Galactic Black: Dreaming in Tongues and the Black Otherwhere - An Interview with Alexis De Veaux
Girl Negro. Sokari Ekine ©2022. Courtesy of Alexis De Veaux.
By emerald faith
Alexis De Veaux’s JesusDevil is exemplary of Black queer feminist literary work oriented toward Black freedom – nestled in the beauty and complexity of Black queer being.
Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem, the product of two merging streams of Black history in New York City –immigrants from the Caribbean on her mother’s side and migrants from North Carolina on her father’s side –who settled in Harlem in the early decades of the 20th century. The second of eight children, that history was embedded in her mother’s view of life: “You got three strikes against you. You poor, you black, and you female.” But Alexis was drawn to the world of words and books, and literature soon became the means by which she re-imagined the world her mother understood.
The social movements of the 1960s, and the Black writers associated with them, had a determining impact. Alexis began to envision the possibilities of living as a writer. In the early 1970s, she joined the writer’s workshop of the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Harlem. The workshop was run by the late writer Fred Hudson. Under his guidance she won first place in a national Black fiction writers’ contest (1972); published her first children’s book, Na-ni (1973); and the fictionalized memoir, Spirits in the Street (1973). By the end of the 1970s, Alexis’s reputation as a writer bridged multiple genres: fiction, children’s literature, playwriting and poetry.
In the ensuing decades, the tensions between the Black Arts Movement, an emerging Black feminist movement, and, later, the Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, were the backdrop for Alexis’s writing. Her work began to be defined by two critical concerns: making the racial and sexual experiences of Black female characters central to her work, and disrupting boundaries between forms. In 1980 she published Don’t Explain, an award-winning biography of jazz great Billie Holiday, written as a prose poem. As a freelance writer and contributing editor for Essence Magazine in the 1980s, Alexis penned several socially relevant articles, traveling on behalf of the magazine to Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Egypt. Alexis published a second award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo, where she finished graduate school, earning a doctorate in American Studies in 1992. A project nearly ten years in the making, her biography of Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004) has been the recipient of several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004), the Lambda Literary Award for Biography (2004), the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005). She is also the author of Yabo (2014), which according to Jewelle Gomez “…speaks in a powerful and insistent cadence about things we may have forgotten: death, desire, magic and the drum beat of resilience.” Her work is available in English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian.
Today, Alexis is a celebrated writer and activist recognized for her lifelong contributions to a number of women’s and literary organizations. She has collaborated with the visual artist Valerie Maynard and poet Kathy Engel on the digital project, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been Terrorized?”(available on YouTube); and co-founded with Kathy Engel, Lyrical Democracies, a cultural partnership aimed at communities interested in working with poets to enhance existing social projects.
Please note: This interview has been condensed/edited for readability.
emerald faith (ef): “to live in states of being not yet in existence” – from the Preface to JesusDevil
While you incorporate the above phrase as a definition of ‘parable’ or ‘to parable,’ I also read it (and other included phrases like “to suture or disembogue”) as a constellation of phrases that attempt to uncover or wrestle with the queerness of Black gender. Across your writing, I'm drawn to the ways that you foreground a refusal of a kind of gender normativity or coherence through your main characters and spirit figures. This orientation in your writing feels quite distinct, particularly for writers coming out of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Could you talk about how you came to center those particular perspectives and dis/embodiments in your writing?
Alexis De Veaux (ADV): That's a wonderful and complicated question. Let me start by saying, I have had the honor of having some longevity in my life, so I've had time to think about questions of gender in my own life and witness humans evolve around questions of gender and sexuality. I think that these are critical issues for Black people, especially for Black queer people because, for us, these are life and death questions. And, we are not only framing the questions, but modeling the answers in the lives that we live. So, I think it’s imperative that when we think about this question, we also interrogate what it means to be Black and “human” because those of us in “Black skin” have not been considered human because we were owned through chattel slavery, stereotyped as animals – it goes on and on. We’ve never had the distinction of being human vis-à-vis whiteness. It’s important for those of us occupying these spaces of Black and queer to nuance and interrogate these notions [of gender and sexuality] and also dispel notions of Blackness as being this or that – to also move away from the idea of monolithic Blackness and look toward Blackness as occupying multiple realities and spaces.
