No one has ever proposed marriage to me. That’s a shame—most acutely for the people who had the chance. Still, as a weepy-window-sitter of a woman, oft-afloat in childhood dreams, I used to picture these moments that might have been. They were at rivers, in the rain, beneath trees, on earth, as it is in heaven. No other audience.

There were words, though. Always words—

many and profound,

as words are the deepest of the many loves of my life.

            The closest I have come to these imaginings was a day in 2015 when a man finally asked to husband… my writing. After four years of working, and workshopping, and wishing, and praying, *Dave was a big-time New York City literary agent ready to profess his intentions. With my permission, a friend had passed a writing sample along to him, and he asked her for my number to follow up. I remember the street I was on when she called to tell me in hushed tones that he might just “like-me-like-me”. The next day, he called to say he loved my work, which, at the time, seemed the same as loving me.

Dave’s affections flowed freely. I was “fearless”, “talented”, and “beautiful” in his eyes. He was moved, at times, to tears and he wanted to be my partner, not just now but for forever. He promised to cherish, to champion, and to create new life with me, that we would bring into the world together. He wanted to know if I would have him—or perhaps more accurately, if he could have me.

So, on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in May, while sitting on the floor of the little white house that I bought out west so that I could be a real honest-to-god writer, through tears that seemed centuries old, I said “yes.” Then, I got up crying and convulsing my way over to my best friend to tell her the story I had wanted to tell for my whole waking life—the story of being wanted.   

            When you are Black in white spaces, as I have always been, you are, by default, if not insistence, the one who must bend, contort, and, as necessary, break to fit the spaces where God or the devil has left you. I used to believe that one day I could achieve whiteness, which is to say I would work to earn the dignity that others received as birthright. This didn’t bother me much because I was confident, talented, and God, or the devil, gave me an extraordinary capacity to be what people wanted me to be.

            Over several years, Dave and I had many long intense phone conversations every couple of months when he got around to reading my most recent set of pages. He always asked me to share more of myself with him—to find new angles and plumb new depths. He gave me specific assignments here and there, mostly at my behest, desperate to give him any and everything he wanted from me. That process unearthed new themes and re-imaginings, resulting in work that was more linear, grounded, and “in scene”—a quality that Dave found substantially more important than I did. I am thankful for the many ways that he shaped me and my work. Mostly.

An ongoing disagreement between us was that I write essays, and Dave believed that essays don’t sell. I’d name collections that had performed well, and he’d explain why those were irrelevant for our purposes. He was not, to his credit, a “platform guy” who insisted that I join social media or social clubs to prove my worth to him in numbers, nor did he attempt as a white man to tell me what my black and biracial experiences were or should be. Still, he was part of a bigger, money-making machine and his job, as he understood it, was to help me fit a predetermined and simultaneously enigmatic role in the industry.

And, I was eager for that help. I was not a perfect or even a particularly practiced writer at that point in time. I knew even less about the business of getting published, so I took nearly every suggestion about how my story should be told—changed the name, the length, the style. Trusting Dave’s expertise, I wrote and rewrote proposals to unseen editors who were as opinionated as they were invisible. We had to prove to them that I was good enough, black enough, commercial enough to be worthy of their time and energy. But no matter how dangerously pliable I became, after three years, Dave was still yet to pitch my book to even one publishing house.

Agents don’t get paid unless their client does, so there was nothing financially scandalous about our relationship, but a few women who were successful writers encouraged me to part ways with Dave, believing that no matter how affable, he was wasting my time and talent. So, three years after that first phone call we shared, I told him that we were stuck and that I didn’t think I could be the thing he wanted me to be. He did not disagree.

I set out on my own again, querying new agents, magazines, and journals—at least fifty per year for three years. This was not better. They told me I was a wonderful writer, “interesting and eloquent,” “lively and thought-provoking,” but ultimately, they “didn’t feel the spark,” “wouldn’t know how to market [me],” thought I should work harder on “building a brand.” Some went out of their way to be kind, assuring me that they were certain some other agent would “fall in love”, reminding me that many best-sellers get passed over, and wishing me the best. Most though, did not respond or acknowledge me,

or my words,

or my work,

 at all.

