The Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Phillips

Author:Julie Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

a long and sometimes arduous journey toward self-possession . . . sweetened by an increasing ability to stretch far beyond what I had previously thought possible—in understanding, in seeing common events in a new perspective, in trusting my own perceptions. It was an exciting journey, sweetened also by the sounds of their laughter in the street and the endearing beauty of the bodies of children sleeping.

She was also aware that as a lesbian mother she risked ostracism, while as an African American mother she was parenting against a dominant culture that didn’t support Black maternal bliss. If motherhood is a missing or unseen subject position to begin with, then Black, queer motherhood happens at an intersection of invisibilities. To be a mother in that situation, scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, is not normative at all. Instead it’s a queer act, “where queer means a violent disjuncture between how our bodies are interpreted by the outside world and how we feel inside them, where queer means ‘I am not supposed to exist,’ but I do.”

Audre observed, “As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be.” Her countermoves were to redefine motherhood as a place of both safety and defiance while giving her children the gift of themselves.

Her poem on her pregnancy, “Now That I Am Forever with Child,” ends with the birth of her daughter, Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, in March 1963:

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