As my work has evolved and matured, I am looking at myself, but I'm also looking at all of us who wear the mantles of Blackness, and thinking about how we are evolving, how it is now different from, as you've identified, the 1970s and the importance of radicalizing blackness. We're not in the 1970s, we're not in the 1960s, and yet we stand on those shoulders, and we stand on those ideas, but it is our responsibility to push them, to push them toward freedom, which is something we don't yet have. When I talk about living in a state that's not yet in existence, I want to imagine freedom. We've had these legislative moments, for example, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Act, et cetera. But obviously those have not ushered forth freedom. Black people are not free. And I'm not saying that some things haven't changed, I'm just saying we're not free.
Gap Tooth Girlfriends cover. Courtesy of Alexis De Veaux’s personal archive.
“We’re not in the 1970s, we’re not in the 1960s, and yet we stand on those shoulders, and we stand on those ideas, but it is our responsibility to push them, to push them toward freedom.”
ef: That's helpful – when I was reading for my preliminary exams, yours and Sharon Bridgforth’s, as well as Randall Kenan’s work really struck me. love conjure/blues came out in 2004 I think, but y’all were participating in and/or coming out of the 70s/80s/90s and complicating Black gender in your writing. And that feels important, I think, to insist on unsettling and messifying Black gender in our literature, and I believe our texts will be all the richer because of it. Kenan’s work in A Visitation of Spirits was a bit different, but similar in some ways as he was interrogating the human/animal distinction.
ADV: I love that you raised him up. He was such a light for us. He came like a comet, he came, he fled – he left relatively early in life when we think about life spans today. And yet he left us things to think about. They always leave us with something to think about – when people are quoting Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, whomever they are quoting, they are quoting what that person left us to think about and left us to do the work of.
ef: I hear you saying that, in doing the work, that means expanding on what might have been seeds or limitations in order to account for our current conditions and the different kinds of experiences and positionalities that have emerged in their wake. Part of my question was informed by the various discourses that surround Black lesbian feminism of the 70s/80s/90s – I think your work and Sharon Bridgforth’s work, among others, are emblematic of how our elders can and do grow with us in thought. I don’t believe that the people whom I consider Black, queer, literary, or otherwise, elders are not growing with me.
ADV: And this is what we mean by inhabiting another world, just essentially inhabiting another way of being. Everything is possible, and we must understand what we mean by possible. If you can imagine, it can happen. To use a cliché, white people imagined being on the moon, therefore they got there. You know what I'm saying? Cause’ they imagined that possibility, and they made that possibility happen. In our own racialized histories – Harriet Tubman imagined her freedom, and that's how she got there. And then she imagined that she could free other people. So, she went back into those unfree spaces multiple times, risking capture, but she imagined that she could bring people to freedom. So, I imagined that Black bodies can exist in ways beyond enslavement, in ways beyond ownership, in ways that are beyond binaries. I imagine that that is possible. So I'm writing towards those possibilities. I'm writing towards those other worlds. I'm writing towards the ways in which Blackness can exist beyond white supremacist notions of Blackness.
‘Alexis with the Jolly Nigga Bank”. Photo credit: Sokari Ekine ©2023.
“I imagine that Black bodies exist in ways beyond enslavement, in ways beyond ownership, in ways that are beyond binaries. I imagine that is possible, so I’m writing towards those possibilities.”
ef: “tenderness of cosmic poetry” – from JesusDevil
Across your writing (thinking specifically about your interview with Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work, your short story “The Sisters” in Home Girls, your discussion with Judy Scales-Trent called “Conversations”, also in JesusDevil) this notion of inheritance in a broader sense or cross-generational connection is significant. In a literary sense, to whom do you consider yourself an heir? Who do you draw on or engage in cross-generational and/or ancestral communion, and why are they critical to your Black lesbian feminist literary lineage?
ADV: I know that this sounds cliché, but I really do believe that I am an heir of the first writings that came out of Black people in the so-called New World. I'm thinking of people like Phyllis Wheatley, for example, Frances Harper. That whole line of Black women who were writing in the 19th century during and after slavery. Am I writing the way they were writing? No, but I'm writing in that lineage. I am Black and female-identified. I am coming out of very specific socio-historical realities. I understand the position of Black females in this culture, and I understand the things that we have worked towards, both in terms of politics of respectability and in terms of more radical visions of who we can be. I also understand that I am not the first queer person – that this generation of Black and queer people are not the first, that we also extend and are heirs of those who came before us and who also were probably enslaved. I am famous for sharing a conversation that speaks to this point. I was having a conversation with my spouse, Sokari Ekine, who is a Nigerian visual artist. And I said something about my ancestors not being queer, and she looked at me and said, “how do you know?”
