For the Mamas of My Sistahs in Atlanta

Posted on December 7, 2024 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

I cannot remember everybody’s Mamas first names, but here is what I know.

There is not a Black woman in Atlanta born between say 1945 to 1965 that can name 3 Black women that were bigger bad asses than their own Mamas who had names like Dorothy, Mary, Geraldine, Syble, Sadye, Carrye, Sarah, Hattie, Laware, Mattie, Helen, Mignon, Gloria, Etta Mae, Carolyn, Violet, Lena, Sophia, Vivian, Myrtle, Evelyn, Mamie, Miriam, Frances, Geneva, Cora, Doris, Andrea, Delores, Agnes, and the list goes on. I am sure I have left out a name or two, but…

think of just three women that might outdo your Mamas in any one of their endeavors. Try to do that so that you will fail and know how lucky you are and on whose shoulders you stand. Try it so you know how much you deserve rest, support and praise. Try it so you know you don’t owe anyone anything. They owe you.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

#MakeAmericaLiterateAgain

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers. All Rights Reserved.

An Aging, Weary Black Woman’s Directives

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

©️ by Leslye Joy Allen

1. Do not waste what is left of your life on sexists, misogynists, practitioners of misogynoir, racists, homomisics, transmisics, xenomisics, and on people too lazy to look inside a dictionary to discover what these words, with their prefixes and suffixes, mean.

2. Never render CPR nor succor to those who are not kind, who cannot be kind, and who think it is a waste of their time to be kind.

3. Follow Malcolm X’s request to never call any man “brother” until he demonstrates that he is one.

4. When confronted by sworn enemies, do not, as my late Mama would say, “bother to piss down their throats even if their guts are on fire.”

5. If some illiterate soul wants to learn how to read, point them to the nearest literacy class. If some soul doesn’t read much, but wants to read more, give them books. The ones who refuse to read, leave them alone.

6. Per the instructions of my second grade teacher Sister Mary Gemma, always remember that, “you only have two cheeks. Therefore, you only turn the other cheek once.”

7. Rest on purpose. My late Daddy used to say, “Let the men do some of the work because they owe you the same things they already believe you owe them, on demand.”

8. Stop fighting every battle. My late cousin Billie used to say, “You can’t fight in every skirmish if you plan to win the war.”

9. Stop adding caveats like, “I don’t want anybody to take this the wrong way, but…” or “I don’t want anybody to get upset, but…”to your opinions. These kinds of caveats and prefaces, as Dr. Jacqueline Howard Matthews would say, is an apology for your opinion before you even render your opinion.

10. As Black women en masse we have no permanent friends, only permanent interests.

©️ Leslye Joy Allen

#MakeAmericaLiterateAgain

Blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a reference to this hyperlink: https:/leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers. All Rights Reserved.

Bookstores & Librarians & Libraries Rock: Writers & Readers, Pay Attention

Posted on December 1, 2024 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I love bookstores & libraries and librarians, but particularly librarians. They are natural allies to historians or anyone doing research. When you tell them what you are looking for they can point you right to it. I love archivists for the same reason, but archivists deal with materials that are older, and rarer than the books you see on the shelves in bookstores and in public, school and university libraries. This blog, however, is more than a shout out to the folks who handle books, it is for anyone who has written or who plans to write a book.

Here’s a tip. Do your best to get your book reviewed by a librarian. Here’s why.

While most scholarly articles and many scholarly books are peer-reviewed (which means exactly what it says: reviewed by one’s academic peers), the majority of novels, memoirs, some scholarly works, and popular authors’ books are not reviewed by their peers or by librarians.

There is one advantage that a librarian-reviewed book has: If the librarians responsible for purchasing books like the book and recommend the book, they will buy it and other libraries will buy it too! Library sales are not like other purchases. Let me explain.

Let’s say you are a new author. You and/or your publisher (if you have one) get a local bookstore to buy 100 copies of your book for 50 percent off of the retail price of each book. The typical timeline to return copies of books that did not sell is around 6 months. Let’s say, all but 20 copies of your book sold, so the bookstore returns the unsold books for a refund. Now, you certainly sold more books to the local bookstore than to a public or university library, BUT libraries’ sales are final and books are never returned unless there’s some physical damage to the actual book.

