“So many things, so many experiences, seem to be about the breaking of a woman, and not the mending of her.”
This line from “At My Gynecologist, the Ghost Gloves Go to the Garbage and the Too-Green Girls Become a Little Less Green” the first essay in Exodus Octavia Brownlow’s razor-sharp collection, I’m Afraid That I Know Too Much About Myself Now, To Go Back To Who I Knew Before, And Oh Lord, Who Will I Be After I’ve Known All That I Can?, sets the table for what’s to come. In a series of essays, following her own growing up, Brownlow shares experiences and observations on how the world seeks to put down and demean women, Black women in particular. The essays center Black women in relation to one another and to the larger world. The book’s third offering, “Stories from my Grandma’s Body”, follows the author’s thoughts on the day before her Grandma is to begin a diet. She tenderly recounts her Grandma’s history with longing and beauty.
“Stories from her breasts, where babies have sipped, and slept, and grew. … Stories from her hands that have slapped against reluctant biscuit dough, and against my rebellious brown bottom.” Brownlee’s prose is intimate and flowing as she pushes back against the idea of diet, wishing that her Grandma could live forever in her “big, beautiful body.”
In the second set of essays, Brownlow tackles the complexity of hair for Black women. She describes the processes for Black hair care – which of course vary with the style, her decision to go natural, and the historical and social implications of the choices made by Black women in this regard. Early in the first essay, “Love & Nappiness: On Hair, Race and Self-Worth 2016”, she addresses the question of “why the hell hair matters so much to the black community?” She then gives us definitions of good and bad hair, followed by a funny but painful scale upon which Black women are rated for attractiveness involving hair, African features (or lack of), and body shape. We learn about her hair journey and “nappiversary”. In writing through her process and decision-making, Brownlow gives us a close window into her thoughts and emotions at different stages and the reactions from others along the way. And lest someone who looks like me, might think, It’s just hair, what’s the big deal?, she hits us with the line, “Appearances are important, when black girls are suspended from school for literally wearing their hair as it naturally grows from their scalps.”
In the third set of essays, Brownlow’s takes us up to the present. We see her with her grandmother again, and we see her moving through the South, the complexities of the past and present intertwined. In “We Deserve More Black Stories with Happy Endings”, she writes: “Yes, I want to write the happy endings despite all of the obstacles, and I am aware that happy endings for black people exist, but in many ways, they are simply conditional. Conditional, until we are pulled over by the wrong kind of cop.” This line leaps off the page, showing us how a happy ending in a Black life can explode in any moment. In her last essay, Brownlow describes being told by an older white man that she reminds him of the “old south.” Is that the south with “whites only” bathrooms, the America with sundown towns, a nation with slavery, or the current south with confederate statues which still loom over the town square?
Reading Brownlow, these questions and so many more, hit us square on. Among her many gifts as a writer is to dance between the present and the past, the idealist and the realist, and the verbiage of the academic and the parlance of the storyteller.
In a recent New York Times essay on the mid-twentieth century Black novelist Chester Himes, the writer S.A. Cosby says of Himes: “His implacable drive to examine the Black experience, the disingenuous nature of the American dream, the reality of pain and sorrow and what it does to the soul – that is what makes him the bard of the existential African American psyche.”
With this collection of unsparing essays, Brownlow puts herself squarely in this tradition. One can only hope that as we get more work from this remarkable writer, that the moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice, and that there may be movement toward happy endings.