Introduction
A book called Carefree Black Girls could be about a lot of things, and so I want to start by giving you some sense of what this book is and what it is not. I wrote the bulk of these essays during the most difficult time in my life thus far. Between 2018 and 2020 (years that spanned the traumatic sea change of my Saturn Return), I felt as though I were in a never-ending emotional spiral, a constant falling. This feeling was only intensified by the fact that the world, too, was spiraling, a series of unfortunate events springing up one right after another: the morbid absurdity of the 45 presidency, the revelations of the #MeToo movement, the continued rise of the alt-right and neo-fascism and MAGA fanatics, livestreamed mass shootings, global protests against police brutality, the hell of the last U.S. presidential election and its aftermath, the wildfires in California and Australia, the widespread loss of life due to COVID-19, violent attacks against the Asian American community, black squares on Instagram, and the relentlessness of Black death.
While we were all collectively grappling with the existential dread brought on by these upheavals, several personal, world-burning occurrences happened to me in quick succession. I recovered long-repressed memories of sexual assault, some visceral, some hazily defined. I fell into the deepest state of depression and anxiety I have ever experienced in my life. I became a citizen of the United States after a period of living in precarity as an unwanted immigrant. I turned thirty. I attempted to take my own life, twice.
Prior to the suicide attempts, I had stopped regularly leaving my apartment for weeks that gradually turned into months on end. The longest stretch (in which I only ever ventured into my building’s lobby to pick up fast-food delivery) was four months. This hermiting, mind you, began long before the days of COVID-19 and social distancing. In March 2020, when people were just starting to get used to the idea of working from home and avoiding strangers, I had already been consistently doing both for months. The virus merely heightened and validated my desire to hide, to burrow into my little corner of melancholy and anxiety and neuroses.
Not leaving my apartment had nothing to do with a fear of the world. It had everything to do with a fear of being myself in the world. Facing depression and trauma, especially trauma that you have been avoiding for nearly a lifetime, forces you to question who you are and where you stand. What is real and what isn’t? It’s as though every cell in your body is changing and you are painfully transforming, bit by bit, into an entirely new human being. There’s no room for dishonesty when you’re going through that kind of transition. There’s nowhere to hide. And so, being a person in the world felt like an impossibility, because in order to be “out” and be “on,” I believed that I had to be dishonest, to pretend as though I was OK when I wasn’t.
On the rare occasions when I did go into the office (where I worked full-time as a culture writer for HuffPost), I felt like a robot with some sort of glitch. I felt defective. How could I do my morning commute, go to meetings, and make small talk with my colleagues when I could barely get out of bed? How could I answer even a mundane question like “how are you?” with “I’m fine,” knowing that the real answer was “I haven’t slept in seven days and I feel like I’m beginning to see things from the corner of my eye”?
Until I could say I was fine and truly mean it, leaving my apartment was too exposing. Instead, I did the thing I’ve always done when I try to cope with bad feelings—I wrapped myself up in the warm cocoon of my home and disappeared into movies, into TV shows, into the internet. I discovered and rediscovered things that made me feel warm and seen and safe. I rewatched old seasons of Girlfriends and Moesha, listened to albums like Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun and Junglepussy’s Satisfaction Guaranteed and Minnie Riperton’s Perfect Angel on repeat as a meditation, read Claudia Rankine and Octavia Butler and Saidiya Hartman and felt my heart catch in my throat. I watched, over and over again, a 30-second clip from a Nina Simone interview in which she declares, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear!” Slowly, bit by fragile bit, I wrote.
All this to say: the essays in this book came together as I fell apart. And writing about Black women is the thing that put me together again, that got me through, and helped me become reacquainted with the concept of joy and freedom.
I’m constantly, maybe even obsessively, thinking about what it means to be a Black woman who writes about pop culture. A Black woman who watches. I have been writing, mostly about film and television, for over ten years. In my work, in the conversations I have online and offline, there is a truth I always find myself coming back to: Black women are everything. To say that Black women are everything, that they are indeed a driving force if not the driving force of popular culture, is not intended as some pithy, abstracted, tweet-able declaration, a slogan to slap onto a t-shirt or a coffee mug. To say that Black women are everything, are indeed essential to American culture, to the global zeitgeist, is simply to observe things as they actually are.