And with that question, I had to open up – I had to realize that I don't know. But the possibility was there. That’s what excited me – I more than likely have in my particular family lineage, going back to the period of enslavement, same gender loving people, however they identified themselves, however they costumed themselves, however they presented themselves publicly. I am an heir of all of that. I also come from the people that I draw on. In terms of engaging in cross-generational or ancestral communion – people like June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison. These were people that I knew, and they had an impact on me. People like James Baldwin, whom I only met once in life, but when I met him, he turned me around. People like the visual artist, Valerie Maynard, who passed away last year, who was 85. She was an amazing artist. She actually raised me as a younger artist. She taught me to see – not just to look – but to see. And the difference between looking and seeing, being that one is passive looking. Whereas seeing means that you go into – put yourself in. And there are scores of Black women – Ntozake Shange is among them. There are Black women writers who came out of the 1970s who are no longer on this planet who raised me up, and therefore I am descended from them. I also have contemporary people that I feel descended from. I feel descended from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, for example. I feel descended from people like Briona Simone Jones, who is the editor of the anthology Mouths of Rain.
These are writers who are coming up behind me, but who are also raising me by sharing their work with me – showing and teaching me about how they understand their lives as Black queer people. I feel blessed. I'm blessed that I live in a way that I do have a cross-generational or intergenerational reality that I don't want to be simply with people who are my age. I want to be with people who are going to help me grow. And growth is difficult, but it can also be a place of tremendous affirmation, tremendous, again, possibility.
These are people who have, in different ways, planted the bricks of themselves in me and have helped me to shape what I would call any kind of Black queer feminist literary reality. Octavia Butler, whom I have also met in life, Audre Lorde, Nelson Mandela. These are people whose names we know, but there are many people whose names we don’t know. My grandmother, Ruby Moore Hill, who taught me to read the Bible as poetry. In her way, she was an influence, and she taught me to think about the stories of the spiritual – to think the spiritual engages in stories and that's how you learn from them.
Alexis De Veaux (right) and June Jordan (left). Photo credit courtesy of Alexis De Veaux’s personal archive.
ef: Your mention of Valerie Maynard and her teaching you to see is reminding me of your interview in Black Women Writers at Work when you said writers are given the responsibility of sight. It feels as though that raises the stakes when we think about writing in the context of responsibility and not simply as a skill.
ADV: Shortly after I met Baldwin, I read this quote of his, and it has always stayed with me. He said, “The role of the artist is exactly that of the lover. If I love you, I have to show you the things you do not see.” And that is engaged with this notion of sight. And in fact, Baldwin and Valerie Maynard were very close friends. They grew up in the same Harlem. Their families were known to each other when they were kids. They were young people. So, it's not surprising to me then to learn that he would say this and that Valerie would teach me that.
Alexis De Veaux (left) with Valerie Maynard (right). Photo credit Sokari Ekine ©2023.
ef: “hope is a distraction” – from JesusDevil
In the introduction to JesusDevil, through a critical engagement with Kaur Aria, you write, “In other words, we can speak a language that constructs the difference between being legally freed by the state and imagining what Black freedom looks, feels, smells, tastes like every day.” In what feels like an extension of this, Phil (or the narrator) says in the beginning of the book, “hope is a distraction.” Do you consider hope to be an affective dimension or frame for your work? And if not, what other than hope orients your work?
ADV: In JesusDevil, one of the things I'm saying is that the hope project has been not only a distraction, but it has been a prevention. For example, in the 1984 Presidential Democratic campaign, Jesse Jackson's slogan was ‘keep hope alive.’ Hope, I have come to understand, has created a kind of passivity in Black people that I no longer find politically useful. Hope wants to supplant our rage – hope wants to arrest anger. And these are the things – anger, rage – these are the things that have driven our people to seek freedom, to run away. And hope, as I have come to understand it now, is a very interesting tool of structures of dominance. I would rather see us engage in the emotions of anger, rage, and outrage that created the rebellion in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd – that rebellion was not built on hope.
