Slowly, Surely

On Jill Scott, Alice Walker and being a free woman

I went to see Jill Scott at the King’s Theater on Sunday. It’s a few blocks from where I grew up on East 18th and Cortelyou Road, so every time I’m back there I feel young, like I’m somewhere on one of these blocks, in Cookie’s or the 99 cent store or Old Navy, begging my mother for one thing or another, her on the phone and telling me no with her eyes. I feel compelled to tell whoever I’m with that gentrification has been slow to arrive on Flatbush Avenue, that it looks relatively the same. This is true and untrue. It’s changing but not at the same speed as, say, Bed Stuy or Jamaica Avenue. The latter was slow too, until one day I went back and it looked like a desolate 125th, all chain stores and beauty supply stores, the street devoid of the man on the mic urging you to come into his store where everything was 70 percent off all the time and the steady hum of people weaving in and out of this strip of shops. It’s hard to witness, even though I didn’t appreciate it when it was intact, wished, as a woman pushed past a younger me, her Bobbi Boss bundles brushing me as she went, the streets dirty and packed, that someone would fix this place. And now it’s fixed and empty, and I miss when it was alive. Flatbush doesn’t feel like that yet. There’s still a Jamaican buffet and a cellphone store and someone playing roots reggae way loud and the Jehovah’s Witness Hall and Cookie’s even though they’ve gotten rid of the CVS. But back to Jill.

Jill’s been my North Star. I’ve been listening to her since I was in the womb, pre-sentience, pre-cell phone, pre-distraction. She shaped my subconscious, my attitude. The first song I remember knowing all the words to is A Long Walk, which I often sang at the top of my lungs with my mom and sister in that one bedroom on Cortelyou. It was the one song she let me recite all the way through, didn’t mind that I said squeaky clean shit with no front teeth. Jill gave me that little freedom. So when I got in that theater and saw her on that stage, stunning in her floor-length black dress, cheeks full like they’ve always been, sexy like she’s always been, I was reminded that she’s always made me feel possible. To grow up nut-brown with a big body in a place where my issue wasn’t my skin but the size of my thighs and stomach and arms, I had very few people I could look to for who I could become without changing myself. On TV, the women who looked like me, or what I would eventually be if I was not interrupted by Hydroxycut or Atkins, were often used for comic relief, a locus of anti-desire, the opposite of the ideal. They were treated poorly because they were so far from the center, and we, the audience, were encouraged to laugh along, to agree that there was something hilarious about a big person wanting something other than to be small. There was nothing funny about Jill. She looked like the women I saw in real life. She sang earnestly about desire and love and being loved. Didn’t qualify it, didn’t question it. There was no one interfering with her understanding of herself and her interior world. It was painful when I saw her in Why Did I Get Married? as a young person, early in my understanding of myself, and she was made pitiful, accepting poor treatment because the idea of anyone else loving her, largely because she was fat, was unthinkable. But I knew that was what happened when people got their hands on your likeness, that they could cast you in the role that kept things running smooth. But that says nothing of your soul or the way you experience the world. Ideally, anyway.

I’ve been punished for my desire much more than I’ve been celebrated for it but Jill always returns me to a place of curiosity, whatever way I look so totally besides the point. In Jill’s music I hear a woman discovering and exploring the textures of love, how it feels when she applies it to another person and to herself. A woman committed to loving but flexible in its application. A woman aware of her limitations but innovative in her attempts to overcome them.

Some of my favorite songs of hers are about freedom. “Watching Me” is a proto-”Cranes In The Sky.” There, she wonders about the surveillance apparatuses designed to monitor her while insisting she’s free. Considers the systemic forces bearing down on her and its impact on her psyche. Relatable. She wonders if she’s watching the TV or if it’s watching her, which reminds me that my phone is always listening. That if I say mesh Puma sneaker five times fast I will be looking at variations until I have a pair in my cart and then on my feet. It’s one of my favorite songs on her debut album, and I love that it’s couched inside of all her musings about love and heartbreak and desire, because I often wonder how to balance all that—the macro and the micro and how the micro is the macro because I live a soft enough life to be mostly concerned with my immediate surroundings and the people in it. Then there’s “Golden,” her anthem, released when she was 32, a little older than I am now. I always considered that an auntie song, because it was a song my aunties loved. When it came out in 2004, they were at the entering their early 40s, and would play it loud while they shuttled us to camp and to the movies and to my grandmother’s house. It never felt like a song that belonged to me, but this time, hearing her sing it triumphantly as an encore, I finally understood what the fuck Jill was talking about. Freedom was hers to own, something she took with her everywhere she went. She was responsible for it, and it reminded my aunts, I assume, that joy was theirs to take too. To have and to hold even when life was doing its own thing, not bending to their will. It’s instructive for me now as I witness the surveillance state collapse on our heads, just in time for me to have the best summer of my life.

When the concert ended, people filing out neatly, I meditated on the things she said in between the songs. Musings about life and love. About letting people go and letting new things in. She seems wise now, different from before, like she’s got good boundaries and refuses to do certain things again. I’m still in a discovery phase, I think, still searching for the edges of my inhibition, my breaking points. She makes me excited to grow older though, to look like I look, still soft, so soft, wearing my desire on my skin and speaking about it with an authority that makes everyone listen.

A few days earlier, I finished Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, Alice Walker’s journals. The book is a sort-of record of her life, spanning fifty years, a mediation between her consciousness and its manifestation. Alice narrativizes her experiences while also making sense of her feelings, creating coherence for things we feel deep in our bodies, sensations that resist description but have names if you can find the people who know them. Alice is a free woman, defiantly so. She loves hard but is quick to let that love go when it doesn’t feel how it should. No one is immune from her will, not even the proclaimed love of her life who she plans to build a life with on one page, only to dismantle it a few pages after that. It’s terrifying, this level of agency. Both to have it and to be on the receiving end of it. To love someone

who will almost certainly leave you and remember you fondly but refuses to return. I admire her commitment to it though. Her willingness to kick people out of her house. To be vocally annoyed by the people she loves and not allow her role in their lives to make her meek or quiet. I also admired how much space she cultivated for herself and her writing. She took it seriously and saw things through. I was still thinking about Gathering Blossoms when I went to see Jill, and realized at some point during the show that I was looking at another free woman, a woman who has certainly had to choose herself over all other things, to make lots of space for the work.

I felt closest to Alice when we were similar in age, her issues then seem to mirror my issues now. Same with Jill. They both possessed an anxiety that seemed to recede as they got older, after their prophecies and dreams have come to pass. But for me, on the other side of it, all I have is prophecy and hope and my writing schedule and the desire to make something that matters so I don’t disappear. I want to create something that webs around people’s consciousnesses, follows them into their bedrooms and bathtubs, on their commutes. Write words they reach for to understand themselves. I want to put new names to old things and then do it in reverse. I want to write characters people still think about. I want to make something people want to return to 28 years later. 44 years later. But then I’m also trying to live right? To be present in my own life. To make sense of why I go from feeling like more than enough to a footnote, sometimes in the span of a day, or an hour or from the top of one short form video to the end of another. I just hope it all turns out alright in the end. Spending time with Jill and Alice, witnessing them in their past and our present which, I’m sure felt unfathomable to 30-something year old them, I’m convinced it probably, surely, will be.