Mumble Sauce is a summer and fall 2019 column about how DMV Black communities uplift healing and creativity in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, and incarceration. This is installment eight of 10.

My great-great aunt ran a cathouse in Columbus, Mississippi. My grandfather lived with her until he was 4 years old. He spent a lot of time in the cathouse, which, according to my grandfather, got its name from the illegal moonshine (aptly called “catpiss”) that patrons could purchase at the brothel. 

The bottles of moonshine were buried in the backyard, my grandfather tells me, and he knew the location of each one. When someone ordered a drink, my great-great aunt would send him to the back to dig up a bottle from the earth with his small brown hands.

My grandfather didn’t enjoy life at the cathouse that much, but he tells me now that it beat picking cotton. 

Like a lot of Black people, my grandfather was forced to understand the concept of “getting it how you live it” at an early age. The underground economy—like drug dealing and the sex trades—is filled with people trying to get it how they live it, figuring out how to get their needs met with the means life has provided. 

A popular refrain among people in the sex trades is that “everyone knows a sex worker”—if you feel like you’re an exception to the rule, it’s likely because the sex worker in your life doesn’t feel comfortable telling you. Sex workers are members of our communities. They are mothers, friends, uncles, cousins, and great-great aunts. 

I didn’t know my family’s connection to sex work when I started getting involved with advocacy in D.C.’s sex worker community in 2018. I’d been an organizer with BYP100 DC—a collective of radical Black organizers—for a couple of years, and we were members of the Sex Workers Advocates Coalition. SWAC is a coalition of several organizations in D.C. that formed in 2016 to create safety and support for people in the sex trades, prioritizing the decriminalization of sex work as a policy goal.

I was late to the party by the time I got involved, but I’d had a soft spot for sex workers since I was young. A couple of my middle school friends talked about wanting to be strippers when they grew up, and I had some friends in college who danced and did sex work to help pay for living expenses. Being tangentially involved in the world of sex work became a small pastime. One of my college friends and I would climb into bed together and scroll the Craigslist personals, giggling into the night about the men we saw, drafting and deleting posts about being co-eds looking for a free meal.

Looking through Craiglist personals for entertainment was far from the lived realities of many sex workers. I knew I had a lot to unlearn by the time I started regularly joining SWAC meetings in 2018. Leaders in the coalition—like Tamika Spellman, Nona Conner, and Shareese Mone—made this unlearning possible for me as they shared their wisdom and insight. In BYP100 DC, friends like Nnenna Amuchie helped me understand the extent to which criminalizing sellers and buyers of sex harms Black communities and is a central contributor to mass incarceration.

I’ve found another family with the people I organize with. We were proud to join the legacy of freedom fighters like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who called to decriminalize sex work and invest in community in the 1970s. And we knew that to fully decriminalize sex work in the District, we had to shift hearts and minds. Through DECRIMNOW, we started uplifting the stories and perspectives of the countless Black and brown trans sex workers who experienced violence and wanted to be safe.

Now, after decades of fighting to be respected and supported, the D.C. Council is starting to take the needs of people in the sex trades seriously.

On Oct. 17, the Council will have a hearing for the “Community Safety and Health Amendment Act of 2019,” a bill that would remove criminal penalties from selling and buying sex in D.C. Sponsored by Councilmembers David Grosso, Brianne Nadeau, Robert White, Anita Bonds, and Charles Allen, the bill was introduced this summer with the help of SWAC and the DECRIMNOW campaign.

My co-organizers and I are passionate about the bill because we’ve seen criminalization and policing bring harm to people in the sex trades and our broader communities. Police abuse against people in the sex trades is common. Criminalization pushes the trades into the shadows where people aren’t able to access support due to stigma and fear of police involvement. Incarceration is inhumane, and having a criminal record exacerbates obstacles to accessing resources. Decriminalizing sex work and investing in safe and stable housing, health care, transportation, education, and other forms of support would benefit us all.

D.C. has a rich history of resistance from Black LGBTQ+ folks, so it’s no surprise that the District is one of the first places to introduce a bill like this. While many sex workers are in the trades because they enjoy it, a lot of sex workers in D.C. are Black and brown trans women, cis women, trans men, and non-binary people who turn to the trades to survive. With limited access to support, selling sexual services is one of the only ways many people are able to support themselves. 

Some people in the sex trades are escaping abusive family situations. This was the case for my big-sister-from-another-mister Nona Conner, one of the organizers with SWAC and DECRIMNOW who works at Collective Action for Safe Spaces. Conner ran away from her family’s home in Southeast D.C. when she was 15 with nothing but $20 in her pocket. She fled to K Street and met several other Black trans girls who had escaped abuse and violence, too. They all did sex work to survive. Being turned away from job interviews because of her identity made Conner rely on sex work even more. 

Conner had little recourse when she experienced assault at the hands of clients or strangers. Police officers couldn’t be trusted. They often enacted the abuse themselves. 

Police abuse is one of the main reasons why Spellman, a mother to many in the movement, is fighting for the decriminalization of sex work. An advocate with local harm-reduction nonprofit HIPS and a leader in SWAC and DECRIMNOW, Spellman spends most of her nights visiting popular strolls in D.C. to make sure sex workers have condoms and access to safety. She wrote in 730 DC last year about some of her experiences with police brutality while sex working, including a time when an undercover officer engaged in a full sex act with her before revealing that it was a sting. It’s an experience many sex workers in the District can relate to. Police abuse against sex workers—including sexual assault—is an open secret in D.C. 

Spellman enjoys sex work, but she doesn’t enjoy how hard it was for her to find a job despite having a college degree. She certainly doesn’t enjoy the police abuse that she’s experienced, abuse that is encouraged by a society that demonizes sex workers and Black trans women. And it hurts her heart to see so many of her sisters lose their lives to violence.

Spellman and others in the DECRIMNOW campaign often call on the names of Zoe Spears and Ashanti Carmon, two Black trans women with experience in sex work who were killed earlier this year. In my last “Mumble Sauce” entry, Bianca Bonita Carter, an organizer in SWAC, DECRIMNOW, and No Justice No Pride, recalled seeing Spears at a cookout the day before she was murdered. To Carter, it seems like violence against Black trans women in the DMV, especially those with experience in the sex trades, is escalating.

