Shelter

The birds were confused and so was I. I had watched them just one day before, perched in branches, singing extravagant operas, digging for worms, switching places as though playing musical chairs—living. Now they move back and forth across an empty yard, not sure where their nests and young have gone, buffa operas now turned into negro spirituals. They had homes, they had conference centers, maybe churches, restaurants and recreational facilities all wiped away in less than a day.

I watched as they cut the trees down, not envisioning how open the space would be afterwards. I was shocked when I finally realized that cutting down the trees would mean there would be no trees. Yet the process was exhilarating watching huge branches fall to the ground and, of course, tree trunks—one even being forced with three men pulling a cable attached to the top half of a tree while another man who had climbed the tree to cut off smaller branches remained attached to its lower half seemingly undaunted by the prospect of going down with it.

The three trees that stood tall, wild, and overgrown—indigenous and free—were a forest of their own making. They didn’t fit in an urban city, despite their size and maturity hinting that they might have been here first and that the city might be what doesn’t fit. But as I stood in the back of the house, this historical, Philadelphia house that is said to have once been the slave quarters for the enormous next-door plantation home no longer with any trees in its backyard, it was easy to forget the main road only two blocks over with cars and buses and fumes and people.

The shelter the trees provided, I thought, were for the birds. I had watched them every day from morning until they all seemingly evaporated in the early evening before materializing again for the next and new morning. But now, I watched them walk on ground where trunks had been. I watched them flying through air where they once landed on branches. As I stood there smoking a cigarette in view of my next door neighbors and strangers passing alongside the street on the other side of their house, I understood. I lamented my own shelter—not theirs.

My smoking provided isolated moments, strung together to convince me that I was present for them. It’s when and sometimes why I’m not seen, and how I can step outside of myself without ever really leaving myself in some sort of abusive way. Being in public view leaves me in the strange and nonsensical reality that all I’m really doing is smoking a cigarette. Without shelter, I’m merely exposed, a vulnerability of weakness and addiction, and maybe everything that goes beyond that—all of it on display because the trees were cut down.

I didn’t need them for oxygen. I didn’t need them to watch the birds. I just needed me, all of me, to myself. I needed to not be seen and the trees were giving that without me knowing to ask for it.

Just last night the shelter that I thought I had while on zoom with my video turned off was challenged when I asked a question of the panel Columbia University chose for the evening. I sat and twisted my hair, my natural hair which, beautiful to me, only looks wild and untamed to others. In asking the question, I was exposing myself mentally, psychologically, maybe even spiritually because of the nature of my question: “What would you write about if this pandemic turned into the end of the world—if it just decided one day that it was going to end everything. What would you write about? What topics would you feel we need as the last way to see ourselves?”

I was glad to participate, glad that I wasn’t consumed by the fear of speaking, of saying something when everyone else remained quiet, as smart people, unlike me, do. The moderator asked me to show myself, saying it was much more valuable an exchange for those who I addressed to see my face, to look at me as if meeting physically in a room and present with one another.

She was right. In the moment, I didn’t consider the shelter I had to give up, what I had to reveal—the vulnerability of any black woman being seen with her natural hair untamed, hardly meeting a standard of beauty for public exposure. I started my video after quickly wiping my face with a paper towel to remove splotches of oil on my face that might give me an unnatural shine reflecting the dim light in awkward places on my face. But I didn’t cover my hair (I didn’t have time) and I didn’t speak up to say I’m not in a state of showing myself. I simply turned on my video and said with my hair unruly, “I’m in the middle of twisting my hair which is why I don’t have my video on.”

And so I revealed myself to the authors, the moderator, all the students that I have not yet met in person, all the students that I have not yet had the opportunity to dazzle with my beauty, my face manipulated, make-up in its rightful place, my hair done in a way so it doesn’t reveal what it really looks like. Just enough to keep hidden what so many black women try their best to do, technology taking the place of what the trees had been providing for me.

With the trees gone, I could now be seen by strangers walking by, cars, and now maybe even family who are turning the corner to pull into the driveway. My in-laws, the people who although they are my family, I still don’t want to see me as I really am.

At the time I felt confident. At the time I even felt excited that I had the confidence, the strength to show my face, my hair half-twisted, half out, the kinks sticking straight out after a day of humidity that shrank my hair from passing my shoulders to only inches from my scalp. It was after spending a day confronting nature, the natural state of the condensation colliding with the natural hair on my head, that I took this experience, this collaboration between my body and the earth, that I felt empowered, my vanity stripped away, no longer captive to altering what is natural within me and outside of me to fit an unnatural and altered reality of what beauty is—and what black is.

The next day I woke up horrified, recoiling at how bold I felt revealing my face and my hair, splotches of oil on my forehead. What was natural yesterday felt unnatural today.

“Why would I do that?” I asked myself. “I’ll have to make sure that I look extraordinary every time I log on so that people think I’m beautiful, so that people know I’m beautiful.”

Now that I see the birds circling around where those trees once were, I understand the natural exposure, the taking away of their shelter and my (un)natural exposure with the click of a button.

The open backyard of my neighbor’s house piles up with cinder blocks and bricks. Surely something is to be constructed in the place of those trees, something, hopefully, that will shelter me once again from the public. Something, I hope, I can hide behind as I smoke a cigarette.