Blackness

"in a space before time and words, the world was covered in a thick blanket of darkness. it was a warm and loving covering. since it was hard for the spirits who inhabited this space to see one another they learned to live by and through touch. so if you were running around lost you knew you were found when arms reached out in that loving darkness to hold you. and those arms that held the spirits in that beautiful dark space before time are holding us still.

this is a little origin story i made up. i thought of it one day when i was trying to explain to a little brown girl where the babies lived before they were born-so i told her they lived in this world of loving darkness. i made up this story because i wanted this little brown girl to grow up dreaming the dark and its powerful blackness as a magic space she need never fear or dread. i made it up because i thought one day this little brown girl will hear all sorts of bad things about the darkness, about the powerful blackness, and i wanted to give her another way to look at it. i held her hand, just like my father's father, Daddy Jerry, a man who worked the land, who knew the earth was his witness, had once held my hand in the darkest of the summer nights and taught me that the blanket of night i was scared of was really longing to be my friend, to tell me all its secrets. and i reminded her, as he reminded me way back then, that those arms that first held us in that dark space before words and time hold us still. "

~bell hooks

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery