By Amber Butts
When I was 7, our house burned to the ground. A year later, my uncle was hit and killed by a drunk driver a hundred yards away. I sometimes drive past both the house and the adjacent street where my uncle was hit, looking for something to show he had been there. Looking for some marker of life, of death, of witness. Some imprint that the ground shuttered and broke during his departure.
The angst of continually trying to bring loved ones back from the dead, of recreating home, is something I am trying to let go of. But right now I just want to know where the two brown bowls in the kitchen went. Did they break like the old china cabinet Bubbie got from the Salvation Army? Did they break like the men who said they would love us and didn’t? Are they underneath my roommate’s bed, collecting all the other things we discarded? These clothes that I cannot fit anymore, where do they belong?
Bubbie has been gone from this world for two years and twenty five days. Last week, I grabbed her Donna Karan “Cashmere Mist” perfume after putting my clothes on with the intent of heading to work.
The last time the perfume saw something outside of my room was a year ago. I put it in a bag filled with makeup for my cousin. I opened the trunk that night to get the bag and my cousin reached for it too quickly. I didn’t like the casual way she held her arm out to grab it, as if it was just a bag and didn’t contain something precious. I wanted to ensure it would be taken care of. So I pulled the perfume from the bag and pocketed it. We went for drinks instead.
I brought the perfume back to my room and sprayed it into my closet 8 times. I shut the door. I wiped off the dust and placed it with my other perfume. I never liked the smell. I didn’t like how it changed all the air in the room—how it settled on the back of my tongue, making me taste it. I didn’t like how it reminded me of churches and stuffed coats with quiet choirs and dust. It was hers. So it stayed another year.
But I couldn’t help feeling both selfish and silly about not wanting my cousin to have it, about the too soon-ness of letting it go. Last week I peeled the sticker from the bottom before placing the perfume bottle in the free items pile at my job. I put the sticker on the back of my phone case even though the gold lettering wasn’t readable because I still wanted some part of it to stay, at least for a little while.
And today I want to go back to my job and retrieve the bottle, though I know the gate is locked and I do not have the key. I sit in my car and imagine climbing the 10 foot metal fence. Imagine getting back to that musky vanilla-hinted perfume. Of touching it again with my hands, twisting the cap, letting the grooves fit between my fingers.
Carrying only what we need is both requirement and punishment for poor Black people. When we cycle through banishment, displacement, exile, prisons, welfare lines and food pantries everything is stripped of us. Or we have to prove who we are, prove that we need it.
Sometimes our things go in plastic bags and when we get out, they are “given back.” Usually, most of our shit is missing or reported as lost. We keep our shit in storage until we have enough money to get back on our feet and take it out. Until we get approved for new housing, until we convince our family/friends to let us place some things “here and there,” until we make it. And we do sometimes make it, but we never go back and we never really have “enough.”
If we do visit our things, we find they are really just sitting in containment. They don’t get sun or air or attention except for the days when we realize we are paying to keep them somewhere. When we visit our things, we are given clear instructions on how we are allowed to be with them, which is almost like not having them in the first place. Storage facilities discriminate against Black customers. When Bubbie died, we had to first negotiate with the storage company on how and when we’d be able to get her belongings out, even though my mama had been paying the company to keep her things for a decade.
During house visits, birthdays and holidays, we gather and reflect on what we have. On these days, we say, “Look what I have accumulated” which translates to, “These are the things I’ve acquired in my search for worthiness. Will you witness me? Aren’t you proud? I saved these things from the fire. Look, that burnt photograph has your face on it. Look closely, rub it a little but not too hard. See there? There. There you.”
Before she died, I’d visit Bubbie’s house and help her go through her things and watch her never want to let them go. It was traumatic. For both of us. I felt like I was judging her and couldn’t stop. Sometimes she had things I wanted and I would say, “You don’t need that. Why do you have it? You have too many things.” Sometimes I’d ask her for a thing directly and she’d say “no.” Sometimes I worried about her eating expired food she’d held onto long after it’s freshness left. Sometimes I wanted to push her on the letting go so that she could make room for something else.
