A REMEMBRANCE

I had four aunts. I remember as a young pre teen these beautiful, tall, slender, yet not small, brown women. I remember going in the bathroom and seeing their silk nylons hanging from some made up stick my grandmother used to whip our asses when we didn‘t listen. I remember sneaking peeks as they were getting dressed to go to work or out on a Saturday night. I remember getting a warm feeling in my pre pubetic groin watching them put on their silk stockings, red fingernails clicking the hooks over the elastic white garter to hold up the black rim hose.

I marveled as they took their time pulling up the shear man made cover over those shapely legs, they seemed to admire their bodies and automatically knew and understand the chemistry that made them woman. Not subservient, not weak, but what Nature intended when it split the hermaphroditic human animal into two entities for better survival, one of testosterone and the other estrogen.

Today as I was riding on the train, two black bodies in military uniform caught my eye. I stared through the window because my brain didn’t agree with my eye. For several minutes I wondered, but then I saw the outline of what appeared to be breast or a flak jacket beneath the camouflage, I settled on breast. As the train pulled out of the station, I reflected on the relationships and attitudes of black, white, and in general, “western” women of today and my aunts of yesterday. Then I really wondered if Nature was able to keep the separation it worked so long and hard to create or was it losing out to anything goes, all that’s good, white feminism, strong black woman material pleasure, all in the name of progress?