The evangelical teachings of the Baptist churches in which I grew up insisted that our flesh - our bodies and their longings and impulses - were sinful, dangerous, and unhealthy. I was trapped in a raging battle between my spirit and my flesh. I did not look like a Black girl comfortable in my own skin. Sex that left you with telltale signs that you had been touched right and handled with care. She looked at me with those laser eyes that Black mamas use to see right through you, and commanded me to “Start having sex.” She meant real good sex. My grandmother didn’t have all the language for these differing ideological positions, but she had good sense. I was still far too much of a Christian zealot to be either pragmatic or feminist. My grandmother had already developed a pragmatic blend of both feminism and Christianity that worked in the context of her life as a rural poor Southern Black woman born two years before the Great Depression. In her own way, I think my grandmama let me know that the women’s movement was a win for Black women, too, because in the 21st century, it meant her granddaughter could have a wonderful sex life without bearing children until she chose to. “But we couldn’t get the stuff,” she told me. She told me that she would have opted for only two children rather than the six she’d had (and raised and loved) if birth control had been widely available to Black women in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Louisiana. In the way that none of us is ever inclined to think about the sex lives of our grandparents, it never even occurred to me to ask about whether my grandmother had waited until marriage to have sex, or to consider the sexual practices of young Black folks in the 1940s.įor my Gram, access to birth control mattered greatly. She and my grandfather got married and then had their children. We went up in the woods and did it, but we did it.” By the time I was born, Grandmama had been a widow for 10 years. Whoever wants to know this about their grandma? “Don’t ever let anybody tell you we didn’t. I made it onto the porch and sat down to listen to my good Christian 75-year-old grandmother, a lady given to elaborate hats and bejeweled suits on the Sundays she didn’t usher at church, extol the virtues of sex to unmarried me. That, coupled with the asshole I chose for a first partner, meant that I wasn’t having particularly joyful or enthusiastic sex, and most times I was in sanctified denial about my desire to be sexual in the first place. There was a classic Black woman read in my grandmother’s words, an unspoken “If that’s true, I can’t tell.” Of course she couldn’t! I was steeped in all kinds of Christian guilt about the little bit of sex that I had had and the copious amounts of vibrating I had done. For my 22nd birthday, my homegirl, horrified at my post-college near-virginal status, took me to a sex shop and purchased a vibrator for me. For the record, I had, in fact, had a bit of sex by age 22. There was an accusation in her words, as though this was something my 22-year-old self should have been doing forever. I’m sure my eyes bugged out of my head, as the horror dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be any old regular visit to the country. As I took the four steps up to the house, face scowling at the hot Louisiana sun beating down on my brow, my Gram squinted at me, called me by my nickname, and declared, “It’s time for you to start having sex!” The summer before I left home for graduate school, I drove down to the rural Louisiana countryside to sit on the porch with my grandma. Martin’s Press | February 2018 | 15 minutes (3,982 words)
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