Here's a PANSY excerpt for you and yours
a National Get Caught Reading Month special
Pansy: A Black American Memoir is out now! Read on for an excerpt from the Best Young Adult Nonfiction at the 3rd annual Richard Wright Literary Awards.
ABOUT PANSY
PANSY is a memoir in tradition with the biomythography style coined by iconic Black queer poet and author Audre Lorde in the book, Zami.
PANSY is a non-linear, episodic story that combines poetry, cultural criticism, and essays. It follows me, a transmasc, southern writer, as I fumble through an awkward Memphis upbringing in the 90s and early aughts, an insufferable Nashville PWI, and a fierce NYC queer awakening, all with a poignant throughline on Black exceptionalism focused on my wildly agonizing first publishing experience with novel, Juniper Leaves.
Now, some chapter disclaimers: No, I am not Christian. Yes, I’m still punk-as-hell. And did I ever get those gauges? You bet I did.
Okay. Without further ado, here’s a sample chapter of PANSY for National Get Caught Reading Month.
Like a Kick in the Face
Memphis, TN, Fall 2005
Life, in the shape of a size-10 Doc Martin boot attached to a gaunt, pale-bodied Christian punk screamo singer atop a makeshift stage inside an indoor skatepark, kicked me in my mutherfuckin’ face.
But first, a lot of other things happened.
One of which includes my starting tenth grade at a new high school after leaving Craigmont, a place the whites of Memphis claimed was quickly “going downhill” after (Black) kids from North Memphis got bussed there.
I didn’t leave because those kids got bussed. But I cannot lie to you, other than sadly exiting my soprano spot in their epic gospel choir, or their expressly great track team, I was quite happy to hop on out that bitch because Black kids from North Memphis could see right through my charades like a camera through cellophane.
By charades, I mean the sort of scaffolding wall surrounding my jello-soft interior, of which I’d just adopted post-middle school after the harrowing realizations that I was, in fact, very, very weird. I’d accepted it. Tried for years to avoid it but there was no lying to myself anymore. Now, words like transgender or queer hadn’t blessed my vocabulary just yet, but I knew ‘gay,’ and the way it left my mouth still felt like the worst kind of slur so I rebuked it like any good Christian would. Called it ‘weird,’ instead.
My walk, like a butch robot, was ‘weird,’ not a clear sign of my dyke-itude. My sturdy cadence, though paired with a pitch sometimes only dogs could hear, did not help either. And neither did my style, of which I couldn’t possibly pretend was hitting the way it was supposed to had hit. Not at a place like Craigmont High where North Memphis girls somehow figured out a way to make a white button-up shirt and khakis look fresh. All I had to do was speak, and the Black kids at Craigmont could read me up and down like a scroll. It’s ‘cause when I spoke, I sounded like I was trying too hard.
I saw what cool was at Craigmont very fast. It was night and day different from Woodstock Middle ‘cool,’ so, none of my Woodstock cool transferred over. And I’d worked so hard for it! Still, not a bit did. And at Craigmont, it’d be foolish for me to even try. Not that I didn’t try. Nobody said I wasn’t foolish. But the mix of imitation and raw me-ness mixed up into it came out like the silliest brew of out-of-touch nerd.
One sentence out my mouth and the Craigmont kids could clock every bit of my person. They’d know my parents looked down on their parents. Could have probably predicted that just that weekend before, my Daddy had been on a rant about young Memphis thugs overtaking his band class, sounding like Uncle Ruckus. They could hear it all in my voice, all in the bend of my words that didn’t quite bend like Memphis, because they’d been expressly trained not to.
And so, my performance of Craigmont ‘cool’ didn’t just fail flat, it made me seem fake. And fake is bad. Like bad, bad. Fake is worse than nerdy, which is worse than corny, because corny and real still have a lot of potential to be fun, and fun is always good.
