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Black August, a month-long period dedicated to Black freedom fighters and resistance against repression, comprises an opportunity to realize the revolution in day-to-day fashion. Originating as a practice founded by incarcerated Black folks in California--in remembrance of George Jackson and the many political prisoners who continue to struggle for self liberation--Black August has since spread across the country and across the globe. Observers are encouraged to study, fast, train, and fight, in preparation for struggle in all forms and facets; and time is spent in dialogue with and care of Black liberators.
Through this short fiction work composed for the Ujima WIRE, author and curator Chenoa Baker imagines the possibilities available in a young Black girl's cultural liberation.
Collage designed by Cambria Kelley.
I didn’t like everything I saw. But that’s the beauty of it. Some things sung out to me. I’d always been that way. Sensitive. Seer. Soulful. But words did The Twist and The Mashed Potato beckoning me to dance with them in the key of confusion. When I wrote and read in cursive, I rip-curled through the sentences and held my breath in case the water swallowed me before getting to the other side. Reading aloud was like speaking in tongues; my classmates giggled. Irony is, I’m named after a pictorial language: Hieroglyph.
To quiet my brain, I’d self-liberate to the school’s art studio during lunch; being surrounded by images soothed me. I went into Ms. Serenya’s art room, put on a Sun Ra record, opened one of her books, ate my Pb&J, and traced the gestures of Alma Thomas, Lois Mailou Jones, and Norman Lewis while getting crumbs on the pages. Ms. Serenya held this safe haven for us, teaching outside of the curriculum to ensure we knew ourselves and our aesthetics.
If reading was The Twist, tracing artwork was The Stroll, an even-paced partner dance that I could keep up with. It was almost a glide.
“Hey, Glyphs, the bell rang–time to go to class,” Ms. Serenya beckoned; she was the only person to call me this affectionate nickname outside of my family (everyone else called me Hiero). I threw out my remaining crust, put my lunch pail into my backpack, and headed to arithmetic.
Most days we experimented with lattice multiplication or long division, but today we paired up and worked on geometric shapes. Again, a language that made sense to me. I saw it everywhere: the searsucker on my classmate’s pants, the ribbons in a girl’s hair, the three scoops of ice cream on a cone, and the angles of my taut hair in shimmering cornrows — not too greasy but just right. Most Black girls in my school had a press n’ curl with bumped ends to match the white girls in class with automatic wind-in-the-hair; and when there was no wind, they created their own by flipping their ‘dos around. My hair defied gravity, like I didn’t belong here.
That’s probably why when the teacher had us pick our partners for our assignment (to find the diameter of Mars), I was as isolated as oil in water. Used to this ritual, I kept my eyes on my paper and started doodling like I didn’t even hear the instructions. If I was meant to be a pair, someone would find me. No use in interrupting my imagination for disappointment. Until…
“I’ll be with Hiero,” said Curtis, who recently broke up with Lisa. The rest of the class had their mouths agape, and I blushed. My heart flickered so much I almost didn’t notice the cramps in my abdomen and tenderness of my chest. For a while, I bit into my No. 2 pencil not sure what to say next.
“Mars bore the same name as the god of war by ancient Romans because of its reddish blood-like color,” I blurted. “The ancient Egyptians called it Her Desher. meaning ‘the red one.’” My nerves always made me a leaky faucet of facts.
Interrupting my thoughts,a ruckus broke outside the classroom. Through the door window oculus, I saw Ms. Serenya being ushered out by security guards, her arms filled with a box of books and the contents of her desk. It felt like a rubber band snapped into my aorta. Admin was never fond of her, and she’d gotten in trouble with the school for her Afrocentric practice before
Forgetting myself, I ran out of the classroom to catch up with my favorite teacher. “What’s going on?!” I called out to her. A tremor in her voice made my stomach ripple. “They fired me,” she replied between breaths. “I should’ve known they would get me eventually.”.”
The rest of the day was a blur. All I remember is landing in the nurse’s office with swollen, salty eyes and a pool of red in my white underwear.
***
On a summery Saturday, I went to the free breakfast and childcare set up by a comrade of my mother’s. A bit upset that I'd missed the morning’s cartoons, I was reluctantly driven there by my folks who had to pick up an extra nursing shift. After filling my late-morning hunger, I wandered around this repurposed space that looked like it once was a warehouse; retooled by the Panthers, it now held creative workshops and a room with books upon books: The New Negro by Alain Locke, books in Yoruba, Swahili, Twe, and my eyes caught a book filled with adinkra. The symbols called out to me.
To avoid the room of swirling words, I found an old office in the warehouse to be alone and absorb these elegant, curved, geometric forms. It felt like a war room from Star Trek, with a commanding table in its center. But there was a pile of red dust, maybe sand, in the middle. I had the most curious urge to draw the adinkra symbols in the pile.
Before I could get my fingers to scribble, I heard footsteps; I took a handful of the sand in my pocket to practice with, along with the book, and walked back into the main room. I sat at one of the few tables in the dining hall space not covered in syrup and poured the red sand onto its surface.
I hoped to disappear while tracing these forms. I was lost in a trance for a beat–I glanced up after a while and everyone at the Free Breakfast program was gathered around me, captivated by my intense effort.
Some light flickered from the sand–an errant glint of sunlight reflected from someone’s watch onto the table, I thought. But, one blink later, like a fever dream, I found myself on a red planet.
Chenoa Baker (she/her) is a curator, wordsmith, and descendant of self-emancipators. She was the Associate Curator at ShowUp, an adjunct at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and a consultant on Gio Swaby: Fresh Up at PEM and Touching Roots: Black Ancestral Legacies in the Americas at MFA/Boston. In 2023, she received the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA) Young Art Critics Prize.
Most recently, she taught African American Craft History at the James Renwick Alliance, and she edits with Sixty Inches From Center, Pigment Magazine, The National Gallery of Art, Boston Public Art Triennial, and The Corning Museum of Glass; she also writes for Black Art Auction, The Brooklyn Rail, Public Parking, Material Intelligence, and Studio Potter.
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