Stigma against sex workers and discrimination against Black and brown trans women contribute to violence against our loved ones. It’ll take a long time to repair the harm that has been done. The bill to decriminalize sex work is a small piece in a larger puzzle of creating safer environments for everyone in our communities.

Ultimately, all people in the sex trades need access to resources and community support, not the threat of arrest and harm. Moralistic arguments about whether it’s “right” to sell sex quickly become moot when you have nothing to eat and nowhere to live. 

I’m a Black queer woman with family from Maryland to Mississippi. My grandfather grew up in a cathouse because his daddy was lynched before he was born. I understand the history around violence, including sexual violence, against my people throughout slavery and colonialism. Having autonomy over our bodies is central to our freedom and liberation, and that includes having the choice to trade sex to provide for ourselves and our families. Restricting that choice using stigma, policing, and shame is simply another form of control. 

We deserve support and liberation instead.

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Mumble Sauce is a summer and fall 2019 column about how DMV Black communities uplift healing and creativity in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, and incarceration. This is installment seven of 10.

Bianca Bonita Carter has a name for each of her wigs. That’s 16 names in total.

The unit named Blue Violet is her favorite. It’s a long bob with black roots and green and purple tips—a loose body wave with bouncy curls that Carter loves to flip. 

The 22-year-old Afro-Latina poet and activist has her hair in thick dark braids flowing over her shoulders when I meet with her at Calabash, a local Black-owned-and-run tea spot, on a weekend in late August. As much as she loves her braids, she misses her wigs. 

“Blue Violet’s awesome as fuck,” Carter says. A deep dimple appears on her cheek as she smiles. “I have one named Bianca, one named Bella, one named Rakim, one named Orange because she’s orange.” She describes each wig and its personality, listing them off one-by-one with her fingers.

“Wigs are like a safety net.”

Safety isn’t often accessible to Carter, so she cultivates it where she can. She loves coming home after a long day and taking off her makeup, putting on a wig, and writing poetry over a cup of tea. 

The removal of makeup is an important part of Carter’s self-care ritual. She loves the feeling of her bare skin, and she’d wear makeup less often if she felt she could. But experience has taught Carter to be hyper aware of how she’s perceived. She wants to fall under the radar of people who are out to harm her, and makeup helps. 

“You have to make sure your makeup is done, your highlight is right, your body is right,” Carter says. “It’s exhausting. I know what I am.”

This is Carter’s current reality, but she dreams of a world where Black trans women can feel safe no matter how they decide to present themselves on any given day. 

Carter fights to actualize these dreams as an activist and a community organizer. With the No Justice No Pride Collective, Carter works alongside other organizers to provide housing and support for trans women, decriminalize sex work, and end transphobia. Her day job is at Casa Ruby, an organization that provides shelter and resources to LGBTQIA+ youth around the D.C. area. 

This work plays off of her many strengths. Carter is known among her friends as the caregiver: big-hearted, kind, warm, and understanding. Armed with a natural curiosity for the way the world works and her place in it, Carter challenges herself and the people around her to abandon mainstream ideas of what makes someone “worthy” and “deserving” of safety and support.

“I work for trans women who aren’t heard. The trans women society calls ugly. The trans women that they say look like men. The ones who aren’t ‘cunt’ or ‘undetectable,’” Carter tells me between spoonfuls of Calabash’s chickpea soup. 

“Being a woman is about individuality, about being your own self. I met a woman a few days ago who had a mustache and a full beard,” Carter says. “But that’s a woman.”

Carter’s grandmother instilled in her a belief that people should be affirmed and supported in being who they are. She grew up under her grandmother’s watch in Brooklyn while her parents lived in Southeast D.C. Carter loved living with her grandma, a youthful spirit whose playfulness and generosity made her feel loved and protected. 

“We’d have a challenge to see who could stay up all night into the morning to see the sun come up,” Carter says. Carter would always win, and later in the day, her grandmother would make homemade lasagna for her as her prize. 

This love and support never faltered while Carter transitioned, and Carter wishes this was the norm for all trans women. Having a supportive guardian helped Carter survive. 

“If anyone wanted to say anything about me, she would say ‘fuck them,’” Carter says. “Live your life and do what you wanna do.”

Transitioning isn’t easy, and it isn’t linear, either. Carter remembers starting her transition when she was 12 years old, but she paused when she came to D.C. for school, unsure of how accepting people would be. Wigs were an important aspect of Carter’s transition, and the memory of her first time wearing a wig in the District remains etched in her mind. 

Carter wore long hair on a day she had a test in one of her classes. The teacher demanded that Carter take her wig off in the middle of the test, claiming that it was distracting other students. Carter refused, and the teacher sent her home. Carter’s father yanked the wig off of her head when she got there. She ended up finishing the school year with a haircut.

Poetry became a refuge from the abuse Carter survived at home and at school. She wrote poems for her friends and teachers, stanzas containing affirmations and well-wishes that she hoped would guide them through hard times. Between doing homework and writing poetry, she barely slept. 

Carter remembers the exhaustion clearly. She failed a lot of classes, but poetry made her feel good. “I loved that I could make someone else happy from what they’re going through.”

Contributing to the healing of others through poetry helped Carter find equilibrium during the turbulence of her teenage years. Bouncing between New York and D.C., she saw the size of her friend groups dwindle during each visit. She lost her best friend to suicide. Many of her friends in Brooklyn died, went to jail, or were in prison serving hard time. Carter started timing her visits back to New York to coincide with her friends’ release dates, staying with her grandmother like she did when she was a young child. 

Everything changed a few years ago when Carter’s grandmother passed away. At 18, Carter moved to D.C. for good. 

“I call D.C. my home, but when I was going through all my bad shit, my trauma,” Carter says, “it was here.”

Carter started growing close with her mother in D.C., but her relationship with her father, who she lived with, remained difficult. He kicked her out not long after she moved in. “He figured out I was escorting. He said that he’d seen me in different cars, said it was disgusting.” She ended up finding shelter at Casa Ruby, the same organization she works for now. 

Although she didn’t know her mother for most of her life, they grew close quickly during this time. Carter describes her as her best friend. 

