The Potty Mouth Granny

  • Ain’t No Apology in My Story

    I can’t speak for all Black women, but I know this much—I don’t owe a motherfucker an explanation about anything in my life. I was a mother to two children by the age of twenty-one. I received welfare assistance. I didn’t get my GED until I was twenty-seven. I know what it means to start…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • Happy Women’s History Month!!!

    History is full of women who kicked the door open, got told to sit down, and then quietly built a whole other house behind the scenes anyway. Let’s wander through a few of them—some loud, some hidden, all undeniable. A Chinese pirate commanded 70,000 people Ching Shih wasn’t just a pirate—she was the pirate. She…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • Segregation Was Not Our Golden Age

    When I see Black people online talking about how segregation was somehow better for us as a people, I feel something rise up in me that I can’t ignore. Not just frustration—something deeper. A kind of ancestral irritation. Because what are we really saying when we romanticize a time built on restriction, humiliation, and enforced…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • 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.…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • 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…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • 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…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • 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…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • 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…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • 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…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • Fabulous Me

    In May, it will be twenty years since I graduated from college. Me—the high school dropout they quietly counted out. Me—the mother of two children by the age of twenty-one. Me—the welfare recipient society loves to reduce to a statistic. And also me—the college student who walked across that stage with a 3.8 GPA, a…

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