Arguably the most celebrated and influential pop stars within the last decade and the current one are two Black women: Beyoncé and Rihanna. Both have defined and then redefined what it means to reside at the intersection of business and artistry. Visual storytellers, including Ava DuVernay, Michaela Coel, Issa Rae, Mara Brock Akil, Misha Green, Dee Rees, Janet Mock, and Shonda Rhimes, have changed the film and television industries from the inside out by creating stories centered on Black characters who look, behave, and live lives radically different from anything that’s been seen before.
On Instagram, baddies and models of every ethnicity rock fashion and beauty trends that Black women either created or popularized: cornrows, oversized door knocker earrings, long, intricately designed acrylic nails, artfully sculpted baby hairs. Other so-called beauty trends are imitations of the actual physical attributes of many Black women. People pay small fortunes for lips, asses, and melanated skin tones modeled after Black women (whether the people getting these treatments are conscious of it or not) to be carved, pumped, and injected into their non-Black bodies.
Yet the culture that Black women pour their talents and their creativity into, the culture that emulates Black women, steals from Black women, needs Black women, is the same culture that belittles Black women, excludes Black women, ignores Black women. One moment, Beyoncé is hailed as a pop cultural deity who can do no wrong (a kind of praise that leaves little room for her humanity or meaningful critique). Another moment, the internet debates whether her daughter Blue Ivy, a beautiful little Black girl, is ugly because she has inherited the features of her father, Jay-Z (wide nose, thick lips). Exploring that unreality, that state of being seen but unseen, essential but unacknowledged, loved but disrespected, is part of what this book is about.
In 2013, I was the first person to tweet #carefreeblackgirl, which eventually became a popular phrase used to celebrate Black women, much like #BlackGirlMagic and #flexinmycomplexion. The tweet was auto-posted from an Instagram post, a blurry picture of my then twenty-four-year-old self smiling in front of my alma mater, The New School, captioned with: I go to school to give looks, then I leave. #carefreeblackgirl
Only a few hours before I posted that tweet and that picture, I was fantasizing about suicide the way one would fantasize about a lover. This was several weeks after my birthday, which had put me in an implacable funk. I was experiencing that need to hide that often sets in when I’m sad, an uneasiness with being seen, heightened by feeling invisible. I was mired in an incredibly dense sense of darkness, the kind of darkness that’s easy to disappear into if you are not careful. And I wasn’t careful—I egged myself on. Yes, I told myself. You do not matter. If I didn’t matter, I concluded, I quite obviously shouldn’t exist.
In retrospect, the image of myself huddled over a laptop, searching YouTube for informative videos on “how to safely overdose,” is morbidly funny to me, even though in the moment it was very much the opposite. It was during this search that I came across (or the Universe’s algorithm arranged for me to see) a link to a Josephine Baker documentary on YouTube. I still don’t know how, given the state of mind that I was in, I was able to muster the energy and the curiosity to click on the thumbnail, but I did.
I was astonished that America could produce such a person and then reject her. I was transported by the story of her life, her journey from poor St. Louis–born Freda Josephine McDonald to ~*Josephine Baker*~, the first international Black superstar. I was even more transported by the story of her body in movement, the signature dips and curls that catapulted her to fame in 1920s Paris. One clip in particular held me enough that I played it twice: an excerpt of Baker dancing in the 1927 film La Revue des revues. Just twenty-one, she is in the center of some chic cafe entirely populated with white patrons dressed in tuxedos and gowns.
Baker is dressed in something short and fringey with patches of what looks to be leopard skin. She is the most elegant, the chicest, the coolest woman in the room, her body moving with a rhythm and poetry that can only be described as Black. I remember watching her spiral and twirl and flip, contort her face into odd but satisfying expressions, her eyes suggesting a knowing sarcasm. I remember feeling lifted. The image of her spiraling body pulled me out of my own spiral. Knowing that someone like Baker had existed in the world I lived in lit something up inside me. When the documentary was over, I made a gesture toward existing, an assertion that I mattered, even if I didn’t fully believe that yet. Social media has always been a great place for pretending, for playing, for projecting some idealized version of self. A way to hide in plain sight. I posted the selfie and the hashtag. An attempt to be carefree.