I was just listening earlier to Nina Simone singing Mississippi Goddamn, and she, in her way, addresses this question of hope. They told us to just go slow. They told us to just wash the floors and pick the cotton, and hope was engaged by those activities. But at the end of the song, she bangs the piano keys, and she says, that's it. And it's clear that she's gone through this whole historical scenario to come to a point of saying “this, and no more.” So, I try very hard not to use the word hope in a contemporary sense. But again, to go to those emotions, that means that we will be pushed to be more aggressive about Black freedom. I mean, we've been struggling for Black freedom in America for over 400 years. I mean, it's just tiring just to say that sentence over 400 years. When people talk about Black Lives Matter, I'm like, think about the first African that went overboard because they thought their life mattered. They would rather live underwater – what we call deaths. They would rather live underwater than be taken. That's the beginning of this thing we call Black Lives Matter.
As I say in JesusDevil, Black lives don't matter. Black lives do not matter in this culture. Look at what has been happening more and more recently. We just don't matter because we are not human.
“Hope, I have come to understand, has created a kind of passivity in Black people that I no longer find politically useful. Hope wants to supplant our rage – hope wants to arrest anger.”
ef: At the end of the first parable – “Girl Negro,” there’s a conversation happening amongst Phil’s ancestors. You write, “she never said she wanted to die. An ancestor noted, but what does she want? They queried each other. Until after tossing that question about the abundant dark matter, they all finally agreed their descendant wanted to transition, not because she wanted to die, because she wanted to be differently alive.” This feels resonant with what you’re saying – in thinking about this notion of refusal born from a desire for our spirits to exist otherwise than despair. Your earlier mention of Nina Simone and this conversation around rage and refusal has me thinking about what it feels like to watch Nina Simone’s live performance videos – it is such a visceral and weighty externalization of absolute rage – absolute despair. It feels difficult, for me, to turn to hope from that. And this is helping me think about interrogating hope more intentionally – to consider the ways hope has been conjured and wielded against and through Black people for the sake of regulation.
ADV: And that's exactly what hope has done. It has regulated us. And I love the way you understand this work too, emerald, because I think there are several parables that deal with refusal. And I think the whole of JesusDevil can exist in a conversation about reparations not simply as what we want someone to give us. People, y'all know, y'all owe us. This is not news to y'all. Your wealth is built on our backs. And y'all know this because y'all didn't do the work. We were forced to do the work that created the wealth of this country. Y'all know, this is not news. So this whole discourse around reparations, I think it's an important one. But it should not only be done in one way, in one realm, on one plane.
We should, as Black people, Black diasporic people ask ourselves, what do we mean by reparations? How do we get reparations? Not just, again, in terms of what is due to us by this government, which this government can pay us. It's bullshit for them to be telling us they don't know how to do it, and there's no money. Come on. There are billions of dollars going to Ukraine every day. I'm not saying that the Ukrainian people don't have a just cause. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the United States government has priorities, and we are not one of those priorities. They owe it to us, and they owe it to Indigenous people. They created both of those moments at the same time. The slaughter of Indigenous peoples and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, both of those things were crucial to the invention of capitalism. So yes, we need to have that larger political and policy conversation around reparations, but we also need to have this every day, one-on-one, two to three, five to five, however many, or the one with the self, asking, “what do I mean by reparations? What do I mean by refusal?”
“Flamboyant Ladies Theater”. Photo courtesy of Alexis De Veaux’s Archive.
ef: “ecology of touch” – from JesusDevil
Thank you so much for that. This next question is interested in writing as a multi-sensory endeavor and has two parts: If you were curating a soundtrack to JesusDevil, who would be on it and why? What other kind of sensorial experiences contributed to the writing process of JesusDevil? Whether you went on a walk, caught a sunset, and something came to you, or you were cooking something that smelled a particular way, and that conjured something in your mind.
ADV: Wonderful question because I’m building the playlist upon which JesusDevil exists for me right now. So, it would include Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn,” Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have my Money,” Bill Withers’ “Grandma’s Hands.” It would include John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” Bob Marley’s “Could you be Loved?” and “Get Up, Stand Up.” It would include 90s House music – the whole thing, not any one person, just the whole thing. Oh, my girl Lauryn Hill’s “Everything is Everything.” This is music that lives in my body, is always in my head. When I think about JesusDevil, these musics are languages and surround the writing process for the book. Whether I was listening to them as I was writing, which I generally don’t do, except if it’s Miles Davis or John Coltrane, because I can’t listen to words If I’m also listening for words. This is music that I would be surrounded by, if not playing, then certainly again would be living in me and did live in me. “Mississippi Goddamn” can never not live in me. “Empire State of Mind” can never not live in me.
