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| Jacob Lawrence, The Lovers, 1946 |
By Dawson Johnson
The Black Love space is the gap between your uncle’s fingers that, when pressed to his lips, rolls off the wood-tip and ambles in your direction alongside his grunts about saving the twenty he slipped you. You’ve seen it before. It is the glaze that coats your older cousin’s yellow eyes after one too many King Cobras—the glisten of his slugz that dances under Grandma’s stove light as he slurs something about how proud he is of you. It was the draft before hand met rump, and your mama promised that what she was doing hurt her more than it did you. You remember it staring back at you and your cousin while the two of you stirred mud soup for the squirrels you were sure would enjoy the delicacy. It’s wound in the strings that pull your Aunt away from her grocery shopping and entangles her with an old classmate until the duo giddily works the knot out themselves and they go their separate ways. The Black Love space is the relatedness that binds us all; it’s every inch of Black life.
The Black Love space escapes between each breath my professors take, especially when they insist my classmates and myself are significantly more intelligent than we have been made to believe we are. The Black Love space is the darkness that envelops the picnic tables at Tougaloo Park when it’s someone’s birthday or the last night before a holiday break. The Black Love space is what has kept me alive—whether it’s the bouncing ellipses that let me know my friend wants to talk to me or the touch of hand to arm when someone knows I’m not OK.
When I think of how the Black Love space has been mutated by the reverberations of slavery, I think of how those resoundings prevent me from enjoying the space to its full extent. The Black Love space harms me when my mama suddenly remembers the passed-down trick of not getting too close to her child for fear of a disquieting loss. This space harms me and those like me when the wish for financial stability and capacity to fully care for one’s family causes us to mistakenly prioritize money above all else. When distorted, the Black Love space can prevent me and others like me from connecting to the fullest extent.
Related:
• AALCI 2020
The Black Love space escapes between each breath my professors take, especially when they insist my classmates and myself are significantly more intelligent than we have been made to believe we are. The Black Love space is the darkness that envelops the picnic tables at Tougaloo Park when it’s someone’s birthday or the last night before a holiday break. The Black Love space is what has kept me alive—whether it’s the bouncing ellipses that let me know my friend wants to talk to me or the touch of hand to arm when someone knows I’m not OK.
When I think of how the Black Love space has been mutated by the reverberations of slavery, I think of how those resoundings prevent me from enjoying the space to its full extent. The Black Love space harms me when my mama suddenly remembers the passed-down trick of not getting too close to her child for fear of a disquieting loss. This space harms me and those like me when the wish for financial stability and capacity to fully care for one’s family causes us to mistakenly prioritize money above all else. When distorted, the Black Love space can prevent me and others like me from connecting to the fullest extent.
Related:
• AALCI 2020
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