Working for Pleasure, Not for Free
The Sacred Handshake of Service
“And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart…“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it…No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them! Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it — you!”
— Toni Morrison, Baby Suggs in Beloved, preaching from inside “The Clearing”
Yesterday I witnessed my Aunt May and Aunt Harriet shake eachother’s hands gently as they held eye contact while exchanging words. Ages 99 and 88 respectively. A decade apart, it was more like exchanging eye contact while holding words. I sat next to them, watching this choreography unfold over the stage of time and finally understood. We live to hold eachother and holding eachother is supposed to feel good. Picking up the watermelon my 4 year old cousin was using as a seat, my other 74 year old cousin Larry cuts it with 3 hands and a knife. Clear gloves catch the sunlight and turn metallic every 7 seconds if you're paying attention in between the song lyrics, “breast or thigh?”, “mac and cheese?”, “green beans?”, “where you want it?”, “you know I don’t like my food to touch”, “do you want potato salad?”, “who made it?” and we made it. All this to sing, we made it.
Yesterday I went to the homecoming cookout for the church of my mother and her mother and the mother before hers. My grandmother would say, “you always come home for homecoming” and every reason was on full display. Aluminum foil vessels of love reheated over fire, five generations run around in their own way, some doing cartwheels, some in wheelchairs pushed by another. This is summer. This is service and it looks as good as it tastes, it smells as good as it feels. And in this moment I remember, this is a texture of belonging I want to spin into every fiber of my life. Being of service to eachother is the only work worthy of our hands. And we must love them. We must love whatever helps the holding.
My gender fluidity first showed up as protection. It showed up as power much later. But at first, I dropped into masculinity to escape the expectation of cooking, cleaning, caring inside the set design of familial theater. I observed the women in my family, the expectations placed on them, the disproportionate cooking, cleaning, caring prescribed for their hands only1. The flat chest helped and my hips followed me wherever I went but I was able to shave my head, oversize my wardrobe, override the wild calling of uncertainty with explorations into science and technology and prioritize my intelligence over my intuition. It worked for a while, foreclosing the expansive possibilities inside gender fluidity and opting into a limiting binary instead. From Brooklyn to Dawn, my family left me alone until it was time to come home for homecoming. Until it was time to fall into the hands prescribed for cooking, cleaning, caring where I found something quantum. Something inside that too long, not long enough handshake of Aunt May and Aunt Harriet. Something I don’t need protection from, something I must train to be available for. The power passed to me, to us, hand to hand, across the hands of time to now. How do we practice holding it?
That time we all heard it, cool and clear, cutting across the hot grit of the day. We are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond2. All at once, we’ve collectively fallen into eachothers hands because we’re remembering there really is nowhere else to go. We’ve remembered we don’t need protection from eachother, we need boundaries. We’ve remembered we don’t need to guard our hearts from the vulnerability of love, we need to practice a somatic sense of safety that helps us navigate fear inherited from trauma. We’ve remembered independence isn’t a triumph but a myth wrapped in historical violence and poorly stewarded privilege. We’ve remembered asking for and receiving help is the most courageous and transformative point in our story, not the low point to interpret as a valley of shame. We’ve remembered mutual aid is the only mountain top worth climbing toward as we release all the weight that holds us down and makes the journey more difficult than it needs to be. We’ve remembered we don’t need to carry the pain alone and grief is meant to be held collectively, in our bare hands. We’ve remembered to follow a leader who has caused harm without taking accountability is an act of both self and collective sabotage. Now what?
I used to think being a Captive Maternal3 was an existential prison sentence, conscription to a predetermined and premature death from a bleeding heart. But when we hold hands, exchange eye contact and hold worlds another way opens up. Another route without language or road signs, a path activated through a secret handshake unfolding in plain sight. Metallic and earthbound. Quantum and southern. All of a sudden we’ve been transported to a land where the only payment is pleasure and we have full permission to save it, spend it, share it. A shared resource that grows on trees and rains from the sky. With our bare hands we collect it, play with it, create with it across generations, across genders, across guards. We live to hold eachother and holding eachother is supposed to feel good. A promise paid in full. It turns out freedom ain’t free, it’s hidden in the pleasure we refuse to seek.
“Then, the artist must prepare her hands for weight. I will say now this weight may be immeasurable and dynamic; may vary in volume, unpredictably. In light of this our hands, our hands...our panic, the heat in our lungs, so much depends...Then, the artist must prepare our hands for acid. Have a bowl of vinegar ready. And, also, a thick paste of baking soda and water. Though, these may not be enough. The skin burns, and leafs. The incessant pathologists pace. Yet we travel with the speed of light ahead of all our trouble.”
— Dionne Brand, “Ars diagnostic: vol. 8.9”, found in the back of Simone Leigh’s exhibition catalog published by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2023)
📰 Seeda School News
📋 Seeda Studio is accepting applications for the Fall 2024 Implementation Accelerator. This offer is for you if you want to join us in the Fall 2024 Retreat and work 1:1 with me on implementing the pleasure practices and web portals that will support you in setting up the tech/sales backend and frontend infrastructure for inviting folks into your creative offer by the end of the year. New payment options are available for incoming worldbuilders and Seeda School Alumni.
🕯️ Inside the Seeda School Treehouse Open Studio session last week, I was reminded of the nourishing power of creative ceremony. We took turns sharing and exploring multi-media dispatching, processing our process, putting respect on our name, creative play and permission. We quilted inside the Zoom chat with emojis, affirmations and hyperlinks. We shared our screens, recited our poetry, read Audre Lorde out loud and so much more.
🔗 This week inside the Seeda School Treehouse is Research Week where we will take turns adding to our digital altar and spending time with our references, dispatches, PDFs, images, quotes, poems, tools etc. from this month so this seed data might inform next month’s dispatches aka pleasure permission slips. Research alongside us this week in the Seeda School Treehouse Summer 2024 Are.na Channel. 💌
Saidiya Hartman, “Manual for General Housework,” Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019), pp. 77–9.
“Paul Robeson” from The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Library of America, 2005). Copyright © 1970 by Gwendolyn Brooks.
“The Captive Maternal emerges within the “end of the world,” which becomes the New World of conquest, chattel slavery, and genocide…Captive Maternals are not identified by individual or personal identities—not by gender, social status, class or formal education. They are a function, not an identity. They/we are identified by their/our function in service, caretaking, sacrifice, and resistance to dishonor and disposability.” — Joy James in “The Captive Maternal is a function, not an identity marker” published by Scalawag on April 28, 2023. You can also see my love letter “Captive Maternals and Wet Nursing a Genocidal State: How Do We Tunnel Out?” and the Decolonial Feminist Collective (@decolonialfeministcollective) and
(@theconflictedwomanist) “New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After) Life of Erica Garner” Study Guide for more black feminist reflections on service.
I am so grateful that you exist and that you are breathing into our collective capaciousness today
loved this post! thank you for sharing these experiences.
P.S. Beloved is easily one of the greatest books ever written. Morrison is ferocious in her prose! You should also check out Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin