I am now 61 years old and have been a musician since 1976. I happily retired from live performance at the onset of the Covid Pandemic in April of 2020. I canceled my website and hung up my microphone, feeling satisfied that I'd said and done all I needed to say and do. Then came January 6th, 2021. As an African American woman who’s spent nearly four decades addressing sexism, racism and all the other isms that keep me up at night, I am suddenly unable to resist the compulsion to leap from my LazyBoy and scream out that I am shattered, broken-hearted, angry, betrayed and horrified by what looks very much to me like an apocalyptic plague of crazy, armed, white folks (mostly--but not limited to--men) that are obliterating the planet in every possible way with their unbridled conquest and heedless assault on all living things. Besides annihilating what's left of the flora and fauna, privileged pale Northern European colonial capitalists are leading the way in the frenzied killing, maiming and disenfranchisement of my dark sisters and brothers each day in ways that terrify me and often make me feel utterly naive and foolish to have ever let any such scoundrels into my heart. Throughout the benighted Trump years I fumed and grieved in equal measure while bathing myself in the relief that my time here on earth was drawing ever shorter. I laid low, consumed and depleted by my own devastating personal experiences with white excess and oblivion and I counted myself fortunate to be leaving this mess without having produced any precious brown children to be abused by the brutes, yet an unexpected gift by a dear friend changed all that in an instant and hurled me into the bloody fray faster than police pull triggers on people of pigment.
Laura Koch surprised me with an online analysis kit to determine my genetic makeup. Digesting the results of this information set in motion an unwelcome rage that aligned perfectly with the disgust that overtook me watching a violent mob of angry white guys trying to overthrow what’s left of our ailing democracy to reclaim it entirely for white supremacist rule - just like we had in the good old days of the antebellum South. While absorbing and processing my “23 & Me” DNA results I felt blind-sided - cold cocked with the horrors of my own unsavory, revolting, super-rapey ancestry. I learned that I am 48% African (Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Congo; and 52% Northern European--British, Scottish, Irish). It occurred to me that my birth came only 97 years after the official end of slavery and I was suddenly visited by a persistent, unshakeable image of a dark, very young woman (perhaps 14 or 15 year of age) who had just reached the East Coast of America, after a miserable, foul, death-filled voyage on a ship overflowing with others like her, sick and paralyzed with fear after the vile journey. I cannot get this pitiful sight out of my mind. I can see her head making repeated contact with the wooden planks beneath her as she is being violated, without mercy, by someone -a white man who reeks of alcohol, tobacco and body odor. His hair and skin are greasy. He is filthy and nearly all of his teeth are rotten. He is somewhere between 30 and 40 years old. This scenario comes to me often, unbidden, at all hours of the day and night. I don’t know if it is the result of an overactive imagination, or perhaps a glimpse into something that actually happened. I do know that she and I are related. I am, as well, related to him. Regardless, it disturbs me and refuses to be suppressed. Yet, here’s the thing...despite all this ugliness, disappointment and betrayal - despite the niggling doubt that has crept into my psyche lately and threatened to obfuscate all hope, I remain certain that human beings enter this world, more good than bad. Even as this core conviction is being challenged like never before, I do still believe.