Читать книгу Radical Humility - Группа авторов - Страница 11

Ruth Nicole Brown

Aunt Dottie’s house burst with butterflies. Everywhere you turned there were swallowtails on doilies, Painted Ladies painted on refrigerator magnets, Monarchs grouped in migratory scenes, and Angle Wings stitched on pillows.

The outside not to be outdone by the inside, Aunt Dottie landscaped her yard with colorful mixed-media artistic excess to feature her favorite technique—planting silk flowers among annuals and perennials. Plastic and surely living insects added more color and some movement. Tire pots were painted white to match the painted white tree trunks. The grass was always cut short and edged to perfection.

A small framed two-bedroom house, Aunt Dottie’s exceptionally beautified sanctuary was home to many: a butterfly garden. More people than I would ever meet in an Ann Arbor month stopped by to visit daily, announced and unannounced. I believe they stopped by for the same reason I did. Aunt Dottie knew how to love you back, so much so, you were prompted to reflect to ask: if it is blooming time, how might I open up to the necessary beauty needed in the now to fly?

“Ruthie,” she called me, “Is it alright if we have McDonald’s pancakes in the morning?” Store-bought pancakes served as invitation for me to extend some grace to Aunt Dottie’s aging body. She needed to conserve energy in the morning for the day’s festivities, which would range from backyard fish fries, all-day church service, and Deacon Street block parties that ran late into the night. We watched Wheel of Fortune. We listened to church on the radio. We held long conversations. I listened to my Uncle Jack tell stories about old Detroit and Kresge’s factory. Aunt Dottie showed me photographs and shared family memories. In her speech, I searched for and found how she moved, and that’s the way I sing, like grace is a fluttering living thing.

Sarah Grace is the name given to me by We Levitate, the band I am in, which makes music from our collective practice. We Levitate calls me “Sarah” because I have four children, which seems of biblical proportion in relation to my career as a professor. Academic culture teaches work-life balance as one of each, not four of anything. “Grace” is the characteristic those in the band most often name when others want to know who I really am in the classroom outside of my performance with the band and Lil’ Kim-inspired “Crush On You” blue wig.

Formally trained musicians want to know what instrument I play in the band. But besides our own creative props—which might be a whistle for me, a white dress on Porshé, Jessica’s black leggings, and Blair’s DJ equipment—I don’t play an instrument in a traditional sense. I definitely do not sing on key or with perfect pitch. The sound is a conglomeration of funk, soul, rhythm and blues, gospel, hip hop, and house, and sometimes I sing, speak, and rap. More than anything, I think, we make music that sounds like the gifts we’ve each been given.

At one of our We Levitate concerts; the dancing went on longer than the flyer stated and we insisted on paying the tax for extended space rental. A homegirl (who has never met Aunt Dottie) and I were driving home, listening to our music on a CD because we just could not get enough. Hungry from the dancehall, she reached in her purse and found some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. After popping the bag open, she extended them in my direction, offering me first dibs. “You, before me,” she said. This password, handed down from generation to generation, I recognize immediately. A butterfly overhead.

Zabeulah Carey Wade, who my family called Aunt Dottie, was one of my Grandma Ruth’s older sisters. As a girl, I visited Aunt Dottie and Uncle Jack’s for family reunions. I relearned the meaning of “neighbor” and was intimately introduced to chosen family. Family photos were intentionally placed and hung throughout the house teeming with keepers of Kentucky and Tennessee traditions. I did not recognize them all but I knew that to them, I belonged.

The more Aunt Dottie gave the more she had to give. It was a negation of self that depended on a complete understanding of generosity divine as trees, gendered feminine outside of patriarchal norms, God-given, disabled, and Black. Carey girls kept house with exacting science and decadent artistry. Each one stretched in a different direction; they kept a profound sweetness in their arsenal and taught new generations of Carey girls their no-nonsense ideas about living through family rituals of gathering on occasions of celebration, mourning, and reunion.

Aunt Dottie made power out of delicate tenderness, speculative impairments, and feelings of deservedness too often denied Black women and girls. Ordinary and extraordinary, she formulated humility from generosity so it could not be reduced to something like low esteem. Something always grows from the conditions of this world. Aunt Dottie’s generosity was sourced from a life-affirming humility that, among many things, works as antidote to misunderstanding.

Gossiped about for loving too much, Aunt Dottie was born with her heart on the right side of her chest cavity. That was the first explanation I heard of why she gave differently—as if directed by an astral force, and it didn’t seem untrue enough to question. In Pembroke, Kentucky, where she was born with a wrong-sided heart that exuded a correcting love, her exceptionalism was felt and lived through touch. You had no idea when you changed and transformed in her presence, you just knew that it happened. That is all and everything to how her humility means and teaches. The very best given is not to be owned, but added to, and then given away as good weather for flight.

