dancing minds, lemon butter bones

Notes on Black women, storytelling, and liberation

I been thinking a lot lately.

Deep, looping thoughts that pulls me to the window like some soft, Black heroine in a novel with an unresolved ending. The sky outside is always thick and indecisive in these scenes of melodrama. Neither fully light nor fully dark, like the very air is trying to make up its mind. It’s morning, maybe. Or that strange hour when late afternoon pretends to be night. I wrap my robe tighter. The cotton is worn thin, but I like the weight of it on my shoulders. It reminds me I’m still here. That I’ve survived another day. That there’s still something left to say.

Photo by Tem Rysh on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the stories we tell. The ones we carry, repeat, write down, pass along. How those stories hold us steady. How they tell us who we are, and give us room to breathe, to reimagine, and to become. Black folks have always known how to story our way through: through grief, through joy, through the ordinary and the unspeakable. To me, that has always felt like a kind of liberation.

When I seek a compass, I return to Toni Morrison—whose essays and speeches remind me of the weight and possibility of our words, always pointing toward what it means to write and live with intention.

Her words orbit me. I don’t always try to solve them. Sometimes I just turn them over in my hands like smooth stones.

One quote, in particular, has been circling my spirit:

“There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one — an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/ writing world we live in.” - Toni Morrison

That last line—“the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one”—makes me ache. What does it mean for a mind to be open? To dance? And for that dance to be peace?

And how radical, how holy, that this peace is “most natural in the act of reading and writing our world”.

That dance lives in the stories we pass down.

Stories like the one about that time my grandmother forced us to hitchhike to South Carolina with a lemon pound cake.

Photo by Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash

ii.

There’s a story my family tells every time we’re all crowded around the table, plates still warm, belts still loosened. It’s the one about the time the car broke down on the way to the family reunion in South Carolina way back in ‘99 (or was it 98?). My uncle swore the culprit was Grandma’s kitchen-sink packing: pots, gifts, both of her Bibles, a broom (don’t ask), and a pound cake she wouldn’t let ride in the trunk, all packed alongside the family in her little red Subaru. We’ve all heard this story a thousand times, and still, someone always interrupts to say, “No, no—that’s not how it went.”

But somehow, we all agree on the punchline: my grandmother standing on the side of highway in her Sunday wig and church shoes, waving a white towel at passing cars like she was hailing a cab. Every retelling erupts in laughter; someone slaps the table, someone else wipes away tears.

What I remember isn’t the breakdown itself, but the way the story bends and flexes in our collective mouths. I like to exaggerate the tilting pots, my mom and uncle bicker over the date, my sister insist on the exact shade of her wig. Each correction, each flourish, each punchline is a stitch, sewing a net that catches our history before it slips away.

Katie Geneva Cannon, womanist theologian, called this collective remembering “human archaeology.” It is one dancing mind meeting another. It is the kind of choreographed memory that shifts slightly every time, not because it’s untrue but because it’s alive. We not retelling the same ol’ story just because… we’re tending it. Brushing off the dust. Making sure it still fits.

When we reanimate that memory, we name ourselves into being. We claim our lineage of laughter, resilience, and resourcefulness despite how absurd it might seem. We rehearse the lesson: when life breaks down, we hold on to whatever we got left.

Sometimes I wonder what we’re really laughing at. The absurdity? The grit? The fact that even stranded, Mother Grand still had her dignity, her pound cake, and the knowledge that survival sometimes tastes like lemon butter?

That story is a family charter for how we’ll face tomorrow’s breakdowns. It insists that our stories, our shared jokes and jibes, lock in a future where we remain visible, whole, and witty. That ritual is Afrofuturism in practice.

iii.

I’m still at the window. The tea has gone cold. The sky shifts, blue threading through gray as if it’s finding its rhythm again. The robe slips off one shoulder, and I let it. I’m tired of cinching myself up.

I trace invisible steps with my pen, another turn in Morrison’s dance of open minds. I practice Cannon’s archaeology of the soul, gently excavating my grandmother’s pound cake story, my mother’s laughter, and the words I still haven’t written yet.

There is peace in this, I realize. Not the absence of chaos, but the presence of witness. The act of speaking, and being spoken to. Of writing, and being read. Of reading what others have written, and telling their stories over again.

I write because I need to, but also because I want to leave something behind. I want another Black woman, tired, brilliant, and on the edge of something holy, to read my work and whisper, “Yes, I remember that too”. To feel the heft of that lemon pound cake in her hands and the pulse of this dance in her mind.

Soulwork is this: holding the laughter and the broom, the Bibles and the breakdowns, then transforming them into a language that outlives us. Without this choreography of memory, our truths collapse into silence, and silence in our history has too often meant disappearance. And I will not go quietly into that dark night.

Storytelling, for Black folks, is the alchemy that turns our survival into a language others can breathe. It’s how we grieve. How we praise. How we protect the parts of ourselves that no one else can hold.

And for me, that’s what writing is. A sacred act of connection. A circle.
A dance.

Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!

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