Black Woman, Interrupted

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ruby Baptiste from HBO’s Lovecraft Country and what it means to be a Black woman, interrupted.

My brain has started on this thought so many times over the past few weeks but I truly haven’t had the space to finish it. Nor have I had the peace of mind to imagine what my life might be like without the pressure from, perception of, influence on, worry for, and comparison to others. I’ve been trying to wade through the deep sea of interruptions, the toll I pay economically, socially, spiritually, mentally, and generationally to be a proud Black woman. 

My best friend often makes this reference to “not being able to put your purse down,” as an allusion to a woman’s intuition for her safety or comfort. This is of course a metaphor, but also a perfect illustration to demonstrate the load Black women often bare: the (in)visible burdens of our partners, friends, communities, as well as our own emotional burdens. And we carry all of this without the proper space, time, or sanctity to set our bags down and rest.

I too realize how much and how many I’d been carrying after 2020 sat me on my ass and boredom left me with nothing but myself to analyze. My bag was filled to the brim with all the things that I hadn’t had the time or place to process. I kept getting interrupted by things as global as the death of Black women at the hands of the state or our lovers and something as local as worrying how my retired, widowed mother would manage yet another unexpected bill. Something as slight as a rude coworker’s microaggressive comment about your appearance on a Zoom call or as something as threatening as your doctor choosing to ignore your pain during a “routine” procedure.

My Black woman manual tells me that grace and meekness are what I offer to all of these circumstances, leaving my anger with no outlet, my worry with no end, my indignation with no target, my misery with no company. Maybe some of this is about having unhealthy boundaries and a misguided desire to always seem helpful, but maybe it isn’t. I wonder how much these interruptions have stolen from me. I even wonder now how these words will be received.

“I don’t know what is more difficult⁠—being colored or being a woman. Most days I’m happy to be both, but the world keeps interrupting. And I am SICK of being interrupted.”

“Ruby Baptiste”, Lovecraft Country, Episode 105.

Ruby reminded me that it ain’t only my shoulders that are tired. It’s not just me feeling the constant blockage of obligation to others before self. I think of my sisters, aunts, cousins, and friends who have had to fight tooth and nail to find sanity in a world that does everything to steal it away. A world that literally sucks the curls from our heads and the melanin from our skin, but won’t let us be beautiful with hyperpigmentation, won’t let us be professional without a filter, won’t let us advance without a co-sign, won’t acknowledge our genius without shame, won’t let us sleep in our own homes or drive our cars, won’t let us live without trauma, won’t let us express emotion without fear, won’t let us protect our own without martyrdom, won’t let us speak above a whisper, won’t let us be soft and vulnerable, won’t let us just be. I am constantly at war internally making sure that everyone else around me is comfortable before I think to put my bag down. And when I do finally feel a moment of freedom there’s still some nag that feels the need to apologize for taking up more space than before. When do find the space to be unapologetic, it is when I finally accept that rage and all of my other raw emotions are completely justified.

But mostly, I can’t afford anger. It’s bought with a white man’s privilege and a white woman’s adjacency that I scarcely dare to own. But if I’m honest, there is no one more deserving of anger than Black women. At being last, at being stuck, at being obligated, anger is the natural course.

In the war raging against us, anger becomes useful. Ruby shows us this not only in her own life but as Hilary, whose skin she wears to assume the stature she has long since coveted. Usefulness then is not just in service to others but in service to self. Her rage becomes a method of self-soothing, of creating space, and stepping into power.

My collection of Audre Lorde falls easily open to her essay on the Uses of Anger, to the page where Lorde prescribes that Black women grow up in “a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that we survived, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service…we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insights within our daily lives.”

Anger is not only helpful as a blinder to rage through the interruptions to creating the safe, peaceful spaces we deserve but also as a way to unlearn the methods of muting, mutilation, and minimizing that we use to comfort and appease others. I’ll wear it like a suit of armor, protecting me from the perceptions, pressures, and pain interrupting my unapologetic, Black woman flow.

I live now as a Black woman (un)interrupted.