People, Places & Things

 
 
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Evelyn Redcross, Foreue
Evelyn Redcross removed the cap off the 2 ounce bottle of room freshener and instructed me to stand back. “I spray over here and you let the scent come to you,” she said.  She pushed the pump only once but within seconds, the room was filled with the gentle fragrance of Lime. “Man that smells really, really good,” I said, as I savored the scent   Usually, my senses do not take kindly to sweet smells, in particular artificial aromas like room fresheners and perfumes. But this was really soft and reminded me of pleasing to that palette feeling you get from drinking a glass of lemonade. Corny, I know, but true. “You don’t need to use much just one squirt should be enough,” she said. “Some room fresheners, you have to keep squirting, you know?” Yeah, I know. I had stopped using air fresheners years ago and opted for boiling spices and herbs on the stove but this sray, I could stand. 

The Lime-Wood room freshener is just one items being sold under the moniker of Foreue natural skin products, which are vegan-friendly and not tested on animals. Hand and body lotions, soaps and facial astringents round out most of the product line.  I hadn’t planned on purchasing anything that day; better managing my discretionary dollars had been at the forefront of my mind for a minute.  But Redcross infectious smile, coupled with my sudden thirst for a glass of lemonade, convinced me that I could splurge - maybe just a little. 
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October Gallery
Ironically, I arrived at the Foreue table only after touring an amazing art collection at the October Gallery, which specializes in the artwork by mostly African American artist. Nestled on the tree-lined residential block of Green Street (6353 Greene Street), the secondary space for the October Gallery is a bit deceiving – particularly if you are expecting a store-front, retail shop with big glass windows rather than an actual house (I actually drove pass the gallery twice before I noticed the sandwich board sign on the sidewalk). However, the home-like feel serves as a wonderful way to showcase how certain pieces might look on your own walls or propped up on your mantle.  In the kitchen, a woman boiled corn on the stove in preparation for the ArtNik, which was happening later on in the afternoon, while nearby a stirring picture by Amachi Omenihu inconspicuously hanged on the wall.  In the converted dining room, Mercer Redcross, proprietor of the Gallery, perfomed his managerial duties of paper work, while the black women figurines by Annie Lee frolicked behind him.

“Are you a collector,” asked Mercer, as I walked through and admired the pieces.  I nodded accordingly.  I told him how I began collecting earlier this year, after being hip to the amazing artistry that goes into protest posters.  Mercer and I engage in a discussion about how many artist present both social and political themes in their pieces without it necessarily being overly overt.  He shifted through a bunch of prints, which had been sprawled across a table and shows me prints from Laura Cooper’s White Mask series.  Sometimes an artist draws inspiration from the political and social climates that exist during the time in which they lived, he told me. I thought about it for a second, it made sense.

I didn’t purchase any artwork that day as my rigid budget wouldn’t permit it.  However, I left the gallery with my newly purchase bottle of room freshener in my eco-friendly paper bag and a new frame of mind. Like the bottle of freshener, it is the subtle messages in an art piece that once discovered and appreciated, could be just a powerful as if the message was sitting your face.
 
 
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Many moons ago, my dad and I were having a conversation about MY musical taste (my dad and I regularly had conversations about MY preferences and how they were all wrong). At the time and like many black urban area youth, I was heavily into Hip-Hop, with a splash of R&B.  I would bob my head to Wu-Tang for breaksfast, sit back and mack with Biggie for Lunch and C-Walk it out to Dre Dre and Snoop Dogg for Dinner. Yes, if you asked me back then, I would have thrown up some sort of made-up gang sign and told you that I was hip-hop for life.  Matter of fact, that's what I told my father, when he asked why I would I listen to that "noise."  

"Young lady, all that rap will kill your brain cells, perhaps you should start listening to some real music.  Some Jazz," he said.

My father was certain that I would mature out of hip-hop for a more "adult" genre of music.  As irked as I was at my father for mocking my musical styling, I would later find out that he was right - and wrong at the same time. I still bob my head to the hip-hop greats but I have also, as my father would say, matured to appreciate all genres of black music: from afro-beats to afro-punk; hip-hop to yes, even jazz. If it has a great beat, rhythm or tempo, I'm grooving to it.

Most ironically, my father, who is a mature man in his 50s, is the proud owner of the Notorious Biggie Smalls' Ready to Die CD. Go Figure.    

   
 
 
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“In honor of Juneteenth Independence Day, I ain’t doing a muthertruckin’ thing – I think my ancestors would have wanted that way. “

That was my Facebook Status update from this past Saturday, half jesting, half serious.  In previous years, I have preferred not to participate in honoring the day, in which a Calvary of Black Soldier arrived at a plantation in Galveston, Texas to read the proclamation to my distant enslaved ancestors that our supposedly freedom was granted from our oppressors. I always questioned the logic of celebrating our collective freedom, when so many of our brothers and sisters remain enslaved through the prison industrial complex, inferior education systems, disparities in health care and of course, mental oppression.  And less not forget, our Spanish-speaking brothers and sisters, who according to Race-Talk, are the new face of enslaved people here in America.  With so much work to be done on the liberation front, what exactly is there to celebrate?

Needless to say, attending the first annual (and revived) Juneteenth Day along the 6300 block of Germantown Avenue wasn’t initially on the top of my list of things to do. However, I ran into a friend, Deborah Gray, owner of the Coloring Book Gallery Children’s Bookstore, located at 6353 Germantown Avenue, who urged me to come through. Paraphrasing Gray, “There’s going to be food, a drumming circle and of course, you can check out my store.”  According to Gray, the Coloring Book is the country’s the oldest multicultural children's bookstore.  Recently relocating from Northern Virginia, the shop with the pretty blue façade, which also sits along a stretch of Germantown Avenue where the great majority of businesses are black-owned, has the privilege of being the city’s only children bookstore. So as a lover of books and sometimes children, how could I refuse the invitation?

While I arrived too early for meat of the festivities, which kicked off later on in the afternoon (I had a class to teach which prohibited me from staying too long) I did manage to catch the reenactment of the life of Harriet Tubman (the condensed version, of course) and check out Gray’s bookstore (see video below).  And as I walked passed by the storefront displays tributing the many facts of black history at several of the businesses along the Avenue, I was hit with the sudden awareness of how our educational system does a piss poor job of actually educating, and how little is known of our history in and before this country. And while the displays themselves were of the no-frills, generic kind (basic black history facts on cardboard cut-outs), these businesses – these black businesses – are doing a service of keeping our history alive (and inspiring a thirst of knowledge) for the younger generation, who has to maneuver in a society that wants them to “get over it” and assimilate. And I would be remised if I didn’t mention the spiritual connection between our ancestors of past, who’s slaved for someone else’s gain, and the black businesses along the Avenue, who’s were now free to reap the reward of their own labor.

So, is the celebration of Juneteenth Independence Day premature? Perhaps. However a big part of liberation involves the re-education of our people and if the honoring of this day brings forth a new, or renewed, sense of self, than let the celebration begins.