Now, real means a couple different things, depending on who you ask. But in Memphis when I was in high school, it was all pretty straightforward: Real recognize real. Real recognize fake. If you know, you know, and if you don’t, tough.
And Real Ones were always Black or brown. Always the heart of the city they come from, born and raised, the ‘culture’ part of the town that tourists come to see, and developers ironically push out when they have the chance. They carry the story of their city in their twang. You spot it in the strut, note it in the references, the slang, the likes, dislikes.
There is no once removed to a Real One, no uncanny valley where the realness should be. Not like with my hollow attempts. My cousins on my mom’s side are Real Ones. Around them, me and my siblings got to be the corny exceptions because we never felt the need to act fake around them. They got that we had no control over how we were raised. By two boujee Black parents who trained Memphis right out of our tongues to the point of no return. However, that didn’t mean they didn’t drag us about it constantly.
Stiff head ass, Keke would laugh.
Corny, boujee head ass, said Ashley, whose boisterous laugh would crack me up despite myself.
Getting dragged came with the territory. Everybody knows this is a price you pay as a corny kid around Real Ones. As long as you don’t front like you’re something you’re not, Real Ones will respect it. Because they know speaking white people’s language how they do is how you make a come-up, it’s how you find a job that pays more than the city’s average, how you save up enough to move to another city where there’s more chances to thrive. And you’ll probably thrive, because it’s easier to thrive when you know how to talk that talk. Everybody knows that, just some of us don’t want to, or can’t, or never had the chance to, or rather stay Real.
Now, I’m not saying you lose part of your Blackness for success. This is not a boujee Black vs hood Black critique. What I’m saying is American success is a rocky, white road, and to travel down it you gotta be fluent in the language, in the movements.
Some Black parents, like my dad, are generations deep in it. Fluent. Then there are exceptions like my mom, who somehow break through barricades separating classes after winning rigged games they were never ‘spose to win. She was the first in her working-class family to graduate college. And that’s with 9 siblings and a single mother after her dad passed. The first to get a college-educated type job—a teacher. The first to marry a third-generation middle-class Black man (mind you, Black middle class and white middle class are two very different things).
But me? Let’s just say if (white) success is your first language, like it was mine, odds are you’ll grow up a lil’ cornier than your Black counterparts. It is what it is. As long as you don’t play like you’re still a Real One, when you’re so far removed from your city’s heartbeat its funny (by no fault of your own, of course), you’ll be fine. Either accept it or live the tortured life of an ashy Black conservative. We all have our plights.
Anyway, back to sophomore year, 2005. Millington High School to Craigmont High. Where were we…
Right, yes, yes, how the whole ‘me’ part of me just wasn’t hitting. Not for myself, and apparently not for the rest of the Black Craigmont High population. And so, instead of hiding awkward, teen, closetedness devout Christian girl, (GIRL, okay?!) delicateness, I wanted out. I couldn’t deal. I wanted nothing more than to hide in plain sight while I figured this thing out, and you can’t hide around Black people who know what truth looks like.
So, Millington High School, which was about 50/50 Black and white at the time, seemed a better option. Plus, most Black people in Millington were different. Instead of being Memphis or Shelby County natives, most of them were army brats, just arriving from places like Guam and Korea. They had no context for my particular brand of weirdness (see: queerness) and therefore I could hide in plain sight around them, too. As long as I avoided the few Real Ones during my two and a half years there, which was fairly simple since they were the minority, I was good to go. And it felt nice. To blend in with a bunch of other nerds who were just as miserably insecure as me. I didn’t stand out at all.
But then I discovered Tokio Hotel. Or, more specifically, Bill Kaulitz, the ever-pale, makeup-donned German lead singer of Tokio Hotel. I’d never seen a more gorgeous, mysteriously androgynous creature in my entire life. One look at him and I knew, I was doomed because every wrong thing he was, I wanted to be.