Bubbie stored different items in her apartment and in our homes, but she wanted them all back. She made us promise that though we could hold different items in our garages and living rooms, they belonged to her. They were to be given to her when she was able to find a larger space.
More than 100 of our family members are sprinkled throughout the Bay Area and only two of them are homeowners. Bubbie never owned a home. Neither has my mama. Richmond, Martinez, Oakland, Dublin, Pinole, Sacramento, San Leandro, Stockton, Antioch. Each year, we move further out. Each year one of us faces eviction. Sometimes three times in six months while carrying a baby, while being fired, while managing an apartment complex, while getting kicked off of food stamps.
Black folks accessing home ownership in the Bay and the US as a whole is nearly impossible. Each time we move, we think we can stay for longer. Think our things will last a little longer, extend, travel. Time does things we have not asked, things we try not to expect. It wears us out and down and around. It tears us apart.
I wanted to buy things that would last. Bubbie wanted to go to the Dollar Tree to buy plates that melted in the microwave. I keep things in my trunk just in case folks need something. She wanted cups that weren’t supposed to be reused. Dish soap that stained and made rotten and caused cancer. We both wanted things. We wanted car rides and someone to tell us they were sorry. We wanted our own language. She wanted something that would hold the grief of her child dying before her. I wanted something to hold the child that I could not have.
We’d eat bowls of popcorn and tell each other stories. On quieter days, we’d whisper to each other between movies or cooking sessions or children’s tantrums, “You know, you can’t take anything with you when you die, right?”
Why did we believe this? Why do I still? Why are Black folks only ever allowed to carry what we need, even in death? How are we hoarders if we never get what we need? We are folks trying to keep people with things, and keep things with people, while everyone else is trying to take them away.
Why can we only take what we need when we die? Why not more? Didn’t you have a couch that folks could only sit on if the plastic was setting right? Didn’t you, too, get smacked and see ghosts? Didn’t you shake your head? Weren’t you resentful? Didn’t you know that Bubbie was saying, “I do not want to leave. And, I will leave you. Carry me with you as I go”?
I let the perfume go to not be tied, to be lighter. I tell myself that new breath can only come if old and held breath is let out. I say that I can form new, healthy attachments that don’t encourage me to keep all the time. And still, I want to keep.
There is nothing but mangled wood and steel in a great pile, and suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it. – Jesmyn Ward
My mama and I watch Hoarders and never connect with the white folks on the show because they seem so detached, so impossibly disconnected from their family members who try to provide care. The Black hoarders on the show feel like us: human, alive, tired. They make complex decisions and are relatable because they are multilayered. They struggle with child rearing, poverty, control, judgement, obesity and policing. Everything in their home is a fetish, an honor, a ritual. We watch in reflection of what we have laid claim to, how we have marked and unmarked. We talk about what we want to keep.
Slavery, colonialism and white supremacy have encouraged us to not feel because their impact on us is unbearable. Children have been pulled from us without the possibility of reunification or goodbyes. Rituals and practices centered around touch, connection, and support have been dislocated and criminalized.
What we have lost has changed us. Evictions, fires, divorces, breakups, child loss, depression and death have shaped us in inexplicable ways.
We struggle to maintain access without being punished for having excess. We’re exposed to higher quantities of trash because waste management does not prioritize the cleaning up of our neighborhoods until they are no longer ours; until we’ve been pushed out, houseless and/or our land is bought by large companies When we have things, when we make noise, when we take up space, when we build joy, we are fined.
What do we then return to in the midst of chaos, loss, consumption and poverty? What objects can we preserve, and is preserving them a dying act? Why must we let go? Is the idea that we have to let go of anything inherently anti-Black?
The things we touch, the things our folks have touched, the things we then let other folks touch. This passing, remembering and rendering is a love politic that we have grown in deep blood, barricades, and filth.
Redefining inheritance that isn’t reliant on consumption and capitalism is our birthright. We form our own havens for houses that were once ours and are no longer. We dream up new homes that center community while still fighting for the ones we “lost.” We know and have always known that federal, state housing and banking institutions have furthered and built this loss, regardless of what they market it as.