Aunt Dottie and Uncle Jack moved to Detroit for the same reasons as did many others in the 40s—factory work promising economic stability. They brought with them a vibrant sense of the social and profound faith. I do not know what, beyond youthful naiveté, pride, and stress, kept me away from visiting Aunt Dottie and Uncle Jack when I was living and studying in Ann Arbor. I didn’t go see Aunt Dottie as my mother encouraged until my third year of graduate school. It had been a while. I was no longer a girl. I had exams. I was trying to be grown.

I saw them enact an economics I did not learn in the course books, yet felt in a real way in heavy pockets. After the three of us held hands in prayer, Aunt Dottie would say, “I know Daddy gave you gas money already, but we can do better than that!” and she would give me a wad of cash. To which Uncle Jack, would say, “Oh Ruthie! We so enjoyed you this weekend,” hugging me and handing me some more change. While loading the car, Aunt Dottie would call me back inside of the house and say, “Me and Daddy thought we could do better than we did, so take this and get home safely.” I wondered where the money came from—the three of us in the kitchen was a Rubik’s cube. This was not a small thing. Even in the grand gesturing of this “you before me” ritual, it was unassuming. They were trusting this Carey namesake to not be distracted by money but available to the lesson of their outgiving ritual.

In the band, I sing so clear in my roundabout way: the social delight as stronghold. I wander the stage motivated by pleasure, coupled with a deep satisfaction that feels like the music hums all over the place. I am giving myself a chance to profess with little expectation of return; there may be no applause. The obvious question—”What is she doing?”—is a question that is Black. In search of how she made this something to be taken in that also fills up is also Blackness. After We Levitate performs and levitation is shared, everyone is freer. That energy transforms me every time.

Selflessness can be distorted, exploited, or denied but, I think about what it means to keep a humble home. Aunt Dottie preserved recipes for vanilla cake with chocolate sauce spooned over top, teacakes, and rolls learned in her girlhood, so that they are now a cherished memory in my own. I too have committed to the rise of baked goods and the raising up of people with the stir and stillness collective work requires. Slow and steady the lyrics come to me through a network of relationships with and among those similarly eager for the taste of fulfilling change. My recipe for nuance includes humility in the way that I learned from Aunt Dottie.

My contribution to the band is to follow the ways of butterflies; reveling in the beauty of smallness and abiding things so delicate they might just break, if not respected and acknowledged—sentiments requiring sensitivity, an aesthetic preference for the habits and ways personnel management might suggest be thrown away, and a politics of delight. Such music I learned as Aunt Dottie’s niece was wholly restorative. Even unto herself, a song.

For me, We Levitate’s studio practice, where we create and record music, is such a vulnerable ritual because I am not formally trained yet I get to announce all the ways that I am, in the presence of those who see me doing and know that I have never lied to them. In my verses, I hear myself making the block beautiful and uncontained. We extend the moment by promising another.

Zabeulah’s lesson is a dotted butterfly that scientists often refer to as Polygonia interrogationis. During periods of intense questioning, Zabeulah’s lesson will appear so you do not forget humility in the practice. The presence of this butterfly is a message for cultural workers to rename that which you need so that it cannot be weaponized against your dreams and collective impact. Each dot is an instance of us being for each other, and a “you before me” logic whereby humility and giving mean something beautiful when expressed between and among Black women and Black girls. When Zabeulah’s lesson lands nearby, it asks you to remember that not everything can be professionalized or commodified.

Zabeulah’s lesson sounds like this: Use whatever is most feared to reflect and inform who we say we are as recipe for the rise. The heat is hot and you’ll have to be flexible. Skilled in waiting, letting go, and holding on, we can, through the dip and toss, motivate each other. A different version of Sun Ra Arkestra, all of us as Black brown dark matter, popsicle melting, just keep playing. When Black girls go first we are going together. So, give it up. That is a hard and fixed direction in the form of “I can’t make it,” “I didn’t like it,” and “Maybe, next time,” and “What in the world?!”. Extend with patience some call grace. Stand supported by artifice and artifact. The sound of a healthy selflessness or what I understand to be a queer practice of self-abnegation, resists the kind of self-regard on which status quo algorithms of humility depend. You have to listen for it always and especially when hungry.

Notice Zabeulah’s lesson. Feel the delight of us being for each other and inspiring both rest and movement. The dotted markings of care are evident, complete incoherent ciphers of other ways, including yours. To be trusted.