Sisters of the Roundtable

I do not know what called the knights of King Arthur’s court to make their way to the roundtable, but for a group of sister friends in Maryland, it’s a chicken. A ceramic chicken. A semi-grotesque looking chicken which would function as a gravy boat if they ever used it for that. It was given to my friend and her husband as a wedding gift. Apparently, the gifter imagined their sense of style and the couple’s taste could brave abandoning the wedding registry for gifts from worlds unknown. Usually it stays put in its original box and keeps company with the other misfit items in the cabinet above the refrigerator. However, every now and then it makes its way onto the kitchen or dining room table serving notice to spouses, significant others, children, and even the occasional visiting pet that it is time for them to clear the room, time for a fresh pot of coffee to be made, time for more desert, and time for the sisters to gather around. It is around the table at my friend’s home that these group of sisters, some related by blood, some by bond, others by experience gather around the table to share stories, to plan strategy, offer counsel, and give testimony and ear to both burden and promise. At the table these group of Black women find solace and strength, find fire and calming nurture, find affirming nods and story recognized that help them to live full lives in times and in spaces that are often less than life affirming if not downright hostile. There is life at their table. There is a deep down salvific power in the gathering of these sisters.

The art and practice of Black women gathering around table is not new. It isn’t even particularly unique to Black women, but it is a ritual that I longed to be a part of even as a child. For the women on the maternal side of my family, weekends at my grandparents home were a regular occurance. My grandfather would find his spot in the living room near the tv or in his car to listen to talk radio. My brother, when old enough to play outside, would find his weekend friends to play with until the street light notification signaled that playtime was over. But the women, my grandmother, my mother, my aunt, and their girlfriends would pile around the table in the kitchen in a room whose size should not have been able to accommodate their numbers let alone their uproarious laughter. The kitchen, perfumed by the scent of collard greens cooking on the stove and percolating coffee and whatever other tasty morsels my Nana would whip up, welcomed these women and their conversations and the life that they made when gathered in that little room around the table seemed otherworldly.

As a young person I tried my best to remain hidden outside of the door in a chair in the corner. I tried hard not to peer in too far, not to look as if I was paying them and their grown woman business any mind. But it was hard not to lean into the gravitational pull of their stories. Difficult not to laugh at their laughter even when I had no idea what the punchline was. Inevitably I would be found out and banished from that chair in the corner and told to go outside and play. My books or playtime with friends would have to do in those moments, but I dreamed of the day when I would be able to sit down with them, to drink coffee from one of my Nana’s Corningware tea cups, and to lend ear and testimony to the stew of rich life that their sistering conjured.

Finally, on break one semester while in undergrad that day came for me. I was told to pull up a chair and to sit at the table. I was asked about life away and who I was dating and how my classes were going and what my future plans were. I don’t know if the date had been set in their minds of when my invitation to this exclusive group would come or if they decided that particular day that I looked grown enough to join them. The truth was that I didn’t care all that much about why they extended the invitation. All I knew was that I had been given an audience with this esteemed council. I could laugh loud and offer up my opinions and even when they rolled their eyes at me with a “Child please! Just live a little” kind of look they never rescinded the offer. I was there to stay. I even got a cup of coffee poured by my Nana’s own hand to seal the invitation. This is where I learned first hand of the power and nurture of Black women’s friendships with other Black women. It’s where I learned that in the company of sisters that one could swap recipes, talk politics, pray about scary diagnosis, complain about jobs and men and children and in the same breath offer prayers of thanksgiving for jobs and men and children. I would not call these relationships perfect any more than I would call these women perfect, but the way that they loved each other, the way that they modeled true deep down abiding sisterhood was perfection.

These gatherings, these moments of sisters around table, were as vital to life as water and oxygen as earth and fire. It was the unnamed essential element that kept worlds moving and even more so kept these women grounded when their worlds flung out of control. Though I did not have the words for it then, I would come to understand an essential truth. Whether it was gathering week after week at the roundtable in my grandmother’s kitchen with the Black women who faithfully made the pilgrimage or with the sisters who would surround the tables I would come to set, or those who would invite me to join their gatherings whether signaled by a ceramic chicken or an email or a text or a link to the pandemic era living room otherwise known as zoom, these unguarded moments where the dignity, beauty, humanity, and value of Black women could happen without being contested have unmatched significance and power.

As a woman who witnessed the power of these relationships in my formative years, and as one who has been a girlfriendy kind of girl for as long as I can remember, I admit that fir a long time I hadn’t understood women who didn’t seem to celebrate these kinds of relationships. More than not understanding them, I confess that I have been a bit judgmental. The idea that Black women couldn’t be trusted by other Black women, or that Black women are inherently jealous of other Black women, or are inclined to sabotage the relationships or success of other women as a unique character trait to Black women specifically not only failed to hold any truth in my personal history or that of the cadre of sister friends whom I know personally, it also does not hold up in the socio-political witness of Black women historically. Whether speaking of the Black Women’s Club Movement in the late 1800’s that worked to dismantle racism and engage in the work of racial uplift or of the Black Lives Matter Movement founded in 2013 by three queer Black Women (Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullers, and Opal Tometi) in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of 17 year old Trayvon Martin, Black women have a rich history of supporting each other in ways that not only strengthen and support them personally, but that affect society at large and in significant ways. While I still find the position problematic, life has softened my judgemental edge. But this matter of Black women’s relationships with each other, this practice of sistering one another at a time when the precarity of Black women’s wellbeing and very lives has come to light in more public ways in our national life together has brought the value and necessity of our gathering in safe spaces to the forefront of my mind once again.

