My chosen family. We banded together over time beginning in about 1985 as a potpourri of multiracial families who mostly lived in or near the Powderhorn Park area of Minneapolis.
Twenty five years later we still connect. Our now adult kids consider each other "cousins" and we adults "auntie," "uncle," "friend." And the grandkids are hatching. Some of them are friends, and even call each other "cousin." Our chosen family is now three generations strong.
We still camp together once a year on Memorial weekend - the original parents, now in our fifties and sixties; the "kids," now in their twenties and thirties; and the next generation, who are toddlers, preschoolers, and grade schoolers. We've added new families along the way - the circle is ever expanding, ever welcoming.
But back in the day one of our most important times of celebration was Kwanzaa. We gathered yearly on New Year's Day and embraced all of its meaning and all of who we were. I wrote the piece below in the early nineties as a celebration of us, my chosen family.
Happy Kwanzaa!
Family
It was our interracial families that brought us first together, but it's our history that binds us still. I feel drenched, no quenched, as I watch us at our annual Kwanzaa gathering at Karen's house this New Year's Day. We draw together in ritualistic ways, each year a rhythm of camping, storytelling, of gathering up this chosen family of ten families, our Kwanzaa ritual embedded at the center of the cycle. It's like the Thanksgivings of my childhood family, the cousins, aunts and uncles gathered 'round, each meal the same — turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, a salad with pomegranate seeds, cranberry sauce, two pies for dessert, pumpkin or mince meat, cool whip or ice cream, a comfort to be counted on.
Kwanzaa is an African American celebration, by black people for black people. But we claim it too, all of us, together. It's a refuge really, no one staring, no one glaring at our vibrant messy mix — black, white, Puerto Rican, Mexican, married, single, divorced, widowed, straight, lesbian. Our rowdy children flow among us, a striking swirl of texture, line, shape and hue.
We bring food and gifts to share. Black beans and rice, chicken wings, Pamela's Florida gumbo, my spicy black-eyed peas, sweet potato pie, Kathy's North Dakota double chocolate bars.
The gifts, called zawadis, are songs, games, crafts, stories or poetry. Tonight each zawadi seems a perfect reflection of the giver. Like Katie's, who's a social worker, who loves anything that helps us share our feelings. Tonight she gives each of us a page of mailing labels and a marker. She tells us to write down "people praises" on the labels, then walk around and stick them on each other. Soon our shirts are covered with stupid, corny messages that make us laugh, make me cry.
You're nice.
I like your style.
Your feet are cute.
You dare to be different.
You make me smile.
Even the boys play. Usually they circle around the edges of our gatherings, hanging back, hanging tough, hanging cool. But tonight, Oberika, who is fourteen and obsessed with slasher movies, slides past me and slyly slips his praise on me — Thanks for being nice to me. And from my son Anthony — You're the best mom in the world.
We catch up on our lives and offer up our pain here. The daughter who ran away, the failing marriage, the struggle with MS, the house lost to unpaid debt.
I remember the night I read some of my secret lesbian poetry. Still married, still not out, I chose to break my long silence here.
The Kwanzaa after Karen's husband Donnie died, his best friend Terryl read a poem for him and we all lit candles for him. Then, to honor him, we put on some funky funky funkadelic music and danced and danced for him.
Tonight we're funkified again. We line up for Jr. Walker and the All Stars and as the saxaphone blasts and the beat slams down we clap and shout while each dancer takes a run down the chute. The little kids jump up and down, teenagers do the tootsie roll, and we parents bump and grind the best we can.
The house fills with our noise, every corner, every inch awash in us. It's chaos — too many kids, not enough room, too much motion, but we don't care. I close my eyes and zoom away high into space like a camera for the closing take. I look again and see us still, a little speck of light, sparkling in our corner of the black black night.
January, 1995
(Quilt painting also by me, 1987)