“If someone wanted to judge me, they’d have to go through me and her. If someone talked shit about me, she’d fight for me,” Carter says. But her mother passed away a year ago. “She was my shield. I didn’t need wigs as much back then.”

Wigs can be a form of self-defense. In an area where trans women are routinely assaulted and murdered, one of Carter’s tactics for survival is to switch her look up to avoid recognition, experimenting with different hairstyles and makeup frequently. This is the result of several traumatic experiences. Carter has been sexually assaulted multiple times. Her housemates have been jumped over the last few weeks. People have tried to break into their home, thrown rocks at their windows. 

Society has directed violence toward trans women, especially Black trans women, for decades. Several Black trans organizers in the DMV, including Carter, say that this violence is on the rise. Ashanti Carmon and Zoe Spears are two Black trans women with experience in the sex trades who lost their lives to gun violence over the last few months. Carter was with Spears at a cookout the day before she was killed. Neither murder has been solved.

“Most of the things that happen in D.C. are never discovered,” Carter says. “You always have to be aware of yourself. What your surroundings are, where you’re at, who you’re with, if the person you’re with is setting you up the whole time.”

“You have to think about everything.” 

Carter spends a lot of her time thinking. About her grandmother and her other grandparents, her mother, her best friend, and her relationship with her father. When she has time, she thinks about poetry. She dreams about being a famous poet like Maya Angelou, one of her icons. Carter’s own poetry is about hope, love, joy, and freedom—ideals she hopes will be more widely reflected in the world one day.

She also thinks about her children—other LGBTQIA+ young people who she’s met in D.C. and started to mentor. Carter has three sons and a daughter, and she takes her role as a mother very seriously.  

“They’re all trying to do something big with their lives,” Carter says, her eyes sparkling with excitement and pride. “One of them just got an apartment. One of them has a girlfriend. It makes me feel like a champion.”

Carter would love to have her own apartment one day. There isn’t much left in her paycheck after helping out her kids and other LGBTQIA+ organizers, so she’s raising money on PayPal with the hope of filling in the gaps. By following her duty to fight for safer communities for trans women, Carter feels that a breakthrough will come.

The 22-year-old poet knows she’s experienced more than many have in a lifetime. But she chooses to believe in the good in the world, bringing it to life with the glide of her pen.

“My grandmother taught me what I believe in. And what I believe in is right.” Carter nods her head and presses her lips together, signaling there was nothing more to say on the matter. Her braids fall along her face as she turns back to her tea, holding her lost loved ones close in her heart. 

They’re safe there.

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Mumble Sauce is a summer 2019 column about how DMV Black communities uplift healing and creativity in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, and incarceration. This is installment six of 10.

It’s hard to get proper crispy home fries in D.C. Trust that I’ve tried. As someone who’s obsessed with potatoes in all their forms, trust that I’ve tried more than I should.

I didn’t have to tell the server at Provost my potato preferences when I ate there for the first time on a hot Sunday afternoon. Each piece came out brown and crispy on the outside, and warm, golden, and soft at the core. A glass of freshly made raspberry juice washed it down.

Ask the folks at Provost how they do it, and they say they just got it like that. 

Provost is Nina Gilchrist’s creative child. The D.C. born-and-raised restaurateur and bartender decided in 1998, when she was still a teenager, that she would one day own a restaurant. She enrolled in culinary classes like pastry making and hors d’oeuvres at Prince George’s Community College and trained under chefs through the Roosevelt S.T.A.Y program, a DC Public Schools academy that caters to 16 to 24-year-old people. 

After years of training, envisioning, and exploring alternate career paths—Gilchrist also used to be a teacher and a Realtor—Provost had its soft launch this summer. 

Nina Gilchrist has always been about her business. “I’m the middle child, but a lot of my siblings call me big sister,” Gilchrist says. She grew up in Michigan Park and Rock Creek Park with her mother, father, and three siblings, and often helped her parents at night with housekeeping and getting her siblings ready for school the next day. 

She enjoys being part of the balance in her family. And her family rolls deep. When I went to Provost to eat and talk with Gilchrist, I also ended up meeting her mother, father, multiple nieces and nephews, and cousins. The younger family members sat in booths with their noses in their phones and tablets. Other family members were working at the restaurant, and some came to laugh and hang out.

“I’m a nurturer,” says Gilchrist. Soft-spoken with golden locs, her gentle and nurturing nature is present both in conversation and in the restaurant she’s created. Provost offers vegan, vegetarian, and organic food options, as well as off-menu items for children, people who are gluten-free, and people with a variety of other dietary needs. “I believe in organic food, in animals living a certain life and being a part of certain habitats,” Gilchrist says. “And I wanted to open an establishment that caters to the needs of many people. We want you to come and eat and feel satisfied.”

Gilchrist credits her background in early childhood education as one of the reasons why she takes such a caring approach to food. She used to work with 6-week-old to 3-year-old children as a teacher in Maryland. This path felt natural to her. Her mother ran a child care center, and many of her other family members are teachers. This commitment to education is one of the inspirations behind Provost’s name.

It’s a fitting name, given that the building Provost is in has a lot of history waiting to be learned. The restaurant sits on Rhode Island Ave NE in a small red brick building flanked by a Black beauty supply store and salon on one side and her father’s realty business on the other. The restaurant’s design is a mixture of modern and rustic, taking advantage of the integrity and beauty of the building’s older parts. The walls alternate between old crimson brick and sleek modern overlays. 

The building used to be a dry cleaners. Irvin Gilchrist, Nina Gilchrist’s father who has lived in D.C. since his elementary school days, tells me that a Black seamstress opened the dry cleaning business at the property sometime in the 1960s and ran it as Colbert’s Cleaners for years. A few decades later, that property came into the hands of the Gilchrists. This section of Rhode Island Ave NE is a rare sliver of D.C. where multiple spaces are owned by and cater to Black people. 

Keeping the spirit of local Black communities alive is what the Gilchrist family is all about. Many local, young Black chefs are getting their start through Provost. The restaurant’s pastry chef was trained at Prince George’s Community College and makes a mean bread pudding. Gilchrist’s niece, who fills multiple roles at the restaurant, is a current student. The head chef, Chef Taye—the person responsible for the perfection of my hash browns—grew up in Prince George’s County. 

