The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

by Junauda Petrus

  I’m like that, I got a lot of layers too, but I think other kids think I’m just this whatever tomboy Black girl, who always reading and playing ball or working out or something. I basically fit in, which is okay, but sometimes, I wish I felt comfortable to put my layers out there more.

  If I’m honest, part of my renewed curiosity is because recently I found out Whitney Houston fell in love with this other girl, Robyn, when they was teens and working a summer job in New Jersey. I was just looking stuff up online and found some things about her “rumored romance” with her basketball-player best friend, Robyn. I don’t know, but it just seems cool to know that she had this connection with this other girl. And that the other girl was a beautiful basketball star, and Whitney fell for her butt, called her the “sister she never had.” Mmm-hmmm. I feel that. I think I’ve felt that way before. With Ursa, my bestie, I felt that somewhat and in another kind of weird way with Jada, this girl from math.

  I read that when Whitney hit it big, Robyn was her for-real, ride or die. That she became Whitney’s assistant and her confidante and always had her back. For real, for real. They shared a huge apartment together that was bad and beautiful and was living that good life together.

  When I listen to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” after reading more about their connection, I imagine Whitney and Robyn slow-dancing in an icy and lit penthouse in the eighties and it’s all back-in-the-day fresh. A world of windows, looking over the city lights and skyscrapers, black and white everything, with leather couches, a big sound system with mad tapes and CDs, glass tables and a neon chandelier. Old-school and tasteful. They are two Black girls, slow-dancing, teen twin flames who loved each other. Inseparable.

  I feel it.

  Anyway, some people deny it, but when I look at pictures of young Robyn and Whitney and how they are smiling and close, a part of me thinks it’s true. I just do. I can totally see why Whitney loved her. She is cool and smooth, more swag than any of those cheesy, Jheri-curled dudes probably trying to push up on her. I also read that one time, Robyn also maybe whooped Bobby Brown’s butt. I wanna be like that—smooth like Robyn. Just a tender thug who Whitney would love.

  Maybe Robyn was her true love. I wish she coulda stayed with her if that’s what she wanted, and they’d be in love forever. Maybe the world would’ve loved her if she was queer. I would’ve, no doubt. Whitney was an angel and what if Robyn could’ve been her bodyguard? Why did that basic-white-boy Kevin Costner, with no swag, have to save her? It should’ve been Robyn’s cool self. Ain’t Black women always saving everything anyway? Why can’t we save Whitney?

  When I listen to Whitney sing, I’m feeling every feel there is to feel. Lighthearted. Melancholy. Joyous. Romantic. Her voice can do anything, and I get chills hearing her riff and vocalize. I put my head under my blankets, bring my knees to my chest and cocoon myself with Whitney and the darkness and softness surrounds me.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next song on my list is by my favorite band, BLK LVRS. All of the musicians in the band are weird Black kids. Like me, I guess. I really like the lead singer, QWN Asantewaa. I like them ’cause they is just beautiful and different. They wear simple clothes and a fade haircut and sneakers. Their voice is really soft and deep and emotional, and they write most of the songs and play guitar.

  I think if I’m honest, I’m pretty sure I like girls. But I’m not really sure either because a part of me also likes guys, like Terrell. The first time I thought about this in a real way was when I went to see BLK LVRS—my first real, grown concert—and I had this serendipitous, moment-long micro-situationship with this girl.

  My mom and dad had surprised me with seeing BLK LVRS for my fifteenth birthday. It was an eighteen-plus show, but apparently the venue allows kids to come with their parents. It made my whole Black life that year, because this was, like, one of the few times they had gotten me something that really felt like me. Not some dumb light-purple frilly blouse or skinny jeans with floral embroidery on the butt or dangly earrings with pink shells or a bougie manicure and pedicure (side note: I did low-key like that ish, though. It actually felt good. Soaking my hands and feet in water and all of this concentrated attention to my fingers and toes made me tingle. I found a dope iridescent-emerald color called Octopussy, which was a weird name, but it made my nails look like the back of a beetle).

