Kim McLarin - Womanish: A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life

More Advance Praise for Womanish

Full of feeling and absorbing incident, Kim McLarins Womanish is a companion book for searchers of the soul. In the tradition of James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Henry Thoreau, McLarins essays reveal an original mind in action and set to take action. Read Womanish to be inspired, to get angry, and to learn to hold and use that anger in our incendiary times.
MEGAN MARSHALL, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

Bold, well-crafted essays on living, loving, and striving while black.KIRKUS REVIEWS

Womanish is the education the United States needs but doesnt deserve. Not only has McLarin done the homework, shes created an elegant cheat sheet in the form of thirteen perfect essays.
FOREWORD (starred review)

WOMANISH

A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life

Kim McLarin

New York, NY

Copyright 2019 by Kim McLarin

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquires to:

Ig Publishing

Box 2547

New York, NY 10163

www.igpub.com

ISB: 978-1-632460-80-6 (ebook)

CONTENTS

Womanist (Opp. of girlish, i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious). A Black feminist or feminist of color. From the Black folk expression of mothers to female children, you acting womanish, i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered good for one. Interested in grown up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another Black folk expression: You trying to be grown. Responsible. In charge. Serious.

Alice Walker,

In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Victim and Victor Both Start With V appeared first in themorningnews.org as Moving Stars.

A Case for Revenge appeared first as The Low Road in themorningnews.org.

Eshu Finds Work appeared first in The New England Review

Maurices Blues first appeared in The Sewanee Review

The author is grateful to these publications for permission to reprint these essays.

Disclaimer: Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Womanish

Alright, Cupid

When we have pleaded for understanding, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in a far corner. When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats.

Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, 1974

The first step of deprogramming is education, informing the person you are trying to free just how indoctrination works to hamstring a mind. But information alone will not free a believer from her beliefs, no matter how destructive, because belief is not intellectual. Emotion got you in and emotion will get you out.

By the time I stepped into online dating, I knew a great deal about the corrosive internalized effects of white supremacy and anti-Black bias. I knew about the old doll testwhispering in my ear should stand in the way of my feeling worthy of love.

I also knew that it did.

What I needed, it turned out, was a cheap, effective, powerful tool for deprogramming myself of the beliefpartly personal, mostly hegemonicin my own unlovability, a tool of liberation and empowerment, one that worked on both mind and heart. Audre Lorde famously wrote that the masters tools would never dismantle the masters house, but what I needed was to first dismantle the shack the master had built for me, and then to build myself a new home, brick by brick. Using, you know, the tools I had.

This is where online dating comes in.

These are the lessons I learned from online dating:

I. Declaring that you want to be loved is empowering.

II. Seeing how many people want to love you as you are is empowering.

III. Understanding the choice is yours is empowering.

I.

After her divorce, my mother never dated. In part this was because she had four young daughters (and one young son) to protect and knew well the dangers of leaving unknown men lying around the house. But she also believed (not unreasonably, given her experience) that men were more trouble than they were worth.

That a woman is complete unto herself and does not need a man (or any partner) to live a rich, fulfilling life is a truth that begs the question: the issue is not need but want. A lot of straight women I know dont want to be bothered and though some of my friends in this category are white the majority of them are Black. I cant be bothered, they say as I recall my latest dating disaster. I cant be bothered, they say as I cry about a broken heart. I cant be bothered, they say and I hear, beneath the personal declaration, a judgment, an implication that continuing to want to be bothered reveals some major weakness, some lacking of self. But maybe thats just the way Im hearing it. Maybe the oppressive specter of the Strong Black Woman/Black Superwoman haunts only me and not my sisters. Maybe their white female friends and acquaintances were not constantly saying to them, Youre the strongest person I know! even as they stood there and crumbled. Maybe these women had not, in fact, internalized the notion that not only should Black women not expect to be loved, they should not even desire it.

Apparently, I had.

During this time I watched old reruns of the Dick Cavett Show. Cavett was an awkward, slow-witted and deeply unfunny interviewer (Lord, give me the career of a mediocre white man) but his show attracted extraordinary guests, including Lauren Bacall and Lena Horne. One night I watched Bacall discuss how she was punished, career-wise, for being human and refusing to try to live up to all the impossible fantasies America heaps upon the white female body and white female heart. Another night I watched Horne discuss how she was punished, soul-wise, for being human, to refusing to live down to all those other American fantasies, the ones of Black women. I was very icy for many years, she told Cavett. I could not be at ease with you or many people, because of the ice society had put around my heart. When things that happened to me broke my heart I realized I wasnt my ice. I was very fragile, very human and a woman who had been this way for protection.

Both women impressed me. Only Lena Horne made me cry.

In the face of dehumanization, any expression of ones humanity is both resistance and reinforcement. In launching myself into online dating I admittedto my friends, the world and most of all myself,that, yes, I wanted to be loved, that I yearned for companionship and caretaking and connection. Instead of pretending to have it all together, I announced it was sometimes perilously close to falling apart. Like anybody else.

I wrote a profile and found a photo and posted them: Love Wanted.

It felt good.

II.

Seeing how many men desire you