Nina Gilchrist feels honored to be surrounded by so many Black people with a passion for food, and investing in their success is important to her. “My goal is to do things right within my reach,” Gilchrist says, her hands politely folded across her lap.

She is grounded. While the excitement of the restaurant finally being open continues to brew, Gilchrist is focused on what she needs to do next. It was a long road to the restaurant’s first day of serving customers, and she knows more journeys lie ahead. “Many people who know me when I was trying to open the restaurant, they know it was like I didn’t even want to talk about it anymore because it was so challenging,” Gilchrist says. “But now I’ve reached my goal, and there’s many more action steps to take.” Among those action steps: applying to be a certified organic restaurant and throwing a grand opening sometime in the fall. 

In the meantime, Gilchrist is devoted to learning how to make Provost a creative space for the community. She grew up with D.C.-based photographer Beverly Price (who I interviewed for this column previously) and went to one of Price’s parties at House of Secrets. Inspired by the art there and reminiscing about her former days as a singer and dancer, Gilchrist knew that live performances and creativity would be an important aspect of Provost’s culture. 

“The way they vibrated and connected with each other at House of Secrets,” Gilchrist says, “that’s the kind of vibe we want.” 

Gilchrist’s vision for Provost is bigger than she lets on. She leads me to the restaurant’s upstairs rooftop, a patio with colorful floor cushions and lush greenery overlooking Northeast. On this Sunday, I linger between the rooftop and Provost’s main floor until well past sundown, laughing with Nina Gilchrist’s relatives and eating bread pudding until my belly is stretched past its capacity. Meanwhile, Gilchrist made her way back behind the bar, mixing drinks and making sure all of her guests feel welcome.

“In D.C., we have so many talented people who aren’t recognized. I’d like for this to be a place where people can shine and grow,” Gilchrist says slowly, tasting the potential in her words, taking her time to savor each one. “I would like for this to be a space where people can be creative and free.”

Provost; 2129 Rhode Island Ave. NE; provostdc.com

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Mumble Sauce is a summer 2019 column about how DMV Black communities uplift healing and creativity in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, and incarceration. This is installment five of 10.

The first period bell was about to sound off at the middle school I went to in Upper Marlboro. I wanted to be anywhere else. I went to the hair salon the night before to get styled for my uncle’s wedding that was coming up in a couple of days. The results were … well.

I slept with my head propped up to maintain the integrity of the bundles of curls pinned at the top of my cranium. I put on a hoodie as soon as I got to school and snuck from my locker to class. Slinking into a chair next to my friend, I removed the hood, my chin tucked to my chest. She did her best to encourage me. 

“It’s like,” she paused and smiled, “it’s like a beautiful bird’s nest.”

A relatively common experience for many Black girls is hair salon angst: entering the establishment hoping for a blowout like Phylicia Rashad, and coming out looking a little more like James Brown than anticipated. But I still loved my hairdresser. I found peace when her colorful 2-inch acrylics scratched my scalp with my head tilted back in the sink. Her layered bracelets clinked like windchimes whenever she washed my hair. And afterward, I got to journey through the building’s hallways to get cheesy puffs from the vending machine. I stuffed my face with multiple pieces at a time, tinting my fingers yellow and watching subtitles on The Jamie Foxx Show while sweating underneath the roaring hair dryer.

But I didn’t like the way relaxers burned. I learned early, with a different childhood hairdresser, that some burns went too far. I developed a bald spot the size of a clementine on the back of my head in elementary school—a patch of scalp as smooth and shiny as a newly waxed gym floor. My mother feverishly rubbed the spot with soap and water at night. But during the day, I climbed to the top of the jungle gym during recess and let the wind blow through my hair, my bald spot gleaming in the sun.

Black hair and the places we go to get it done are so often sacred, sites of both joy and trauma. Hair salons and barber shops have historically been spaces for Black people to socialize and confide. Small teams of community organizers frequently used barber shops and salons as meeting spaces during the Black freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. And they can be healing spaces, too, with many establishments supporting people with things like blood pressure checks and unofficial therapy.

But along with the sacredness comes the trauma. There are endless streams of information telling us that nappy hair is ugly and “unprofessional,” that the only acceptable textures are slightly curly, wavy, and straight. I begged my parents for a relaxer when I was 6 years old, embarrassed by the way my braids puffed through their twisties and stuck out on the sides of my head. At the salons I went to, I understood beauty to be pain. So much pain is forced on the shoulders of little Black girls, who are encouraged to suffer in the name of achieving societal standards of beauty that were never meant to be attainable to them in the first place.

Now I wear my nappy hair in a high top fade and go to barber shops. Still, this presents different issues. I avoid getting haircuts for as long as possible. I’ve had too many experiences of overhearing homophobic and transphobic comments, and been on the receiving end of too many suggestive come-ons. When I finally do go to the barber shop, I hope I won’t have to endure conversations about whether I’m single, or about how many piercings I have and whether you can see them all.

Throughout the negative experiences, there’s still the joy. I love seeing Black people do hair and thrive. Doing hair is a source of income and an expression of creativity for many, and a lot of spots in D.C. strive to incorporate a sense of community in their work. Lady Clipper Barber Shop, a Black woman owned-and-run barber shop on U Street NW, showcases work by local artists in the space. Wanda’s on 7th, a salon in Shaw owned by the legendary Wanda Henderson, a Black stylist and cosmetologist who grew up in LeDroit Park, is a landmark in the community and symbolizes Black power in the middle of a gentrified neighborhood. And there are many talented stylists doing hair out of their homes, hustling to make money and navigating expensive licensing fees that a lot of poor Black stylists struggle to keep up with.

Through it all, when we’re creative with and loving toward Black hair, we exercise agency in a society that tries to take power away from us. Whether doing hair puts money in your pocket and helps you get by, or you’re experimenting with different wigs to see what kind of vibe you want to present to the world on any given day, hair provides us with an opportunity to sustain, fulfill, and express ourselves.

