The Potty Mouth Granny

  • 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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  • The Sociology of Death

    I’ve been obsessed with death since I was a little girl. Not in a gothic-novel way. Not in a let me scare you way. In a quiet, watchful way—like a child sitting on the edge of the bed, listening for the sound of the world ending. My grandmother believed Jesus Christ was coming back in…

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  • Cheering the Boots That’s Still Kicking Our Asses

    The USA is home to Black people cheering on SS Brownshirts and censorship—and that sentence should rattle the teeth. We are watching a grim magic trick in real time: history in a cheap disguise, hoping nobody recognizes the smell. The Sturmabteilung once strutted through Germany claiming order, purity, and national pride, while quietly laying the…

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  • When Your Soul Is Weary

    I’m standing at the window, watching the snow come down—white, fluffy, quiet like it’s trying to behave. It looks like a postcard. Like peace. Like childhood laughter and cocoa commercials and lies. And I hate it. Snow is beautiful in the way a coffin is polished. Clean. Cold. Final. People talk about winter like it’s…

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