Partus Sequitur Ventrem

An old piece, made new again. With love, from Baby T.

¹Every night, I pray for my womb. I get on my knees, bow my head in supplication, and plead for guidance and protection concerning the vacant sack in my belly. I lay my searching, black hand across my abdomen. I close my eyes seeking refuge or hope from an unknown but resilient fear. I search for peace in a world that will try to kill my seed.

A single tear, a groan—reactions to what seems will be the inevitable. My eyes close as I pray for my womb. I cannot rely on sight as I dream of the future. For what I see foretells heartache, marginalization, death.

God says, “Before you were born, I knew thee.” Yet, the Devil in White condemns my fetus inside my belly before my water breaks, so eager to rip the child from the solace my body has created. Will the child even get a chance to breach my walls, to touch the outside world?

The Devil in White also holds the stethoscope around his neck. His hands are gloved…I hope, and they are reaching out to examine my inner parts. His touch is light, caressing my jewels under the pretense of assessing my child’s health. Can I trust these hands? Can I trust this world with my most precious creation?

Oh baby, the body that shields you now has been ransacked by the trauma of blackness in a bleached world. Pallid and ghastly is my face, as I walk with the weight of the patriarchy, the emotional burdens of myself as well as others, and the generational anxiety that I hope will not be passed on to you. How can I feed and nourish you when my body’s oldest friend is pain?

Grief causes my heart to race, and before I know it, I’m falling. Catching myself, I wake up. I had fallen asleep, fallen into the nightmare of reality. The tears of my dreams were actually sweat coating my body. I head into the shower, and as I let the water run down over me in streams, I fall into another trance.

Why am I worried for something that has yet to happen? That is years away from happening? I force myself to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. But, unfortunately, it’s not that crazy.  I was reading about that woman whose OB/GYN licked her during a routine exam. What about the rates of maternal death during childbirth for black women? I hope to survive it. I pray that my child will not grow up motherless, even if they are fatherless.

Do they have a dad? To be honest, do they need a father? How integral would he really be to my family unit? What could he do that I cannot? Of course, I would like them to have one, but my mom did it all by herself. So can I! Can I? I could, surely, but do I want to? I used to repeat to myself: “I’m a strong, independent woman who don’t need no man,” but my mother, who shares my belief that words are spirit and life, violently reprehended me and chastised me for putting the idea into the atmosphere. I think she wants me to avoid unnecessary struggle. Yet, I question if it would really be easier to rely on the consistently inconsistent temperament of the black men I’ve dated so far. If not them, then who? Who will the father of my child be? Who will I love enough to welcome a child into this mess of a world?

Can I afford to love a black man? The last guy I dated asked me who I would save if my child and my lover were drowning simultaneously. We were talking about a video where a husband complained to his wife about being served food after their child. This man, with his beautiful black skin, his kinky curly hair plaited in cornrows down his head. This man, with his eyes carrying college-educated wisdom and a passion for environmental justice, with a well-paying job and plans for our future. This man, with soft, lush, kissable lips…Sweet Jesus! This man, with the emotional maturity of a squirrel. Damn. He said, he could not let the love of his life die, and if necessary, they would make another baby. If it was said to assure me that he would choose me over anyone else, he failed. If he was searching for a ride-or-die, he would not find one in me. As I responded shamelessly that I would save my child, I remembered that “bae” was also the Danish word for “poop.”

I mean, how could I not save the life that, under no choice of their own, I had brought into this world? A black child, born doubly black, is birthed into the struggle of their parents. Swaddled in fear, this child is raised with a hyperawareness of their body and how they move through space. By their parents, teachers, aunts, uncles, and everyone else in their village or on their neighborhood block, they are told to: “Stand up straight!” and “Keep quiet!” How will I ever raise an autonomous being when the world teaches them to ask permission to relieve natural urinary urges? Permission to go to the bathroom and pee?

What if I said that I understand Sethe and what it means for my love to be perceived as “too thick?”

And what about me? Me, who has still not learned how live in this world valiantly, fearlessly, confidently as a black woman. Me, who is still struggling to find herself beautiful and smart and more than enough. Me, who is still sorting through the trauma of personal and systematic rejection. Can I then willing unite with a man who is still figuring it out too? Will we not double the strife, double the trauma, double the suffering? Can we love each other the way we need to be loved? Can we really sex away the pain of our existence?

Would I sound hopelessly naïve if I confessed that I do not want struggle love? It does not take a genius to realize that there is a reason why there are very few romantic comedies of black love in our day and age?  What happened to my brothers to the night, the blues in my left thigh trying to become the funk in my right?² Love & Basketball, Brown Sugar, The Wood, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, The Best Man, Poetic Justice—those belong to another generation. If Beale Street Could Talk, Moonlight, Queen & Slim—our movies are not divorced from tragedy. Even Shonda Rhimes, in all of her creative genius, casts Kerry Washington and Viola Davis opposite white men. I miss the days of R&B, even though I never really knew them.