But that, my friends, is not how you blend in. At all. Didn’t matter. I didn’t care. I needed some way to express myself that felt more real and free than this caricature of a “good girl” I’d been rocking. Plus, this was Millington. I figured I had more space to experiment without getting dragged.
So, what does a closeted queer who knows nothing of the terms “closeted” and/or “queer,” but just listened to a torrented version of From Under the Cork Tree by Fall Out Boy for the fourth time this Monday morning wear to feel good? You rock a black and white checkered zip-up hoodie you once saw Pete Wentz wearing on TRL.
On your feet are some knock-off vans because your mom refuses to pay more than twenty dollars for “flat, boy shoes.” And your mom won’t let you shave your sides so you secretly die the under-part of your relaxed, scene-grrl swoop purple, the part your parents won’t spot unless you dramatically flip it up, revealing your forehead, like you do constantly when hanging with your new, partially white, partially Black, very emo friends.
And you are not gay. Not ‘queer.’ You aren’t even a little bit strange. You’re emo. Maybe a scene kid, sometimes. And no one bats an eye because they’ve just seen the I Write Sins Not Tragedies premiere on TRL so none of this get-up phases them one bit.
I had this one good friend named Kelsey. A mixed emo kid with scraggly, bright yellow curls the color of Hayley’s from Paramore. She had a blood-red jacket she always wore that looked a lot like my checkered one, so when we walked together, we looked like a two-person punk band called Checkered Blood.
Kelsey was tall and commanded a room, and even though her black eyeliner was thick and her smile a little naughty, she had soft and sweet sad-girl eyes. I think this is why my mom let me keep hanging out with her.
Kelsey was like no friend I ever had. If the dirty boy in Charlie Brown was a house, it’d be hers. The tannish film over everything felt grungy—good grungy. And besides the subtle, though consistent, desire to puke at the smell, I liked going to Kelsey’s house. It was like going to a punk house, and that made me feel so cool.
Kelsey’s mom, a white lady, was a nurse and rarely home, and her mom’s also white boyfriend didn’t give two fucks about whatever we were up to. He spent most of his time playing Xbox in her living room, sometimes alone, other times with this other guy named Toby. He didn’t say much, barely even looked up, and that was perfectly fine with me. We could do whatever we wanted. Invite our friends, like this one Black anime-obsessed guy named Curtis, who I rarely saw outside of class because his parents were somehow stricter than mine. And we could leave Kelsey’s place on a whim. Whenever the mood struck.
I could even smoke if I wanted at Kelsey’s house. This fact titillated me. I loved that I could do it. And no, I did not. I’d just watch Kelsey smoke and felt very cool about it every single time. I liked to be around people who smoked weed. I liked to be around people who could tell their parents to shut up, who could drive their mom’s boyfriend’s car without a license to pick up Hot Cheetos and Snickers from Wallyworld around the corner, who could dye their hair all over, not just the undersides of their swoop.
Kelsey made me feel cool by association. The fact that she never did her homework, that she’d write gay Fruits Basket fanfiction during English exams—all of that only made me love her more. Because while Akito and Yuki made out in her notebook, I was furiously writing and erasing question B in hopes this grade would boost my chances of getting tapped into The National Honors Society. While she was getting caught smoking weed in the courtyard after school, I was at one of my many extracurriculars (show choir, student counsel, jazz choir) counting down the minutes till we’d meet again. We balanced each other out.
Kelsey strangely liked how my family would eat dinner at 6pm sharp. I liked how the only way we’d eat dinner most days at her place was if we threw together some ramen concoction in her kitchen by ourselves.
My favorite thing about Kelsey had absolutely nothing to do with her bad girl demeanor at all, though. Nope, my favorite thing about Kelsey is that, she too, was a devout Christian teen. I’m talking down-on-your-knees-for-prayer-before-bedtime-Christian. And since none of my siblings gave a flying duck about religion, and my Mom had already made it very clear that I didn’t need to do all this, I didn’t have too many outlets to express Christian fandom. It was great.
