The Potty Mouth Granny

  • Hidden Gems of Chicago – Jackson Park Highlands District

    Tucked into the South Shore area like a well-kept secret with good manners, the Jackson Park Highlands District is one of those neighborhoods that makes you slow your car down. Not because you’re lost — because you’re looking. Developed in the early 1900s, it was designed as an upper-middle-class enclave. Tree-lined streets. Curving boulevards. Large…

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  • Why Chicago’s Architecture is the Best in the World!!!

    Since the election of former President Obama in 2008, folks who have never set foot on my block have had a whole lot to say about the city of my birth. Headlines dripping with doom. Comment sections full of experts who couldn’t find 79th Street with a GPS and a prayer. So I decided to…

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  • Crowned in Antlers, Not Angels

    I’m not a religious person. Never have been. But I’ve also never been convinced that this whole strange, spinning, breathing operation is powered by nothing. There’s a difference between rejecting religion and denying wonder, and I’ve never been able to cross that second line. I was flirting hard with atheism for a minute. Not in…

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  • Losing My Brother: A Soliloquy

    November — He was missing. Missing is a strange word. It sounds temporary. Like misplaced keys. Like a sock behind the dryer. It suggests retrieval. Resolution. But this was different. Received a call telling me that he was missing. Sending my son to the police station to file a missing person report. Asking friends on…

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  • Afeni Shakur

    Afeni Shakur was not a background character in history — she was a thunderclap with oratory skills. Activist, organizer, political defendant, mother of a cultural supernova. Steel spine, poetic fire. She was born on January 10, 1947, and became an ancestor on May 2, 2016 — and her contributions to Blackness are immense. Long before…

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  • Wild Women History

    My reading project for the past two years has been diving into the history of women — and it’s been fascinating. What I’ve learned is that women have been treated like shit for thousands of years, regardless of race or socioeconomic status. If you’re a woman, you’re treated like you ain’t worth two dead flies.…

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  • The Politics of My Hair

    We as Black women have a real complicated relationship with our hair. The texture and length of our hair have long been tied to ideas of beauty and social acceptance — especially when it’s judged as the “right” texture and the “right” length. Too often, those standards were never designed with us in mind, yet…

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  • Surviving My Brothers

    Grief keeps its own calendar. February comes in like a quiet thief, soft-footed and merciless, carrying dates that glow like coals. My brother Randy — gone on his birthday February 7th, just thirty-four, the candles never meant to be memorial lights. Four days earlier I was in a hospital bed with a broken leg, my…

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  • Anti-Intellectualism

    I try not to judge people too much these days, because Lord knows I’m not a saint. But I’ll never understand why some folks don’t like to read. Reading saved my life. I started early — books, magazines, newspapers — anything I could get my hands on. If it had words on it, I was…

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  • The Day Death Missed Me

    Today is the 32nd anniversary of the day I got hit by not one, but two cars — and somehow stayed among the living. I don’t remember the impact. Just crossing the street. Not the sound. Not the moment my body met metal. My mind keeps that door locked. What I do remember is waking…

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