Some years ago a group of girlfriends known as the Brunch Crew participated in the installation festivities of one of the crew who was being installed as the Dean and Vice-President of Academic Affairs in an institution of higher learning. She wanted us to serve on a panel to talk about the ways Black women experience friendship with each other as a source of accountability and nurture. The Brunch Crew was going on the road. We were a mix of sisters whose ages at the time ranged from late 30s to late 50s. Preachers, pastors, academics, and attorney professionally. We are single, divorced, mothers, and without children of our own. We are a mix of brilliant, creative, gifted, opinionated, thinking, writers, speakers, activists, and advocates whose conversations regularly run the gamut in a single sitting. It is the gift of our friendship… this willingness to be our unapologetic, unadulterated, unfiltered grown woman selves without censure or justification. Whether gathering at brunch around table or in our messenger group online our friendship with each other, our support of each other, our willingness to pray for each other and cuss with each other, to talk of both fulfillment and longing, disappointment and accomplishment, to console when needed or argue when that is what’s necessary, to share both the sacred and what untrained ears might think profane, our loving of each other… sistering of each other is priceless. And yet what is also remarkable is the normalcy of it to us. We all have other iterations of these same kinds of relationships with other Black women as well. This is what we know of Black women. Not the mythological version of the strong Black woman or the caricature of Black womanhood often portrayed on big screens or mistrusted in boardrooms or distorted in news cycles, but flesh and blood, beautiful even with flaws, both strength and vulnerability, insightful and wise, fully formed in some ways and yet evolving in others... this is who we are.

After our panel discussion several women approached me and shared that though encouraged by our conversation they admitted that it made their longing for such a connection with other Black women in their personal lives more pronounced. Sister after sister. I didn’t have time to ask them why this was the case. It did not seem appropriate to ask these sisters while we were pouring coffee or viewing the beignets or passing each other on the way to the restroom or wherever the sisters and their longing found me. But I wondered. I wondered why they didn’t have this kind of friendship with Black women that I and the Brunch Crew sisters had in abundance. I wondered if it was location. If they were in environments where they were the only Black woman as far as the eye could see. I wondered if some of them had believed for most of their lives that it was impossible to be friends with Black women and now that they knew better they were out of practice on how to connect with other sisters in meaningful ways. I had no idea what their stories were. But what I had was great concern. How do Black women live in this world, in these times without significant friendships with other Black women? How do sisters maintain their sanity and health and substance and clarity? How do they navigate the realities of racism and sexism and misogyny without the council of sisters to at very least bear witness to their story? Where do Black women find refuge if there is no refuge in the stories and faces of other sisters?

In her book, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Dr. Brittney Cooper asks, “What does it look like for Black women to move freely through space when we are always confronting the precariousness of life at the intersections of race and gender, or class and mental health, of love and dreams?” (Cooper, 109.) Yet part of our survival in navigating this tempestuous terrain has been to utilize the care and support of other Black women as our compass and balm. Of course there is family and friends. Of course there are sometimes spouses and significant others. Of course there are colleagues and associates and significant friendships and connections with a full range of people throughout our lives, but none of these relationships render the connection and shared experience of Black women insignificant.

The constant struggle against the invisibility, exploitation, devaluation, hostility and violence hurled against Black women impacts our livelihood, our wellbeing, not to mention our bodies, minds, and souls. Yet, when the concerns, including our anger, about the injustice we experience fall on uninterested hearts, sisters have found not only solace and understanding, but a space to regroup, to heal, to grieve, to plan, to strategize even to rage at table with other sisters.

It is the company that sisters find at table that helps us to make sense of not just struggle but of the joy and promise of life, our lives. It is there in fellowship with our sisters that we get to see the ugly, the distorted, and dismembered more clearly. And we also get the opportunity to sister ourselves human again in ways that make us more available for friendship and familial connection… in ways that help us to go back into the struggle of the day with a greater sense of our worth and beauty and divine nature. It is necessary... this healing work. It is needful… this time away at table. It is essential… this kind of gathering of Black women.

Whether in homes or lunch rooms or restaurants or church fellowship halls, this ritual of sisters at table as a central gathering place reminds us of our humanity. Reminds us that our black, our brown, our caramel, our cafe au lait, our hips, our wide noses, our height, our short, our skinny, our fat, our loud, our quiet, our comfort, our rage, our beauty, our tears and laughter, our thinking and artistry, our strategizing and leadership is common. Familiar. This time of gathering, the gathering of women around table is precious time. Life affirming. Healing. We may not all have a ceramic chicken calling us, but we all surely need gathering at table to remind us that there in the company of each we are seen, we are accepted, and we are loved. Home… indeed with each other we are home.