Here’s what happened:

Like I said, I needed milk and this store, being right across the street, was indeed convenient. Only, when I looked over there I saw that there were a bunch of people jammed into one of the doorways of this very small store, with more trying to get in. I knew just from that that Malik was on duty because when the owners are there no one just hangs out. Malik was well-known in the neighborhood, a youth football coach who was viewed by the kids as part father confessor, part big brother, part wise old man and all around good guy.

Anyway, this crowd – this was weird even for Malik days; usually kids hang out outside or pick up a broom and sweep the parking lot or make sure the gas nozzles are on straight, or whatever. Never had I seen them all trying to cram into the tiny store doorway at once, everyone looking in the same direction, plus these weren’t all teens – obviously something had happened and I hoped it wasn’t something bad.

Perhaps strangely, the crowd didn’t deter me or the guy who had just pulled up to the pumps in the late model Mercedes. Me, I didn’t feel like walking to the big store and he, well there were no other gas stations nearby and he was obviously in a big hurry.  Anyway, the people in the doorway somehow made room for us get through and as soon as I crossed the threshold I heard that noise people make in threes in the back of their throats; “Mmph, mmph, mmph,” then “Man, that’s a blessing.” So, Malik was okay, that was his voice – but why was everyone staring his way? And what was the good news? I snaked around shoulders and arms, listening to the echo as it moved from person to person -  “.. a blessing”, “Yeah, that’s a blessing.” Maybe someone won the lottery.

Just as I reached the back of the store and grabbed the milk someone said “26!” and the process started over again – Malik’s voice saying that’s a blessing and the echoes throughout the men in the store. I had what I came for but I was really curious now about what was going on, so I sidled on over to the car product section, because that is where I had the best view of the front door and the register, and pretended I was really interested in STP and stuff. From there I got my first real look at the crowd – had to be about 25 people, all but two younger than 40, most looked like they were in their 20s, all Black, all male, all looking toward Malik.

Some of the guys I recognized – like Old Pete who walks around with a shopping cart collecting cans and plastic and old bike parts to fix up bikes for neighborhood kids. And the kid with his sideways baseball cap, big shirt, big shorts and one sock falling down. He stomps around with a frown on his face, holding his crotch, and every time I see him I have to laugh (to myself) because he reminds me of some sort of Spanky and Our Gang character or something who has to go to the bathroom. I do not tell him this because I think he thinks he looks “tough.”

No scowl on the kid this day, though; in fact, he looks young and anxious and innocent as he stares at up at Malik – who looms over everyone because the shorter store owners have a raised floor behind the register to make them look bigger. Malik is already so big that, with his football-player build, shiny bald head and earring, even on level ground he looks like someone just coaxed out of a lamp. 

Another sends a number into the mix and gets the throat sounds and the blessing and then suddenly the kid pipes up – “16!” he says, looking if possible even more worried. Everyone turns to him, Malik looks at him – then shakes his head three times in lieu of the sound and says, “Man… that’s a blessing”. The kid’s face is luminous and gratified – his offering was accepted. There is also an illumination in my mind as I get an idea of what all this is about.  They are calling out ages. Their ages. I realized I was witnessing …what? A rite? An affirmation? A bonding? I had no idea what to call it, but it was something special so I ignored my warming milk and stayed right where I was as the ages and blessings moved through the gathering.

Finally Old Pete says “64!” and a murmur arises even before Malik strongly declares that that’s a blessing and the crowd echoes it. Another surprising offering comes – “65!” and things stop for a minute as everyone looks. I see it’s Mercedes Man, the guy who had been in such a hurry. He was still there, right next to Old Pete – it seems he, too, got caught up in the impromptu pageantry of whatever was going on, and put off whatever he had been rushing toward. All attention was focused on the two older men, Mercedes Man and Old Pete – and they looked at each other, eyes weighing and cataloging.

One in a $1000 suit, his whole being so soft and shiny and expensive he looked like he’d been run over with a floor buffer; the other in old overalls and scruffy tennis shoes, his whole being so scarred and pitted by life he just looked like he’d been run over, period. I saw the expressions flicker across everyone’s faces as they sincerely but distractedly offered their blessings – only a year separated these two in age, but life had separated them in far more than that.

After a moment things started rolling again.

I had to leave so I walked to the front, put my milk on the counter and, as a sort of sideways acknowledgement of what I had just witnessed, said “42!” I understood the kid’s anxiety now – would my offering be accepted, I wondered? Black women may die of different things, but we too tend to die early. I got my answer as Malik smiled and shook his head three times and declared my age a blessing, and as the men added theirs Malik presented an offering of his own. “I’m 32.” Then, maybe thinking he should explain the all male grouping (I was still the only female in the store, and there were still only Black people in there – both odd things) Malik started talking about how Black men, Black boys – they sometimes don’t live that long. Any age a Black man attained was a blessing; an older age, like he was, sometimes a miracle. He has a little girl, he says, five years old and the center of his life. He wants to grow old for her so he stays out of messes and away from trouble – but sometimes even that doesn’t work if you’re the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Everyone listens and nods, looking somber and determined, hopeful and a bit hopeless as some offer their stories, too, of themselves or someone they know who is gone – to disease, to prison, or, far too often, to the grave. Not all sadness or despair, of course, or even primarily – plenty of triumphs and just day-to-day eventless lives. Kids off to college, better jobs, forming families and so on. All the more shocking when often senseless tragedy strikes someone-who-could-be-me, though.

I knew all this, of course, what Black U.S. American doesn’t? But after looking at and listening to this group of men and boys who were everything – rich, poor and in-between; fat, thin, baby thugs, fathers, sons, blue collar, white collar, never had a collar in their lives, high yellow, golden brown, black as coal, very young, old young, very old – after looking and listening and accidently witnessing this… whatever it was, after this I knew all this in a very different way, to the marrow of my bones.

