Day 30----

I read!--nearly a whole book today! I feel my humanness seeping back into my brain...I'm sure it's visible in my face, my hands, my shoulders. The pinch between my eyes less cavernous. The clinching of my body whenever anyone touched me, even the cat, slowly rolling away with each page turned, each half hour passed of this still happening nap. The first in six days. Someone besides myself made me tea... he brought it to me as I wrote at my desk... then sheepishly asked if he could have the room so he could have a phone call with his partner from work. I couldn't even remember what this felt like anymore. I feel bad that I need this time so much. But I feel no doubt that I do. I was even considering waking up at 5am to get two hours to myself--odds are she'd wake up then too and then I'd get none of the time and all the over-tiredness. I don't see any way around this need for naps still.

reading: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

How have I gone thirty-one years without reading this?? This is one of those things that makes me want to do so much better by my bambi. I know most schools assign this. She will read this before she leaves home. And she will never go to a private school. The kind of place that makes itself the arbitrator of correct literature, the police of women and anyone of color. That thinks Uncle Tom's Cabin, Huck Finn and Othello are the maximum nod necessary to the liberal obsession with "diversity". 

I'm furious that the only women I knew could write were children's writers or mystery/spy writers ("candy reads" as my dad dubbed them), Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte (not Emily haha). All white, all old or dead. Angelou's prose is at a level I --and he-- could never believe possible. And that is his and my past's desperate loss.

I find it interesting that I could not read my Sarton, Adrienne Rich, Margaret Atwood-- all of whom are excellent and there's absolutely value in their writing. But right now, in a time of global crisis, I needed to read the true narrative of someone, one voice among many, who's entire life would qualify as a global crisis if it happened to a white person. To grow up black and female in the US in the 1930s, to do so now still-- is to live with the gravitas, the fear, the slightest edge of which we are now all experiencing. And communities of color so much more.