Lauren Smith-Fields.
Cheslie Kryst.
I speak your names.
We are burying our little sisters. I can’t move on. Their bodies are sacred and I am SO TIRED of Black women being used or ignored, but not tended to.
I see the photos and videos: you both were magnificent. You wore beauty so regally. Seemingly effortlessly.
Beauty is dangerous for us. Not because of us, but because rape culture was perfected through serially violating our great-great grandmothers. Our usury, our pain, was normalized. This country—white wives and sisters and daughters included—trained itself to be indifferent to our bloody beds.
“No” was not a choice or a word the law would honor, though I know us; we said no. We said no with averted eyes and underarms we would not wash. With garlic rubbed under our nails and between our breasts. Through networks of knowledge of where not to be at what time. We said no with baggy clothes and hemmed in curves. We screamed. We kicked. We begged. We froze. We clenched. No.
Time has not healed the wounds. Folks are so used to ignoring our Nos that they froth and rage at our Yeses. Protest and tut our choosing of gentleness, of dignity, of the erotic and the sensual. We are despised for wanting. Pushed back for daring. Snubbed for achieving. They would have us reduced to unwomen, content in the folds and creases of life’s crumpled cast-offs.
Our bloody beds still don’t move the law, perhaps because they already know that “nice guys” like them are also rapists and murderers. Nice is flaccid word and the justice system, impotent.
We learn and practice the law and it still doesn’t move. We earn the gleaming crown of the American Dream, and it, thorny and heavy, draws blood.
I don’t know what happened. I don’t know. Will we ever know?
I do know the anguished cries of mothers, and the stunned, voracious grief of loved ones. I do know that Black women are among the missing, abused, and the murdered. I do know that Black women go through extraordinary lengths to experience love, care, and self-worth in this place that actively hates our daring, our intellect, our beauty, and our tenacity. I do know that it’s a miracle when we win. Every time.
I do know that our default is not safety here. I know that it is resistance and resistance and resistance and resistance to look at ourselves and see good and see God continually when the principalities and powers of this age want to reduce us to the creases and folds as shadows.
I do know that we fight hard, but we are overwhelmed. Sometimes we do not survive.
I do know that Lauren and Cheslie should still be here.
I love your writing. You are brilliant. Shining. And I'm glad you're still here.