And I walked out of the store changed, if just a little. Even now, years later,  I sometimes pass groups of young or old Black men, or Latino, or other target groups and think – that’s a blessing.

And when I look at my three beautiful Black grandsons I see them in my mind’s eye as old men, and hope the blessings hold.

[The title of this piece is from Dwayne Betts’ wonderful, thought-provoking essay, The Tragedy of Biggie and Pac / photo of group of young men is from here]

Doesn’t that question puzzle you? It did me, when I first heard it. And every time since. My reaction when I first heard it was – well, what isn’t a feminist issue?

I think that question – and the context in which it is usually posed, whether as an inquiry in comments or  precursor to an explanation of why in a post – has done more to turn me off of mainstream or white feminism than all the race and other issues combined. It’s that question and what it says about the state of feminist teachings that makes me question whether this is something I want to be identified with or not. And the conclusion, which so many others have come to is mostly “not”.

Yet… I hate to give up the label of  “feminist”. It’s been *my* word for so long. Just as I was born in the shadow of the Civil Rights movement, I was also raised in the backwash of the Women’s Liberation Movement. I have been calling myself a feminist since I was young (I am 51 now) and – because I didn’t know any better, not really having had access to the feminist theory at the time or any other than life feminists of various hues and education levels  – had molded the meaning of the word to fit my belief’s perfectly. The belief that women are at the center of everything in life and that little can be accomplished in a sustainable way in any area – human rights, social justice, healthcare, environmental justice, education, food and water scarcity, labor movements, upward mobility – just about anything at all, without positioning women and their rights and needs at the center.  With women of color and other marginalized folks at the center of even that.  Everything else (in my way of thinking) flows both to and from this.

I quite liked considering myself a feminist, no matter the guff I took from boys and men, or women who thought it was little more than a dirty word. I suppose it’s a sadness – and an irony – that it took meeting actual, professional “top of the tree” feminists to finally convince me that I wasn’t one.

Perhaps not so oddly, I don’t see women of color  asking the dreaded question (not to say that none have or do, just not in my experience). I imagine that’s partially because we dwell in the intersections and thus are used to looking every which way as opposed to being so narrowly focused only on what affects us personally, but is there more to it than that? It may be that our lives (or those of people we know and/or love) are often lived so close to the nexus that we have no other choice than to realize that it all affects us, as women. We fix it all or die.

I don’t know. We (woc) have no special majik or anything, and we certainly can get things wrong, forget to listen to the people closest to the issues (with no harmful intent, but we all know how much good that does), possibly apply the wrong prescription – particularly those of us who are still trying to deal with our western privilege – but even if we get it wrong (at first) I just haven’t seen anyone have to explain why we should try to get it at all.

So, yep, I’m still wondering… what isn’t a feminist issue?

(picture at top from the Brooklyn Museum)

He doesn’t belong to anyone – although he seems remarkably well cared for, for a stray. His thick, glossy fur on his large, muscled frame alternately reflects and absorbs all light as he wanders, strutting through his half-wild life as a part of the neighborhood he’s foraged in since he was small.

There is nothing special about my patio; like all the others in this 8 plex it’s a small square with pebble stone paving, and open to the courtyard so that we can look out at the bushes and any flowers the neighbors have planted. The elderly woman who lives across the way has the best patio, by far – all sorts of interesting things: hanging plants, flowers in pots, a bunch of different wind chimes, a bench and a bbq. Me, I have a small 3 legged table that I shove into the corner so that it will stand up, and a black folding chair with a cushioned seat. She is not as fortunate in her view out of her window as I am in mine.

And I guess I should say I share a chair, because it no longer appears to belong just to me.  If I peer through the patio window at night, sometimes I can make out a dark shape on the chair, almost blending in until he lifts his head to give me an unconcerned stare out of brilliant green eyes.

I wasn’t surprised to see him there, even the first time. I’ve pretty much come to expect that, wherever I live, a black cat will at least come visiting in a memorable way, if not take up residence.

The last one wasn’t mine either. She wasn’t a stray and she only came to sit outside my patio door (a different door, a different place) with a purpose.

When I first glanced up and saw her sitting there looking in my window – tall and delicate with silky black fur, jade green eyes and a golden pendant around her neck – it was the morning after I discovered that there were kittens behind my fireplace.

Well, I didn’t realize they were behind the fireplace at first – I just heard the mewing. My cat has been fixed since she was  young, so I knew they weren’t her doing. And, strangely, they weren’t the black cat’s doing either – I’d seen her around for months, and she hadn’t been pregnant (unless she carried them all in back or something, like some women do).

Anyway, the kittens were there, and for as many days as it took to first, figure out that they weren’t going anywhere on their own and then for the maintenance person to find them and figure out how to extract them, the cat would appear each morning to sit right outside my patio door, just waiting.

Once the kittens were gone, she was too.

The one before that was born on my patio. Its mother (again, not my cat) was one ugly cat – orange and yellow and brown, with a funny smushed face. She was wild and never let me get near her but still I fed her, when I could,  just because she was so ugly I was afraid no one else would, and she didn’t  seem all that good at scavenging.

She repaid me by having a kitten on my patio. Just one. A little black ball of fluff, with green eyes. After a few weeks, though, she picked it up by the scruff of the neck and toted it off to some better place she’d found, I guess. Anyway, she didn’t come back and neither did the kitten.

I was moving soon myself, so I just silently wished them well and continued to pack.

Funny to think that I’ve never actually owned a black cat, but I always seem to have one around.

(picture above of the cat is from Flamingo Patterns)