  So, I’m at the show, I have on my BLK LVRS shirt, black skinny jeans, and a silver chain with Saturn on it that my mom got me for my birthday. My hair was in a braid and I had a big X on my hand to show I wasn’t drinking, which I thought was cool anyway. My parents was back in the cut, where some of their friends was chillin’ and they got appetizers and drinks and was just being bougie adults in the way my mom loves and my dad is awkward about. My mom says it’s good for him to talk to beings besides his plants and his seeds (seeds—as in his children, Sahir and me, but also his actual seeds for Black Eden, the seeds he collects and germinates, and the seeds he raps to once they’re in the dirt. The Fugees, mainly). Mom says if she ever dies, he going to need some friends, maybe even a new wifey. He hates when she be talking so reckless about things like her dying. I think maybe ’cause his parents died when he was young, and the idea makes him feel scared, like a world without my mom would feel.

  The energy of the show was very intense for me. All I could do was take in all of the fly people, their different looks and colors. They were beautiful. I had never experienced that ever before. My parents let me wander into the ocean of audience and be free of them, as long as I stayed close to the stage or their bougie district and kept my phone handy. I walked around and tried to be low-key and blend in, but in that space, part of me wished I had let myself let loose and pick an edgier outfit.

  I said “excuse me” about ninety-nine-eleven times, and twisted my body through the crowd until I was standing real close to the front, right on the edge of the stage. I wanted to see QWN as close as I could. The wait seemed forever to come out, but there was a DJ playing some bops to keep the crowd ready. When the band got to the stage I was only a couple feet away from QWN.

  They was smaller than I thought they would be, but they was also more everything else. More beautiful and dope, and I couldn’t stop looking at them. The whole audience seemed to love and want QWN. I mean, my whole body was vibrating. They was all in the zone. QWN didn’t seem to notice us at all, except for between songs when they would talk and tell little stories in they deep speaking voice, otherwise, they would let their guitar talk and harmonize their singing alongside it. Their voice made me feel like they cared about me. I know that’s weird, but that is the only way I can explain the way it feels when I listen to them.

  I memorize your skin

  and you tattoo your love

  and your poetry on me

  You love like rain

  You beautiful sweet

  You saturate me

  my ancestral wifey

  give me touches that

  sweeten up

  complexities

  with all of the tenderness

  with all of the permission

  You are temptation

  and goddess perfection.

  Moaning their lyrics, behind the bass line, the whole band was going hard and hitting that beat. I felt every note in my gut, really underground in me. And the whole crowd was feeling it too, and I was swept into our collective energy.

  I’m not gonna lie, I was also feeling super awkward, because I ain’t even know if I knew how to dance at first. But then this girl next to me out of nowhere starts to groove with me. I still remember what she got on, she was so magically pretty. She was looking all witchy, with a lavender-colored Afro and white boots and a necklace of mandarin-colored flowers. I started dancing back before I could think about it. She was real smooth with her movements, twirling around me and dropping it low, like bow! I was like, da
mn . . . I did a helpless version of my dad’s two-step, and to my surprise, she seemed impressed. She soul clapped at me even—like I was killing it. She smiled and I just kept doing my thang, grinning back at her. And I don’t know why I still remember this, but she smelled good too, like cocoa butter, jasmine flowers, and a little alcohol on her breath, even though there was an X on her hand like mine. All of a sudden, a crew of her friends came back with drinks, and she smiled at me and then floated away among them and I got pushed farther back. It made me feel a little disappointed, but I get it: Those were homies. But for some silly reason, I had wished we coulda danced all night together to BLK LVRS and I coulda maybe even known something about her. Next thing I know I hear a familiar voice.

  “Mabel, they is so fresh! I had to get on this dance floor and do my thang, baby!” and there was my mama behind me, shimmying and old-lady twerking her heart out to the music.

