What Is In A Name?

Posted on January 2, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

My late mother struggled with infertility for 13 years before I was born. She told me that not only did doctors test my father’s sperm, but that she had her Fallopian tubes blown out with hot water. Many times she was in so much pain from the treatments that she couldn’t bend down to tie her shoes.

When I was born, my parents were 3 and 4 months away from turning ages 40 and 41, respectively. Mama and Daddy decided on the name “Leslye” because it was gender-neutral and also because my father did not particularly care for the practice of men naming sons after themselves.

“A boy either has a reputation to live up to or one to live down,” Daddy used to say. Anyhow, my name, had I been born a boy, would have been “Leslye Charles Allen” which would have included only my father’s middle name.

My late mother discovered the spelling of “Leslye” in a Reader’s Digest article where a young woman with that name and spelling was being sent on a tour of Europe as her graduation present from her parents.

When Mama brought the name and spelling of “Leslye” up to her good friend Esther Flournoy, my Aunt Esther said, “Cooter (their nickname for each other), what will be the middle name if your baby is a girl?”

Mama told me that she honestly did not know. At that moment, Aunt Esther said, “I like names like ‘Faith,’ ‘Hope,’ and ‘Joy.’”

Mama tried all combinations of these names until she arrived with “Leslye Joy.”

The hilarious and thought provoking book “Children’s Letters to God,” first published in 1966, was the very first book given to me by someone other than my parents.

It was given to me by the woman responsible for my middle name. Most of my classmates from Saint Paul of the Cross Elementary School and Saint Joseph High School never knew my first name was “Leslye” until long after we graduated.

Yet, I have had college professors, most notably Dr. Waqas Khwaja, and those wonderful women who cooked and fed me while I was a student at Agnes Scott College, just simply start calling me by my middle name “Joy” as if they all automatically knew that my middle name was the one that had the most love and history behind it. I was and remain warmed by that.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

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.

Men, Women, Amnesia and Jimmy Carter

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

My last few blogs have largely been laments about illiteracy, sexism, and an assortment of problems we are facing with the incoming administration of Felon 47.

This particular blog is not really about men and women who have amnesia, but rather about those among us who conveniently try to forget uncomfortable truths. I am thinking about the now late Jimmy Carter as I write this. He was one of the few American men to write boldly about sexism and misogyny as a worldwide crisis.

So, let’s consider this. Felon 47 is not a new phenomenon in American history. I hear all this bluster from people about his abuse of women, his racism, his rape charges, and etcetera, but…

Back in the late 1700s Thomas Jefferson was having illicit sex (rape) with his 14-year-old slave Sally Hemmings. You notice how folks never bring up her age? Jefferson also knew that little Sally Hemmings was his wife’s half sister because his father-in-law was—like many slaveholders—taking advantage of their “white male privileges” to do whatever the hell they wanted to do to women, particularly Black women.

Now, before any of my Black brothers and sisters get too comfortable, let’s acknowledge that Elijah Muhammad who founded the Nation of Islam did damned near the same thing when he was screwing around with and impregnating his teenage secretaries.

Whenever I hear someone say that Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, I want to scream because Malcolm X did not leave. He, along with Wallace Muhammad, was put out of the Nation for daring to raise questions about Elijah Muhammad’s behavior.

In spite of some of the sheer depravity we all have heard about in recent months, you would have known so much more IF most people actually listened to women in general, and Black women in particular.

The same Black women that most men and too many women never pay any attention to could have told you that there is not a nickel’s worth of difference between Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. All of these men had different illicit methods of making money and illicit methods of chasing underage tail.

For the next 4 years every American will learn that the very high price of sexism and misogyny exacts far more than most are willing to pay. And the very high price of not fighting against these ills will ultimately cost you your soul.

