What books helped you understanding yourself better?
Have you ever read any of Becky Birtha’s short stories, poetry, or children’s books?
When I was coming out during my last semester of college, there was no Internet. We did not walk around with personal computers in our pockets that gave us instant access to resources and connections to communities of all kinds. As my realization of myself as Lesbian started to unfold, I wanted to get my hands on as many Black Lesbian and feminist books as possible. I wasn’t scared, conflicted, or anything like that. But most of the Lesbians I knew were white graduate students and professors. I needed Black Lesbian blueprints and voices. I wanted to read Black Lesbian stories.
I was late to or altogether missed several classes trying to satisfy my urgent search for these stories, which started after someone gave me a copy of Audre Lorde’sSister Outsider. I go into detail about that day in another much longer reflection. That semester, I spent many hours in the library skimming books that came up in my searches for “Black, Lesbian,” content, weeding out those that associated Black Lesbianism with abominations, psychopathology, a white feminist ploy to destroy the Black family, etc.
Grace come to me in my sleep last night. I feel somebody presence, in the room with me, then I catch the scent of Posner‘s Bergamot Pressing Oil, and that cocoa butter grease she use on her skin. I know she’s standing at the bedside, right over me, and then she call my name.
“Pearl.”
Becky Birtha’s collections of short stories - For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women and Lovers’ Choice were two of the vital books I found that helped introduce me to Black Lesbian worlds, relationships, and language as I prepared to graduate from a PWI, excited about my expanding understanding of who I was.
Three decades after I first found Birtha’s writing, “In The Life,” the last story in Lovers’ Choice still makes me ache, dream, and smile over the beauty and possibility of long-term Black Lesbian love and how ritual and memory can keep us tethered to our Love, even 13 years after she has passed.
