RIP Velma deSelby Bowen Plus Written On the Subway Wall

Part of me thought going to Velma’s memorial was a dreadfully presumptuous thing to do. An action Chuck Palahniuk would use to characterize an irritating minor character in Chapter 3. Later, in Chapter 7, this same minor character might end up eviscerated in a particularly gruesome swimming pool accident.

I didn’t know Velma. At least, not “know” know. She and Scraps were responsible for me stumbling across LiveJournal, which has since become an important part of my life. “Karmic” is my shorthand for those kinds of connections. Also, I thought she was a really fine writer in the Maya Angelou style of fine writing. She sifted details in a tremendously conscious way:

Tonight, though, I will put the somber thoughts aside, and have dinner with Soren, then go to hear a friend play at the bar where I used to sing... and who knows? Perhaps it will snow, and we will be able to walk through new snow on our way home; or perhaps it will rain, and I will be able to look at light reflected in the drops pearling on Soren's lashes. Something beautiful will happen.

(Note that the LJ entries I'm quoting here are all public entries, so I'm not violating the confidentiality of locked entries, which I do take very seriously.)

As it turns out, I was glad to have gone because I found myself moved to speak, and what I spoke about was what a tremendously good writer she was, which her family may not have known. Her friends, of course, would have known – as in know “know” – but possibly the fact was overshadowed by her dramatic personality.

Since I didn’t know her, there was nothing to overshadow the effects of her prose on me.

The memorial took place in the Harlem church where she was baptized. Velma had an interesting relationship with her own ethnicity. I wouldn’t call it ambivalence. But Velma didn’t like to be defined, and race was one more thing she didn’t want to be defined by.

One of the major reasons I like having a buzzed/shaved head is that the first time I looked in the mirror after having my hair cropped to lie flat against my scalp, I saw that I was black, she wrote.

That sounds odd, so let me unpack it a bit. When I was younger, I didn't want to be black. Not because being white seemed superior…but because in fifth through twelfth grades, particularly in fifth and sixth grades, I was bullied a lot for not being black enough…

"And lastly, y'all need to blacken up a bit. Not so much that you become unhireable or anything, but you know, you kinda act too white. Put a little soul in your stroll. YOU'RE NOT BLACK ENOUGH FOR ME!"

As far as I could tell [that] meant that I actually did my homework, was polite and wasn't interested in boys/Kool and the Gang/being rude to my teachers/etc….No matter what I did, somehow I was never "black enough," so I decided that I would stop trying. I would identify myself with all ten of the races/nationalities that are in my family, and then say, "I'm black -- it's faster to say and write."

At some point in my twenties, I realized that that was bullshit. I am black, and therefore whatever I do defines part of "the black experience." I didn't talk about it much, and continued to mention all of my ancestry when asked, but put black first.

When I had my hair cropped for the first time, though, I looked in the mirror, and saw -- how do I put this? -- I want to say that I saw my African-American/black facial features clearly, and liked them much more than I had when I had hair either framing my face or pulled back and styled in some weighty way. Nose, lips, cheekbones, the curve of my eye sockets: a real black woman. (A real New Yorker, too, but that's more in posture and mannerisms, I think.)

It was a journey, and it seems odd, and perhaps highly idiosyncratic that for me, it came through taking off my hair. (For many other women, it seems to come with dreads.) But it's part of how I got here.

This is a remarkable piece of writing for many, many reasons.

It’s what I spoke to in front of the microphone, and what I said to her sister on my way out the door. Find an editor, I said. There is a really compelling memoir here that wants to be published.

But who knows if it will be? I suppose Scraps inherits whatever strange rights adhere to these kinds of writings, and I imagine he’s not really well enough to embark on this kind of project.

###

I spent the day hanging out with BB in Brooklyn, having so much fun. I realized, too, that my friendship with BB reminds me a lot of my friendship with Tom, whom I’ve never stopped missing although, since we had a great relationship, I don’t agonize over him the way I agonize over the various missed connections. Tom got sick; Tom died. I was by his side when he died, and later I lied to Phil Elmer Dewitt, told Phil that Tom had died listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This got published in the various press accounts of Tom’s death and made it into his Wikipedia entry.

In fact, Tom died listening to the hiss-hiss-hiss of his morphine pump. But I knew how much Tom would have loved the mythic end I concocted for him.

For years after Tom died, I could feel him hovering over me. Protecting me. I’m absolutely certain I got the People Magazine gig because Tom pulled strings with the heavenly host on my behalf.

Then one day, I woke up and Poof! Tom was gone. On to his next reincarnation, I guess. He’d sat around in Bardo watching the instant replays of my life on the ginormous, giga-pixel-plex screen long enough. They finally kicked him out of the bar.

###

The various 42nd street subways have these strange phrases painted on the eaves.

So Tired.

Power Changes Everything.

I’d like to know what Public Arts program they’re a part of.