  * * *

  • • •

  We played BLK LVRS on the ride home and I was still buzzing from their weirdness and freeness and Blackness. I tried to relive all I saw on the stage that night: the bass player, BLK Rose, who is tall and dark with a pretty smile and a pink fade, and his jumping up and dancing all over the stage. And BLK Dahlia, their drummer from Senegal, who was raised in New Orleans. She moved between every style of rhythm from congas, wind chimes, to her drum kit to a djembe drum that she played on some of the slower songs. The keys player, BLK Iris and her glittery periwinkle dreadlocks past her fat, fine butt, wearing a mint-green wedding dress, her eyes closed as she did rhythms on her beat machine. And of course, my favorite, QWN Asantewaa, and their emotional voice.

  “She’s a butch, right?” my dad said from the front seat, promptly killing my vibe. “She could sang her ass off. That falsetto was a young Prince in his hey. Ooooh and she play real good, like Jimi all day on that guitar. I’m glad we went, ladies.”

  The way he said “she” and “her” really annoyed me. Like he knew them or understood something about them because of how they rocked they hair or clothes. “Why can’t you just enjoy the music, Dad? Why the first thing you wonder about them is if they butch? And they don’t go by she,” I blurted out, feeling heat in my face. Then both me and my dad got quiet.

  “Sequan, the singer—QWN Asantewaa—goes by ‘they,’ baby,” my mama said. But she didn’t stop there. “And oooh, that little cutie, QWN is a fine, little tender-roni. I can see why all y’all kids be acting wild behind them,” she said, revealing cougar feelings about QWN Asantewaa that nobody was wondering about.

  “Right, they, not she. My bad.” He looked at me in the rearview mirror, but I don’t think he noticed me rolling my eyes. “They used to call ’em butch or stud back in the day. I wasn’t trying to be mean, I ain’t know. I did enjoy the show, though, I said that. I liked it.” I just kept rolling my eyes at his fumbling. Whatever.

  “There are still butches or studs, but there are they and thems and more too.” Mom put her hand on Dad’s. “This indigo generation is next level. It took me a while to pick up on it, but I get it better now. I know you wasn’t trying to be insensitive, ’Quan, but just be mindful okay, honey? They go by ‘them’ and ‘they.’” After my mom broke it down in her own way, my dad and I both stayed quiet the rest of the drive. I felt like I wanted to cry for some reason and a couple tears came down and I wiped them slow, so no one would notice and I felt even more dumb, since I was grateful I got to go. My mom turned up the volume, and as QWN’s voice filled up the car, I looked at our city glitter by.

  Even though we still close, my dad gets weird around me in certain ways that makes me awkward. I don’t know how he would feel if he knew I liked girls, because he was kinda too geeked when I got a “little boyfriend,” as my mom put it when I first started chilling with Terrell. I’m pretty sure my mom wouldn’t care, since she’s always had lesbian and gay friends. I think my dad would feel some type of way about it, like a little disappointed or confused, to be honest. I don’t feel in a rush to talk to them all about my feelings, because . . . nah.

  Listening to QWN tonight on the mix reminds me of that night a little. Low-key, a little bit ’cause I always wondered what happened to that lavender-’fro girl, to be real. I just wonder if she thought about me again, which was a long shot, but what if? What if there was a Whitney-and-Robyn connection? Either way, that BLK LVRS show was the dopest night of my life—even with my dad being basic. It’s weird that even listening to QWN, with myself alone now in the middle of the night, two years later, I feel like I’m still in that room and a part of them in a way that gives me a good feeling.

  AUDRE

  WHY I HAVE TO LOVE SOMEONE I CAN’T LOVE? My mother beat me and shame me for being “nasty” and I start to wish myself dead. But if it nasty, I find that nastiness in the church I try and avoid my whole life.

  My mama and I was always different but the older I get, the harder it is to live with she. She never seem quite at peace with life. She certainly never seem to feel peace with me. When I was young, she would be in she bedroom for hours, sleeping or watching detective shows. Queenie would come by and cook and lime by us and sometimes comb my hair. When my mama was happy, though, that was my favorite world to live in. We going to the beach, she buying new clothes for sheself and me, she would get new lipstick, perfume, and things that make she feel pretty. We cooking and liming together. But if she in she shadow place, nothing is okay, and I staying out of her way and in my own world. When I was eleven, in addition to going to Queenie’s on Saturdays, I started going down the road by Auntie Pearl and Episode’s house, watching TV and exploring the hills with our other cousins and neighborhood kids. Episode is Auntie Pearl’s youngest son and my favorite cousin.

