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I looked up synonyms for me and the results scrawling across the screen didn’t represent the queen I see bc the word my fingers typed was “black”

And I noticed an inherent lack of reverence in the connotations of our skin because my blackness was defined more akin to a sin with terminology like clouded and murky and somber and sooty, and swarthy and shadowy, and ink-like and starless and dingy and dusky

I Googled myself and the results crawling across the screen were stereotypes of me because my fingers struck the keys to form “black woman”

And the first entry fed into my retina and flipped by my frontal lobe read “angry black woman” and what a miraculous joke it must be for The Bachelorette to pick its first black woman because although we are capable of doing it all, the washing and the cooking and the child raising and the working and hustling we would prefer a little bit of love in our lives

I searched another part of myself, a rarity in our world, but an emerging field that gave me hope, “black woman lawyer”

And through the computer generated pages I read about Constance Baker Motley and feelings of pride and endurance and anticipation surged through my glitter adorned fingernails into my core

I found myself on the Internet, in our history, relegated to one month for 300 years of whippings and kidnappings and spirit-breaking bondage and 3/5 denigrating then one hundred more years of lynchings and raping and false accusations and court-sanctioned murder

I type myself into the search bar and still I am destitute

But I know

I am the dream of the slave and the fear of other’s ancestors and their current offspring

I am the spirit of endurance and dogmatism

I am the refusal of systemic, hegemonic, traditional hatred

I am the seed at the root of the chloroform-deprived leaves and stems pressing mightily against the concrete

I am the buried angst of a midwife’s granddaughter, delivering melanin- deprived children at the apex of her career but entering through the basement marked “colored”

I am the daughter of the whirlwind of the army brat swept from Germany to France to Tennessee only to find the same boots his father laced up to lay down his life for this Country would snuff out our for failing to cross the street in the presence of a White woman

I am the progeny a woman whose voice lifted people from their seats and forced their eyes to pour, whose love persists beyond galaxies

I am the sister of love and honesty and intelligence and humor

I have been compelled by familial bonds to squeeze out a diamond of hope

I was molded in the image of my Creator whose love storms across continents

And yet, I am a nomad bleached away in the East and eliminated in the South, buried under alleged academic institutions in the North, and color blinded by “Western Accomplishments”

I am the tired, the poor, the disparate mass yearning for freedom and acceptance

I resemble the eternal wave, reincarnated without any attempts to reveal the cruelness that the trough has inflicted in perpetuity

I am the wretched refuse so carelessly eradicated by the police

I am the woman deemed unfit to consult with a physician and choose my own path

I am the homeless waiting for Her to lift a lamp to warm my face

And I wait beside the door as others pass by with only a whisper of a lash or a taste of a famine or a dream of liberty

But still I wait patiently for the moment of acknowledgement and remorse and redemption

For the moment when each transgression against my ebony body, my womanhood, my people

Is rectified, and this Earth from the Mother of Nature embraces me as her home.