Hair used to be my enemy, but it isn’t anymore. We started repairing our relationship during my freshman year of college. A silky 18-inch black weave with a blunt bang adorned my head at the beginning of the semester. But a few weeks later, my friends joined me in a dorm room and formed an assembly line to cut all of it off. One friend cut the threads of my tracks, her fingers moving with the dexterity of a spider to remove the string attaching the weave to my cornrows. Another combed through my braids, unraveling the plaits and exposing the shiny nappy curls at my scalp that contrasted with my hair’s frazzled straight ends. Finally, a different friend shaved my head. My dark curls fell in clumps onto the floor. They looked like fluffy black poodles dancing in circles across the room.

I feel lucky to have hair with a life of its own. This is hair that can be braided, pressed, twisted, fluffed, loc’ed, coiled. Thick tufts that stick out in different textures no matter how they’re manipulated. Shy, nappy curls that shrink when they’re wet, but still manage to grow in the direction of the sky.

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Mumble Sauce is a summer 2019 column about how DMV Black communities uplift healing and creativity in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, and incarceration. This is installment four of 10.

Toni Lane says you can feel plants talking to you if you pay attention. 

Her houseplants had just finished cussing her out. The sprawling spider ivy and aloe had spent the day baking in the sunlight piercing the window of Lane’s studio apartment. The 65-year-old artist was busy making lino prints and hadn’t noticed they needed water.

Lane tells me this as we nurse our half-finished bottles of Beck’s in her home, which is also her art studio. Stacks of canvases fill each corner. One of the walls is a large bookshelf holding self-made publications going as far back as the 1980s. 

The multidisciplinary artist often refers to herself as the Magnificent Toni Lane. The name fits her well. She wrote her first book in Marseille, France. She owned a gallery in San Francisco for nearly 10 years. And then she had a brain aneurysm and lived to paint the tale.

Toni Lane currently works with other local disabled artists at Art Enables, a D.C.-based center that provides artists who have disabilities with education and professional training. Her art portrays experiences of Black women and girls. Lane’s signature style breaks down the human figure into its barest parts. Geometric, high-contrast bodies painted with thick brushstrokes and rounded edges bleed through her canvases.

Whether it’s through her series “Ghetto Girls Rule” or paintings inspired by Black people who have lost their lives to violence, much of Lane’s artistry highlights the harm that Black and brown people endure. She’s moved by people like Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was found hanged in her cell after being jailed for a traffic stop in Texas, and Relisha Rudd, a young Black girl who went missing from a D.C. homeless shelter in 2014 and has yet to be found.

“There are children in cages. In detention centers. In jails,” Lane says. “As an artist, I feel like I have to put it out there.”

Lane’s childhood in Southeast D.C. is her biggest creative inspiration. The brick project buildings that towered over her in her youth are reflected in many of her pieces, especially in her “Ghetto Girls Rule” series. “I had a wonderful childhood. Call me ghetto any day, I loved it,” Lane says, breaking out into her signature wide smile that shows all of her teeth. She grew up in Anacostia’s Frederick Douglass Dwellings projects with her parents, sister, brother, and cousin. “You learn about community, about family. You get close to people. You know the man in the corner store, and when you get caught stealing he knows just who your mother is,” Lane laughs.

Lane gave birth when she was 18, and a few years later, she was studying photography at the University of the District of Columbia when she decided to move to France with her daughter. They “beboped” around the country for six months.

“My mother got me some ‘Learn to Speak French’ records when I was around 13. At first I wondered why she got them for me. I thought only rich white people went to France.” Lane laughs again. “But I would play my records real loud in the ’hood. Everybody knew Toni was learning her French. And I knew I’d go to France one day.”

It was in Paris that Lane found out she had been accepted into the San Francisco Art Institute. She started attending classes in California. The school didn’t have very many Black students, but she got to study under the legendary Black artist Robert Colescott. Lane’s eyes mist and she stumbles over her words as she describes her admiration for the late painter. He gave her the first canvas she ever owned. 

Life in California was wonderful and hard. Lane graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in photography in 1983 and started teaching art to high school students in Oakland. Driving a taxi cab paid the bills. San Francisco’s lesbian and gay scene offered her friendship. In the early 1990s, she opened her art gallery, Ethnic Trip Cultural Art.

At the same time, she lost friends to AIDS. And the violence her students faced took a toll on her heart. One of her favorite students, LoEshe Lacy, was fatally shot while she was sitting in a parked car with her friends. She was only 16 years old.

Lost in grief, Lane escaped to France again.

“I went to Marseille. This time I stayed for about six years,” Lane says. “I didn’t come back until 2005 when I realized I needed to be closer to my grandkids.” Her daughter had started having children and Lane wanted to be around as they grew up.

It would be a long road to stability for Toni Lane once she got back to the District. She went to the hospital with a mind-splitting headache in 2006. Doctors in Fairfax rushed to operate on the aneurysm that had developed in her brain. “I felt lucky to be alive, but depression set in. My mental state was whacked,” she remembers. Lane’s mood worsened. Recovery was long and she felt lonely. A few years later, Lane started going to rehab where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

“Part of me was like, ‘Bipolar? Well, I’m bisexual. I’m a Pisces. It fits.’” Lane chuckles and takes another sip of her beer. “Another part of me felt like, ‘I’m the Magnificent Toni Lane. I used to have a gallery. I used to drive a taxi and teach kids in school,’” Lane says. “I had to work to accept it.”

Art Enables helped her on her path to acceptance. SSI checks were barely covering the bills when her behavioral health case worker suggested that she check out the D.C.-based arts center. Lane became a studio assistant soon after. She’s been at it for around three years.

“Working with people who have different disabilities makes me stronger. And the artists there are great,” Lane says. “We create some beautiful art together.”

Before this interview, the last time I’d seen Lane was at Art Enables. She was taking photographs of an event at the center. She maneuvered through the crowd with her camera hanging from her neck, her finger ready on the trigger, her senses guiding her to the scene she should capture next. 

Lane tries to pay attention when her environment is speaking to her. And just like her houseplants, the environment speaks. The clamor of Anacostia project buildings. The rattle of classroom desks in Oakland. The hum of Paris streets in the night time. Lane’s surroundings beg her to create wherever she goes. 

The result is magnificent.

To learn more about Toni Lane’s artwork, check out her website, ethnictripculturalart.com.

