I was up at 6am yesterday morning, volunteering to help shuttle NYU freshmen and their families into a residence hall on a Sunday morning. The building was the same one where my parents left me years ago, and I recognized the excitement (and shell shock) as families unpacked bags from their cars or from the taxis hat brought them from airports.
I especially recognized the look on the face of the parents. When mine dropped me off, after our journey from Orlando to JFK to 11th street, their faces said scared-shitless-but-pretending-not-to-be. After the obligatory trip to Bed,Bath, and Beyond, I sent my parents on their way and set about living my adult life. It’s hard to believe now that there was once a time I got lost walking to Washington Square from the East Village. I must indeed be getting old because the freshmen looked tiny to me. I was looking at some of the moms and thinking: “really, you’re going to let her live in New York City by herself. She doesn’t look a day older than 12.”
To be truthful though, New York has allowed me to live my dreams. It’s no wonder so many of the greats – from Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes – found their voices and their way in this place. As I reflect on the years since college, I must admit, cheesy as it is, that dreams are made here. Last week, I felt like I was dreaming as we held our first (and definitely first of many) events. It was an exhausting and elating process. Leading up to the evening, I worried about turnout, logistics, absolutely anything and everything.
Then, the night began and everything got right. As I opened up, describing the Zora&Alice vision, and seeing all the wonderful people who had turned out to support it, I was moved by a feeling. It’s hard to describe it exactly – it reminded me a little bit of the way I feel halfway through a performance by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir or in the middle of watching Alvin Ailey dancers perform Revelations – I just felt lifted.
I could tell the crowd felt it too. Head bobbed as Courtney Young read her insightful piece on colorism, published in a former issue of Bitch Magazine. Miss Aiesha Turman nearly brought me to tears with her moving story about her grandparents and growing up black in Albany. When Victoria Lanier read from Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” it felt like a perfect fit. Zora&Alice has been, for me and for our editors and contributors, a way for us to take action. Rather than just bemoan the media’s one-sided representation of us as black women, we stopped being silent and complacent, and took the risk to build something. After a pause, Nina Fernadez brought youthful exuberance and swagger – her performance connected the young and the old. Nina, still a college student, reminded me of where I was just a few years ago and put into spoken word many of things I could not express then. I can only hope to someday be half as funny, smart and sexy as Twanna Hines. She closed out the evening with two pieces on love, loneliness and sex.
In planning the event, we gave the readers little direction. Instead, we asked women we admired to read and allowed them to choose pieces that resonated with them personally. What we got was a great representation of the diversity and complexity of black women’s voices. Black girls do talk and think about colorism, family, social activism, the past, the future, love, sex, and everything in between. We are complex, strong and weak, hidden and over-exposed, loud yet unheard.
Seeing excited freshmen begin their “real” adult lives forced me to appreciate all the things I’ve done – and hope to do – with mine. Following our reading, I was thrilled to attend a screening of The Black Girl Project, a documentary that I cannot rave enough about (but will in a future post) in which black girls, mainly young girls in college, to speak candidly and honestly about their lives. After all of that, I’m feeling good about black women in our twenty-something and thirty-something years.
Courtney Young
Aiesha Turman
Nina Fernandez
Victoria Lanier and Twanna Hines catch up during intermission
