10 Tidbits about Rayshauna

1.       I feel deeply. I have been known to cry at the museum, during flights, and during my favorite arias. Jascha Heifetz’ rendition of Bach’s Chaconne always sets me right, Monserrat Caballe's take on Puccini’s O Mio Babbino Caro always makes me want to bake somebody a cake, Jessye Norman going to town on Purcell’s When I am Laid in Earth makes me want to lie down and never get up, and Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of Nessun Dorma makes me never want to sleep again. I adore sculptures by Bernini, Romantic era paintings by Delacroix, and Mississippi Delta Blues. They all make me cry. In case I haven’t gotten my point across, I’m a sensitive cookie.

2.       I’ve always had interesting friends. Some of my first imaginary friends were the gods and goddesses from the children’s book of Roman myths I used to carry around. I often brunched with Venus and listened to Proserpina talk about her on again-off again relationship above and below ground. I’ve waged war on homework with Mars and took Cerberus on walks (with triple the usual amount snacks, naturally). When I got a bit older, I loved memorizing my favorite literature, so I held onto my favorite chunks of Ovid’ s Metamorphoses, Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I also live-tweeted the Norton Anthology of African American Lit so I could retain what I was reading, but kept my interpretations private once I realized that people get paid to sift through texts. And yes, I also had real, live human friends - ya meanie.

3.       I was not always Humanities-focused. I was very into science fairs back in the day. My projects included crafting a model human heart (complete with fake blood flow) and a model human eye. I wanted to be Marie Curie when I was younger and was over the moon when I got a chemistry set. I conducted chemical reactions and had a flair for presentation. I competed regionally with other chickadees from across Chicago and made a game out of memorizing the periodic table and making up stories about how some of them turn into others. Eventually, I would move to Cambridge, MA…and encounter a wonderful collection of artwork made up of the elements.

4.       I’m eternally grateful to the adults that raised me.  I grew up in a multigenerational home with my maternal side of the family. I’m an only child and it was so affirming to be poured into. I got years of piano lessons, participated in Gospel choirs for decades, and I used to compete in competitions. My mother stressed the importance of learning, and bought me more flashcards and study materials than I could stomach. She also took me on walks, god bless her. Self-mastery and the love of the transformational power of learning were key. My childhood was full of books, laughter, board games, making great food from scratch, and summers in Chicago. I was a lucky duck.

5.       I need to roam. When I was 14, I chose to attend a high school clear across the city (which meant a commute of at least 90 minutes each way). In the winter, I would get up between 5:30 and 6 to get there by 8. During that time of year, the sky was still half dark – and I would imagine Helios driving his chariot and making things bright over my part of the world. During trips home from school, I would ride the El with friends, meandering and shooting the breeze. By the time all was said and done, it was dark again. It was during these trips home that I would look up and see Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in the ads above passengers’ heads on the train car. I would come to memorize the poem because it seemed like it was following me – it is my favorite poem and I can still recite it on command. Every time I recite it, I feel 14 again. My second favorite poem is T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I enjoy thinking about peaches and yellow fog rubbing up against window panes. This need to roam has taken me all along both coasts and bunches of places in between. Hopefully, I'll use this passport soon. Berlin and Reykjavik, I'm comin'!

6.       I’ve been a lucky lil’ somethin’. I hit a few numbers in the Texas lottery…when I was about 10. My memory’s a bit fuzzy around this, but I picked some solid numbers. I wasn’t a millionaire, but a little dough is a lot when you’re a whippersnapper. Michael Jordan came to play basketball at the park across the street from my childhood home, so I went out to play, too. I’ve got bunches of stories like these – and the older I get, the more I realize that luck usually hinges upon playing the game and putting yourself in right spaces. This is a practice I took with me to New England. I started to sit in the front rows of lectures and learned to take pride in my grit and hunger to learn...rather than be ashamed of my rocky academic career.

7.       I had a mean entrepreneurial streak. I used to sell things and pitch ideas every chance I got as a child. Candy apples weren’t sold in grocery stores near my house? Fine. I walked around, taking orders from the neighborhood and went downtown to the factory and got cases at bulk price, making a NICE profit. I delivered apples door-to-door as a child in the '90s. I also became a girl scout JUST so I could sell cookies. I used to create useless committees for the kids on my block and make membership cards – “laminated” ones, if you will, using clear tape. Nearly 15 years later, I used those same skills to run New Wave – Young Boston Feminists, a Meetup group of a couple hundred people. I still have the itch and am coming home to my ‘trep roots. A place like Cambridge is great for someone like me. Don’t’ be surprised if you hear about a lil’ somethin’ soon. *wink*

8.       I LOVE my culture. I love being Black. I love mining the past. I adore the Mississippi Delta Blues tradition and am an amateur genealogist. I’m a grandchild of the Great Migration from Mississippi to Chicago – and I relish every opportunity I get to blab about it. Chicago is home to juking, footworking, and scores of other gorgeous expressions of human ingenuity writ Black. From where I’m sitting, the story of Black America closely resembles the mythology I grew up loving. Orpheus is a Black America with outstretched arms toward vestiges of a pre-exilic past; Hephaestus is a track-laying railman in the Reconstruction era South. I have a Blues sensibility and an ardent love for the myriad ways this “nation within a nation” forged the truth of themselves in an unyielding land. And with style, honey - with style.

