"god’s brown face"

From the sureheaded playwright Lorraine Hansberry to genius Afroharpist Alice Coltrane, from lunch ladies who make monkey bread to grandmothers who fuss during commercial breaks, Black women are the supreme recipients of affection in these speakers’ lives. Sometimes the affection is broad—a seeing, a framing to preserve, it takes the form of insight. Other times it is a bit more complex—a curse word never uttered to the beloved’s face, pain lingering inside a shared experience of religion. Nikky Finney calls Lorraine Hansberry an “unforgettable insurgent, who always wanted to be in love,” and her speaker reads her while waiting “for an incapable lover to finally leave.” Jada Renée Allen honors that iconic line from Lucille Clifton, transforming it for her speaker's identity. E. Hughes’ speaker tries to understand her mother in perhaps the most expansive way—as a person and not just a parent, as a luminous young woman doing her best just before she enters an era of loss. These moments with our beloveds instruct and offer, as the scholar Kara Keeling writes, “time in which we can work to perceive something different or differently,” they bring us closest to what Hughes calls, “god’s
brown face.”