By Jailyn Gladney
“And when great souls die…
Our senses, restored, never
To be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They Existed.
We can be. Be and be
Better. For they existed.â€
When Great Trees Fall by Maya Angelou
In my earliest memories of my mother she is standing at the stove with a spatula in hand as oil pops erratically on the surface of the pan before her. My baby brother and I are dancing to the voices of RuPaul, Erykah Badu, Prince, and Heather Headley, which blast from the big black boombox that she’d sometimes drag into the kitchen to keep her company. Her bottom lip is caught between her four front teeth in a nasty bout of kitchen-choreography (a distant cousin of the more popular bathtub-vocals).
The phone rings and I know that it could only be one of two people: My godmother or my Nana. Phone calls with one often resulted in a phone call to the other and my brother and I both knew from a very young age that it would be hours before we could drag her away from her two best friends.
Throughout my childhood, it was a clearly defined (though unspoken) rule that my brother, my father and I were not welcome in these back-porch, closed-door conversations between grown women. And still, it is these conversations between my mother and the women she loved most that would form the basis for my understanding of what love between women looked, sounded and felt like.
Three years after I left my childhood home for college, my godmother would pass suddenly and Nana would develop a neurological disorder which would result in the loss of her ability to write or speak. Both incidences would mark an end to those phone calls that I so intimately associated with my mother, godmother and Nana. And though she has been careful to mask the impact that these losses have had on her, I know better than most how much my mother of so few friendships, values the women she considers family.
Like many southern, Black women, my mother’s love language is food made by her hands. When my brother and I were too wrapped up in our university studies or social lives to return her phone calls, she cooked her way through the loss of her best friend and her mother, intent on ensuring that nothing as trivial as TSA and a few hundred miles would prevent her from showering us in homemade meals infused with her love. When Nana got sick and could no longer cook for her household, my mom made a point of stocking their freezer with the very same meals: In feeding those she cares about, my mother is able to pass along the love that the women in her life gave to her.
Nowadays, the hours my mother used to spend on the phone with my godmother and Nana are spent talking to me. Every week I’m afforded a small glimpse into that mystical world of grown-woman-ness: The gossip, the giggles, the random updates and most importantly, the vulnerability that Black women are often only allowed to show when in the company of other Black women. And still, I have largely watched my momma grieve from a distance and have been intentional in giving her the space she deserves to mourn the drastic changes that her small community of women has undergone.
Across oceans, state-lines and grief-stricken silence, Black, southern women have cooked, laughed, and worked their way through losses that no one of conscience could blame them for buckling under. It is this in which I have found solace: in knowing that she is not alone in her heartache; In knowing that she is not the first or last Black woman to suffer such unimaginable loss; In knowing that from the ashes of death and grief of varying degrees Black women have fashioned communities which sing of a fierce, deep and irrefutable love; In knowing that when she is ready she will come to me.
My momma and so many other southern Black mommas are proof incarnate of the Black woman’s resilience. In the wake of devastating losses to their communities at the hands of death, disease, white supremacy or any combination of the three, Black women have time and again forged new relationships, created new spaces for community and fought to live long enough to tell the tale.
They have filled the spaces left by those women they have lost with the breath of women who are still around. They have protected each other, laughed with each other and passed on their cumulative knowledge and stories with the singular hope that the next generation will find comfort, purpose and guidance in their doing so.
Suggested Reading
“The Men Who Left Were White†– Josie Duffy, gawker  (April 12, 2014)
“Healing our Wounds: Liberatory Health Care†– bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism Â
“Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference†– Lorde Audre,
Jailyn Gladney is a freelance writer living, writing and playing in Washington, DC. She loves mangoes, comfy couches and her not-so-little little brother. She is the product of an abundance of southern sunshine, black love and literature. The keyboard is her sword. More of her writing can be found at jailyngladney.com.
