The femur may be the hardest bone to break, but as Durham-based writer Shorlette Ammons discovered after a motorcycle accident, rural resilience is plenty strong, too.
Story by Shorlette Ammons
January 24, 2023
They say the femur is the hardest bone to break. I broke mine in June 2019. A car plowed into me and my companion while we were riding my 2011 Suzuki TU250 — my first motorcycle, my first time riding a passenger on back of me. We were on our way home from a Saturday brunch date. Two girls. On a date. On a motorcycle. A symphony of scenarios that once felt impossible to me. Defying convention and family norms to lean into the audacity of what I know is possible for myself, as a Southern Black woman, having only been out a few years prior — all colliding at a familiar Durham intersection. Joy and grief. Pride and shame. Authentic and fraud. Most certainly a metaphor for crashing into your own determination. It was a great day until that moment. A beautiful, sunny summer afternoon. Good food and good company. Our progressive town is small enough that most folks who rushed to our aid as I lay in the middle of that busy intersection knew one or both of us. My upper body turned one way, with the face of my helmet just keeping me from kissing the pavement. My lower body headed the other way with my right thigh somehow in line with my left shoulder — “twisted up” I would later call it.
I have a fairly clear memory of doing a sort of body scan — taking inventory of my parts for what hurt and where. Shoulder. Hand. Slight headache. Leg. Hip. OK, definitely leg. More specifically, my upper leg, and the thumb on my right hand. Shooting pain up my right arm to my right shoulder. Basically, the entire right side of my body. The in and out of my breath more rapid than normal, but, yes, breathing. I’m not great, but I’m alive. Is she? I peer up. She’s bouncing around. Maybe talking shit to the folks that hit us or urging the gathering crowd to DO SOMETHING. She’s not in great shape, but she’s OK given what we just went through, and she’s doing exactly what I have known her to do, but with added delirium. Protective. Raging. Checking in. Repeat.
My twin sister, who lives about six minutes from that intersection, seemed to beat the paramedics to the scene. I remember a similarly frantic delirious care and concern. It was as if we were both having an out-of-body experience, stuck in a dreamscape, lunging toward each other with a reach too short for us to clasp hands. Her hysteria was more urgent, more heightened, than my passenger’s. I, on the other hand, just wanted a nap.
The surgery needed to repair my parts — broken femur, broken thumb, dislocated shoulder; “skints,” scrapes, and bruises; aches and pains all over — was much easier to repair than my broken ego that made fragile what I valued so much at the time: the relationship to riding my bike, Damita Jo, which brought me so much joy; the trust that I would be safe on my bike that I had promised my daughter and my passenger and her mama; the very freedom shared by me, Damita Jo, and my favorite curvy backroads, now in fading proximity. The bodily repair was definitely the easy part — despite the fact that the rod used to secure and heal my femur was too long and would later have to be removed because of a hip impingement that created constant discomfort. I believe this to be a larger systemic issue regarding the expectation of pain thresholds for Black women — another essay, for another time.
During my physical therapy, my goal was to embrace the burden of daily pain in order to move, ride, get free. As my eager, well-meaning white physical therapist demonstrated the routine of moving weight from one leg to another, her lesson in teaching me how to walk again, I quickly realized the person teaching me to walk don’t walk like me. My Black, my tomboy, my femme, my country, all that constituted MY walk. This reality set me back to a familiar actualization. As Black country people and as people growing up in rural places, we measure our recipes in dashes and pinches as opposed to tablespoons and teaspoons. Our blood memory is our measuring cup. These are things that aren’t taught but can’t be unlearned, which is a part of our cultural currency, that come back to us during times of our deepest remembering, like searching for the familiarity of my slow country stroll.
The tattooed scars that lace the right side of my body, from my hip to my ankles, make me more vulnerable and exposed than I’ve ever been, increasing my fear of embracing lovers old and new and welcoming summer days when my skin would feen for open air and sunshine. I’m still traumatized, but I still ride. How else am I supposed to get free? Damita Jo and the scars we’ve shared since June 2019 have shifted my idea and understanding of freedom from focusing on the shackles that hinder us toward one that is about the joy of chasing joy. Freedom is the thing I think about every day, even while the fear stays present. It is indeed a mutual respect. The freedom to embrace — to “feel the fear and do it anyway” — is a choice, but it is also a characteristic of rural resilience that is difficult to unlearn.
Shorlette Ammons currently serves as Program Director for Farm Aid, where she leads programmatic efforts to keep small family farmers on their land and thriving. She is also a freelance writer on food and family, with recent articles in The Bitter Southerner, Southern Cultures, and The Charlotte Observer. Shorlette is a native of Mount Olive, North Carolina, where she grew up in a large family of farmworkers, cooks, and storytellers. She now calls Durham, North Carolina, home.
Audio recorded, mixed, and mastered by Shirlette Ammons
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