Redefining Realness by Janet Mock Page A

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    Grandma Shellie prepped dinner before Sunday service, and her house filled up with people and good food afterward. Dad scoffed at church and rarely attended. He said church was two hours too longand all arrogance, and that he didn’t need a minister serving as his medium to God; he could speak to God whenever he wanted. He apparently spoke to him every day, with a can of beer in one hand and a Newport in the other. It was one of the many things Grandma and Dad disagreed on, including suffering and hard work being the prerequisite of living a good life, as Grandma often said.
    “Mama, don’t tell my babies that,” Dad once rebutted Grandma. “That ain’t true.”
    “Babies, that’s why your daddy ain’t got shit,” she said, serving Chad and me unfiltered truth about the ways of life.
    I was enamored by my grandmother and lurked around her kitchen, where the Mock women—Grandma, Auntie Linda Gail, and Auntie Joyce—gathered. I eavesdropped on them discussing grown folks’ business, about the way Ms. Cindy, Auntie Linda Gail’s neighbor, had been asking after Dad. It was all the more scandalous because she had just split from the father of one of her three sons, and Dad quickly filled the vacancy, secretly staying nights at Cindy’s.
    “Now, he ain’t got no business to be sneakin’ at his age,” Grandma said from the stove, where she stirred two pots of gumbo. (She always made one without shrimp because Uncle Ricky and I were allergic to shellfish.)
    Auntie Joyce, whom we lovingly called Wee Wee (her childhood nickname), nodded and mhmm ed in agreement, her eyes looking through the glass cup, where she was measuring vegetable oil for a chocolate box cake.
    “Well, that ain’t nothing,” Auntie Linda Gail clucked as she tore her long, curved acrylic nails through stems of collard greens she was washing over the sink. “When I asked Cindy about it, she had the nerve to tell me that it was none of my business. I ’bout bopped her on her head.”
    I had to do everything in my power not to laugh with them. Isilently soaked them up like a biscuit to honey butter. Then Auntie Wee Wee, with her large eyes and tall, slender frame and sweet smile, winked at me and said, “Come help me out, baby.” Making the chocolate cake gave me entry to graduate from eavesdropping to being one of the girls. Auntie Wee Wee whipped the batter with a wooden spoon as I greased the pan with a stick of butter. She beat the mix for a couple of minutes before pouring the brown gooey sweetness into the round cake pan. I placed it in the oven and watched it bake under the light’s glow while licking the bowl quietly as they continued talking.
    This is womanhood , I thought, watching the women in Dad’s life cook and cackle in the kitchen. Auntie Linda Gail had two sons and paid her bills with the help of welfare but stayed fly in the projects by doing hair out of her kitchen. She rocked an asymmetrical haircut, with a long, honey-blond weave bang that sat prettily over her left eye. She had more style than any woman I have seen in my entire life, the epitome of ghetto fabulous before there was such a thing. Auntie Wee Wee, on the other hand, chose an effortless approach to beauty. She wore small silver hoop earrings and black shoulder-length hair that she tied back in a ponytail. Her large eyes were usually rimmed with a stroke of black liner, and her lips were perpetually painted plum.
    My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like intersectionality and equality , oppression , and discrimination. They didn’t discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.
    Witnessing these women, albeit in the bits and pieces and slices that I was lucky to observe, contributed greatly to my womanhood. Collectively,