Mumble Sauce is a summer 2019 column about how DMV Black communities uplift healing and creativity in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, and incarceration. This is installment three of 10.

I tasted pigs feet for the first time when I was around 20 years old. I stared down at the hunk of meat on my paper plate, unreasonably fearful of the taste, and let it grow cold before I lifted a morsel to my lips and tore off a bit with my teeth. 

I pushed the plate away from me on the TV stand I was sitting in front of in the den of my grandparents’ house. My close family was congregated for a holiday. Pigs feet and chitlins are a delicacy to several people on my dad’s side—except for my father himself, who understood why I neglected my plate. My uncle went to the store to pick some up about an hour before. Everyone remarked how they’d be nothing like how my grandmother used to make them. 

My grandmother cooked pigs feet all the time. I remember the overwhelming smell, coming into the house as a small child and immediately knowing what atrocity was occurring—grandma’s cooking pigs feet again!—and staying as far away from the kitchen as possible. But it didn’t matter. The stench of boiling pigs feet tends to fill up a whole house. 

As childish as I am about pigs feet, I miss that smell. I miss my grandmother.

My grandmother was a fat woman. Her rolls provided a perfect platform for hugs, and her warm brown skin looked beautiful draped in yellow. One of her favorite shirts was a lemonade-colored short-sleeved blouse that had rows of tiny ruffles sewn across the fabric. She’d greet me and my sisters when we came home from school like a golden sun rising behind the stone steps of her Upper Marlboro home.

I want to see myself the way I see my grandmother. Instead, I’ve spent much of life policing my body, reminding myself of all of the things I need to change in order to become beautiful. I would have traded anything to have long, flowing hair and lighter skin in elementary school. I made a pact in middle school with one of my closest friends to get breast augmentations as soon as we turned 18. I started obsessively exercising as a teenager, supplementing my already strenuous track and soccer practices with frequent bike rides, crunches, and waist measurements. I researched liposuctions and fat transfers in college. At my lightest weight, I still found rolls to pinch and poke as I stared at my lean frame in the mirror.

There’s no way to quantify the amount of energy I’ve wasted over the fear of becoming fat. Our world has a peculiar history of categorizing fat Black people’s bodies as spectacles meant to be judged, mammified, fetishized, or criminalized. 

I often think about an experience that fellow community organizer Amber J. Phillips, a fat Black woman, had while she was traveling on an American Airlines flight to D.C. in 2018. A white woman called the police on her because Phillips’ arm was touching the woman’s as they sat next to each other on the plane. 

Eric Garner, a fat Black man from New York who passed away in 2014, also crosses my mind. An NYPD officer choked him to death, ignoring Garner’s cries that he couldn’t breathe. People have tried to claim that Garner’s weight caused his death ever since. The union attorney representing the NYPD officer who killed him recently argued that Garner didn’t die from being choked, but from being “morbidly obese.”

Most frequently, I remember Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan woman born around 1789 near the warm and hilly terrain of the Gamtoos River in South Africa. Like many Khoisan people, Baartman had large fat deposits around her bottom and hips. Baartman was enslaved by Dutch farmers as an orphan and labored near Cape Town until a British doctor, noticing her ample bottom, had her sent to London to be a part of an exhibit. The doctor put her in a circus show where she had to dance for audiences that ogled her body in disgust and amusement. She engaged in sex work to support herself and started drinking after her popularity dimmed. Baartman passed away in 1815, in her mid-twenties and far away from home.

Fat discrimination, in many ways, developed as an extension of the marginalization and “othering” of Black people. This discrimination is palpable. Fat people experience poorer treatment from doctors, discrimination in hiring and lower pay, bullying, and judgment from strangers. Poor fat Black people are especially harmed by this, as they are judged for their Blackness, for their fatness, and for their poverty.

The weight loss industry has made billions of dollars capitalizing on our fears of fatness. Research shows us that these fears are irrational. Thin people are often just as likely to be unhealthy as those who are fat. The commonly used Body Mass Index (BMI) is shown to be biased against Black people and an ineffective way to assess someone’s health. And diets frequently don’t work: Many dieters don’t lose weight, and those who do are destined to either gain it back or live their entire lives in a state of near-starvation. 

I’m familiar with that near-starvation feeling. I’d rather not feel it again. I’ve gone from a size six from my last episode of disordered eating to now being a size 14. While I’m larger than I have ever been, I still experience privilege compared to the way society treats my loved ones who are poorer, darker, and fatter than I am. And I’m still working on looking at my new protruding belly, rippled with purple stretch marks, as something to be praised, not policed.

Our society tells us that fatness is something to be eradicated. But many African communities have historically associated fatness with beauty and abundance. This isn’t surprising to me—I see it all the time. Hess Love, a fat Black advocate and writer in Baltimore, radiates this energy. And I see it flowing through Je’Kendria Trahan, a D.C.-based fat Black nonbinary healer and one of my closest friends, who creates art affirming the beauty of sags and rolls. 

Beauty and abundance are what I see in my grandmother.

My grandmother’s spirit often visits me without warning. She reminds me, sucking her teeth and cocking her head to the side, that my body is worthy because it is mine. Sometimes these visits happen when I’m making a cup of coffee. Or she’ll come to me when I’m walking outside and notice a bush full of roses that resemble the ones that used to grow in her front yard. Other times I am laying in bed, about to go to sleep, my fingers tracing the shiny stretch marks running along my belly, tiny purple rivers racing toward my womb.

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Mumble Sauce is a summer 2019 column about how DMV Black communities uplift healing and creativity in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, and incarceration. This is installment two of 10.

There’s a secret portal hiding in a house in LeDroit Park.

On the outside, it looks like a large colonial home, similar to the ones around it. If you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for, you wouldn’t know there was anything going on inside.

When I went to a party at this house a few weeks ago, it was dark and I approached with hesitation. I was joined by another Black woman who was similarly lost, both of us nervous and acutely aware of the dangers of being a Black person approaching the wrong home. We chuckled and felt more sure of ourselves once we reached the front porch. The rattle of the wood beneath our feet let us know we were in the right place—music was playing inside, and a lot of it.

