we were here

How do you write a book about a woman with nothing but a name? I have a queue when it comes to writing projects: first in line is this essay for School Library Journal, then the sequel to A Wish After Midnight, then Billie’s Blues, then The Hummingbird’s Tongue. I’m presenting on the latter at a conference in Liverpool in June, but I still think about that project and the challenges that lie ahead. It’s no longer a book about my paternal grandmother because all I have is her name and some anecdotes that may or may not be true. So it’s becoming a different kind of book but one that’s still consistent with my overall project of fighting erasure. Last week I went over to Weeksville for a meeting with the executive director and lead educator. I’m excited to be partnering with Brooklyn Prospect Charter School; their middle grade students will take a historical fiction class with me before publishing their writing in an anthology and taking part in a community reading in May. I’m also looking forward to our literary salon, which will be by invitation only, but we’ll try to film the event. Imagine your favorite Brooklyn artists dressed in period clothes from the 1920s/30s…and I proposed an on-site portrait studio so we can take photos of the guests in all their finery—like the dignified portraits taken by James Van der Zee during the Harlem Renaissance. Everything I do during this two-month residency has to be documented so that funders know what we got up to, but also to leave a historical record. I have nothing that belonged to my grandmother (other than her name) and so have to use my imagination to create a profile of her and a picture of her life. She left nothing behind besides her two children; my father’s been gone for over a decade and my aunt has limited memories. The asylum in Antigua has no record of Rosetta’s commitment; there’s no death certificate. When I was doing research on my mother’s African American ancestors, I met with my great-aunt who proudly pulled out a pair of gloves that once belonged to her aunt. They were going to be donated to a roadside museum—a tiny wood-frame house that most travelers would likely bypass. So I asked to try the gloves on—they reached past my elbows and I felt quite elegant. But my great-aunt grew impatient and made me take them off. And I remember wondering whether it bothered her that I was Black—the only visibly Black person in a room full of people who had been raised to deny their “Negro ancestry.” On another trip to Grey County I stopped at an antiques shop and there was a large framed photograph on the wall of a nineteenth-century Black woman. The shop owner didn’t know the woman’s name and had acquired the piece through an estate sale. It was out of my price range but every once in a while I think about that woman in the portrait…unnamed, unknown, unclaimed. And now in hostile territory because the once interracial community has now become entirely white—and not by accident.

Renee Watson, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, me, Ibi Zoboi, & Dhonielle Clayton

On Saturday we had our second Black Women Writers Hangout up in Harlem. I’d had a full week and did consider pulling out; on Friday night I went to a party and managed to mingle for more than an hour, and then got up the next morning to have breakfast in Chelsea with friends from MA. As an introvert, that meant I only had a little more to give before I shut down and slipped back under my rock. But I was so glad I went to Harlem because spending three hours with these women was invigorating! We talked about the publishing industry, and coalition building, and Empire/Game of Thrones/How to Get Away with Murder. I woke with a migraine on Sunday and took a much-needed day of silence, but I’m already looking forward to seeing these women again in April. On March 18 we’ll all be at the Schomburg to hear Renée talk about her new novel, This Side of Home, with Jacqueline Woodson (get your tickets here). Whenever we get together we always take a moment to pose for a photograph. Most of what we discuss is off the record and not to be repeated, but we still want our gatherings to be remembered. And we want other writers to know that community IS possible when you commit to those who are on the same path. That’s one of the goals of my residency: to create a community of writers on a site that historically served as sanctuary for all kinds of Black people—free, fugitive, and everything in between…