The other day, I asked a boy: “Do you have what it takes to be the Michelle to my Barack?” He countered that Michelle made Barack, encouraging me to pursue that role instead, and insisted that he was a “Barack.” Rolling my eyes to his display of machismo, I responded. I gave kudos to Michelle for holding down the fort, but maintained that I was the dreamer.

Too often, black women are lauded for holding their men down. As the best friend, my arms were your refuge, your sacred hiding place. As you rested your head in my lap, the tears, the ones you only let me see, flowed freely as I rubbed your back. As the lover, I unequivocally forgave you as you continually broke my trust, but I don’t want to be the Beyoncé to your Jay-Z.

I want to fly, but you’re holding me down. I’m the bedrock off which you launch into the air. I provide the solid, sturdy cushion for your landing. I’m always there for you when you fall. I come home from work to begin loving you, my 5-9 job. When will it be my turn? Will you catch me? Instead of holding me down, will you allow me stand on your shoulders? Like Rafiki lifting Simba towards the sun, can you show me that kind of love?

I am not sure I can afford not to love a black man. I see myself cooking dinner, the only area where I willingly take on a domestic role, and waiting for my husband and children to return to the house. The first hour goes by, and I assume, they just forgot to call. An hour and a half, their phones must have died. Two hours, maybe they are still stuck in traffic. Two and half hours, my mind is starting to scramble…

If my children are beige instead of the dark brown hue I sport, I pray that they never forget that they are black. If my husband cannot teach them, I must repeat the exhausting work of explaining my experience to my husband and my kids. Over and over, retelling stories of oppression I have yet to heal from. Will I survive it?

Don’t they realize that black girls are magical? The word, “magical,” is too innocent. Yet, if I called us witches, I fear that would justify their violence toward us. It was Robin Williams who warned us that we only have one little spark of madness that we mustn’t lose. I hope I have more than one because someone, rather multiple someone’s, keep trying to blow it out.

Like black girl magic, black boy joy is almost impossible to encapsulate in words. It’s the ugly ringing of laughter in the dark, oppressively silent expanse. It’s the knowledge that love isn’t always red; it’s not even blue, like the color of a hot fire that burns both steadily and intense. This fragile yet resilient black magic and black joy are as precious and precarious as the garden we lost when man fell.

Let me suggest that this is the rhetorical paradox of blackness. Blackness encompasses all the colors of the rainbow yet appears void of it all. It’s collective and individual. It’s the juxtaposition of magic and joy against the spectacle of black death. Its bubonic power builds and destroys.

This narrative of strength is slowing killing us. Our skin isn’t thicker; we still bleed red. Black girls missing; Black boys dead. Black men incarcerated; Black women crucified. Where does blackness find solace?

Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, […] Botham Jean, Joshua Brown, Atatiana Jefferson : I wanted to forget their names, to not close my eyes and see them being shot. There was a second this week that I could not recall the list, Trayvon et. al, and the guilt that swelled up in my soul choked me.

“I can’t breathe,” I muttered into the void.

So how can I ever laugh? And if I don’t, I am a bitter black woman. “You’re so beautiful…why don’t you smile?” Bold strangers call out to us on the street. 

Today, I found out that the man who promised to choose me over our potential kids has found himself a new girlfriend. He’s in a whole-ass stable relationship, and I’m still here. Dreaming of the empire I plan to build with somebody’s son, I’m here. I’m here, like Hannah, eyes closed and head bowed. I’m here, with my heart and a knife in my hands, like Sethe. I’m here, dreaming and praying and healing, because “that which is born follows the womb,”³ and sometimes, the womb alone.

1. In Narrative Medicine, we refrain from prefacing our work. We abstain from preliminary explanations to allow the work to speak for itself and the audience to own their individual interpretations without the judgement of the author. However, I’ll rebel, here in this aside, because this is a piece I workshopped with my narrative medicine colleagues. Folks, I hope you remember this essay because I reflect upon those Wednesday nights of a past life with such wonder and amazement. To be held in that way, I realize now that it’s rare. The vulnerability we curated in that room is like nothing I’ve found in the outside world. More intimate than the midnight chats of a teenage sleepover or the lingering quiet after a Bible Study, this writing workshop was a unique space where experimentation, nakedness, and triumph could exist simultaneously. So, if this piece is a bit unlike the one you remember, I know. I wanted the world to see it, but when I read it again the naïveté and youthfulness secreted off the page, like a sweet, sticky sap. Coming face-to face, or rather page-to-page, with a girl I recognized, but no longer knew, made me chuckle and then choke up. So, it’s been edited ever so slightly so that Baby T can be seen and that the present version of me can stomach it too. There are no acknowledgements for a piece this short, but this one deserved a love letter. Besitos.

2. Love Jones, my birth year. Darius is the archetype for artistic sassiness, but forever my Achille’s heel. Maybe, it was fated.

3. The literal translation of “partus sequitur ventrem” is “that which is born follows the womb.” It was legal doctrine of colonial America that stated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mother, not their father. This is a departure from the Anglo-saxon patrilineal custom where children receive the surname and the legal status of their fathers.