Stolen Milk

"After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That's what they came in there for. Held me
down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn't speak but her eyes rolled out
tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it
made a tree. It grows there still."
"They used cowhide on you?"
"And they took my milk."
"They beat you and you was pregnant?"
"And they took my milk!"

Mama Toni Morrison continues to give me language. When traumatic silence and paralysis seize me, I lean on her. In Beloved, Ms. Morrison did not look away from the violence of enslavement in the United States. The flippant and casual dehumanization echoed throughout the plantation, staining and contorting everyone and everything (though the white folks pretended things were normal and God-blessed).

In the quote above, Sethe, speaking to Paul D, remembers being held down and sexually assaulted while pregnant. Her rapists then whip her so severely that her back sliced and opened everywhere. What does she remember with the most horror? What do I as a reader remember 25 years after first reading these words?

They took her milk.

Sethe’s body created nourishment for her child, but her rapists were so used to the system that blessed them for taking, that they freely sucked the life out of her, simultaneously gorging themselves and starving her child.

The perversion of nourishment and creation persists unapologetically in this country. It is consistent and strategic.

But Still…I Rise.

This weekend, I wanted to add my support, my voice. I liked and double-tapped and applauded Austin Channing Brown, Kathy Khang, Kristina Button, Patricia Taylor, and other women attempting to call in a person named Rachel who did not attribute a quote from our deceased Mother, Maya Angelou. I watched the women of color call Rachel in, with earnestness and righteous anger, but most of all with tired frustration. I watched as they were ignored, then berated in pseudo-religious terms, or stubbornly racially blind missives, by Rachel’s followers. I observed a tepid apology and deletion of the post from Rachel. I am now observing the passive erasure of the women who expended energy to call Rachel to the most mundane standard.

The hurt and anger caught in my throat this weekend and only Mama Toni could help me work them out.

Stolen milk.

No, this weekend wasn’t about slavery. But the legacy, though. It’s thick in this. It’s about the echoes of the system that blesses my dehumanization, starving my children and feeding those who don’t create, yet continue to profit. The peculiar institution that blessed white people who used black bodies as three-fifths of a person for representation, human chattel, economic assets to build banks, free labor for hundreds of years, and the canvas of every perverse proclivity.

The inheritance of this, passed down from generation to generation regardless of economic status, gives white folks permission to ignore us, belittle us and still audaciously and brazenly credit themselves for our labor, our flavor, our lives.

“And Still I Rise” is a chin-up, back-straight encouragement to those of us who are the hope and the dream of the slave. It is precisely because we have been beaten down so many damn times that Mama Maya was inspired to offer this poem as a hand up and a dust off. This is nourishment to the downtrodden. It’s milk from our Mother Maya.

Rachel sucked it up and spit it out for an insta-post.

She is dripping with stolen milk. And when she and people like her grow fat on the work of black women, we are all traumatized, because this behavior ain’t new. When she carefully erases the call-outs for the sake of her brand, we observe that 1) she can actually see what’s being said, she just chose to ignore, and 2) she’s twice-afflicting black women with the audacity of erasure, both by lack of accreditation and again by deletion.

Yesterday I relived all the times a well-positioned or monied Christian white woman (and the WOC who support her; don’t get it twisted) snatched my voice for her own gain. It’s happened for as long as I have been in evangelical circles, and it’s a compound trauma wound that has yet to heal. I keep believing in the supremacy of Christ leading to the abolition of systems of evil in my professional and personal relationships with my white sisters in Christ—which frankly has left me hollow. How many times have marketing sororities and non-disclosure big houses stamped us into the dust?

I am sure that there are other sisters who felt retraumatized this weekend, and this part is for them:

Folk can’t steal all our milk. I mourn for us that any was stolen. But we still have children to feed.

Let’s stay nourished and strong so we can create, lament, and hand off a better inheritance. When trauma silences us, it’s because we are trying to survive. There’s no shame in it. NO shame. The words will come. The gifts and beauty will come. Remember, we are bearing the wounds of our ancestors, of a nation that carries God and genocide, Jesus and slavery—in the same unremorseful and unjust hands. We see an onslaught of dehumanizing policing, land grabs, disproportionate deaths, strategic impoverishment, and violent language across the news and social media and in our own regions.

Don’t be like them. Don’t add to the scars by beating yourself up.

Observe the catch in your throat and treat yourself gently. Rebel by tending to your wounds.

Mama Maya Angelou wrote this poem for you:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise

Beloved is a novel written by Toni Morrison, copyright 1987.

“And Still I Rise” is a poem written by Maya Angelou, first published in 1978.