Also, I love to cook because I love to eat, so food is always present for me. I also have to take naps – resting my body is part of writing, and I understand that I'm always writing whether I actually have the pen in my hand or not. I only write with pen and paper. I don't write on the computer. That's too, in some ways, disembodied for me. I have a wonderful collection of fountain pens. I write with pen and ink. I love seeing the ink on my fingers at the end of the day. So, the ink itself, paper and ink are critical too, they are critical sensorial [tools] for me. Of course, being sexual, making love is something that is an enhancement for the work. One of the definitions of ‘to parable’ has to do with this notion of what my spouse calls pussying yourself, going somewhere and having an erotic experience with yourself. And that's also what writing is about. Let me see if I can find the quote…
ef: …You write, “To tell oneself an erogenous story while engaging in acts of self-pleasure and pleasing the self as in, ‘what were you doing up there in your room, pussying yourself?’”
ADV: Right, right, and that's the erotic writing pleasure. And in this work, I was more aware because I had someone commenting on it, “well, you've been up in that room a long time. What were you doing up in there?” Because I also have the door closed, and we have a practice at home when one is in their own room, that's the sacred space, and you don't just open the door and bring yourself in. You have to knock and be invited in. Otherwise it's respected that something sacred is going on, and that is not to be taken lightly. So there's a sense of the sacred as part of one's every day that I was also aware of. And seeing both the writing and the sexing and the cooking and walking with the canine in the morning, all of that, having a good glass of wine, having a good cocktail, all of that being part of the work of bringing this forward.
ef: Thank you so much for this – it’s also making me think about the role of intimacy and pleasure within JesusDevil and in the Black lesbian literary archive more broadly, especially of the late 20th century.
ADV: We couldn't take it for granted. And we were growing up and had grown up during a period in which Black bodies were so maligned. We didn't have the language and the political spaces, the political movements to address our own bodies until we became, and so it’s crucial for us to talk about fucking, to talk about pussy, to talk about dick, to talk about our sexual realities in ways that we could define – not in ways too often defined for us. And prior to us, I'm not saying there were never people who did, but the general realities were such that Black people who were writing had to adhere to a kind of politics of respectability that meant that they could not, or they found very ambiguous ways to talk about their bodies. I just finished reading Richard Bruce Nugent's book, Gentleman Jigger, and it's so interesting. Even as the main character talks about loving men, at any of the points in which those scenes happen or sex is alluded to, you don't see that sexual experience. And it might be that we've been obsessed with it. Speaking for myself, I am obsessed with the Black body as an intimate reality.
People like Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, Barbara Smith, Donna Woods, Bradley Johnson, Pat Parker, we had to, because that was the thing that was denied us, our own Black bodies, so we had to look at desire. There was no way we could take desire for granted because we were told, one, we didn't have it. And two, when we did have it, it was abnormal.
“There was no way we could take desire for granted…”
I just saw this documentary on Little Richard called “I Am Everything.” In this documentary, we see how Little Richard who grew up gay, he understood himself as a gay boy, moves into show business, and he makes space for all kinds of people, including you and me. Before there was Sylvester, there was Little Richard. We see the tension between his sexuality and his religious experiences was such that towards the end of his life, he denounced himself as a gay person. Now, that's the tragedy of a life that was really a pioneering life.
That's the real tragedy. Imagine if Little Richard had had access to being positioned in such a way that he did not have to deny himself at the end of his life, that he could have looked at his religious convictions in a different way. One that wasn't either/or – either you love men or you love Jesus, but one that was both/and. We grow and build on Little Richard's experience. You have this whole group of us, Sharon Bridgforth, Cheryl Clarke, myself, and others included, who make a point of not just outing our sexual realities, but of expressing them. This is what I call Black expressive sexualities, which are not in tension with some other condition of being that we are living.
Alexis De Veaux @ the Altar. Photo credit Sokari Ekine ©2023.
ef: “miracoilicious marvelific magicals” – JesusDevil
My next question was inspired by the above quote and the other ways you conjure language in the text. JesusDevil has a fascinating relationship with language. Throughout the text, you incorporate words that you have created and defined. This brings me to a broader question about method. If ‘afiction’ might be used to capture the genre of JesusDevil or the form, could you talk more about your method in constructing the text as well as how you wield language within it?
ADV: I think it's both – I think I’m pointing to a different genre and a different form. When we look at the parables, we see that they’re pretty much written like poems. It's line by line pretty much not in every instance, but in 99.99% of the text, it's written in a sort of prose poetic style. There is no table of contents. When we were doing the mockup for the book, the copy editor stuck in a table of contents, and I immediately had a visceral response. I was like, “oh, no, take that out, not this. Take that out.” The reader discovers each parable, we don’t set them up. So I think it is both pointing toward, if not a new, but certainly a different type of fiction. It's a fiction that's driven by a different set of values, clearly.
