Day 15,750 of the Journey...
The loss of these two amazing icons has quieted me over the past couple of weeks. In addition missed deadlines and self-improvement have had their way.
My spirit was crushed when I learned of Don's suicide. It felt like a blow to the head. When I got word of Whitney's passing I felt like I had been beat into to oblivion. I am still curled up in a ball on the playground peaking between my fingers to see if its okay to get up.
Almost back to back, it feels like my heart's been slaughtered.
Watching Soul Train on Saturday Morning's with my twin sister meant everything to me. It was MOST of all a chance for us to see ourselves. We didn't have to pick out the one "black girl" or the one "black guy". Everybody was BLACK, AFRO-AMERICAN, AFRICAN AMERICAN.
The Soul Train dancers affirmed my lips, eyes, my hair, my skin, my hips and everything God made on me from the top of my head to the bottom of my shoe. Don Cornelius was a Godfather, an uncle, a brother and friend who made this ride...the hippest trip in AMERICA...Soul Train was the truest expression of Langston Hughes' I Too...
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
Don Cornelius brought us to the table...
My mouth gets dry when I think about Whitney Houston. She is no longer here in flesh. "Her spirit lives on" does not console me. I was introduced to Whitney Houston by way of Seventeen Magazine, but not by the iconic cover.
Seventeen had featured her inside their pages before that issue where she licked ice creme sitting next another model. My sister and I took careful note of her name when they gave editorial credits for the clothes and who was wearing them in issues previous to that November cover.
My sister and I had read Seventeen as though it were a holy book of some sort. When Whitney's cocoa brown face appeared on its pages, much like we noted and celebrated the names and biographies of Black History notables so to was Whitney Houston now "notable" to us.
I still remember walking home from the bus stop on Read Blvd in New Orleans East and stopping at the 7 - 11 to purchase our monthly copy and finding our favorite new young model on the cover. "They put her on the cover, but they couldn't let her have it by herself", my young activist mind thought.
Our identity as African Americans, in particular two little Black girl from Huntsville, AL then living in New Orleans, LA was deeply rooted in everything and everybody Black that was great or who had achieved anything worthy to be documented or published whether on television, in a newspaper, magazine or in a book.
From Barbara Jordan to Shirley Chisolm to Garrett Morgan to Stevie Wonder, Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, Marian Anderson or Roberta Flack...we were in them and they were in us.
When Whitney graced those pages and eventually that cover...she too became a part of us. She was beautiful so I too could be beautiful...I could in fact just be. That cover though not the first majority culture magazine to host a black face on its cover was an acknowledgement to our very identity...our existence. "We are not invisible", I believe my heart must have sang that day.
God has called his Angel, Whitney Houston, home and so too does a piece of my soul, my essence go with her...
write, produce and direct
Danna
