Do you know how important you are?

Do you know how important you are?

Do you know that our people slept laying spoon fashion in the filthy hatches of slave ships

in their own and in each other’s excrement and in their urine

and menstrual flow so that you could live

200 years later?

Do you know that?

Do you know that our people stood on auction blocks

So that you could live?

When is the last time someone told you how important you are?

Maya Angelou to Tupac Shakur on the set of Poetic Justice. She repeated this story to Dave Chappelle during the taping of  the show Iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel, where she and he sat and talked.

Missing Grandma

I'm missing my Grandmother sooooo very much.



She taught me that anything that I want is mine. She loved all of us very much and her lesson was always that all my needs are already done.

The Touch of a Grandmother

My family is planning a Family Reunion in July. The reunion is taking place in Maryland. I haven't been back there in 3 years since my grandmother's funeral. I'm having a really hard time deciding to go to the reunion. It's just not going to be the same without her there. I miss her soooo much.

My mother and her sister sold her house where we all gathered. It was the house that my Great Grandfather built for my Great Grandmother. My Grandmother was born there and so was my mother.

It's going to be difficult. She made everyone feel important. Whose going to do that now? There is no one left in the family like her.

I know I'm rambling but I just miss her so much.

She told me I was her favorite. I found out later that she said that to everyone. We all believed that we were the favorite. I know I really was. I don' t care what the hell they say.

I miss my grandmother's touch.