It is a nearly unbearable ache to carry something inside you, nurturing it, protecting it, feeling it shift and grow, but never getting to deliver it into the world. I know I am neither the first nor the worst example of this human grief, but I also know I am not alone. At first, I try-try-tried again, but eventually, even if temporarily, one must stop trying.

There was nothing overly unique about my undoing during the recent pandemic and racial reckoning, but to the person coming undone, all things seem particular, I suppose. This was the first time in my life that I relinquished all attempts at striving. I could not write another email begging someone for a chance. I could not take another meeting that ended with, “I see what you’ve done, it’s phenomenal, and could you— do you think—make it the opposite of this?”

I certainly could not face another woman like one of the first agents I ever met with who told me that racism had come and gone in this country. Her daughter went to a multicultural school in New York, and people of all races sat together at the lunch table, so we could agree, she presumed, that race as a topic of exploration was no longer a relevant conceit. That was 2013. I used to engage women like that. For most of 2020, I took walks, I cooked food, I chatted (with painfully few people), and I did what work required of me. I did not write. Because writing is an act of hope.

My therapist once asked why I didn’t just self-publish, start a blog, or otherwise divest from the capitalist system that suggested that art was worthless unless it was bought and sold under the primarily white gaze. I didn’t answer her on that day—pretended not to know, probably. But I did know. I knew on that day and also on the day sometime later when I finally told her the truth. And, I know it as I sit here today, too.

The reason for not taking matters into my own hands—being my own producer and promoter was because deep within (and also close to the surface) I loved the white gaze. It was, in truth, the god I knew and trusted best—a simultaneously distant and intimately cruel force—one that had always initially ignored and often instinctively detested me but which I had found could be worn down, over time, with my worship, devotion, and of course, abandon. I did not want to create something alone, all by and for myself, because anti-blackness runs through my brain and my body on a seemingly inexhaustible loop. For most of my life, I understood it to be fuel like food when all the time, it was fuel like fire—swallowing me up, charring and scarring not only my body but also my soul.

The first year I started writing the book that would eventually be called Black, White Other, I overheard a lady at a writing conference scoff at the idea of working on a manuscript for an entire decade as a writer on one of the panels had done. “I am not going to work on a book for ten years,” the woman said, her eyes rolling, hip-cocked. I found this impatience disdainful and entitled. I didn’t mind working hard and working long, and I resolved, in that moment, that if needed, I would labor on my book for at least ten years before moving on. And give or take a few months at the end there, when the earth herself seemed to be hanging on by a thread, I did.

 

But now it’s year 11.

 

There is a sign that hangs in my house and in the homes of a few of my closest loved ones. It says, “Practice Resurrection.” I love these emblems over fireplaces and dinner tables, down hallways and stuck in corners, each pointing back to a poem that we used to read together in our intimate little faith community.

People disagree, as people are wont to do, on the exact meaning of the phrase in the context of the poem, but this is what it has meant to me and to us. We don’t believe that everything happens for a reason; or that God wills rape, or torture, or death for some cosmic rationale that we are too sinful to comprehend. We don’t even believe, exactly, that all things work together for the good of those who love God—at least not in the transactional ways we were led to believe they would when we were children.

What we do embrace each time we look at these signs is that death sits stuck in the middle of three sisters. She is flanked on either side by birth and rebirth. Even we, who love God, whatever that means, cannot keep death from piercing our lives over and over again, but we can make habit of rending the depths, gathering the remains, and re-creating the world, anyway.

When I was a younger adult, I used to feel a profound shame that I was husbandless/ childless/bookless, and thus, in my estimation, lifeless. I know now, a few months from turning 40, that my sorrow was pointed in the wrong direction. I was sad for myself back then, believing that I was the one being cheated. Now, instead, I am sad for the world. Because wherever I go, I have my love, my life, and my language with me. I am not the one missing out on me. But you might be.

I know it is bold, untoward even, to claim that I have something to say—even bolder on account of my womanness and my blackness, but I would be lying to claim some smaller, more palatable half-truth. And so, in this space, without anyone’s perversion and without anyone’s permission I thought I would offer a proposal of my own—that you would give me a word each week and I could offer it back to you born again. I know some weeks we will find more magic than others as that is how partnership goes. Still, I hope that you will meet me

across time and space,

at rivers in the rain,

so that maybe,

we could pull heaven down to earth,

together.