The other weekend, I had the opportunity to celebrate a triple birthday event. Three of the members of my squad of friends from undergrad tipped the scales on another year of life and decided to throw a Lemonade-themed birthday party because… Beyoncé, duh!

There was a copious amount of brown liquor, crab legs, shrimp, and beautiful black folks everywhere. At some point, I found myself assigned to the kitchen and ended up frying fish because being a country boy comes with responsibilities at these types of functions. There was music, trash talking over spades games, raucous laughter, and the distinctive smack of dominoes being slammed against wooden tables as we celebrated deep into the evening. There were three types of lemonade; one containing Everclear which I like to call “Death,” another carrying hints of cinnamon and bourbon, and a virgin batch for the children and grown folks who steer clear of the drank.

And there was pound cake.

As mentioned earlier, I’m a country boy. Like, for real country. I’m that small town-bred, back-of-the-pick-up-truck riding, crawfish-hunting in the creek, green-bean snapping, sweet-tea drinking, revival-meeting-at-the-height-of-summer attending, long-story telling and sh*t-talking kinda country. It runs deep. So when I saw this pound cake with no icing shining under the fluorescent lights, sitting in the kitchen cooling, I knew this party was special.

First, I wondered who at this party, where no 60-year-old black women were in attendance, had mustered up the audacity and boldness of spirit to attempt making a pound cake. From the moment I spotted the confection, I eagerly awaited its slicing and even coalesced a group of cake-loving comrades who urged partygoers to begin singing “Happy Birthday” so we could get the ball rolling. We finished the song and a line unlike any I’d seen for birthday cake formed. The people were ready. We descended on the sweet bread like a line of Black Friday shoppers at Wal-Mart running to the back of the store to grab a 32-inch RCA television. Within moments, the plate was clean and some late young woman was hovering over the dish trying to scrape crumbs onto her plate.

The cake was delicious, outstanding, amazing, and all the other adjectives one might use to describe a damn good cake, but it was more than a simple celebratory dessert assigned to the end of the evening – it was a time portal.

As the dense, sweet bread melted in my mouth, I was taken back to a time when life was much simpler. 

I remembered being a small child and relished in the memory of cookouts, holidays and family gatherings gone by. I looked at my friends and took in the absolute beauty of the moment. I looked into the eyes of people who were turning 28, 29 and 30 that weekend and memories flickered of the people we had once been and how much we’d grown and changed in the 10 years since. With each bite, I savored not only the richness of the cake but reveled in the amount of love and joy I was experiencing as I celebrated the lives of people who meant so much to me.  As I washed the cake down with the cool lemonade – the one with bourbon and cinnamon – I fully took in what we were celebrating and words from my favorite black feminist, whose album the evening had been named after, rang in my head.

“You spun gold out of this hard life.

Conjured beauty from things left behind.

Found healing where it did not live.

Discovered the antidote in your own kitchen.”

As we laughed and danced and loved under the open sky, I was certain we had indeed found the antidote, or perhaps we had always had it.

Over the past 10 years, we each had our ups and downs, joys and pains, but here we were, sitting on the porch, having demolished a small ocean of seafood, eating pound cake and simply existing. I relished in the moment so intensely because it seems we are living in a period when the existence and proliferation of black joy has taken a back seat to our sorrow.

 

On this porch, we didn’t have to explain that Black Lives Mattered.

Our being did that.

Here, on this porch, the twinkle in our eyes mattered.

The smiles in our hearts mattered.

Our light, our peace and our hope mattered.  

Our joy mattered.

We needed no affirmation.

We didn’t have to concern ourselves with being too black or too loud or too bold.

We ate pound cake.

We blew bubbles.

And cracked crab legs with our teeth as we danced and sang trap music under the light of the summer moon.

Melanin glistening and souls shining.

We drank lemonade spiked with bourbon and cinnamon.

We were free.

And we mattered.


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