When I think about my work, the life of my work, and over the course of my life, I've always been interested in playing with forms. I've always been interested in something that might be called experimental. I don't call it experimental, but my work has been identified as such, because I'm always thinking about, even when it looks like I'm working within the form, I'm also doing something else – always. That's just my creativity, that's just my imagination. The thing with language in JesusDevil that I was particularly forwarding is that we can name it ourselves. Preach Queen [a character in the text] says this in one of the parables. When we want to, we just make some shit up. We just make up a new word. And when you look at American culture, and in some ways, global culture, you see that what comes out of Black people's mouths becomes the new language. When we get tired of it, we come up with something else. So it's an important way that we express ourselves, that we take this language that is called English, and we bend it out of shape from time to time, and that language is what we agree on.
It's not something that we simply have to swallow. It's what we agree on. So if we agree on a word like miraculicious, then it is. So, I think that's an important, very, very important intervention here in JesusDevil, is to speak to language and to speak to Black people's abilities to invent and refresh language. As Preach Queen says, we prefer the dynamic to the fixed.
Alexis De Veaux with South African anti-apartheid activist, Winnie Mandela. Photo courtesy of Alexis De Veaux’s personal archive.
“When we want to, we just make some shit up. We just make up a new word.”
JesusDevil book cover. Photo credit Sokari Ekine ©2023.
ef: Thank you for that. My last question goes back to Black Women Writers at Work. You wrote about the difficulty you sometimes experienced getting your writing placed in Black publications. Could you share a bit about your experience as a writer and contributing editor for Essence Magazine? What, if anything, was unique about Essence as a Black cultural platform that made it possible for you to write for them in the 80s?
ADV: It was a defining moment for me working at Essence Magazine. I worked there from 1978 to 1991, I think it was. The piece on Nelson Mandela when he was released from prison in 1990 may have been the last piece. For one, it was a period of great growth for me as an emerging writer, 1978 to 1990, 1991. And two, there were two factors of Essence Magazine that made my presence as the first poetry editor and then contributing writer and then contributing editor there possible. One was Susan Taylorr, who was the Editor in Chief of the magazine, and two was Cheryll Green. Cheryl Green was my direct editor. Cheryll was just an amazing human being. Very generous, very, very Black, very political in her thinking, and understood that there were uses for a Black women's beauty magazine that went beyond what color lipstick to wear and how to please your man.
Susan Taylor, I think, trusted us as a team. She was a supporter of my work at large, and she trusted Cheryl and I as a team. Whenever the magazine wanted to do something that had to do with the social or political, I would be assigned that because they saw in me someone who could handle those things. Cheryl and I used to tease each other that we were sort of the underground, we were the hidden guerilla workers. We were like this army of two. There were maybe a dozen essays that I wrote over that time that gave the magazine a kind of legitimacy beyond what color lipstick to please your man? What's the best thing to cook for dinner? That gave the magazine and us as Black women, a broader landscape on which to think about who we were. And too, Essence Magazine had an incredible readership, like a couple million people a month, 2 to 3 million people. I had this amazing platform on which I wrote about coming out, or Haitian refugees, or going South or HIV/Aids. And I would be being read essentially by this enormous market of Black women readers who also, I learned this in years later, would save and pass those issues on to their daughters. I met young women who would say, “oh, my mother gave me your article on such and such and such.” It was an intergenerational readership of the ideas that Cheryl Green, Susan Taylor, and I were forwarding. For me as a writer, it was an incredible platform. I was never once second guessed or doubted about why writing for “women's magazine” was a legitimate platform through which to articulate these ideas about Blackness.
ef: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me Alexis, I can’t wait for JesusDevil to make its way into the world!
To pre-order JesusDevil, please visit: https://www.akpress.org/jesusdevil.html
To learn more about the work of Alexis De Veaux, please visit: http://alexisdeveaux.com
About the author: emerald faith (they/them) is an English PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where they also received their master’s degrees in English and Afro-American studies. Their research interests include 20th century African American literature, Black queer literatures, Black queer theory, and Black feminisms. They are currently an editorial fellow at JSTOR Daily. You can follow them on Twitter at @emeraldfaith. You can follow them on Twitter at @emeraldfaith.