9.       I require LOTS of alone time. Maybe it’s an introverted only child thing, but I love quiet solitude. I’ve always appreciated being left to my own imagination and devices. Having enough room to reflect and ponder made me who I am and helps me stay centered in a loud, overwhelming society. In our culture, we don’t really appreciate all the gifts that introversion and quiet afford us, but trust me – they can be glorious. I often daydream about donating most of my possessions and moving to the boonies in Iceland. The flip side is that when I’m in community – I’m really there. I’m a hard person to know, but I’m worth it.

10.   I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing…and that’s okay! It’s like our uncle Albert Einstein said "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” I just wanna live a good life. I want to use my passport, eat nice food and see my mom more often. I want to learn to play the violin I bought. I want to do work that makes me feel happy to be alive. I want romantic love that gives me the tingles (which, for me, means a man that gives great snuggle with a sonnet in his heart and my name on his lips). I also adore French fries, so I’ll need a lifetime supply of those as well.

So, that's me in a nutshell. Nice to meet ya.

Yale University: On Talking Money and Historical Books

There's just something freeing about renting a car and taking a quick jaunt down to New Haven that makes me so happy to live in New England. I'd been going back and forth about whether to attend the Money Talks symposium and History of the Book presentation for some time, but lover of learning (and aspiring Yalie) that I am, I just couldn't stay away.

People sometimes ask why I make a point of sitting in on lectures even though I'm not a student. I just can't seem to stop myself from exploring, from putting myself in spaces that keep me on my toes (and jotting down scores of terms to google later on). Much like my identity, my response to the question has morphed over the years - in 2008, Impostor Syndrome made me want to inhabit spaces that seemed to both be my poison and have my antidote; in 2011, the answer would include burgeoning intellectual esteem, a sort of ease with which I began to navigate decidedly academic spaces as a result of having spent many afternoons in the front row of lecture halls in the Boston area. Now, the answer is quite simple (and divorced from any mention of Impostor Syndrome):

As a child, I was taught that everything on earth, whether Black Blues traditions or Renaissance art, was my cultural inheritance. Simply by virtue of having been born, I am a humble and grateful beneficiary of the collective wealth of nations...

...and I honor those contributions and continue to undergo a gorgeous sort of alchemy by allowing myself to be shaped by what I learn. It is both an act of great courage and worship. 

So, back in September, I rented a car and set off for New Haven from Cambridge to be changed a bit more.

I listened in on presentations about everything from money and sin in early political economies to the ways women experience the pains of miscarriage and in vitro fertilization. One speaker traced the migration patterns of money and humanized our understanding of cold capital by infusing it with the narratives of immigrants sending funds back to relatives around the world. I took a trip through societies that bequeathed ideas about currency that directly impact our own as we navigate a world becoming increasingly enamored with intangible markers of value through Bitcoin, Google Wallet, and Apple Pay.

Marion Fourcade: "The Meaning of the Mirage: Money and Sin in Early Political Economy" (Yale Law)

Rene Almeling: "Money, Technology, and Bodily Experience: Comparing the Production of Eggs for Pregnancy or for Profit" (Yale)

Nigel Dodd: "Is Bitcoin Utopian?" (London School of Economics)

I took a break from all the money talk to learn more about my first loves, books. I feed the parking meter for the twentieth time that day (thanks, New Haven) and hightail it to the lower level of the Beinecke library. I entered, got a little cubby for my belongings and went into the room equipped with my recorder and bibliophilic zest.

I made my way around the room, stopping to loom over the books and documents. It's always been such an act of love for me to pour over texts, to wonder what lessons they have to teach us, what wisdom they have dammed up in their spines and margins. After all, it's like Norman Rush once opined, "Literature is humanity talking to itself." Literature enables us to sit at the feet of the ages, and like all other deities, she has a long memory.

