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By Mo Viviane (they/she/he/its)

Let me take you back. It’s 1999, and Grandmama is in the kitchen preparing breakfast for the church congregation at Banks Chapel AME Zion Church in Belltown, Kentucky. Every Saturday night, the kitchen stood filled with homemade biscuits, bacon, sausage, fluffy eggs, potatoes, and fruit salad, all to be taken down the hill right next to the house, down to the church, in the morning before Sunday school.

The church was small, but it was all about my family congregating there. And when I drive past the church now, as I go down to visit my Dad, it sits as an empty, dilapidated building, holding only the memories of all of the voices singing deep down in the valley. It is a place that reminds me that familial relationships are a greeting of intimacy.

Historically speaking, Western family structures were built under the guise of a colonizer’s dream, making way for white picket fences to keep us bound. The constructs of our loving were built in the bonds consumed in the antagonization of lynching around the oak, falling like leaves, waiting to hit the ground in blue. And there is a kind of revelation that happens there, when we are told that we could only exist in the in-between spaces.

Yet, I watched Grandmama’s hands knead the dough on the countertops, smearing flour on the table to meet the dough. I found myself in a trance as she pressed her wrists back and forth, tossing the dough around on the table, dipping her hands into water – over and over again. One biscuit cut to another showed me that hands are there for caring, creating, nuzzling up to. 

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If I am quiet enough in my bedroom now, I can still hear the sound of my cousin Mikey’s voice reverberating across the house, just like he did when we sang “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound,” all the way from the back of the pews.

If I am quiet enough in my kitchen now, I can feel the ground that bore fruit of Grandmama’s mama, that made homes to land safely in, when the world often tricks black bodies into dormant places. As I sit in the rocking chair, with a morning coffee, winds revel in blackberry as a reminder that our toes weren’t just made for running, and our necks were not strung in strangeness, but for squishing deep into the wooden buckets for homemade ice cream. There is a pleasure in knowing that we are made for more than purpose.

I had five mamas (all of my aunts and my biological mama), who loved me, taught me what it was like to live life hard and soft at the same time; to make way for the world to try and bring me down. And if it was successful, they all showed me how to lean on those around me when I needed it most. So, when the rain seeped into the ceilings of my mind, I’d be ready for the clearing of the fog that came after.

My mama was a white woman who learned how to braid, and there are few of those that I’ve heard about. She cared for my sister’s and my hair and took the time to commune with my aunts. Every day we went off to school, she ensured that the weaving and waning occurred, sometimes in plaits, in rows, in a beehive swirl, in pigtails with barrettes or beads to hold them together at the ends. Just like Grandmama’s hands, I was reminded that hands are there for caring, creating, and nuzzling up to, even in the differences.

I like to say that this kind of familial intimacy taught me to expand how I live as love, rather than seek it in places that replicate agitated spores. The church taught me to make room for community, to ensure that my fingers knead through the connections like Grandmama’s hands. And a continuous reminder that the nuzzling is about the lifts we make in a space of unconditional gathering. Where loving is about being honest about my heart’s desire. And to be honest, right now, is holding my arms wide, lifting way above the mulberry trees in the backyard of my partner’s apartment, while he’s smoking turkey necks on the smoker, waiting to hold hands in prayer again.

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To learn how to move my hands across his arms, as he leans his head against my shoulder while we watch anime, or listen to Etta James. To learn how to move my hands softly around the lovers I meet when I’m traveling, and make room for the consenting. To hold honestly, talk about those that I surround myself with, from a space of care.

“A clean house is a clean mind,” Grandmama would say. “You never know who is gonna show up at your door; best to keep it all together in the first place.”

The caring is a pillow-soft curating of home, where we have begun to rework the root of the bashing. Where we have begun to tend to the grounds that were theirs and ours, and to move from consumption, while our backs are more about blessing the bodies we have started to tap and toe into. Where our prayers are swept into envelopes like love letters, and the brooms no longer leave scratch marks against the floors of our papers. Where the dusting is a labor that our ancestors bore, while we wash in the essence of expansion.

And keeping it all together is reaching. Reaching for the mirrors that show us ourselves, truthfully. That reminds us that there is nothing wrong with loving in all directions. That reveals to us the secrets of our past, present, and future. That releases us from lies of capital punishment.

What is it that we are willing to have faith in?

I hope it’s hands for you, and hands for me – to continue carrying forward with an un-governance from all the stripping that attempts at our autonomy. I hope it’s the acts that stoneware like a caterpillar climbing out of the chrysalis, without even knowing it’s going to be a monarch. I hope it’s dreaming so big that the weaving continues past this universe.

Mo Viviane (they/she/he/its) is an Independent Journalist and Artist from rural Kentucky. Their work covers harm reduction, gender and sexuality, and creative spotlights and have written for GLAAD-nominated Queer Kentucky and guest spotted as a travel journalist for Transilient’s docu-series on transgender healthcare in Appalachia. They are currently a Fellow at the PressOn South Freedomways Reporting Fellowship, developing an investigative piece over the coming year.

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