This is House of Secrets: a 100-year-old eclectic abode where Black artists have convened since the 1960s. A lot of soul has touched the walls. Icons like Miles Davis, Chaka Khan, Duke Ellington, and Prince have all thrown parties there. Now, in 2019, those parties are being thrown by D.C. born-and-raised photographer Beverly Price. 

The list of stories Beverly Price has to tell is even longer than the locs that cascade like ropes of licorice down her back. You can tell she’s a storyteller from her photography—black-and-white stills of Black people in Barry Farm that she hangs along the house’s walls during her parties. She uses these functions to connect local Black artists to one another while raising money for the house’s octogenarian owner to help him keep his home. 

Price was born and raised in D.C.’s Capitol Hill, so uplifting local Black artists is particularly important to her. “Black artists shouldn’t have to die to be valued. If we don’t support these artists while they’re alive, then they’re not benefiting from it,” Price says. “We’re creating a hub for Black creatives to find their place and feel welcome.”

To say that Black artists are welcomed at Price’s parties is an understatement. Each event has a similar set up. Music for dancing and lounging plays on the house’s different floors. Party attendees can chill and eat outside. And the hallmark is what’s going on in the attic: a jam session where anyone at the party can play different instruments, sing, chant, and rap.

The attic at House of Secrets feels like stepping into a different universe. The ceiling is painted with gradients of blue hues, bright stars, and emotive suns and moons. Couches line the room’s periphery, punctuated by end tables topped with large red lamps, houseplants, and antique figurines. Party attendees sit on the crowded couches and along on the floor, careful not to disturb any of the room’s relics, foreheads shiny and sticky with perspiration. There’s no shortage of people fidgeting in their seats to hop on the mic to freestyle or to get their turn on the drums. “Everyone brings something to the space,” Price says.

To Price, giving local Black artists a chance is a form of paying it forward. She found a love for art after a close friend gave her a camera in 2016 as a gift. Price had gotten out of prison 10 years earlier, and she felt like she was getting her bearings for the first time since she went away. She served a five-year sentence under D.C.’s Youth Rehabilitation Act, a law that provides incarcerated youth a chance to move forward in life without a criminal record.

“I was in the federal penitentiary at 18. I had to grow up really fast,” she says. “I had to sit in a cell—I was in lockdown for a year—and I had nothing but time to find myself.”

Shortly before Price got her camera, she had a dream in which four young Black boys with deep blue eyes rose out of the ground at Barry Farm and placed a camera in her hands. This dream confirmed for her that photography is part of her life’s purpose. She started doing research online to learn some tricks before taking classes at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, a community arts center in the neighborhood where she grew up. Since then, Price’s photography has been featured in the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The vast majority of subjects of Price’s pictures are children at Barry Farm. You can see them riding bikes, throwing up peace signs, making silly faces, and protesting. Price’s life experiences helped her realize the importance of uplifting the perspectives of youth. She has a strong and loving relationship with her family, but she remembers going into foster care briefly when she was around 5 years old after her parents experienced mental health crises. That experience, paired with her experience of going to prison when she was a teenager, armed her with a lot of compassion for kids. 

“While I was in prison, I knew I had to prepare myself. I knew the odds were against me. The system in America is very harsh for young people,” says Beverly. “For someone so young to make a mistake, and to have it follow you around forever … it made me question the compassion of this country.”

“My photos tell a story of concern for the youth. I’m a mother to the community.”

There’s power in Black people’s stories, and Beverly wants to give people the chance to share them. That’s why she’s started doing photography workshops with local kids. It’s why she’s cultivated relationships with so many Black artists across the city, providing them with platforms to dive into their crafts with other musicians. It’s also why she’s developed a bond with the owner of House of Secrets: Beverly’s been documenting his story while helping him take care of his home.

“House of Secrets is a place of ritual, a place of Black D.C. culture. It’s a Black museum and is vital to the ecosystem of D.C.,” Beverly says. “The owner is almost 90 years old and he’s still partying with us. We’re keeping the vibe alive.”

As far as I can tell, this vibe has remarkable reverberation power. Each of Beverly’s parties has been a bit bigger than the last; each attracting different Black artists to flex what they’ve got. Maybe one day, the world will grow more familiar with the stories behind the black-and-white photographs in this secret house.

To learn more about Beverly Price’s artwork, check out her website, beverlypricephoto.com, and follow her on Instagram, @filmgoddess_.

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I’m a Maryland born-and-raised organizer, comic book lover, and troublemaker. “Mumble Sauce” is a City Paper summer pop-up column containing my musings about how Black communities find healing in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, prisons, and jails.

Even though mainstream society tells me I shouldn’t, I have a lot of pride in my Blackness and my queerness. As such, there are a few things you’ll notice about my work. I always capitalize the word “Black” as it relates to race. This is to show respect for and significance to Blackness. I prioritize uplifting stories of women, femmes, and LGBTQIA+ people. We’re too often ignored and left in the shadows. Finally, I love me some counterculture. The column got its name because I love both mumble rap and mumbo sauce. Oppressed people should be free to uplift their cultures and attitudes—we shouldn’t have to conform to mainstream social norms in order to deserve respect. 

The struggle is real, but the resistance keeps my perspective rose-colored. Hope radiates from all the DMV-based people working to heal and build up communities. Their stories challenge us to ask important questions about surviving and thriving in unjust societies. How do we restore what we lose—mentally and physically—from oppression? How do we create alternate worlds where we’re all guaranteed safety and fulfillment? “Mumble Sauce” is a space where I’ll explore the discrimination facing Black folks in the D.C. area, along with the creative ways we’re overcoming it. 

To create a liberated world, you’ve got to have a little imagination. My heart gets light when I think about how Black DMV communities use art, food, and turning up to heal themselves. Most of my columns will share those stories, but my first column will shine light on the state violence we’re healing from in the first place. 

Don’t underestimate the power of the Mid-Atlantic’s humidity. It only takes one summer in the DMV to learn that it gets hot.

Growing up in the Maryland suburbs, summertime meant staining everything with colorful polka dots from my sticky fingers, playing with my grandmother’s hand fan collection, and sweating that never seemed to stop once it started. My shins produced an obscene amount of sweat throughout my childhood. By the time May rolled around each year, shin perspiration would mark the front of the khakis of my school uniform as if I’d spent lunchtime wading through high tides. If my skin wasn’t so brown, I would’ve had a perpetual blush flushed across my cheeks from the embarrassment.