So, here’s a suggestion. Scholars and Librarians rarely review books that do not appear to have some scholarly value. Yet, you can always send your manuscript—whether it is a Science Fiction Thriller, a Memoir, or a Book of Poetry—along with a Cover Letter, requesting a review of your book.

Library Journals like Kirkus Reviews (librarians read this one all the time), Library Journal, Booklist, School Library Journal are some of the journals that librarians read and publish in. If you get a positive review in any one of these, you are bound to sell a few books and potentially earn another audience of readers because Bookstores and Libraries and Librarians Rock!

“If libraries order your book, you’re golden, because those sales are non-returnable—an author and publisher’s dream.” — from Returns 101: What New Authors Need to Know

©️Leslye Joy Allen

Vice-President Kamala Harris at Bold Fork Books, on Small Business Saturday, November 30, 2024. Bold Fork Books is a Culinary Bookstore located in Washington, D. C.

#MakeAmericaLiterateAgain

Sister Survival

Posted on November 28, 2024 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

©️by Leslye Joy Allen

In the aftermath of Kamala Harris’ defeat in the US 2024 presidential election on November 5th, no one took her loss as hard as Black women. Our work for her and our votes for her created that long blue line at 92 percent—the single largest and most consistent voting bloc in the United States.

My sister friends did what sisters always do. We called each other to vent at 10 PM or 3 AM. We called to see how we all were doing. We worried about Kamala. The sentence that came up the most in these conversations was: I’m done.

Baltimore’s Mayor Brandon M. Scott stated that Black women shouldn’t have to shoulder the bulk of everything with little to no help from others. And we won’t.

Sisters are worn out from over work, over strategizing, navigating inter- and intra-racial sexism, misogynoir, racism, the constant double standards, the defensiveness that rears its head whenever we dare to acknowledge double standards, the expectation that we must show up to work in everyone’s behalf, but that we must not make a mistake, and we must always be accessible.

A few days after the election and shortly after I reviewed a NAACP report that concluded that one-in-four Black men under the age of 50 voted for Trump, the poem below popped in my head. It’s reposted here at the request of a friend. I wrote it in 4 minutes to the delight of every one of my former English professors. Every sister that read it, got it. And their responses were all along the same lines:

“Girl, I’m done killing myself for people that never support us.”

“So many men and so many other people only pay attention to Black women when we are fighting for them instead of fighting for ourselves.”

We sisters are not the same people we were the day before the election; and whatever is left of us that still resembles us is on hiatus.

I Am the Warden (and You Have Been Raped)

Posted on September 27, 2018 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

!!!!!!!!!!WARNING!!!!!!!!!!: THIS BLOG CONTAINS GRAPHIC ADULT LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND SOME PROFANITY.

This is for anyone who wonders about what women who have been raped deal with.

The first thing any college woman is taught in those early orientations is to never allow a man to know exactly where she lives until she gets to know him really well. This one can be tough, particularly when a young woman has had a really nice evening with a guy. She doesn’t think about rape. But, she better. I still remember the night my late friend Lynn called me on the phone in a panic.

“What’s wrong Lynn? Where the hell are you?” I asked.

“Girl, I had to fight this man off. He said he could cook. He wanted to make me dinner at his home. I didn’t think anything about it since a co-worker introduced us. Everything was fine until I got up to leave and he told me ‘You aren’t going anywhere.’ I had to hit him with a paper weight to get out the door.”

I remember that night. Lynn was so upset that she got on I-285, and circled the entire city because she literally forgot how to get home. She’s gone now, but I still think about it.

Then there was the friend that went to a party and woke up on a bed with her clothing on backwards. Scared to death for her, I made her go to the hospital. Well, they found semen with active sperm in her vagina. She never told anyone but me. She told me to “keep my damned mouth shut.” I’ve never betrayed the confidence of a friend in my life, but it annoys me to the point of not sleeping some time. “I just want to forget this,” she said.

