fugitive knowledge of Black femininity

Dear Miss Craft,

Lately I have been thinking about the fugitive knowledge of Black femininity. When I say Black femininity I’m not talking about Black womanhood. Kind of like when I talk about being free, I’m not talking about freedom. Freedom is a condition that a state power gifts to you.  Free just is. Free is like breathing, unrestricted for the those privileged with full life. 

We been defining ourselves on the defensive. Rightfully so. During your context, the Victorian audiences constructed Black women to be laboring machines, prostitutes, and objects of scorn. Unworthy of consent. Unworthy of protection. Unworthy of humanity.  Black womanhood has been defined as the condition juxtaposed against White womanhood. Meaning the condition of Black womanhood was created for the existence of White womanhood.

Your performance of gender, race, and class pushed the boundaries of what these conditions all mean. You contributed to national dialogues on femininity, masculinity, blackness, and whiteness, and I must ask you, how did you steal away your Black feminine knowledge?

You identified “the true woman's role as spiritual center.” Given what your role was in the condition of slavery, the state told you that was an impossibility. You were to be a devoid, over-sexed, abject, hopeless black whole. But little did they know, Black wholes are boundless, infinite and mostly undiscovered. Did you put your Black femininity there? Does it exist in a different universe? Is bound by age or time? Do you have access to your ancestors?

I am inquiring metaphysically because in this context, it was never meant to survive. 

Fugitives. You composed, manufactured, packaged, sold, and resold to white audiences. 

Your escape from this world required you to perform masculinity, whiteness, and privilege in order for your femininity to exist. It feels deeper than the condition of womanhood. It is far more expansive than dress. I am asking these questions because Black womanhood has been given to me, but I’m trying to understand my Black femininity.