The room I sit in embodies the sort of opulence that, at one point, was relevant to its time. The walls and mantle are dark mahogany, while the curtains that line the wall and drape the windows seem to blend into themselves—a moody, sandy brown.
I’m sitting at a table of smiling white men four times my age who are doing everything in their power to make me feel comfortable despite having little to no common ground besides the work that we do. I’m a grant writer, and many of them sit on a board or are current members of the Rotary Club. Out of habit, I begin counting the number of faces that look like mine. A reflex I have yet to grow out of since moving from Mississippi. Scanning the room, I see the befuddled faces of a few other attendees who seem to question my presence, I’m unsure if it's my age or my skin tone–maybe it's both.
Out of politeness, I offer small smiles and curt nods until the speaker of the Rotary Club Breakfast takes the podium. Introductions and agendas are listed. A woman is then introduced to take to the podium, the first thing she says piques my interest—she has a doctorate in English, she is an executive leader of a charter school, and this is why what they do works.
As a fellow English literature lover, I shift in my seat to learn more about why they do what they do. How their students read a strict and specified curriculum, that their grade levels are reflective of the books they read. To my excitement, a list of titles is highlighted on the overhead screen.
When she begins to talk about great American literature and how diverse their book list is, I let my excitement get ahead of me. She begins to recite the lauded greats: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger and Steinbeck. The diverse writers were, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. I noticed that MLK Jr. wasn’t on the list, but as her eyes roved the room—almost in clockwise rotation, she counted me and at least two other Black professionals—and tossed his name in.
I almost expected her to mention Zora Neale Hurston, at least Maya Angelou, and hopefully Richard Wright or James Baldwin, all writers who were writing close to, if not the same time as Hemingway and Steinbeck.
My interest in her presentation now deflated, I started to think about the validity of Black writers and how spaces of literature are often divided. How decades and centuries have passed, yet some writers born in America aren’t considered our country's greatest writers.
I’ve been reading books about the craft of writing, and one I’ve started sifting through again is In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker. A book I bought in college as a resource for a paper on creativity, Black women, and identity. I never finished it, but remembered loving what I did read.
I’m always enamored with how other writers approach the craft. For instance, when Maya Angelou would start a new project, she would check into a hotel, a sort of solitary retreat, allowing the silence to overtake her and begin to reminisce. Other writers steal away to cabins in the woods, and others just simply write where they can. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, delves into a subject I always thought about myself but never fully had the language to express, which is literary separatism—the divide that exists between Black and white writers. In my own studies, there have been very few places I’ve had the privilege of being taught by teachers and professors who removed the barrier between great writers and just let them be in their own right, removed from gender, race, or class.
I’ve existed in predominantly white spaces as both a professional writer in grants and in poetry and fiction. I’ve had to fight for my work to be seen as legitimate, specifically on the discourse of race within my poetry and short stories. Other times, the work I do as a grant writer is closely examined through the lens of race.
The funding world is primarily made up of donors who don’t look like the communities served. In most organizations I’ve worked with, I’ve been asked to write from a perspective of despair because that is the language most funders will understand. Instead of humanization, there seems to be a deep desire to other those we serve so that donors can feel good about who they give to and why.
Instead of donating to “young Black and brown scholars who require resources to continue reading at or above their grade level,” they’d much prefer donating to “African American or minority students who, through various challenges, need your support to begin reading at or above grade level.”
The number of times I’ve been asked to amplify the need of an organization is more so a masked way of saying can you make it look like we have a significant need because donors will think we’re too successful? Even in the world of philanthropy, we are asked to tone down successes in order to receive necessary funding that has the capacity to lessen the chasm between resources and opportunities that are severely lacking for Black and brown communities.
As a writer, poetry has a way of seamlessly melding into how I live my life. When tree branches are tousled by the wind, I think that would make a great poem. Every time a bird waddles across my path or a butterfly’s wings flutter a few paces from me, I am reminded that living is in the little things and how that itself is poetic.
When I see the faces of kids I’ve worked with, I tell myself this is poetry, too, how dreams don’t always drift into deference but balloon into beauty when given the space to exist.
