limn

Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

Toni Morrison Nobel Lecture

“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.” In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement. One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?” Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive. The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know”, she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

How Long is Never?

On the History (and Future) of YA and Speculative Fiction by Black Women

I grew up watching X-Men, Star Trek, and The Secret World of Alex Mack. I also loved reading the Animorphs series, as well as anything written by Ray Bradbury. However, the YA speculative novels published last year would have been unfathomable to young me, a dream that seemed too far-fetched to ever exist. If I saw a Black girl in a story at all, we were depicted as suffering from a life of slavery, enduring racism and fighting for our civil rights, living a life of poverty and struggling to survive, dealing with psychological trauma and physical violence, or disappearing into the background as a wise-cracking secondary or tertiary character. I was never the hero, the zombie slayer, or the magic wielder. I was not allowed to have that dream.