Me and Kelsey could talk about how hot Hayley was, and how we couldn’t wait to swoon at her feet come the next Warped Tour, but we could do it without being gay because, duh, we were Christian, and Christians aren’t gay. Definitely not emo Christians. Are you out of your mind?
But of course, we were both very, very gay. Still, every one of our crushes from Gerard way to Ciara were shrouded in “innocent emo giddiness.” Our favorite thing was to hit up Christian screamo shows at the local indoor skatepark. She first invited me to one when I told her I got my parents to baptize me when I was 10.
“That’s so cool. I was just baptized as a baby, like I don’t even know if I would have done it on my own.” She said.
Compliments from Kelsey were like shots of adrenaline. I’d get hyped up every time. I loved how she went up for me finding Christianity on my own. She’d say it made me cooler than anyone who was just born into it. I’d sit there, chest puffed out to Timbuktu. Then she’d point to a blurry picture on her flip phone of some cute screamo band, because Kelsey was cool enough to have one of those at 15.
“I think you’ll really like these guys. The main one, Bryan, is like, very screamo, but he’ll be saying shit like, “Thank God I didn’t die, you know?” It’s tight.”
I loved when she cussed. I couldn’t even say “dang” at home without my parents talking ‘bout some, Aht, aht, too close to the other word!
We’d spend hours furiously bobbing our heads to local Christian screamo bands off Kelsey’s burned CDs. We also loved bands like Emery, The Devil Wears Prada, Underoath. I liked how she never put the bigger bands on any pedestal. Very punk rock.
“Dang, they are tight!” I’d agree, wishing quietly the cop in my head would have let me have ‘damn’ this one time.
I even rocked an Underoath shirt Kelsey gave me to one of the local shows. Well, that along with the slightest bit of black liner and a serious scene swoop that drooped over my right glasses’ lens. Baby. I felt grown.
The skatepark was in the whitest part of Shelby County I’d ever been in—Bartlett. It’s the part of town my parents wouldn’t let me practice driving because the cops over there are known to pull over a young Black driver in a heartbeat. But that night, beside my tall, pretty much passing friend Kelsey, surrounded by all those punk rock white kids, I could get away with more.
There I was, the Black exception. Feeling mighty special about it, too. That’s how you get seeped in. You walk around feeling like the coolest kid around, cause these white kids who get to do whatever the hell they want accept you.
“Let’s head up front,” Kelsey said.
When we got there, it wasn’t too crowded yet. There were a few booths repping local bands and shops scattered around the outskirts of the warehouse-turned-show-venue. Some sold jewelry. Others, mixed CDs. In front of us were two huge doors that led to an outdoor area with a taco food truck and a few fold-out seats.
A smattering of teens our age, and some kids who looked no more than 21 but were not at all high schoolers walked around. Slowly, of course, because cool kids walk real slow. This was a tough thing for me to learn, as I, to this day, walk like Freddy Krueger’s on my case.
I’d tense up when I saw another Black person, constantly afraid they might be a Real One who would clock my game immediately; Gay. Corny. Wack. I knew that at any one of these shows was at least one group of all-Black punk kids who didn’t try and opt out of their Blackness or weirdness to be part of the scene. They were a fearless group to me, of which I surely didn’t see myself fitting into, because I knew they could see that I was not like them. I was not fearless. I was hiding. Surrounded by folks who were supposed to be my cover. Kelsey and me were the only non-white folks in our crew. I liked it that way. I couldn’t tell you then why I liked it, or why I liked that in the right lighting, Kelsey looked like one of them. And I didn’t even want to know why I felt this way. It was honestly much easier to just avoid, avoid, avoid.
By 8:30, it seemed like every emo kid in Shelby County was packed into that space. Every style of platform black boot and loafer you’ll ever see in your life was planted firmly in front of that stage. Finally, the DJ turned up the background music playing in surrounding speakers. It was a song I recognized by Cool Hand Luke.
