“I swear to the Lord
I still can’t see
Why Democracy means
Everyone but me.”
— Langston Hughes
WARNING: There is some very colorful language in this piece, because I am accurately quoting my friend.
Every once in a blue moon I’ll see a golden bullet of a Twitter comment - a colloquial, casual bullseye, shot straight from the holster at the speed of thought, that encapsulates a whole dismaying subject, murders the moral offender, adds a perceptive spin I’ve never thought of before, and makes me laugh.
It bugs the shit out of me that I can’t remember the exact comment, but around three years ago, in the midst of a long thread of hair-tearing lamentation about the recrudescence of Nazis, a zinger popped onscreen of such deadly wit and electric intelligence, I felt instantly compelled to congratulate the verbal sniper responsible, and clicked on the profile of the user, who was operating under the nom-de-guerre of @HarrietJacobs.
The profile image was a hilarious portrait of civic activism: a scowling older black man sitting on the fringes of a public gathering in a portable lawn chair, holding a hand-stenciled sign on a piece of cardboard reading “FUCK YO STATUE.”
That image was already enough to make me a fan and follower of @HarrietJacobs — but the background image, a geometric abstract painting, was so wholly arresting that my eyes stuck to it like a tongue on a frozen flagpole.
The image was so powerful and confidently realized, I felt a stab of shame I wasn’t able to identify the painter on sight. I assumed it was an iconic abstract piece by a well-known artist whose name I’d had failed to retain in the course of my autodidactic art-education.
I believe that if you need to invoke more than seven or eight other artists to describe a piece of music or a work of art, then that work should considered to be original. Like flamenco music, this piece contained distinct hints of a hundred disparate cultures.
At first glance, it was a kind of tribal textile-ish study that might have been Frank Stella, if not for the Gustav Klimt-ish color palette and a certain Peter Max-ish psychedelic giddiness, with a distinctly warm femininity massaging it all into a harmony of voices that were equal parts Afrocentrism, ancient Egyptian art, Inuit totem, European heraldry, and Mexican wrestling mask.
So I DM’d @HarrietJacobs to ask what the artwork was in the background of her profile.
“Oh, I just paint things on cardboard with whatever, and sell them on the street,” she replied.
We began a conversation via text messaging, because I wanted to buy one of her pieces. “You can call me Sistuh Leslie,” she wrote, in our first text conversation.
“I am a militant black lesbian feminist. I’ve been displaced ever since Hurricane Harvey, living in a Motel 6 with my wife, my son, and my dog Cicely.” Her Twitter name, she told me, was an homage to a book I had never heard of: “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet Jacobs (who really should be acknowledged as the Anne Frank of slavery).
Then both @HarrietJacobs and her art completely evaporated from my timeline. The whole account suddenly disappeared. If I hadn’t gotten her email address, she would have been lost to me forever.
“What happened to your Twitter account?” I asked her.
“Girl, they kicked me off Twitter forever.”
“How on earth did you manage that?”
“Tss. I called Michael Vick a ‘coon.’ Coon was misused. I should have called him a Sambo Uncle Tom. He was playing up to the white conservative class.”
I immediately took the greatest of likings to Sistuh Leslie, who has since become one of my closest and most beloved friends. We communicate frequently by phone and we laugh a lot. I have learned so much from her about so many things. Despite many differences in our lifestyles — she lives in Texas, faces intense, mind-bending racism daily, is a beloved substitute teacher of schoolchildren who is FREQUENTLY INCLINED TO SELL HER BLOOD TO MAKE RENT (she is in fact doing it as I type these words), and she is tall and bald from alopecia — there are loads of similarities between us. We’re the same age. Both of our first crushes were on Speed Racer. We both love Stevie Wonder, Donnie Hathaway, the Brothers Johnson, Teena Marie, everything in that vein, and Sun Ra.
I love her Houston drawl, and the way she throws a sentence around.
“My turkey is burnt. You are retarded, Girly Pearlie. QuaCintra, we both rode the same short yellow bus to school. You is a crazy as fuck white girl. I’m on the bus with a big ass bag of dog food. Call if you feel like ventin’ or bumpin’ yo gums.”
I have the strange honor of being Sistuh Leslie’s first and only white friend. “My girlfriends would die if they knew how much of my personals I’ve divulged to you,” she told me. My people have only themselves to blame, and have really been missing out.
She has written me some incredible emails over the years about her life, and no matter how crushingly difficult it has been, she has always maintained a glorious equilibrium, a spiritual warrior attitude, and robust sense of humor.