Goddess Bless Jimmy Carter for not blinking, for owning his missteps and for speaking out when others were too cowardly to do so.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

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

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

Covid, Cuba, and Human Rights

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

As we approach what many people hope is the end of the COVID-19, or I should say the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, let us consider a few things that we need to think about. First, while it is imperative that everyone be vaccinated, we still do not have a vaccination against this virus for children. Second, coronaviruses mutate. There are over 200 head cold viruses and most of them are coronaviruses. So, SARS-CoV-2 is probably endemic, meaning that we will have to contend with it in some form in perpetuity. Remember the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 killed roughly 50,000,000 million people worldwide. Yet, we no longer fear the flu because the flu is easily diagnosed and treatable. So, here’s the skinny: We need a couple of highly successful treatments for SARS-CoV-2; and we also need a test that can be administered where any healthcare professional can tell you whether you tested positive or negative in a matter of minutes. We’re not quite there yet, so be careful. This brings me to the crisis unfolding in Cuba.

As a Black American historian with some Afro-Cuban roots, the island nation has always been of interest to me personally. As I type this, however, the romanticized idea of Cuba that so many of us Black Americans hold—myself included—is dissolving before our eyes as Cubans, and particularly Afro-Cubans, have taken to the streets in protest against the harsh abuses they experience courtesy of state-sponsored police. The pandemic has exacerbated an old problem. While it would be easy to blame the USA for its decades-long (and unnecessarily punitive) embargo against Cuba, I am learning from Afro-Cubans on the ground that the USA’s embargo is not the primary cause of their hardships and grievances.

Many Black Americans are all too familiar with the late Fidel Castro’s visit to the USA where he deliberately stayed in Harlem with us. I remember the late Kwame Ture (né Stokely Carmichael) received medical care on the island. Then there is Black activist and fugitive Assata Shakur who received asylum on the island and has lived there for decades. Therefore, we Black Americans were not prepared to hear or fully accept what we were seeing on the ground in Cuba, namely young Cubans throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, marching in the streets, denouncing Castro, and telling Black American pundits to hush up because none of us have a clue what these young folks have been dealing with. And I have to agree; it is time for us Black Americans to stand down, shut up, and listen without the American-centricity we all carry but often fail to acknowledge.

I wrote back in January of this year that I wanted President Joe Biden to return to Obama-era normalization with Cuba. I still stand by that wish because as the government of Cuba has exported its best doctors to other countries to pay the island’s bills, it has also done so at the expense of the health and well-being of Cubans on the island. The medical miracle that Cuban medicine has been (a vaccination for meningitis, successfully preventing an HIV-positive mother from transmitting the virus to her unborn child, and fighting Ebola) is threatened by a more systemic problem that we do not want to face—plain, old-fashioned racism that Cuba claimed was finished decades ago, and a government that silences anyone that disagrees with its policies, which has apparently been in place for decades.

Right now the American Embassy in Cuba warns Americans not to visit Cuba due to potential violence and the continued spread of SARS-CoV-2. Biden unfortunately intends to sanction individual members of Cuban government. Sanctions have not worked, ever. As material shortages have always been a problem on the island for at least 5 decades, the pandemic has pushed everyone to their limits. Many Cuban protestors have stated that the folks in the government are eating and living just fine. Yet, the masses of Cubans now face severe food and medical shortages, and incarceration and/or death for daring to speak out about the abuses they suffer. Even worse, many Afro-Cubans complain that we don’t listen to what they are truly trying to tell us.

I still believe that the coordinated efforts of Cuban doctors, American doctors, and scientists from around the world can help us stem the tide of this pandemic, where, at minimum this disease only remains as a treatable and preventable disease. Yet, I also know that history tells us that any revolution that goes on too long eventually imitates the regime it was trying to replace. We must also be prepared to acknowledge and work toward a future where we Black Americans listen first to our kith and kin Afro-Cubans to stem the tide of state-sponsored racism, murder, and deprivation that they face—And those diseases are far more difficult to treat than any virus.

This blog was written by Leslye Joy Allen and is protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives-4.0 International 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: U. S. History