By Amber Butts
Touch has always been complex and situational for me. I’ve often experienced it wielded by violence, terror and isolation. Living through and witnessing physical, sexual and emotional abuse has conditioned me into being preoccupied with controlling my body at all times. It has hardened my expression, thrived on my composure and shifted my reactions to closeness, safety and changing environments.
I asked the boy who tripped me in middle school why he did it. I wanted to know why he chose to do it the exact moment after B2K completed their surprise performance on our campus and I was skipping towards the stairs. It was my first concert and I’d felt so light, happy and free. I fell into the fence construction workers had put up to expand our campus field. A curved, pointy metallic piece of the fence went through my arm and when I got up, my elbow split open.
As blood dripped onto my white and light blue Air Maxes, I felt embarrassment, not pain. I pretended the boy’s half-concern was care and said I’d be right back. I went to the bathroom, washed the blood off and cleaned my wound with old, scratchy brown paper towels. I wiped the tears from my face and went out looking for him so we could walk to class together. He was nowhere to be found. After school, we walked to the store and I bought us sodas.
During my first ten years of life, family members around my age were the closest thing to any type of consistent friendship model I’d engaged in.
We had double dutch contests in the front yard, rehearsed for shows that we’d only see and fought over which one of us would be Monica and which one would be Brandy for our weekly rendition of The Boy is Mine. When I needed to approach friendships outside of those dynamics, I offered weird facts I read in books. Then eventually candy, jokes or food. Mostly I spent time alone.
My babysitter sexually assaulted me when I was seven, a year and a half after my uncle was killed by a drunk driver while crossing the street. She was nice and read me books while my mama went to work. I thought we were friends. I learned that folks weren’t nice to you for no reason. An old family saying began echoing back at me: You had to “give some to get some.”
Offering things to maintain connection is unsustainable and perverts the true nature of loving friendships. I know that now. But at the time I thought my hurt at what the babysitter had done was insignificant and an overreaction because I was engaging with people who were not concerned with my feelings. I let what they thought shape my reality. I began engaging in transactional friendships and calling them supportive.
I often put my feet on people. Always have. As much as I’d try to keep my feet away, if I was laying next to you they’d always return to your sides, or faces, or feet when I fell asleep. Once when I was sharing a bed with my cousin, she bound my feet together with duct tape because she didn’t like them touching her. In the middle of the night I got up to use the restroom and fell flat on my face. When my aunt turned on the lights, she thought we’d been fighting because my face was all bloody. I had no idea what happened and didn’t remember my feet being tied up.
Human beings die without touch. In America, we are increasingly touch deprived. We sit in offices and cubicles without experiencing any kind of touch for extended periods of time. We ride trains and shrink ourselves so we don’t touch other folks’ bodies. Sometimes we come home and still don’t experience touch.
Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the first seven to eight weeks of pregnancy. Babies who aren’t held and nuzzled enough have detrimental changes to their molecular profile. Adults are impacted too, a lack of touch negatively impacts our mental health.
Though I am more aware of what a lack of touch can do to my mood, body and sense of safety now, I still flinch sometimes from receiving it. There are times when I’m upset and someone tries to comfort me and it feels like my skin is crawling. I hate that feeling. And all I want to do is swat their hand away. But really, my body is craving a special form of touch instead, particularly from Black folk.
When my grandmama was celibate, she’d ask me to rub her feet and oil her scalp with more consistency than when she wasn’t. She craved touch more, and not just sexually. She was transparent about her loneliness, about the gaps in our lives caused by trauma that we tried to fill, about the loss we never really named. Sometimes I chuckle when reflecting on the bravery she showed by vulnerably requesting touch and naming which kind she wanted. Sometimes I cry.
I am actively in love with my friends. They are my truest, deepest and longest standing loves. Our contact, presence and connection with each other is incredibly intimate. Our touch is sacred especially because it has been used as a weapon to fuel America’s economy.
White supremacy and cis-heteropatriarchy encourage us to have selective (re)distributions of intimacy, touch and care that are reserved specifically for our sexual partners and family members. In order to thrive, these systems must invalidate the intimacy and romance of other connections, especially those of singled persons.
In trying to fill the gaps in my own life caused by trauma, I’ve been forced to question some of the categories and limitations around romantic and non-romantic touch, intimacy, sex and witnessing. It has saved me. The self that I show my friends when I’m hungover, heartbroken, inspired, depressed or filled with joy is the self that urges me to require that type of connection and fullness. The version of me that feels like too much is honored.
A friend who’d just been through a hard breakup asked me to come visit them one day because they wanted some company. We ended up spooning at the end of the night and they told me they’d never had anyone hold them before. They’d always been too tall, too alpha, too masculine to be asked and considered in need. Always the holder, never the held. I still remember how they cried all night, how they drooped their head in the morning and wouldn’t meet my eyes when they realized I was still holding them.
In that particular moment, I wasn’t conscious of the way we were transforming our friendship into something that could sustain our mania, crisis, mourning and grief. But after that I started to offer my hand, back rubs, scalp massages and cuddles more often, most times in the midst of revisiting memories of nonconsensual and unsafe touch. I began accepted long hugs, hands on my shoulder, close sitting for extended periods of time. I extended these possibilities (and struggles) out towards what it would mean to consider children, surrogacy, farm life and be in community on a scale that isn’t reliant on conditions that do not serve us.
Society devalues deeply Black and freeing siblingships. It seeks to dilute and misrepresent that connection by creating systems where only a portion of us can win and only by being in competition with one another. But Black friendships are my deepest and truest loves, my most accountable and loving relationships. And anytime that friendship is lost it has hit me harder and has been more devastating than any of my romantic relationships.
These friendships have allowed Black people to imagine, actualize and provide a direct contrast to the infrastructures and realities built off of and reliant on our blood. We get to practice nuance, messiness and not having everything fit together all the time. Our relationships with our friends inform how we process and engage in sorrow and loss over other things and people. They are definitive, necessary and life-changing.
The vulnerability that I practice in friendships opens me up to more practiced and embodied vulnerability (and trust) with myself, my romantic partners and my community. I have given my friends more of me and they have listened, believed and encouraged me in every part of my life.
When I commit to these friendships, I become better at all of my relationships, including with lovers and family. When I’m in deep love and friendship with a person, I’m more honest and safer. I take risks because my safety is not measured by the world, it’s measured by the relationships I’ve built. When friendships are rich and loving it means I have more space to extend myself and to allow others to do the same. It also means that the way I engage in romantic partnership is more grounded and intentional.
This betterment is especially true when these healthy siblingships are intergenerational. When I’m deeply connected to folks in different age brackets, (like I was with my grandmama) it opens up my ability to learn, listen and take action. All of these indicators shift based on demographics. Most of my relationships have ended in healthy ways because of the friends I had around me at the time. They can always go another way.
I’m refusing to approach my friendships from a sense of lack and instead choosing them from a place of abundance with the goal of healing. Then I will be allowed to recognize not only their fullness, but my own too.
Suggested Readings:
Erotica Noire/ Black Erotica, edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis, Reginald Martin and Roseann P. Bell, 1992
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937
Dorothy E Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 1998
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.
