We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival by Natalie West & Tina Horn

Author:Natalie West & Tina Horn [West, Natalie & Horn, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2021-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

What I Have to Do

femi babylon (formerly known as suprihmbé)

“I don’t gotta do anything but stay Black and die!” was one of my mother’s most commonly uttered phrases during my childhood. “Stay Black” is a common Black phrase. Stay true.

Mami is a first generation, Gen X college graduate, but I sometimes can’t tell if my gramma is as proud of her as she was of my uncle, her favorite child. My grandmother is a boomer and worked the same job as long as I knew her, until she was forced to retire early. By the time I was in high school, she was living off social security and my mother was sending her money. Mami never taught me about money or how to manage it. She had the phone bill in my name for a few years, but I didn’t learn about credit until I maxed out a Chase Bank credit card. She had a closet full of clothes and shoes that she rarely or never wore. Mami was a high school Spanish teacher, then a principal, and she was queen of the side hustle before white people got their hands on it. She braided hair, sold Avon, made her own candles. We were a wavering working-class family. “Pink collar.” After the divorce my two sisters and I became latchkey kids and I walked to and from school at age seven. When I was eight or nine, the whitelady neighbor next door called child services on my mother. I can’t imagine what for. We were mostly quiet, tiptoeing in and out of the back door, laying blankets on the stairs and sliding down into a pile of soft bed things. When the social worker came, we dutifully lied, claiming our Auntie was meeting us at home and just stayed inside.

Mami said the whitelady also asked, during one of their former over-the-fence conversations, why she didn’t ask for alimony during the divorce proceedings. My stepfather was abusive. I’m not sure why my mother declined alimony but as I got older I heard her say, “I didn’t need it.” Black women are supposed to take pride in our ability to overcome.

As a young girl I never thought about work, or marriage. I thought about writing comics and growing my hair out. I thought about traveling. I thought about freedom from my mother, who was also abusive, mostly verbally and psychologically, but occasionally physically. It took years of growth and self-defining adventures for me to scrub my mother’s words from my mind. Unlike most other kids my age—including my siblings—I didn’t work in high school. I wasn’t allowed. I didn’t get an allowance. Every once in a while my grandmother gave me pocket money, but Mami took money from our piggy banks whenever she felt like it and dared us silently to ask for it back. Because I was barely passing in high school after being a high-achieving straight-A student in elementary school, my mother stopped investing in me. I had lost my value.

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