.”

---

---

 How do you fight for love
When the world has broken you?
I know that times are rough
When you're down, keep looking up.

Sault - Fight For Love, (Untitled) 11, 2022 

Yesterday, the Good Good Good Newspaper posted on their feed: 

It’s been a week since Election Day. Many of us are still processing the results. Here are 5 actions you can take right now to help build a better future. 

First up:

Cancel your Amazon account. Amazon has faced widespread criticism for its impact on the environment, treatment of works, and unethical data collection. 

You have the power in your dollar. Canceling your account is taking a stand against a giant corporation with problematic practices. It allows you to find alternatives that better align with your principles and what you want the future to look like. 

With an uncertain economic future, it’s up to us as consumers to protect small, independent businesses – not giant corporations. 

I was saddened by the lack of imagination. Only a few years ago, we considered Amazon workers “essential”. I was surprised no one had considered what a boycott would do to the workers. How do we remain good neighbors to those who do not get to choose their principles over their paycheck? Are we outraged because of how this coming administration might harm them? Or are we outraged for ourselves?

I wrote in the comments section: 

My entire family back home works at Amazon. Lots of hand-to-mouth hardworking folks work for that company. Are there other suggestions that won’t hurt people who are already scraping up a living just to get by? How do we act without our actions inadvertently hurting those who need their paychecks? 

They never replied, but another person was livid at my question. They told me all the reasons I was supporting evil and wrong-doing and oppression and slavery. It reminded me of all the people who told me that if I voted for Harris I was voting for genocide. 

I asked: 

Again… what about the workers there now who need their paycheck? Have we asked them what they think? 

The person said something like, “It’s not my fault if the workers are casualties in this principled war. They can work somewhere else. I’m doing them a favor.” Again I’m paraphrasing.

I said: 

Okay. Well, if you’re not to blame, then I guess those workers can sleep well with that knowledge.

And they pulled their gloves off and let me have it: “I worked for Starbucks and I quit because it was evil and if I did it they can too.” Or something like that. Again, I’m paraphrasing because I blocked them, so I can no longer see their comments.

I gave them my final reply: 

So nice to meet you here in the comments of @goodgoodgoodco. I feel good. Do you? 

For every boycott, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. More than likely it will be “an unintended violence” that we didn’t see coming. What if instead of taking a stand in the streets of commerce, we planted our feet at home and at the stroke of dayrise leaned out our windows and sang a simpler song in unison? What if we harmonized our intentions? 

What if instead of telling my story in comments sections I chose to write a better story using actions and not words, IRL not URL? 

---

---

Tricia Hersey’s new book, We Will Rest! The Art of Escape opens with a Q&A: 

Q: How do you find rest in a capitalist, White supremacist, patriarchal, ableist system? 
A:  You tap into your trickster energy. You become an escape artist. 

---

---

Guests at a 1925 breakfast party for Langston Hughes, hosted by Regina Andrews (then Anderson) and Ethel Nance (then Ray) at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue. Hughes is second from left.

---

One night in 1924, an interracial group of artisans and patrons of the arts became escape artists. They came together over good food and good wine and good music and conversation, unwittingly birthing something new: the Harlem Renaissance. It didn’t solve the problems of racial oppression with vehement acts of protests. Instead, it pressed the traumas of lynchings and the displacement of The Great Migration into novels, plays, music, art and poetry. Without this conclave of Black love plucking its own feathers to create a cozy nest of Black stories, perhaps Rosa would’ve never had the courage to sit down. I believe all our acts of resistance, from the ones who jumped overboard rather than live in chains to John Lewis defiantly facing billy clubs, are fueled by this kind of joyful expression. This New Negro movement beginning in Harlem at a dinner party made the darkness an affable host, adding leaves to the table, daring her to put out the good china. It taught us that resistance can be abundant. It doesn’t have to whittle away our souls. It doesn’t have to crack skulls. It wouldn’t dream of disappointing us. What if the darkness is calling us, but we’re too scared to sit at her table? 

---

---

Don't waste time 'cause time is precious
It's your only time you've got here
Life will always bring its pressures
Use it wise and keeps those treasures.

Sault - Time Is Precious, Air 2022 

We marched and they met us with tear gas. We boycotted and the needy were left with the crumbs. We voted and they stormed the Capitol. We voted again and they organized and outvoted us. Did you know Dr. King’s autopsy showed he had the heart of 60 year old, even though he was 39 years old when he was murdered? Did you know Black Lives Matter activist Erica Garner died from an enlarged, stressed-out heart at 27 years old? Just before her death, she said, “I’m struggling right now with the stress and everything. This thing, it beats you down. The system beats you down to where you can’t win.” Is death the only rest the weary will ever get?

What if this time it’s not the time to push, but the time to draw nearer? What if resistance prefers to spend its energy blowing kisses to the hurting rather than throwing punches at those too big to feel the impact of each tiny blow? What if it’s more contained and concentrated like the flavor of a preserved lemon? What if just a little bit of its rind could season the whole pot? What if it was good for the digestion? What if it cured gut rot? What if it was so tender it melted on the tongue? What if it was bright as sunshine and salty as tears and just as necessary for our wellness? What if resistance was cathartic? 

This time around, we could choose to do this differently. This time around, I’m salting these lemons. 

---