The Lesbians Who Showed Me a Path

“I am my ancestors’ wildest dream.” I first heard this oft-repeated phrase at church. It was one of the pastors at MCCNY, Rev. Gayle, an African American lesbian who began a sermon with this line. I knew what she meant about the distance traveled to freedom. And yet, my body reacted with tears I had to choke back at the realization that I’m none of my (biological) ancestors’ wildest dreams. My life now is their nightmare: unmarried, no children, lesbian, feminist, anti-racist, over-educated, professor, city-dweller in a place my father could only say with a slur.

But, I’ve done what queer people have always done: fashioned new kin and ancestors with other queer people. Two of those ancestors for me are Minnie Bruce Pratt and Mab Segrest. Both are white, Southern (both from Alabama), lesbian, anti-racists. Both shined a light on a path for me out of patriarchy, out of white supremacy and into a fuller, much richer, more joy-filled life. They did this through their writing. Minnie’s essay, “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” from 1984 changed me. I got handed this essay by Kate, a dyke friend in grad school, who said, “here, read this.”

It was the first thing I’d ever read where a white-raised person dealt with their own complicity in white supremacy. It’s not perfect, to be sure, as this essay by Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty points out, but it shook something loose in me, deep down. In 2001, Minnie published, “Who Am I If I Am Not My Father’s Daughter: A Southerner Confronts Racism and Anti-Semitism,” and another lock opened when I realized that I could name the harm that white supremacy had done to me.

About ten years after that essay by Minnie, Mab Segrest wrote Memoir of a Race Traitor, and I’m no longer mad at her for taking the best title for a memoir. In that book, Mab recounts her very real battles with the KKK in North Carolina and her coming to terms with her own family’s racism. I wrestled with this book for a long time because (spoiler alert) she ultimately reconciles with her family of origin and that always felt too neat to me. Still, the book remains one of singular importance for me. Just that it exists in the world elevates and encourages me. Her latest book, Administrations of Lunacy, is full of powerful insights about race and psychiatry, and will be important for my memoir when I can get back to that in November.

Minnie went on to the ancestors on July 2, 2023. Mab is still fighting the far right back in North Carolina. Just yesterday, I had the great honor to be in the room with Mab and a bunch of researchers and activists combatting the far right. I never got to meet Minnie but had met Mab before yesterday. We sat next to each other at the start of this meeting and we fell into easy short-hand conversation, and our catch up felt like one with an old friend. We immediately started talking about Minnie’s passing, and I offered that even though I don’t really believe in heaven, it comforted me to know that Minnie was now with Leslie Feinberg (author of Stone Butch Blues), her queer, communist, partner who died in 2014. To which, Mab replied, “Fucking Marxists! Minnie would hate that.” True enough.

When it came time for Mab to present about her current work with Blueprint North Carolina, mapping the threat of the far right in her state, she started by reading this poem from Minnie’s poetry collection, The Dirt She Ate: New and Selected Poems, called “The Sound of One Fork.” Here is the poem:

Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof
and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree
as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone
in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,
that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before
its dark green turns into red, that waits
like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia.

While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork
against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper
alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years
has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn
and okra that she grows in her backyard garden.
Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost
as the windless silence, persists like the steady
random click of a redbird cracking a few
more seeds before the sun gets too low.
She does not hurry, she does not linger.

Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely.
But I know what sufficiency she may possess.
I know what can be gathered from year to year,
gathered from what is near to hand, as I do
elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road,
gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining
in rows of claret red, made at times with help,
a friend or a lover, but consumed long after,
long after they are gone and I sit
alone at the kitchen table.

And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons
on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods,
I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night
will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day.
My family, my children live in other states,
the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here
than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left
of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds,
when I get up and come in to fix supper,
in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them.

In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves,
the woman next door and I. Still, we persist.
I open the drawer to get out the silverware.
She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick
the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer.
I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch
and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light
to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water.
She stays until the day grows so bright
that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied.
She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight,
grey and slate blue against a paler sky.
I know she will come back. I see the light create
a russet curve of land on the farther bank,
where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe
under the first blackbirds. I know
she will come back. I see the light curve
in the fall and rise of her wing.

Listening to Mab read this poem, I felt like I was meant to be in that room. At last, the dream of these ancestors.