The Potty Mouth Granny

  • If I Was Black and Male For A Day

    First of all, before I write this essay, I would like to state that I love being a Black woman. I love the beautiful brownness of my skin, my hair which is a crown that has anointed me Queen of my universe, my full lips, slanted eyes, and the strength of my ancestors who endured…

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  • Chatham: The Pride of the South Side

    When people talk about Chicago’s historic Black neighborhoods, places like Bronzeville and Hyde Park often dominate the conversation. Yet on the city’s South Side lies a community that has long represented stability, homeownership, education, and Black middle-class achievement: Chatham. Bounded roughly by 79th Street to the north, 87th Street to the south, Cottage Grove Avenue…

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  • Bronzeville: Where the Great Migration Learned to Breathe

    There are cities within cities. And then there’s Bronzeville— not just a neighborhood, but a testimony. To understand Bronzeville, you have to walk backward through time, into the long shadow of the Great Migration—that massive, sacred movement of Black folks who packed up their lives in the South and headed north with nothing but grit,…

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  • A Dedication to the Juke Joints of Chicago

    They don’t put you in the brochures,don’t line you up along the lakefrontlike polished teeth in a tourist smile—but baby, you are the heartbeat. You are where the city exhales. Down on the South Side,in rooms low-lit and thick with memory,where the floor knows more storiesthan any history book ever printed,you breathe. You hum.You testify.…

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  • We Were Never Meant to Be Silent: A Love Letter to Black Feminist Thought

    Let me tell you something plain—Black feminist theory didn’t come out of a classroom. It came out of kitchens with cracked linoleum floors. Out of bus stops in the cold. Out of women raising babies with one hand and holding themselves together with the other. It came from us. Before anybody gave it a name,…

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  • Lady Day

    The way Billie Holiday was hounded by the government literally until the day she died is one of the biggest tragedies in Black history. When she sang “Strange Fruit,” that wasn’t just a song. It was an indictment. A slow, haunting autopsy of America. Written by Abel Meeropol, but carried into the bloodstream of the…

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  • Chatham — Quiet Power, Black Excellence, and Front-Porch Dignity

    Chatham sits on Chicago’s South Side like a well-kept secret that refuses to beg for attention. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t perform. It is. Tree-lined streets, sturdy brick bungalows, lawns edged like someone still believes in order and pride—that’s Chatham’s quiet language. Where it is (and why that matters) Chatham is roughly bounded by 75th…

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  • Pocket Town

    Pocket Town in Chicago is a place name for a very specific little corner of the city’s South Side — it’s not a restaurant or bar, but a neighborhood identity in its own right. This pocket of Chicago life has a rich and complicated vibe, stitched into the larger fabric of Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood.…

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  • Sharpshooters of My Bloodline

    Lately I’ve been thinking about my great-grandfather and his little brother. They were enslaved on the Barrow Plantation in Louisiana when they made the decision to run. How they did it, I will never know. At just eighteen and fifteen years old, they chose motion over fear, the unknown over the certainty of chains. They…

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  • A Dedication to My Great-Grandfather Hark Allen

    Happy Memorial Day to my Great-Grandfather Hark Allen. Originally named Hark Barrow, he was a runaway slave from the Barrow Plantation who joined the Northern side of Civil War, gained his freedom, and changed his last name to Allen. Lived through the pandemic of 1918 and almost saw the Great Depression. Lived until he was…

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