Part I

I’ll riff, there are five Wednesdays left in 2025, and, in homage to Toni Cade Bambara, I am Working At It In Five Parts. The ‘It’ in question is the it that is on, freedom also known as love, love also known as freedom, also known as what we do it for (same it, and by we I also mean me...). You may sense that this subject cannot be contained within five rinky dinky notes in five rinky dinky weeks. No matter, it is the jumpoff, it is the continuation.

Mark Woolsey Chapman, my uncle, would have turned 67 today. He is one of the people who I write to, write with. He has been an ancestor for 44 years. I return here to celebrate him. I return here to continue the study.

My mom’s birthday is on Friday (Happy Almost Birthday!). The two were born 363 days apart, my mom first. Every year on December 4th, Mark would taunt my mom because they were the same age for one day. He would really milk it.

From what I’ve gathered, they had a fierce rivalry and camaraderie throughout their childhoods. They faced a lot together, kept each other in the ways they could.

I am thinking about rivalry because I am thinking about freedom: about how both ask something of you. Both have been known to provoke, to ask for a person’s best. Both require participation, and, I think, both also, strangely, prompt affection.

At the feet of this rivalry, this celebration, this fierce love that pulls no punches, I return to the beginning: it’s because it’s on. It’s on, like a fight. It’s on, like a dance, it’s on like awestruck speechlessness. These words that provoked me more than four years ago, that gathered me, from June Jordan:

My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You being with your family and the kids on your block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back to your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage.

And then if you’re lucky, and I have been lucky, everything comes back to you. And then you know why one of the freedom fighters in the sixties, a young Black woman interviewed shortly after she was beaten up for riding near the front of an interstate bus—you know why she said, ‘We are all so very happy.”

Happiness (joy) on, because struggle for freedom on; as in, thank you for having me. Thank you for asking something of me.

I look to ones like June Jordan, like the woman she nods at here, “the ones who took on the work of freedom, who understand it as synonymous with love.”2 This freedom-love/love-freedom paradoxically accepts you exactly as you are and prompts you to change. It is born of rivalry, of camaraderie.

As in, Haha, tomorrow, we are the same age. For just one day, each year, we are the same age. Between our arrivals, apart, we are, for a little while, together, if we say so; if fight for it.