Young Black girls, those born to parents with foreign birth certificates and even more foreign values, aren't born for themselves. They are a tool, a vehicle to arrive at their architect's long-forgotten dreams.
Her personality, her desires, and her dreams are never truly her own. She wants to please, she's trained to, and so she does. There isn't anything wrong with this. It is what she is made for! You wouldn't be upset with a wheelbarrow taking the dirt from the ground from one place to another, or the doctor for saving the patient's life. It is her duty.
She grows to begin discovering "desire". To desire for things outside of that she was created for. Her creators tell her to dream but not out of the confines of her purpose. The doctor can also be the nurse or the PA, if she would like. You would never use a Ferrari to transport bones! My God, there are hearses for that.
She is delighted that her predecessors think so highly of her. She knows, without being told, that she has a job to do. But what of the sun? What about the grass on her feet, the pen in her hand... where do these fit?
The world is broken, is she not supposed to fix it? She is obsessed with who she is supposed to be and calls it love. She names it passion.
Then she falls in love. Has her heart broken. Is hurt in so many ways. Is told to feel less, feel more, don't show emotion. She is told to lower her voice, to raise it, run. Run! Be thinner, be less, who cares how much it hurts, it should hurt. She doesn't want to hurt anymore.
Young Black girls eventually become young Black women. Women who are so, so tired. Who want to laugh and twerk and create art. So they do. They value what matters to them and their creators claim they don't know who the young Black girl is anymore. That she has lost her faith. They don't know they never knew her but rather just held their tool in their hands and moved it in the ways they needed to.
But the hurt doesn't go away. It hurts her to not be what she spent so long telling herself she was. It hurts to watch the world continue to burn and know that no matter what she did, that job, that role wasn't going to put out the flames. She has to seem strong in her decisions so she hides the pain.
She learns that the pain lives next to the joy. Why did it take her 25 years? Why was she so unhappy? Why was she so scared?
Well, it doesn't matter. So she creates. She sings loudly. She dances and looks silly doing it. She doesn't hate her body. She learns, learns, learns every single day. The people around her are showing her that she has always been extraordinary but that she didn't need to be to be loved. She is so loved.
And, what of her originators? They separated who she was meant to be from who she is. They mourned the loss of their tool to grow in love for their daughter. There is still so much they don't know about her but she knows only pain lies there. Where there is pain there is also light. So much light.
Comments