There is a picture that always makes my momma smile. Her afro is well-sheened. Her lips are covered in red, her neck is adorned by one gold necklace, and then another, and then another. My daddy’s thick, hairy, brown hands grabs her by the waist.
He is behind her. His afro is well-sheened, almost as perfect as a picture can capture a moment that is in time but transcends it. His blue suit, as blue as the sky, is tight on his arms, and his white shirt is open at his chest, showing a bit of chest hair. He smiles.
My mother smiles back at him. I can hardly imagine how happy they must have been.

My mother’s hands are on top of my father’s. I think they are headed to prom, somewhere to dance, somewhere to get lost and be close. His thick, hairy, brown hands are at her waist. She smiles.
They are lost in the moonlight, wondering what’s going on in Vietnam, and in the streets of Harlem, and in the Black rural schools, trying to stay together. They imagine themselves rolling away on midnight trains, giving each other and Black people the best of their love.
I wonder if they knew that those same hands, and those same smiles, and those same eyes would behold a son who would try to look back at them and recover the beauty that had almost been robbed from them. I wonder if they knew that their son would want to go back to that time.
Do they know I want interview them as a stranger and ask them, “what do you think about the murder of Martin?”, “Did you think the Black Panthers were right?”, “Can we save this country?”, “How deep are you in love?”, “Do you hate white people?”
“What if I told you that Trayvon and Sandra and Mike and Breonna and George and Ahmaud would be names that you remember as visceral as Martin and Malcolm?”, “Are you afraid?”, “Can the Spirit touch me as the Spirit touched you?” They will pause. They will be confused.
“I am from the future,” I would say, as they prepare to turn dance floors into prayer rooms. “I have come with a prophecy.” They do not know me. They will look at me strange but they will know I am made of love and of blackness and of beauty and of soul and of well-sheened afros.
I am made of red lipstick and tight pants and well-chiseled chest and light blues and deep blacks and gold chains and blood on pavements and cameras capturing tragedy and of protest and of dancing and of wake up everybody. “I am your future,” I would say.
My hands hold that image, outlined in gold, and I remember I am watching Quest Love and the Summer of Soul. It is hot. The sun is unyielding. It beats on my face like the drum stands behind David Ruffin in Harlem. Woodstock looks envious upon us.
I close my eyes. Bodies dance. The man in blue and the woman in black twirl, and swing, and pause, and look back at me. They embrace. The heat is not too bad now. Fireworks try to break my eardrum so I cannot hear and cover my eyes with a white light so I cannot see.
But I know what I am. I open my eyes. I know what we are. I know we have been made of love.

Precious Lord.
Precious Lord, Jesse and Mahalia sing.

We are made of love.

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More from @stewartdantec

9 Jul
What many people call "orthodoxy" and "biblical values" is just a way to maintain power and to mask to their insecurities, arrogance, limitations, and fears. James Baldwin is right: the passion with which many love the Lord "was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted".
And anytime our faith is rooted in fear, we will use God and theology as a justification for our love of power and control. Such a faith, Baldwin writes, hates "almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves." Jesus has nothing to do with theologies of hate.
"There was in the life I fled," he writes, "a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare." Baldwin didn't run from the church because he hated Jesus. Baldwin left the church because those who claimed Jesus failed at love.
Read 4 tweets
8 Jul
I keep thinking about this Ta-Nehisi Coates quote about his time at Howard University: “The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white.”
It reminds me so much of Kevin Quashie’s question, “what would it mean to consider black aliveness?” “To behold such aliveness,” he writes, “we have to imagine a black world…we have to imagine a black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death.”
Both Quashie and Coates remind me that we Black people are so much more than what has happened to us and what other’s think of us. Our world, the Black world, is a real world. It is full of beauty, and complexity, and tragedy, and poems, and beats, and balls, and bodies in dance.
Read 8 tweets
8 Jul
Christian faith would be much healthier if we liberated ourselves from theologies that are about power and control rather than liberation and love.
I often wonder what would happen if we saw Jesus and our faith as less about fighting others and winning battles and more about healing others and freeing others.
For many, we have learned faith is a weapon to wield over others, life is an academic endeavor, and the world is something to be exploited rather than seeing all as a gift from God to be embraced and explored.
Read 7 tweets
28 Jun
The resistance to critical race theory is connected to a long standing history of anti-literacies laws that expanded white supremacy and devalue Black humanity and liberation. Controlling and criminalizing curriculum has always been a device to protect white power.
At the heart is white people’s long standing fear that an educated and empowered Black person is a dangerous Black person. Don’t be fooled, just as anti-black practices and policies were happening back then, they are happening right now. It is about one thing: white power.
If they could have their way, reading, writing, and teaching for freedom would be illegal and suppressed (as they are trying to make it today). White resistance to Black education and liberation is not an aberration. It is the American norm.
Read 4 tweets
27 Jun
Christian faith would be so much healthier if we didn’t see our faith as a war to be won or people as enemies but as worlds to be explored and people to be loved.
I can’t stop thinking about this Toni Cade Bambara quote: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?..Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
What if we saw our faith as joining Jesus in healing and liberating the world and not controlling it and condemning it?
Read 7 tweets
26 Jun
I went home today, South Carolina. The country. My grandma and I talked about old church services, and how she can’t eat salt, and hospital bills. She also talked about my granddaddy, and dementia, how 61 years of marriage never prepared her for these last few years of hell.
The rain came and the rain went as we talked. “I want to keep him as long as I can,” she said, as she told me about conversations she be having about her home and putting him in a home and how home just don’t feel like home and hearts are broken and not there. “Yeah,” I say.
My grandad comes and turns the locked knob, me seeing him, him seeing me, through their old glass window which you can barely see through. “How many years y’all been living her grandma?” I ask. She pauses, fixing her dress. “I think since the 60s”, she says. “Yeah, the 60s.”
Read 9 tweets

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