“ I am fucking tired of fighting a system that has set me up to fail - as a black lesbian agnostic. I graduated magna cum laude from Texas Southern U. English. In 2012. With an adult child, and my partner who works who supported me economically spiritually and emotionally while working full time.”
Being gay in Houston was no cakewalk, especially in her immediate family, where her staunchly religious mother reigns supreme. Her sister and her mother both have used their Pentecostal Christianity as a pretext for objecting to Leslie’s homosexual lifestyle.
“Everyone knew (I was gay) but my mother,” Leslie wrote me. “She is a Christian fundamentalist and an ordained minister no less, but she kept pressuring me. She harassed my ass to the nth degree. Once I visited her wearing pastel-striped Converse Chucks. She asked, "Honey, are those gay shoes?" I replied, "No Ma. The pride flag has colors of the rainbow." She then said, "Well I see some purple and yellow in there." A few days after, I gave up the 411. I'd had enough of her badgering. Although I initially questioned my Lesbianism (because of my Christian upbringing), I was never ashamed of it. I only wanted to protect my mother AND our mother-daughter relationship. After I fessed to the truth, the floodgates opened to other shit that I had experienced. I told her I was a Lesbian. I told her I had two abortions. I told her my next door neighbor had molested me when I was twelve or thirteen (I don't remember which). She knew nothing of these things. My mother who is NEVER void of conversation was quiet as a church mouse. She had absolutely NOTHING to say. One could hear a pin drop in our space. All my mother could do was lower her head and stare at the floor, but gotdammit. She asked for it.”
Texas is a whole other disaster in Sistuh Leslie’s life. I am constantly horrified by the level of racism she deals with on a daily basis. Last week, while I was on the phone, she was passionately fighting on behalf of her uninsured brother, who is in the hospital: she very patiently reminded the staff that she and her brother were human beings, and asked them to empathize with her advocating for his care the same way they would for their own relatives. I couldn’t believe that the hospital staff was so deaf to her requests, she felt she needed to remind them that she was human.
“I live in wack-ass Texas. They look at me like a freak.
I don’t feel like I belong when I walk out my door in the South.
I don’t think people will appreciate the radical/militant sociopolitical messages I am attempting to convey, I feel as if I’ll live and die without being understood. Houston is diverse, but the strings around here are still pulled by white males.
I walk around with people harboring their preconceived notions. If you’re staring that hard, do you want an autograph?
This world, they judge you by what you have. THEY SEE RIGHT THROUGH ME. THEY KNOW I am making $12 an hour. And a penny. These peckerwoods are tricky.”
Her income is terrible, because she is a teacher of children.
Sistuh Leslie gets up at 4AM to commute to her substitute teaching job. “I walk on that bus like I own the fuckin’ company,” she declares. Fluent in Spanish, she teaches art to largely black and hispanic youth, and makes sure to talk to them about having a “sense of self” and the necessity for “code-switching” (being able to drop street parlance for a white audience.)
“Schools are another institution - poor, working class brown kids are bring primed for juvenile hall and reform systems. If the kids aren’t behaving, they are labeled. I try to reach the kids with unconventional ideas. They are going to remember this baldheaded black woman. It took a while for me to get here. But when it comes down to who I am as a black woman? We are born leaders. Born visionaries. We birthed a nation. We had to go out in those fields and had to pull the same amount of harvest work as a black male slave. We had to leave our babies at the end of the cotton rows. When it rained, women would come down to their babies and they would be dead in the trough.”
Sistuh Leslie, I can confidently state as a former New York Times fashion critic, has a wonderful sense of personal style. Her house is filled with the theme of bald-headed goddesses.
“I got those earrings for $1 from a Korean shop and covered them with African fabric. Voila. The necklace is a wire covered with repurposed fabric. I sewed old beads to it.”
I feel such deep admiration for Leslie. She is the strongest person I know. She is constantly creating beauty from nothing.
“If my rent is paid, if I have food in my pantry, money on my bus card and supplies to draw…I am content. I am praying to my ancestors, Orishas, Isis and Black Jesus and the Cosmos Omni.”
Amen, my Dearest Sistuh Leslie.
If you feel inclined to make Sistuh Leslie’s life a little easier, please go to Amazon and buy a gift card for this email address:
(She has no bank account. Thanks.)
All artwork by Sistuh Leslie, except the top piece, which is my portrait of Sistuh Leslie.
What a beautiful story of a more beautiful friendship. Now I love Sistuh Leslie too.
The graf that begins: “Schools are another institution…” is so hard-hitting—like pretty much everything you shrewdly quoted from her emails—but dang. You’re both lucky to have each other. Thanks for sharing.