  My mother’s dad died from drugs and madness when I was twelve; that is when she started getting really into church. I remember my grandfather Ivan was funny and kind to a point, but it was only on the surface. I ain’t know if it was because drugs or he had a hard life, but he would promise my mama something and then he wouldn’t do it, or he’d do something else stchupid she ain’t ask for, like bring me a bike with two flat tires when I asked for them shoes with the wheels in the heels of them. Then he get mad when I was disappointed, like he brought me what I ask for. He was always doing things like that. He blame it on when Queenie left him in the eighties—just like his mother did his father when he was a boy, which he seem to blame Queenie for too. Either way, after he dead from overdose, my mama decided to start going to church on Sundays, and then church was all of the time. The next thing I know a corny, clear-skin man always hanging around and that seem to be the official thing that separate me and my mother: a husband named Rupert.

  After a while, it was either I go to church or we always arguing about it, because she feel I is “acting like I is a woman” since all I do now is hang out with my cousin and his Rasta friends, plus I stopped eating meat and ain’t straightening my hair. She sentence me to weekly services to “put me in my place.” I beg Queenie to ask Mama to let me choose. But Mama got her husband now—a husband that she find in God’s house—and she and Rupert insist, since I is in they house, I must go to they church.

  And that is where I find Neri.

  I saw her right away on my first visit to church. I liked how she opened the doors for all the grandmas. After some weeks, I saw she was always wearing something yellow—whether it was a yellow suit or a yellow scarf or yellow blouse. I noticed that and brought her some yellow flowers from Queenie’s yard one Sunday, and she hugged me and I was fluttering inside my body. Every Sunday, she sang real pure and close her eyes. Her voice sweet and perfect and angelic from Goddess. And she noticed me too. After we saw each other a couple of Sundays, she would find me and sit next to me.

  Neri was my mother’s pastor’s granddaughter, and I loved her on sight.

  One day during service, Neri held my hand where no one could see. I was feeling something when she did that
, like it a special moment. I thought maybe it a church thing people do, I ain’t know about, and I loved it. The energy in our hands was singing a gospel the whole time, and I felt the sermon through her palm. My mother’s God’s grace in Neri’s hands. I get real religious after that. I ain’t never kissed nobody before. I ain’t even feel I wanted to kiss anyone before. But Neri made me wonder: What would it feel like to kiss her right on her mouth? I ain’t know what to do with the feeling so I pushed the thought back out of my head.

  Church became actual church to me. In my head, I renamed it C.H.U.R.C.H., which stood for “Come Here U Rebel, Come Here.” I knew I was a conjurer and feeling weird for being there and finding Spirit. But Queenie had always told me Spirit is everywhere, and that since I was going to church, be open and see what is there to learn about the Spirit of Jesus and the way the Christians try to understand the divine. So when my heart start tingling, I ain’t surprised that I found Spirit in church with Neri.

  One day I decided to take Neri to the ocean, by where Queenie live. It is a private spot that emerges from a walk through a thick grove and a narrow path. We convinced all the adults—and ourselves—we was studying the Bible. I was in a Sunday dress, pink and ugly and making me look like a tall five-year-old. My glasses are old-school frames that used to be Queenie’s, but I like them better than the new styles. My mama hates them, but she never get my style anyhow. I thought I looked funky and original. Neri looked more sophisticated in a navy skirt, with a cream blouse and a yellow scarf, and in her braids she’d tucked yellow flowers that we found on our walk to the water. I laid a scarf for us in the sand. I kicked off my shoes and took off Neri’s shoes too. Pretty feet, I thought. I held she foot and sang a song. She giggled and swung herself closer to me. Hip to hip, she leaned her head on my shoulder but then caught herself and sat back up.