Hot means many things. There’s temperature—the weather right now, or how our faces rush with heat when we’re flustered. And there’s mood—getting hot with anger and rage, or with attraction.

There’s also slang. There’s hot as in obvious, the warning you’ll get from a friend when your efforts to do some undercover act will be easily observable (“Don’t light that jay right now, it’s hot.”) There’s also hot as in the block is hot, an alert that cops are present on the street (“The block is hot, run!”)

All of these definitions converge during D.C. summers.

In May, Anthony Lorenzo Green, an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in Ward 7, lamented that police brutality would make it a “hot summer” in D.C., retweeting footage of an officer shoving a Black person in Southeast. This term is a reference to the “long, hot summer” of 1967. That year, over 150 uprisings ignited across the U.S. in response to police brutality against Black communities. Green—and the Black Lives Matter DC activists who jumped to his defense—received the ire of many officers for his statement. But police violence in the DMV could make this proclamation come true.

There always seems to be a spike in police brutality this time of year. Last summer was a particularly harsh season. Police officers in the DMV killed four Black people between May and June 2018. All of the victims’ families are still searching for answers.

First was 22-year-old Jeffrey Price. He was riding his motorcycle in May 2018 when, according to his family and their attorney, Metropolitan Police Department officers started pursuing him in their cruisers. He died after colliding with a cruiser that pulled out in front of him, cutting off his path. His family and the ACLU are now suing the department for searching his mother’s backyard without a warrant shortly after Price’s death. 24-year-old D’Quan Young also lost his life in May 2018. An off-duty officer fatally shot him in front of a neighborhood recreation center. The officer will not face charges, and MPD has refused to identify him. A few weeks after that, a Montgomery County police officer stopped 41-year-old Robert White as he was walking in his neighborhood and shot him to death for being “combative.” A day later, MPD officers shot and killed 24-year-old Marqueese Alston near his home in Northeast D.C. They reportedly fired 18 shots. 

Then there’s this summer. In mid-June 2019, cellphone video from a resident who goes by Soup Visions LLC captured an officer saying that Mayor Muriel Bowser directs cops to target wards 7 and 8. Around the same time, video of police intimidating a group of Black teenagers made its way around Twitter after being shared by Black Lives Matter DC. There’s also photographic evidence of officers walking through Barry Farm during a neighborhood event while openly carrying their guns, one of which appears to be an assault-style rifle. It feels like there’s new footage circulating on social media every few days. Imagine what happens when the cameras are off.

The block is truly hot. While the D.C. government increases investments in police, Black people are still being killed. Safe and stable housing is still hard to find. Hospitals serving Black communities keep getting shut down. Gun violence still harms our neighborhoods. Families in predominantly Black wards have trouble accessing grocery stores and healthy food. People don’t feel safe, and how could they? When over 1,300 police officers in the Metropolitan Police Department used force in 2018? When 90 percent of those incidents were against Black people?

D.C.’s summer anthem is the discontented roar echoing through the streets. Right before summer came around, Black folks and supporters created #DontMuteDC after a white Shaw resident threatened to sue over a local Black-owned phone and music store that plays go-go music outside of the shop. Organizers and musicians involved with #DontMuteDC later birthed Moechella, a go-go concert and protest starring the historic Backyard Band. The May 2019 Moechella demonstration drew an audience so big that the crowd blocked off the entire intersection of 14th and U streets NW. #DontMuteDC has grown to represent a broader movement against gentrification and displacement. Street art, public forums, and concerts have continued in the weeks since. 

Turn-up-as-protest isn’t the only way people are responding to the sweltering heat, and many collectives have been doing this work regardless of the season. Neighborhood organizers at ONE DC fight against displacement of Black D.C. residents and connect people with healing and educational resources. Black youth activists at Black Swan Academy advocate for moving away from policing and investing in mental health care, community violence intervention, and affordable housing instead. Formerly incarcerated Black women organizers at Life After Release bail Black mothers and caregivers out of jail and provide them with support. There are also Black people at BYP100 DC, where I volunteer. We facilitate workshops to advocate for less policing and more investment in resources, we engage in direct actions to end state violence, and we create art to uplift perspectives of Black people in D.C. And these are only a few examples of the collectives shaking things up in the District.

People are also advocating for Black communities on the legislative level. In June 2019, Councilmember Robert C. White introduced a bill to the D.C. Council that would give voting rights to people who are incarcerated. Given that 86 percent of people arrested in D.C. are Black, this legislation could elevate the perspectives of many Black voices that have been silenced for far too long.

The same month, the Sex Worker Advocates Coalition—a collective I’m involved with—joined At-Large Councilmembers David Grosso, Robert C. White, Anita Bonds, and Ward 1’s Brianne Nadeau to introduce a bill that would decriminalize sex work in the District. Sex workers and advocates cite rampant police violence against Black and brown people in the sex trades as one of the primary reasons why sex work should be decriminalized. Many sex workers are Black and brown trans and cis women, trans men, and nonbinary people who enter the sex trades after experiencing abuse or discrimination in housing and employment. Policing people in the sex trades doesn’t help them. But providing them with access to resources would.

Local activists and organizers have called for decreased policing and increased access to resources for a long time. This isn’t D.C.’s first heat wave. While the heightened attention on these issues is promising, are these efforts Black D.C.’s rallying cry or our death rattle? So many people have been harmed and displaced over the past few decades, and so many lives have been lost because of the lack of safety for Black people in the DMV. We’ve lost two young Black trans women, Ashanti Carmon and Zoe Spears, to gun violence over the last couple of months. Will things change? Will the heat consume us, or will we use the heat’s energy to transform our surroundings?

The moment I go outside during the summertime, I long for another shower. A film of moisture and hot pavement dust collects on my skin, a blinding, oily sheen spreads across my forehead, and sweat stings my eyes. I’ve been trying to navigate the physical and emotional discomfort that summer can bring since I was a child. It’s been 25 years, and while I’m still not quite sure how we’ll all make it through the oppressive heat of the DMV summer, I do know that we won’t stop trying.

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