June 18th, 2019.

June 10th, 2019.

Teavolve’s open mic with featured artist Doctor Jackson Howard – not that he asked to be called “doctor” but it DOES sound pretty good. I’m not quite sure what to make of his sentiment that he left academia because he made better money as a musician… and then he came to play my open mic!

Perhaps he’s got all the same ups and downs we do – as the show previous to this was opening for 10,000 Maniacs. Go fig.

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Growing up I was pretty aware of race. Growing up in PG County I wasn’t particularly aware of the demographics of America. I understood the word “minority” but didn’t understand why it applied to African-Americans… looking around me it didn’t seem to make literal sense.

Most of my school was black, my next-door neighbour was black, across the street THEY were Chinese and had a big family (I remember incomprehensible yelling and the late-night Americanized daughter)… the OTHER next-door neighbour was white but played old blues music all the time so all the artists I listened to through my open window were black and then around the corner was a Go-go band that practiced all the time and they… well, they probably weren’t white.

In my school I remember the “n word” being used occasionally, I remember my mom explaining why it was such an awful word but unlike a LOT of my mom’s Life lessons I don’t remember the context so I’m not sure if it was apropos of anything in particular, or just something she took the time to tell me. I remember black kids picking on a blacker kid – always calling him “Crispy”.

Picking on the outlier, bullying those who aren’t like us. I got picked on because I wore the wrong shorts and my legs were “fish white”. My friend Jonathan was picked on because he was really REALLY pale (cave fish white?). White the spectrum of humanity, it seems like you SHOULD be able to find the perfect midground colour but the perfect average skintone would probably stand out in a weird way too and kids are cruel.

We don’t get much better as we age, but at least in Maryland, civil society enforces a veneer of civility if only to maintain its definition. I spend most of my time in communities where #blacklivesmatter and Black Is Beautiful™ and even most of the rappers will shy away from N-word filler – and so I forget that crispy cruelty from my childhood.

Last night at Teavolve it was kind of slow. We got to go around and pick up one more song from everyone and that was WITH me still playing at the end of the night and WITH me giving the guy visiting from England ANOTHER extra song and WITH some pretty slow setup from a couple of less-experienced artists and some pretty slow setup from some more experienced artists. But it was a GOOD night. People were transparent and beautiful and we had a lot of really positive hip hop at the beginning of the night and Jimmy’s fingers were ON and Dave’s pedal was ON and Chrissie’s new cover was ON and even *I* was ON. There was a lot of community in the room. I felt vulnerable.

And then our bartender, My, got up and performed a piece that totally caught me off-guard.

She talked about growing up hating how dark she was, hating her mother for “mating” with someone so dark that she didn’t have the creamy lighter skin tone of the rest of her family. Of being like dirt. Not in a growing Earth kind of way but in a filth spit-upon scrape-off-your-boot kind of way. I felt myself remembering the kid from elementary school who is nothing but a faded form and a cruel nickname and I was tearing up…at the climax of the piece her self-image is transformed through music and image by seeing another dark-skinned woman perform – and she saw the beauty in her and through that the beauty in herself.

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Poets and performers and musicians – we are very lucky. Certainly to be successful we’re going to have to lie, and to survive we best armour up and wear our masks and thicken our hides. We are lightning rods because, just like the blackest kid in the class, we stick out. But we also have a voice to stick up for ourselves and to stick up for others and at the very least we can use it to remind those around us that their first-impression is not all we are… or in the case of My – who I see every week and chat with every week – my 20^th impression is not all she is.

Maybe I was just tired. Maybe vulnerable. I’m a lightweight so maybe it was the caffeine and maybe it was the whiskey. But damn, I had a visceral, hard moment where I had to get myself back under control before I could approach the stage and introduce the next artist because it HURT to see how much she HURT… and she was beautiful.