Setting up on the small stage in front of us was one of Kelsey’s favorites, a local band called Follow. She’d gotten an autograph from the lead singer, Bryan, on the top of her hand and, in true Kelsey fashion, managed to not wash it off for over a week. By this time, we were a can of sardines, packed in the middle part in front of the stage, staring up at Bryan as he tuned his guitar with this stoic, albeit gorgeous, squint. I liked his face. I liked most emo-boy faces. Gentle, tortured. Perfectly framed in black liner and spikey and/or messy hair.
As if out of nowhere, Bryan yelled into the mic, “Ya’ll ready to fucking party?”
That can of sardines started vibrating like a washing machine. We became one organism, waving, rocking, bopping to a continuous beat and right behind me. Unh! My first hit of the night. Right in my backside.
We were smack dab in the middle of a mosh pit, and there was no turning back now. I looked over at Kelsey. She shoved back. I guess that’s what you do, I thought, so I shoved too, which you might have guessed leads to more shoving. Those first few shoves were nothing compared to when Follow sang the first note to their very first song. Bam! The party really started. Somehow it was always the biggest, tallest white boys jabbing my back and sides. Every single time. But there was no escaping, no, this was a sea of white rage, as far as the eye could see. I was trapped.
And by trapped, you might think I feared it, hated it. No, no, don’t misunderstand. Yer boi was having a blast—the time of my life. Every hit was the sweet, sweet pain of a punch towards my salvation. I’d made it. I was officially an emo kid, and nobody could tell me any different. And I was in the trenches. I was shoving back! I was surrounded by kids who lived and breathed this life, and I was one of them. Finally, not just cool by association. I was so excited I didn’t even notice the inch-by-inch shove closer and closer to the stage, to the point that Kelsey and I were literally up against it, the front of the stage folding into our stomachs with every hit.
I threw up my hands and waved them in the air while my body rocked here and there, only bringing them down to shove back the hardest hitters. I was a bobble head of excitement, grinning big up at Bryan who seemed to be feeding off our energy, screaming louder and louder and even more incoherently into the mic than how he’d started. Living.
He started jumping. We started jumping. He threw up a fist at the part about Jesus and we and all these white kids joined in. This single organism was very much in-sync. And then, he kicked me. He kicked, a classic, straight-out kick into the air, only it wasn’t just air. Because my face was directly in front of his foot, and so I, ever so graciously, caught the end of his swing. Right in between the eyes. Down went my glasses. Black went my vision. I don’t even know what happened in the next few moments, only the part where I tapped back into life, with Kelsey’s arm around me. A small hollow ring around my silhouette as folks watched me hobble to my feet.
“I’m okay!” I promised and before I closed my mouth after that ‘y’ the kids swarmed all over again, recreating that pit as if it never left us. Kelsey was able to squeeze me out in the milliseconds between the re-swarm, but my glasses? Lost in the abyss.
“There’s no way we’re gonna find them in there!” Kelsey yelled over the music, which never stopped by the way, “Should we wait until it stops?”
We squeezed through the crowd and watched from afar. Then waited beside a jewelry booth that sold these things called gauges that I’d never seen before. Note to self: gauges are cool. And I, the true emo kid I was, nodded my bruised little head as hard I could to every song until Follow’s set was done. Couldn’t see a thing. I found my glasses in two parts—luckily salvageable with a bit of tape until my parents took me to the eye doctor a month later. But to me, it was all worth it. Because after Follow hopped off stage, the lead singer sauntered over to me and Kelsey and said,
“Yo, was that you up front? You okay?”
I died.
Life was the Doc Martin boot of a pale-bodied Christian screamo singer and I was a bruised ego, ready to be healed.
Oct 22nd cant get here quick enough. I'm excited for this book!
Nice to virtually meet you also!