The Napkin Project (Thanksgiving Edition): Jacqueline Woodson
Ginger’s Bar is around the corner. My daughter goes there with her friends now—a posse of twenty-somethings with their low-slung pants, flat blown bellies and crop-tops. Always their hair is a wild mess of braids + locks + twists. Alisha dyed hers last week and the color pulled most of the kink from it, leaving the yellow strands falling in corkscrews. Then Malina shaved her their sides (I’ve finally gotten the pronouns right but sometimes they change them around—maybe to mess with me, I don’t know.)
I told Malina about Astor Barber—that in the 90s I lived in that shop getting the same cut. All of them love stories of what it was like to be out in the ancient 90s with its closets and devastated parents and all that butch/femme top/bottom crap. And the straight girls! How every queer girl slept with one at some point. “But why?” they ask. “And who was just straight? Was that a thing?” No one they know (or care to hang with) is just one something.
My hair is gray at the edges now. So much more to tell them but they’re standing at Ginger’s door now. How we all drank then. Smoked too. How some of us died + some of us didn’t. “Have fun,” I say. It all goes by so quickly, I am thinking—even the pain goes around, fades away, then comes back. The love too. Different. Deeper. A melancholic memory.
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