Freedom Interlude

Latoya knew that water was sacred in a different way around here. There was no sugar coating it, her neighborhood wasn’t all that pleasant. She lived on the edge of the territories, caught between two epochs of a feudal Ku Klux south and a capitalist Jim Crow North, there was no space truly ever built for her sacred existence. Her momma named her Latoya for victory yet to come, always bathed her and rubbed her skin smooth with cocoa butter. Her momma was a teacher through and through, and she sure did complain about how those high school kids drove her wild, but she never stopped smiling when all the kids ended up being smartest in the school and shipping themselves off to college. Her momma had wise words all around, and never lacked in that department.

Which brings Latoya back to the water her momma warned her about:

Baby, don’t let your hair slip out that cap, your perm better stay for few more weeks, do I look like I got pockets for new hair for you to be looking right?

Baby, why you always looking at that pool? You know it’s for them white folk to swim around in chemicals and all that, I bet it keeps their skin that pasty.

Baby girl, that ocean’s not safe -- you let one of those nasty white folk see you so much as dip your toes into the water, they might just snatch you up and use your little black and bony behind for gator bait. You ain’t remember what they did to your daddy’s brother down in Louisiana? They did it before, they might just do it again.

Her momma didn’t have to warn her when her daddy came home with broken bones and open wounds from high pressure water hoses used when he walked on his side of a freedom. Thems firefighters and policemen hosed her daddy down with high pressure water like an old man would hose down a rabid dog in Mississippi summer heat.

Her momma and her daddy knew, and it wasn't long until she knew it too: black bodies have blue borders, swimming blacks are escaped slaves, we been drowning in oppression, been sinking so deep with no way to get out, been tossed overboard when we were not enough or too much, or it all, so we gotta ask this too. How many times this water gonna carry us? How many times is it gone let us escape for air? How much longer we gotta wait for blue black babies to be in blue and be black without being beaten black and blue? Why we gotta gasp for air when we never chose to get lost at sea mid-Atlantic?

So that summer, when she was 16 years old, Latoya learned how to swim. Sure her momma didn’t necessarily like that her baby girl stopped perming her hair and always smelled of chlorine, but sure did that little victory girl fly through water like a fish that refused to be caught - like a dark streak of muscle and night cutting through that crystal clear and white water.

Then, when Latoya was just a bit shy of 28 and met a water walking Igbo man, her lips stumbled and her body betrayed her with the way she reached out and for once trusted the water before letting her weight sink into the waves.