TW: racism, colorism, microaggressions, internalized anti-blackness, religious questioning, sexualization of black girls, and generational trauma

It was a hell of a way to die.

Not the kind with casseroles and condolences.

Not the kind where folks wear black and whisper about what you “used to be.”

No obituary. No choir humming you home.

I died respectable.

That’s what nobody tells you.

Respectability will kill you cleaner than any weapon. It’ll smooth your edges down so neat you won’t even feel the blood leaving.

First time it happened, I was small enough to still believe adults knew everything.

Church small. Knee-swinging-from-the-pew small.

The sanctuary was sweating that Sunday. Fans in the corners pushing around warm air like they was tired of the job. Sunlight slipping through stained glass, painting everybody holy in colors that didn’t match their skin. Jesus up there pale as refrigerator light, looking down like He ain’t never had to dodge nothing in His life.

I raised my hand during testimony.

Nobody told me testimonies had rules.

I said, “Why God always sound like He don’t look like us?”

Silence fell so hard it felt physical. Like somebody dropped a piano in the aisle.

Mama’s fingers pinched the soft part of my thigh. Not cruel. Just urgent. Survival urgent.

“Don’t,” she breathed without moving her lips.

That was the first shovel of dirt.

Because I swallowed the rest of my question.

And something in me learned: curiosity can be dangerous when you Black and loud about it.

I smiled after. Sat still. Sang the hymn like my mouth ain’t just been boarded up.

That’s how it start.

A hell of a way to die—quietly.

Growing up Black and girl is a masterclass in controlled demolition.

They don’t blow the whole building at once. They take pieces.

Your volume first.

“Why you yelling?”

I wasn’t.

Your attitude next.

“You got a tone.”

It was called confidence five minutes ago.

Your body after that.

“Pull your skirt down.”

“Don’t roll your eyes.”

“Sit like a lady.”

“Cross your legs.”

“Don’t eat like that.”

They architecting you into something less threatening.

And every correction is a small funeral.

I remember the day my teacher called me “intimidating.”

Fourth grade.

I had answered every question on the board. Not to show off. Just because I knew it. Numbers made sense to me. They stayed where you put them. Didn’t flinch.

She pulled me aside after class. Said I needed to “give other students space.”

Translation: shrink.

I went home confused. Told Mama.

She sighed that long Black-woman sigh that carry history in it.

“Sometimes you gotta dim a little,” she said. “Make folks comfortable.”

Dim.

Like I was a lightbulb too bright for the room.

So I practiced being less.

Raised my hand slower.

Looked down more.

Pretended not to know answers.

That was another burial.

And the wild part? People praised me for it.

“She’s maturing.”

Nah.

I was disappearing.

The mirror got involved around thirteen.

Puberty don’t come gentle for nobody, but it hit me like a spotlight. Curves showing up before I knew what to do with them. Hips announcing themselves in hallways.

Boys started looking.

Men too.

And suddenly my body wasn’t just mine. It was commentary. It was debate. It was public property.

“Fast.”

That word chased me.

I wore the same jeans as everybody else. Same tank tops. Same laugh.

But on me it meant something different.

Because Black girls don’t get innocence extended. We get suspicion.

So I learned to round my shoulders. Fold my arms across my chest. Walk quick.

It was a hell of a way to die—learning to fear your own reflection.

I’d stand in front of the mirror and negotiate.

If I tie my hair back, maybe I look less grown.

If I wear darker colors, maybe I disappear.

If I smile less, maybe they stop reading things into me.

I tried on smaller versions of myself like outfits.

None of them fit right.

But they fit safer.

High school brought code-switching like it was a required course.

Advanced Placement English.

Room full of polished vowels and raised eyebrows.

I knew how to speak their language. I had learned it early. Books had been my secret garden. I could quote Shakespeare and Baldwin in the same breath.

But when I slipped—when my tongue relaxed into home—there it was.

That look.

The one that say, Oh. So that’s what you really are.

So I split myself.

School Me and Home Me.

School Me said “isn’t.”

Home Me said “ain’t.”

School Me straightened her spine and spoke crisp.

Home Me let her words sway, musical and free.

It felt strategic at first. Smart. Adaptive.

But splitting yourself too long start to feel like amputation.

Because which one was real?

And which one was performance?

I’d come home some days exhausted, not from homework, but from translation. From policing every syllable. From making sure my intelligence sounded palatable.