Sometimes our relationships with objects are the only lasting thing left over from our severed connections with children, exes, parents, friends. They replace and/or exacerbate the memory of the loss, causing the individual to compulsively gather more things. Words like “hoarding” and “packrat” could never hold these intricacies, these markers of Blackness and navigation.
A Black elder named Alma gave me a neon orange necklace and matching earrings on Sunday. We were attending an outdoor play called Black Odyssey. The row I sat in was spacious and the play hadn’t begun yet. Three other Black women and I sat around in a row, drinking wine, making jokes and commenting on how beautiful the night was. Ms. Alma’s row was behind us and each seat was filled with elder Back women. I first connected with her when I overheard her saying all of her seatmates were her friends, except for the one she was just being friendly with to get some m&ms.
I turned around after chuckling at a ridiculous conversation they were having and offered her cheese. She took it and said, “Child, I really hope I don’t seem like a beggar. I smelled the cheese but wasn’t gon’ ask for none. You don’t have to give me any if you don’t want to.” I told her it was an honor, that our love for cheese brought us together. She cracked up and became shy at the same time, slapping her hand against her right thigh, averting her eyes a little bit. I made plates filled with cheese, crackers and salami and handed them to each elder who wanted one. Some only wanted the sea salt brownies from Trader Joes, so we gave them the container unopened.
When the play was over, she gave me the necklace. Alma means “soul” in Spanish. She pulled me close, we hugged and tears started falling down my face. She said, “You have a beautiful spirit.” I said, “A reflection of yours,” and tried to breathe. My response was automatic, I didn’t need to think about it. There was a universe stuck inside my throat, willing itself to explode on everything around me. Begging for a more air, or a witness, or thunder, or my Bubbie back. I wiped my face, turned back to my friends and smiled. The earth is still intact.
I wanted Alma to be my grandma because she is alive and Bubbie is not. I want Bubbie to be alive. I wanted to get rid of her perfume because there are so many things in my world that remind me of her not being here. And of when she was here.
I want miss Alma’s necklace to replace those things because she is alive and I need alive things and I worry about having dead people’s things around me all the time. I don’t want to use any of Bubbie’s things. I just want them here. I want her scent. I want the Donna Karan perfume that makes me want to vomit because I wanted to vomit when I smelled it on her when she was alive. And I also don’t want the perfume because I want to vomit in a different way this time. Because her not being here makes me dizzy.
I want miss Alma to be my adopted grandma. And I almost asked her while grabbing her used plate and putting it in the trash can. But my friends were around and I didn’t want her to think I was crazy. I didn’t know what to say out loud and so I said, “Thank you.” I smiled, I let her walk away.
I held onto the earrings and necklace she gave me for the rest of the night. My right hand stayed in my pocket and I rubbed it hard even as my partner kissed me in the car when we got back to Oakland. In the midst of dropping off our friend and ensuring she got into her house, I held the jewelry and yelled at a white man assaulting his partner. I held the jewelry so tight that its imprint stayed on me for an hour. I let it cut into my skin and I watched the blood dry. I remember opening my hand, surprised that it was closed. Surprised that none of it hurt. Surprised that I was able to ball up my fist for that amount of time.
The necklace has a large, plastic star in the middle. The earrings are stars too. I’ll wear them because they were a gift from Ms. Alma. This carrying is important to me. Whether I like the jewelry is irrelevant.
Suggested Readings:
Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, 1997
Kiese Laymon, Heavy, 2018
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones, 2011
Amber Butts is a writer, educator and tenants rights organizer from Oakland, CA. Her work has appeared in Blaqueerflow, KPFA’s Women’s Magazine Radio and 6×8 Press. She is currently at work on an afro-futurist novel focused on themes of intergenerational trauma, imagination, Black survival and environmental racism. Amber’s writing challenges multiple systems of oppression through the use of queer and womanist frameworks. She works to amplify the stories of poor Black folks, with an emphasis on mamas, children and elders. She believes in asking big and small questions that lead to tangible expressions of freedom and liberation.
Amber likes cheese and comic books and sings louder than she needs to.