Turning to art and turning to Black women has always been the road by which I come back to myself. I collect images of Black women like precious jewels: Josephine Baker twirling; little Troy from Crooklyn, hair braided and beaded, smirking directly into the camera; Mel B of the Spice Girls with her pierced tongue stuck way out, kicking a leopard-print bell-bottom-clad leg high into the air; Marsha P. Johnson with red and yellow flowers in her hair, her smile resplendent; Audre Lorde standing in front of a chalkboard with the words “Women are powerful and dangerous” scrawled across it; the bones moving smoothly beneath the skin of my grandmother’s hands as she pounded yam and cassava into fufu. These images, disparate and disconnected, are all expressions, in a sense, of who I am. That’s what this book is about, too: how images of Black women have helped inform and form my own image of myself and allowed me to understand myself.
This book is also a meditation on a single idea: what it means to be a Black woman and truly be “carefree.” What does it mean to define ourselves, to cling to our right to complexity, in spite of everything? Every essay in this book wrestles with that question—how can any one image, any one label, any one hashtag, properly convey this complexity?
The journey of Black women in the culture, of the culture, has been a fraught one. It has also been incredibly beautiful. Hopefully, whoever you are, reading this, you find inspiration in that beauty. And hopefully you are reminded that Black women are essential. Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are culturally and historically relevant, worthy of being shared, heard, awarded, nerded out over, explored, analyzed, debated, referenced, lovingly critiqued. Most of all, our stories are our own to tell.
As I write this, I’m thinking of the Black women whose influence has permeated throughout mainstream culture over the last several hundred years, the actors, writers, artists, curators, musicians, activists, athletes, and more who have healed me in some way, mostly just by existing. I’d like to name just some of these people, to hold a space of honor and gratitude for them. I encourage you to return to this page often and look up each name, one by one, whenever you need to feel inspired or seen or activated in some way: Althea Gibson, Dorothy Dandridge, Cicely Tyson, Claudette Colvin, Dr. Mae Jemison, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Moms Mabley, Whitney Houston, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia E. Butler, Bessie Smith, Florynce Kennedy, Lil’ Kim, Thelma Golden, Melanie B, Queen Latifah, Madam C. J. Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Julie Dash, Robin Givhan, Saidiya Hartman, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Trina McGee, Gabby Douglas, Nella Larsen, Cheryl Clarke, Shirley Chisholm, Yara Shahidi, Cree Summer, Tarana Burke, Salt-N-Pepa, Kelis, Neneh Cherry, Octavia St. Laurent, Marsha P. Johnson, June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, Gladys Bentley, Tracey “Africa” Norman, Misty Copeland, Wilma Rudolph, Linda Martell, Yaba Blay, Mari Copeny, Thandiwe Newton, Nina Mae McKinney, Maya Angelou, Erykah Badu, Vilissa Thompson, Phyllis Hyman, Naomi Campbell, Pam Grier, Mary Church Terrell, Laverne Cox, Kasi Lemmons, Ethel Waters, Marielle Franco, Poly Styrene, Cheryl Dunye, Grace Jones, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Munroe Bergdorf, Genevieve Nnaji, Angela Bowen, Sojourner Truth, Gabourey Sidibe, Skin, Mariama Bâ, Shingai Shoniwa, Ruby Dee, Billie Holiday, Angela Davis, Ruth E. Carter, Eartha Kitt, Toni Morrison, Mahen Bonetti, Alice Coltrane, Serena Williams, SZA, Tracee Ellis Ross, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Aaron Philip, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Toni Cade Bambara, Patricia Okoumou, Aïssa Maïga, Tiffany Haddish, Phillis Wheatley, Assata Shakur, Nichelle Nichols, Angelica Ross, Faith Couch, Lupita Nyong’o, Junglepussy, Nikki Giovanni, Solange, Toyin Salau.
Finally, what this book is not: a history, an explainer, a guide, or a map to Blackness. There are some things I do not wish to overexplain because there is a freedom, an easiness, in not having to explain, and in inviting those who are unfamiliar to do the work on their own. There’s a freedom, too, in not having all the answers. I’m straight, I’m cis, I don’t have a visible disability. I came of age in America, but I am not African American. My experience is unique, thus my perspective is unique—but not definitive. This book does not aspire to define Black womanhood but to challenge and explore the tenuous definitions that already exist.
Most of all, most importantly, this book is an offering.
Copyright © 2021 by Zeba Blay