I wish I could tell you that this doesn’t happen often, except it does. Every man reading this either knows some guy or guys that have run trains on drunk women or some of you reading this have done it yourselves. Some of you keep each other’s secrets; you shrug it off when a woman complains about some guy that follows her or won’t leave her alone. He’s just being a man, right?

My lifelong friend and brother G told me once that he didn’t like a particular guy we both knew. When I asked him why he didn’t like him, he said, “I think he got __________drunk one night and took advantage of her. I can’t prove it, but I know he did it. I hate that m*therf*cker!” Now let’s be clear, most women that are raped are raped by men they know and most rapes are not particularly physically violent. Most rapes happen in a flash with a much stronger and heavier man easily forcing himself on a stunned woman who may or may not be able to fight off her attacker or get away.

To all those men (and the women that protect them) who worry so much about what some poor man accused of rape is going through even when his alleged victims are credible, I have this to say. I’m not going to chapter and verse anyone about why women take so long to come forward. You already know why. Yet, the following scenario is for all those men who conveniently politicize the whole issue of rape; those men who not only defend their political allies who are accused of rape, but also those who gleefully jump on the bandwagon to support rape victims when the alleged rapist is on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Here’s what I’d like for you to imagine happening to you, since empathy on your part, seems to be in short supply:

Let’s say you find yourself in jail; and for the sake of argument, let’s say you are innocent of the criminal charges that have put you in that holding cell for a few days or in that prison for some years. Now, let’s pretend that some hardened prisoner whose nickname is “Beast,” is known for being a bit of a bully and he suddenly decides to “make you his bitch.” And please don’t even bother to claim that you’re not a Gay man and you would not let this happen. Let me stop you right there. Sex in prisons has nothing to do with anyone’s sexual orientation; no one of any sexual orientation wants or deserves to be raped. These rapes are not aggressive sexuality; these rapes are sexualized aggression and violence, acts of power and control over a victim, because after all, “making you his bitch” is technically saying that he’s turning you into “a woman.” The language itself says a lot about how women are devalued in the first place. Suddenly Beast grabs you; you yell for the guards, but no one comes.

Beast has you pent down, with his knee pressing on your back and his massive hands over your mouth. He tells you, “You know you want it.” He rams his penis into your rectum without wearing a condom and without any form of lubrication. The force of him hurts, but you can’t move until he’s decided he’s finished. Beast tells you that he knows you enjoyed it. He also tells you he will “kill your ass” if you say anything. You swear to yourself that you will tell the guards, that is, if you can muster the courage to let anyone know that you, a grown man, has allowed this to happen to you.

Finally, you get the courage to tell one of the guards that you think likes you and might hear you out. You eventually demand to speak to the warden. When you finally get to the warden’s office, I’m sitting there. That’s right, me, the person writing this blog.

When you tell me you’ve been raped, I ask for proof. There isn’t a rape kit. So you’re forced to pull down your pants and bend over so that I can take a look at the tears and bruises on your behind.

I look at you and say, “I’m sorry about this, but anything could have done this to your behind. You could have fallen on something. Are you sure you’re not just making this up to get out of some of your duties or to get even with Beast about something? Beast has been in here nearly ten years; and he was a lot of trouble at first, but he became a model prisoner. He’s up for parole in about a year. I would hate to ruin his life over something frivolous.” I am the warden and I have your life and well-being in my hands—and I know it.

So, I tell you that I will look into the matter. Without any further conversation I send you right back to your cell. You want special protection, but I inform you that doing so would make it seem like we had already tried and convicted your alleged rapist. I literally send you right back to Beast. After you leave, I tell the guards not to worry about any further investigation because this is a prison, and Beast was probably just another horny and sexually frustracted convict. “This shit happens all the time.” I have no sympathy for you at all. I have work to do, a prison to run. You and your allegations are just another inconvenience…I’m going to stop and leave this right here.

This blog was written by Leslye Joy Allen and is protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to this or any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of this or any blog by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. All Rights Reserved.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: Black American Women