The Tables

Memory, I have learned over and over again, can be medicine. Were I to map this knowing — to chart a path, forward and backward and beyond — my navigational tools would certainly take me back to the tables. Virtually every table where we feasted and prayed, held steady under the weight of our stories (spoken and silenced) of sex, pregnancies, touch, desire, and abortion. There they were. The kitchen table was set with lace (rarely) and placemats (often), and the daily detritus of newspapers, water bills, bottles of vitamins, crystal water glasses, a few perfume samples from Hudson Belk (before their final destination on a mirrored vanity or in a lingerie drawer), a clear bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce with nearly neon green peppers floating in vinegar, and the little ceramic napkin holder Great-Grandpa painted down in Savannah. The children’s table was for graham crackers and Friday’s fish and potatoes, with white bread to prevent little throats from choking on bones of whiting or croaker. There were the communion tables, with the Episcopal and Catholic chalices holding real wine. Several of these same Black South Episcopalians and Catholics would spread the gospel of sex education, through demonstrations of condoms in the 1940s and condoms again in the 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic.

Then there were those countless cafeteria tables. So many teachers in the family, so many degrees, so many moves from one district to another. The cafeteria ladies, the altar guild, the physical education teachers, the grocery store clerks, the big kids who got to stay out late and held the privilege of choosing the radio station and adjusting the TV antennas, the “icy ladies” and cake ladies, the dorm matrons — they all knew the things they knew. Some things were held quiet and some things were shouted from pulpits. The heat in us still rose like pine sap. The periods still came. The late-night cookie baking sessions were accompanied by the sharing of secrets or the hope of secrets to come. Once in a while, we’d get away with playing an Uncle Luke cassette in the midst of it all. In my family, sometimes, we talked about it, all of it. Sometimes we talked about it right there at the tables.

It’s hard to believe it’s been over 20 years since I birthed a little human, my child, who is now grown and uses they/them pronouns, so I do, too. Their presence was announced with a dream, like so much Black South news. In the dream, stars appeared above a sea churning with ancestral breath. One of those stars was my child. While there was the air of destiny about their conception and earliest fish-leaping pronouncements in my belly, the power undergirding it all was choice. I had chosen the path of motherhood. It was not forced upon me. With determination I sought out a midwife who would advocate for my autonomy in birthing, a right I knew had been held back from so many women, especially Black women, and most definitely Black South women. Hadn’t I walked from Grandma Anne’s house to the South Carolina State Capitol, where a monument stood of J. Marion Sims, the torturous “Father of Gynecology”?

In defiance, yes, but also as an act of love, I chose a midwife for this rite of passage. I chose. The night my water broke, the midwife on call was a Black woman, who also has deep AfroCarolina roots. She talked me through it all. She caught my baby, easing them into this realm. 

A day later, chatting over hospital paperwork, she noticed my father’s name. He was a Junior and a James, just like her mother’s high school sweetheart, the man her mother reunited with after becoming widowed and he had divorced. She was the woman I knew Grandpa James looked at like honey on biscuits. They had found each other after 40 years, give or take. I had heard of this love story. And there it was shining all over my hospital room through a newborn great-grandchild of James. His sweetheart’s daughter, the midwife, had pulled that baby into a new world.

We were astonished, of course, but took it as an ancestral blessing, bright as the stars in my dream. Grandpa had given our midwife’s mother, his sweetheart, a love token with some serious significance: his family’s hand-carved oak table. His own mother, a widow and washerwoman, made meals there, folded clothes there. Our midwife gifted us the table, where we still feast and pray. When I fight for chosen motherhood, my fight is tethered, like an umbilicus, to a tradition of knowing and naming what Black South autonomous birth has meant for me and mine. This too is reproductive justice.

I have a photo of my parents at a cafeteria table on the campus of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. My mother appears pensive, as she often was. Her Afro is magnificent in its reach. This is, I learned as a teenager, around the time of her pre-Roe v. Wade abortion. 

I learned the story of this moment from my father, as my mother had passed away when I was a child.  I’m sure he noticed my growing interest in Harlequin romance novels and my attempts to sneak a late-night call on my telephone (the one Aunt Effie bought me that looked like a red-lacquered mouth). I had taken to writing and reading love poems as well as sneaking eyeliner to create a Jody Watley cat-eye look while singing “Looking for a New Love” with intensity.

Dad sat me down in front of our coffee table to tell me a story fierce and holy. He told me about falling in love with my mother in college. They made love and later learned that my mother had become pregnant. Mom was still a teenager. Together they sought out an abortion in Philadelphia, even though it wasn’t yet legal. He told me the blood wouldn’t stop. He told me about the hospital interrogation, the fear of arrest. They weren’t arrested, and my mother didn’t bleed to death, but the echoes of that night still lingered. Perhaps he was scared of my emerging sensuality. Or a part of him wanted me to be afraid with him. What was more palpable than the fear was the boldness in his truth telling, without shame. 

What I took from that moment was the determination to choose my body’s path. The message wasn’t abstinence, it was grief over the terrorizing of two young lovers. The message was a prayer for my path to be one of power and sovereignty over my body. This is a story I would one day share with my baby sister and then later with my child.

I sat them down at the tables, and together we held my mother’s memories like sacred text.

The story starts differently now. I used to begin with, “This happened before abortion was legal.” 

Now it starts with, “Let me tell you why I fight.” 

Akilah Hughes: The South Has Power

We Are the Daughters of Texas

Looking Back, Seeing Forward