Listening to the Overgrowth
May, 2014. I am meeting Kentucky just days after Derby. As our plane descends upon Louisville, the view from the window showcases sprawling hills and land lush with more green than I have seen in years living in a state suffering from drought. Arriving with my father and my best friend, we enter a deserted airport, patterned jockey silks of various colors adorning every gate. We marvel at the queerness of the city’s celebratory ghost. In just a few months my best friend and I will begin a new chapter of our lives here.
We make our way down the escalator and find ourselves at a welcome counter full of brochures. My father is pulled into conversation with the white lady behind the desk who quickly learns this is our first time in the city. “Well welcome to Louisville, y’all!” We chat about the Slugger Museum, Muhammed Ali Center, Churchill Downs, and bourbon tours. “Y’all enjoy your time here! We’ve got plenty to do!” She leans in and lowers her voice to just above a whisper, letting us in on a known secret. “Just keep away from the West End of town.”
Having spent a little time learning about the city before our arrival, I know this woman is telling us to avoid the Blackest area of the city and, though annoyed at her blatant racism, choose not to challenge her. We move past the welcome counter to pick up our car.
*
I am often asked why I moved from California to Kentucky. An easy answer is that I moved to attend a graduate school that allowed me to pursue dual degrees in social work and women’s and gender studies. Though true, this answer is incomplete.
I come from a place where rows upon rows of strawberries sing sweet in the summer sun. A place where community is found in aluminum pans of pancit and parking lot corners serving up tri tip sandwiches. Where comfort is so easily felt from the embrace of the hills hugging the town. I also come from a place that masterfully grows weeds that suffocate growth. Weeds that fastened onto my body at parks, in beach coves, on freeways, street corners, at schools, movie theatres, homes. They formed spikes over and under the growing expansiveness of my gender, created shadows that dampened the vigor of my survivor heartbeat. No matter how often I tended the ground in hopes of extracting the roots, they continued to grow. A more honest answer dances around the desire for freedom. I moved because the weeds grew faster than I could pull them.
*
March 2020. The governor declared a state of emergency at the beginning of the month and it seems that the pandemic grows more urgent every day. I’m a few years into navigating a toxic relationship with social media and this situation is not helping. My phone is not on my side. In addition to ongoing alerts from Instagram and Facebook, nearly every day I receive pop-up notifications about local, state, and national news. My partner, a reasonable person who is a bit better at setting boundaries, often reminds me that I can turn that feature off.
A week after the state of emergency was declared two notifications came through: “LMPD investigating reported officer-involved shooting in southwest Louisville” and “LMPD investigates second deadly officer-involved shooting in 24 hours.” Startled by seeing southwest Louisville, knowing that meant near us, I sat with a feeling of discomfort about police killing people, making an assumption those people were Black. I kept the news to myself as I sank into the couch and swiped away the headline announcing the death of Breonna Taylor and the murmuration of movement. Months would pass before I knew her name.
*
A decade ago, during my first year of college, Tumblr radicalized me. Through late night scrolls and reblogs, I was quickly introduced to a naming and analysis of harms I both caused and experienced. Tumblr lit the coals that gathered from eighteen years of growing up in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy1 without ever being told. In high school I received praise and a small scholarship for an essay advancing colorblindness as a solution to racism despite a history of latching onto cultures that were not my own, despite noticing and feeling many of the ways color differentiated my experiences and material conditions from those of my friends. Everybody loses when we uplift the mediocrity of whiteness. In California I learned about consent seven years and six boys too late; rehearsed “woman” in exchange for validation. By the time I graduated college, I was guided towards the work of Dr. Angela Davis and Mariame Kaba, among others, effectively loosening the grip of the weeds by providing a healthier framework to understand abolition and liberation.
In the aftermath of naming and reframing reality, I ran to this purple bruise of a red state. Under the swollen skin of broken vessels, I hesitantly engaged in the practice of being seen. In doing so, Louisville gave me an expanded understanding of family, room to define myself, new spaces to grow. Yet in this spaciousness, I now find myself battling a desire to isolate. In the relative safety of abundant love and a semi-stable job, far from the physical environments of the trauma still stored within my body, the weeds creep. They invite me to crawl into the familiarity of restraint, to envelop myself in the comfort of numbness and seclusion. Too often I let them take hold. But liberation lies in the pleasure and pain that comes from being in right relationship with the broader community that I now call home. I cannot meet others in their power if I do not practice standing in my own.
*
June 2020. A protestor with a megaphone is marching ahead of us, their voice cracks as they call into the crowd: “Say her name!” We scream back: “Breonna Taylor!” They continue: “Say his name!” We shout: “David McAtee!”
We are marching from Injustice Square at 6th and Jefferson to the intersection where David McAtee was killed at 26th and Broadway, though we don’t know this when we begin. It has been less than twenty-four hours since his life was taken and less than twelve since they moved his body out of the street. This is the result of our governor calling in the National Guard and our mayor implementing a curfew—both attempting to suffocate protests. How they expected anything other than death is beyond me. I wonder if they lose sleep over their decisions.
As we leave downtown and pass the 9th Street Divide into the West End, I am reminded of my first arrival into this city. The day is cooling as the sun begins to set. Clouds shield the blue of the sky and glimmer gold in the west. It is nearing curfew. We walk under a rusted overpass where people stand atop holding signs that say “SYSTEM REFORM NOW” and “BLACK LIVES MATTER.” The chanting begins to echo and then fades as we reach the other side. I am not supposed to be here. I am not supposed to care about David McAtee. But I do, we do, this city does.
We reach 26th and Broadway and pause for a few minutes. The crowd turns around and we begin our march back to the square, now joined by people in cars riding alongside with fists up out of windows. This is my first time in the West End in nearly three years. I cannot help but notice I stayed no longer than the time it took to walk in, witness, and walk out.
*
Louisville continues to teach me lessons in liberation. I am learning that weeds that suffocate growth are not native to California. I am learning that where weeds exist (everywhere), they can never be pulled fast enough alone. I am learning that where I am able to pull myself free from their grasp, I leave others tangled in their mess. I am learning that without principled attention and care, I can be the one sowing and nurturing their growth. I am learning that liberation does not come from the naming of a problem, but from the tenderness of love coupled with a practice of accountability.
1 The phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” comes from bell hooks, a Black feminist theorist, writer, and cultural critic who was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.