I am a Writer

I wrote a book in 2017 just to see if I could. A soft voice told me to try it and watch what happens. I've learned over the past few years to listen to that voice whenever it speaks. It led me here to you.

I wrote my first book really fast, in less than a month. The words ran out of me like water from a faucet on full blast. It was so liberating and fulfilling. For the first time I could remember I felt satisfied. I was able to tell the story  I wanted to tell freely without being interrupted because it was too long or boring for the people around me. I didn't have to dilute it for those who couldn't handle the language I like to use. I didn't even have to leave parts out for fear of judgmental people who tried to make me feel bad about my life choices.  I was able to be vulnerable when I wrote and I felt alive, like I had a purpose like there was something sleeping in me that had been awakened from years of hibernation.  

I remembered lots of things while I wrote that book. Like being a little girl in our tiny shot gun house on the southside of Fort Worth writing in the Sea World diary I had stolen from my cousin. I remembered stealing it because my mom wouldn’t buy me one, and thinking my cousin Nee Nee wouldn’t miss it, she was only four she couldn't even write yet, and she had everything. 

I remembered writing about my friend Tamika in that diary. She had a  nineteen year old boyfriend. She told me he picked her up from school. She told me they kissed on the lips all the time. She even told me  about how he rubbed his private parts against hers.  We were in fourth grade. She was one of the little girls my mama would call fast tailed.

I remembered writing about my friend Darryl’s mom in that diary.  She came up to our school in her moo moo gown and dirty pink house shoes with curlers in her hair. She told the teacher to give us some candy she had bought which wasn't candy at all. It was an open bag of cough drops. My teacher slammed the classroom door in her face, and called the front office on her walkie talkie. I remember thinking that was a little extreme. The cough drops were dumb and the robe house shoes and curlers were ghetto as hell but that was no reason to call the police on her. Darryl cried at school that day when we went into locked down.  He was inconsolable when LaMarion Fowler looked out the window and pointed out to him and the whole class that the police were putting his mama in the backseat of their car. 

I remembered writing about  my friend Mary and her brothers and how everyone made fun of them, in that diary. The five of them were the only white kids at Morningside Elementary school. They were dirty from their hair down to their talking shoes. Their pale white skin was smudged with yesterday everyday.  Mary was kind to me though so I was kind back, that's how my mama raised me.

She asked me to help her comb her hair with a little black comb she had gotten from the nurse one day. My friend Sabrina told me not to touch her or her hair because white people had lice.

 While writing my book I remembered unlike most of  my friends I had been around white people before. I remembered spinning on stools at the lunch counter at my grandad's restaurant next to old white men in boots and big hats everyday after school. They were always telling corny jokes and laughing loud about things I didn't understand.  I remember how kind all the white waitresses were to me and my brothers.. They waited on us like we were big tippers because my granddad owned the place. I believed back then that they were people just like us. The good the bad and sometimes ugly. I knew we had to be careful with stereotypes and racism. If we wanted people to treat us with respect we had to treat them with respect. I remembered writing those exact words when I was ten years old.

I wrote about helping Mary comb her hair because she was my friend.  I wrote about how we drove past her and her brothers walking home from school that same day. We stopped at Sack and Save to pick up a few things for dinner, and when we came out and headed home they were still walking. They had a long walk home and I wondered why my mom never stopped and offered them a ride not even when it was raining. We drove right past their house. They lived across the street from my mom’s best friend Miss Sheila. Their house was the one with tree growing right up through it. Mary and her brothers were always out in the garage which was half up and half down like someone had pried it open with a stick. They were out there even when it was cold.

 

While I was writing that book I saw that stolen diary in a new light, the light of adulthood and maturity. I saw that Tamika's boyfriend was some pervert and my friend was actually being abused. I saw that my friend Darryl's life was complicated, his mama was drug sick.  And Mary, she and her four brothers lived in the garage of a condemned abandoned  house across the street from my moms best friend about two blocks from our house. While I was writing this book I saw my own poverty. 

I've never been one to hang on when things didn't feel right, so I've moved on a lot.  I've left projects unfinished, abandoned friendships and relationships alike. I've left a bad taste in more than a few mouths searching for that thing that fit. That thing that felt right. I had a bad break up once that made me think that thing I was searching for didn’t exist.  

While I was writing that book I remembered it does.

While that book was a huge accomplishment for me, completing it wasn't the end, but a new beginning. My calling, my life's purpose was revealed to me through that soft voice telling me to try something I thought I had never done. While I wrote that book all that I had forgotten I remembered. I have a story to tell. I am a writer.

  

Thank You for Reading.

Philena M.