My mother gave herself a verbal pat on the back: “I did sew it up nice,” she said. “But I didn’t mean for you to wear it all at the same time, baby.”
She didn’t stop me from going to school like that, though. I wanted to wear every piece at the same damn time, and my mother, ever the encourager, took me by the hand and walked me into my fourth-grade class, kissed me good-bye, and let me swag exactly like I wanted, sending a clear, powerful message that if I liked it, she loved it. I think she dug that her little girl had her own sense of style—that the way I assembled my outfits and fashioned my hair was the easiest and purest expression of my own voice.
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Being your own self—having a voice—was critical in the hood. I came of age at the dawn of the crack epidemic, when a cocktail of societal ills—high crime rates, poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, chronic joblessness, pick your poison—left countless Washington, DC, folks in peril, living on the margins in some of the most vulnerable and dangerous neighborhoods in America. Fighting your way through the pain of that, gasping for air when you’re buried to the top of your head in lack with no sign of surplus, can leave you feeling some kind of way. Sometimes helpless. A lot of times hopeless. Like no one gives a good hot damn whether you suffocate to death or you breathe again. Still, even and especially when you feel helpless, it’s your ability to be seen and heard that gives you power where you feel like you have none. Even in the darkest places, you exist. Walk through any street in the hood and you’ll see what I’m talking about: boys trotting down the sidewalks, their pants sagging defiantly low and their beards and their attitudes thicker and thornier than a rosebush in full bloom; girls with a mass of hot-pink, sea-blue, and fire-engine-red streaks in their hair, nails long, sculpted, and covered in colorful, intricate designs waving animatedly in the air as they get lost in chatter about the day’s happenings. Everything about those kids screams, “I’m here, I’m feeling myself, and you’re going to feel me, too.” The respect for that in-your-face style is grudging—it’s sometimes even dismissed as tacky. But really, that one black kid doing that weird thing with his pants or his hair is the very definition of trendsetting; the mainstream’s first reaction to it is “What in the hell are you wearing?” Years later, it’s cool as hell on a Kardashian. Where I come from, we don’t need to wait for that validation. As a community, we prize creativity, even and especially if the world we live in isn’t quick to reward it. In the hood, having a voice, then, is freedom.
It’s also a black thing. Let’s keep it real: collectively, we can be a loud, rowdy bunch, particularly and especially among ourselves. I know, this is a stereotype unfairly but typically saddled on the backs of black people; being loud talkers, laughers, and jokesters, dressing flamboyantly and saying exactly what’s on your mind when it crosses your mind isn’t the sole province of people with brown skin, and race doesn’t dictate volume. I’ve seen my fair share of white, Latino, and Asian folk get loud, too. But get yourself around some black folk when our guard is down and we’re around people we care about and our love is filling the space: all bets are off. We can be some loud-ass people.
This was certainly true of my family. We were—and remain to this day—a close-knit crew of trash-talkers: lovers of the put-down, quick with the verbal jab rooted in honesty, love, and a heap of foolery. Whether it was a backyard barbecue at my aunt’s house out in the suburbs, or my grandmother’s kitchen on the eve of a big Thanksgiving family dinner, or the living room couch in the two-bedroom apartment my mother and I shared, my cousins, aunties, grandmothers, parents, and most everyone else who shared our DNA and our space would have all those within earshot in stitches.
I lived for the annual family summer vacation in Ocean City precisely for this reason. Every year, my father’s parents would rent a house in this resort town on the Maryland coast, pile my cousins and me in the back of their ride, and lead the caravan of cars filled with family headed for a week on the beach. Deep into the night, stomachs full with crab cakes and, for the grown-ups, a cocktail or two, there would be fist-bumping and yelling and lots of handclapping to the beat of every syllable in every word uttered, plenty of full-on belly laughs, and furious head nodding, too. From moment to moment, the adults could be alternately arguing and laughing about the efficacy of welfare, the beauty of The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” who could get off the coldest put-down in a game of The Dozens, and who always underbid in a raucous game of Spades. No matter the topic, no matter how heated the conversation got, we’d all end the night spent but richer for the experience—happy, with just enough salve to keep our souls right for whatever was to come when we got back home.