Aaron Pratt and David Gary (Yale) 

Jae Rossman (Yale)

In the Black canon, the Talking Book trope is referenced throughout the generations. Whether we're reading the emancipation narratives of Frederick Douglass (in which the then-illiterate Douglass sees a white man reading and is transfixed by how the book appears to impart wisdom by "talking") or sitting across from Henry Louis Gates, Jr during a present day lecture at Harvard, the notion of an animated book is one that challenges our ideas of agency and wisdom's resting place. I reflect on the more striking images that stuck with me from canonical Black works - how the movements of Black bodies in Toni Morrison's work leap off the pages and tug on my own heartstrings, how the sound of pickaxes and chains clunking and jangling form the pulse of work songs and continue to echo in our collective memory - 

...and I can't help but marvel at humanity's ability to inherit, chronicle and pass down knowledge the ways we have. May we be good stewards of the lessons and maintain the heart to contribute to the conversation.

Rayshauna Tries...The Paint Bar

As I'm sure you've gathered from the Musée page on this site, I'm a lover of beautiful works of art. If I adore anything, it's the fleshy realism of a Bernini sculpture, the sharp ideological contrast of a Magritte image, the unspeakable heft of a Menzel, and the unparalleled usage of chiaroscuro in a Romantic era painting. Ever since I was knee high to a high knee (yes, my Southern colloquialism game is strong), I've been fond of beautiful things that help me make sense of the world. Combine that ardent love with my undying affinity for a nice glass of wine...and you get The Ideologue painting under the influence at The Paint Bar's Boston location. 

A few months ago, I had the good fortune of attending Young Women in Digital's "What's Your Side Hustle?" event. One the panelists, Jackie Schon, also happens to be the Creative Director and Co-founder of The Paint Bar's two locations (Newton and Boston). I completed a write up of the YWD event and sent it along to the good folks at The Paint Bar, who then oh-so-graciously invited me (and my +1!) to participate in a complimentary night of libations and artistic licentiousness. And do you really think I'd say no to that?! Nay it is, y'all. I was there with bells on.

The lower level space is cozy and bright, with walls lined with art by particularly proud creators. I popped in a few minutes early so I could get a feel for the space and do some sleuthin'. I was greeted by Jenna Sherman and Ari Forrester, the wonderful folks providing us with drinks and instructing that night's class. And true to my narrative loving nature, I asked about themselves and what brought them to The Paint Bar. Jenna is an artist and student at the Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Ari is an artist as well and attends the SMFA's arch-rival, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, lovingly referred to as MassArt. Jenna told me about her DJing and artwork while Ari and I bonded over a shared hometown (shout out to the ever-lovely Chicago).

Little by little, the other attendees trickled in and we got settled. While I admire beautiful art, I'd never really gone to town on a piece of my own before. Apparently, this is a common concern as Ari reassured the more rigid folks in the room that there's grace - and that we shouldn't worry if our colors mixed or if our tree happens to look more like a head of lettuce. My tree (which I have since named Sasha of Guildenstern-Rosencrantz, a lovely hamlet in Oceania) started out very much like the little round fella from the Flomax commercials. I began to fill in my Flomax oval with dots of paint and soon had quite the aesthetic. I slathered healthy amounts of paint on my canvas to achieve the "novice" look I was going for and got a refresher course in the color wheel of my elementary school days. While we were all painting the same image, I was so tickled by how folks chose to bring theirs to life - there were tree trunks with a teardrop base, and treetops that were more linear than my lil' nod to the masters of Impressionism.

Ari made the rounds while we let our paintings rest, so I took the opportunity to get in another question. This is a favorite of mine that I like to adapt: "If you could watch (or play a role in) the creation of any work of art, which would it be?"

In all fairness, this is an incredibly difficult question to answer...why is precisely why I ask. While it's nice to admire a thing, an idea, or a person, getting at the heart of why we love what we love just might be the hallmark of my philosophic heart. After taking a moment to consider, he offers Wassily Kandinsky's The Yellow Sound (1909), which absolutely blows me away. I have my favorite works, but I'd never be able to choose only one. Artistry is a communion of sorts, a way for the self to convene with the soul; the "I" with others, the ingenue with the forbears of a respective canon. Art (and liquor to boot!) in its highest form draws us near one another or ourselves. At the very least, it enables us to render into language something we once thought was unspeakable. Good stuff, all around.

During the break, we'd been instructed to flip our works so we wouldn't be tempted to make any changes while they dried. After a few minutes of schmoozing and stolen glances at our neighbors' art, we all went back to our paintings. Row by inebriated row, we revealed the final product of our labor. It was a fantastic night filled with laughter, charm, and levity. I encourage you to pop down to one of their locations and have an experience that's sure to brighten your day.

You'll be in great company. Tell 'em Sasha and I said hi. ;)