Unarchived
In 1934, one of my foremothers Patsy Alexander sat in her West Louisville home and was interviewed by a white reporter for The Courier-Journal. A Black working-class woman’s story featured for being the oldest person in the city. Her Black hands holding a large Bible with frayed and rigid edges holding over a century of memories passed down to her from her father. The Bible, a book she had turned to time and time again. “The devil used to be locked in these pages, but now he is roaming the Earth.” I am sure after she said these words, she peered over her glasses. Having known slavery, emancipation, her hands rubbing and scrubbing laundry for others, having lived over a hundred years and birthed seventeen children, her eyes knew the devil.
With her hands probably grasping the Bible, the only book she knew how to read, she declared, “Louisville had not greatly improved in seventy years.”
As a Black woman, I am lucky to have an ancestor archived. As I comb through The Courier-Journal looking for other stories of my ancestresses, I come up empty. Looking through their archives for my great-great-grandmother Hazel Briscoe. I only find a brief mention, “Burl Wilkinson, 62, of 2237 W. Jefferson…. survivors include his wife, the former Hazel Briscoe.”
A mention of her name clipped, short, and to the point. The paper does not mention how her grandchildren called her “Honey,” a woman whose hips birthed her first child at fourteen. Her daughter, my great-grandmother, followed Honey’s lead, giving birth to my grandmother in high school. Hazel decided her age made her too young to be a grandmother, she declared that we call her “Honey.”
The paper does not mention her hands, which touched crystal glasses, how they were freckled and probably marred by cleaning other people's homes and sliding against washboards to wash clothes. Her eyebrows were high, and her lips were ready to smirk. Always ready to be kissed by the many boyfriends that rotated in and out of her home. Honey. Sweet. Sticky. And sensuous in its movement.
Instead of the pleasures of her life being fully recognized, her life was only noted in the death of someone else.
Black death.
Louisville currently is known for Black death. Breonna Taylor. Killed in her home. The cops who murdered her are still free. Her name and images are memorialized like Lincoln on the mantle of Patsy Alexander’s home. She has become hashtagged, memeified; her death is spurring an uprising.
Her name only remembered in her death. A Black woman’s name being remembered. A Black woman’s name being remembered in Louisville.
Exceptional.
Tyyata Thomas, 23. Murdered in Louisville in 2019 because she denied a man’s “friendship.” Her name has not activated the same change. Instead, she falls into the more than forty percentof Black women who experience domestic violence. Many other Black women are often ignored. Our lives are often forgotten, even in death. It is evident that we pick and choose which Black deaths to take hold of and use as a rallying cry. As a society, we are indifferent to Black women’s lives and their deaths.
Unexceptional.
Patsy Alexander’s life was exceptional. Breonna Taylor’s death is exceptional.
Hazel Briscoe and Tyyata Taylor are just bylines.
Looking over the lack of information in the archives and the current state of Louisville, I began to question when as a city and a society will we celebrate Black women while they are alive. Collect their stories so their daughters know that their foremothers lived and lived complex lives. Lived lives beyond pain and death.
For Honey, I have had to paint her life in words. I have had to redo what the archives did not find important to document. Below, I create scenes from the Louisville Black women who have changed my life. Turning their lives into stories and placing them into their own archive.
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Lina (Lye-na): Laughter echoes, stories, and gossip from a basement that for decades served as a refuge. A place for Black women who walked into church with giant hats, monochromatic suits, and large brooches on their chest could get their grays rinsed out into a giant black basin. Lina placed blue gel on scalps and created straight hair using hot pressing combs that sizzled on the head. Often, those same combs left her granddaughter with James-Brown-like hairdos because she did not want her to look, “like an African.” In Lina’s basement, and through her decades of being a beautician, she had escaped what the women before her had not done, working in someone else’s home.
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Rose: The weekends were her time to shine. Her four children had left her home. Her one granddaughter visited in the summers, living in places far away. As her white roller skates glided across the floors of Champs to old school 70s and 80s beats, she finally was able to live her life for herself: not for a man or a child.
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Angelique: Walking with her small daughter’s hands in hers she powered through to class. She knew that singing was her way to freedom. She clasped her daughter’s hand tight and moved forward.
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I write a lot about the women in my family, trying to connect my stories to theirs. Trying to find myself through their lives. For the majority of the women in my family, Louisville has been the place of their formation.
86 years ago, Patsy preached that Louisville had not greatly improved. In 2020, I would say the same. The devil still walks the Earth, nestled in the avenues and corridors that whisper the centuries of racial injustice and deep-rooted segregation of the city. A city which has manifested itself in violence, poverty, and health and educational disparities. Now is the time to confront the devil. Confront our roots. Often, we need to look at the stories that surround us. The stories we tell ourselves. The stories we choose to collect and the ones we pass forward. Black women live full lives. Let’s celebrate them before they pass away living in a city, a society, and a world that is always looking to ignore and pass over us. Collect our stories and spread them far. Archive our voices before we pass away.