Dominique’s Morisseau’s Sunset Baby was strumming my pain with her fingers, singing my life with her song. Awash in memories of a movement baby left behind. Parents struggling to carve out safe space for their dreams called babies. Belief systems colliding and crashing into economic realities. Dreams deferred ripening into sustained regrets. The fight for right leaves so very little space for tenderness…for gentle words containing the sum of a father’s love. Believing the world too hard for soft words, our parents toiled on our behalf to soften our landings. But wasn’t the movement a battle for a better life? An easier life? A life where fairness and merit are the things that define our success. Isn’t a better world a world where we get to feel soft thoughts, where tenderness gushes down mountainsides landing in tiny coves of the heart. If the fight was not for these things, then what was the point of all the struggle and sacrifice? To continue to operate from a place of silent emotions, epic fears and the expectation that a black life is only a hard life?
I loved a revolutionary’s words mostly because they fell from my father’s lips, but his love was the food I longed for. His patient and persistent need to find the words I so needed to hear: I love you, daugher, and this is why. But I love you was expressed in political strategy, new plans of attack on the system. A dirge of struggle weary to the bone that I misunderstood. Listening to Nina’s I’m just a soul who’s intentions are good, I wonder. Perhaps, if I learn to walk under the harsh sun of his lifetime; then, maybe I’ll feel the warmth of his dappled sunlight called freedom. Perhaps freedom is the tenderness and abiding love for which I long. Perhaps, the freedom to dream these things and wish for more words is the love I long for. While I wanted more, my revolutionary father was giving all he had…all he learned and now he lives in fear for what he did not know registering in my eyes. The eyes of the child he re-made the world for…