That’s the thing about dying this way—you still walking around. Still breathing.

But you ain’t whole.

The boy who told me I was “pretty for a dark-skinned girl” didn’t know he was holding a match.

He probably thought it was a compliment. Thought I’d blush and say thank you.

I did smile.

That polite, practiced smile.

But inside? Fire.

Because that sentence carried centuries in it.

For a.

Like beauty had a condition. Like my skin was a hurdle I’d somehow cleared.

I went home and scrubbed my face harder than necessary. Not trying to lighten it. Just trying to understand it.

Why it scared people. Why it fascinated them. Why it felt like both armor and target.

My grandmother used to say my skin was “midnight velvet.” Said it like prayer.

So why did the world say it like warning?

That night I almost wished to be lighter.

And the shame of that wish?

Another funeral.

I laid that version of me down too—the one who believed proximity to whiteness meant safety.

It was a hell of a way to die—internal.

No witnesses.

Just you and your reflection arguing in silence.

College cracked something open.

Not because it was kinder. It wasn’t.

But because I met other Black girls who refused to dim.

Girls with afros wide as halos. Girls who wore their names like crowns and corrected professors without flinching.

I watched them in awe.

How they laughed loud. How they said “Actually” with authority. How they took up space like they paid rent on it.

I realized I had been renting my own existence month-to-month.

Afraid of eviction.

One afternoon in Sociology, the professor started talking about “inner-city pathology.”

That phrase hung in the air like mildew.

He clicked through slides of statistics. Poverty rates. Crime graphs.

He said, “Those communities lack structure.”

Those communities.

Like we was an experiment gone wrong.

I felt that old church silence creeping up my spine. Felt my thigh tingle with ghost-pinch memory.

Don’t.

But I was tired of don’t.

So I raised my hand.

My voice trembled at first. But it steadied with each word.

“Can you clarify what you mean by ‘those communities’?”

Room went still.

He adjusted his glasses. Rephrased. Doubled down.

And I didn’t let it slide.

I spoke about systemic policy. Redlining. Underfunded schools. Food deserts. History.

Not angrily.

Just factually.

And when I finished, I felt something resurrect.

Like bones knitting back together.

After class, a girl I didn’t know touched my arm.

“Thank you,” she said.

Two words.

But they felt like oxygen.

That day I dug up another grave.

The girl who asked questions in church?

She was breathing again.

Resurrection ain’t glamorous.

It’s messy. It’s gradual.

It look like correcting someone when they mispronounce your name—and not apologizing for it.

It look like wearing your hair natural to an interview and daring them to see competence beyond curl pattern.

It look like saying “I disagree” without cushioning it in softness.

I started writing more too.

Not essays for grades. But stories. Poems. Truth.

I let my voice stretch. Let AAVE live on the page without translation. Let metaphors grow thick and unapologetic.

Some folks said it was “niche.”

I said it was necessary.

Because why should I die so somebody else can understand me easier?

Why should my tongue flatten itself for comfort?

Every time I chose authenticity over approval, another coffin cracked.

Mama noticed.

“You seem different,” she said one evening while we washed dishes.

“Different how?”

“Bigger,” she answered. “Like you taking up more room.”

I braced for correction.

But she smiled.

“I like it.”

We stood there in that small kitchen, water running, plates clinking, and I saw her differently.

Saw the ways she had folded herself so I wouldn’t have to.

The jobs she endured in silence. The microaggressions she swallowed. The dreams she postponed.

She wasn’t trying to kill my spirit in that church years ago.

She was trying to keep me alive.

Because in her world, loud Black girls got punished.

Curious Black girls got labeled.

Confident Black girls got cut down.

She had learned survival through shrinking.

I was learning survival through expansion.

Neither of us wrong.

Just evolving.

There are still days I feel the old deaths tugging at me.

In corporate spaces where my braids get called “bold.”

In doctor’s offices where pain gets doubted.

In rooms where I’m the only one that look like me.

The instinct to dim is muscle memory.

But I interrupt it now.

I speak up.

I take credit.

I laugh without covering my mouth.

And when someone calls me “too much,” I don’t argue.

Too much for what?

Too much for who?

Maybe I am.

Maybe I’m too much truth for comfortable lies.

Too much history for shallow narratives.

Too much presence for rooms built on absence.

If that’s the case?

Good.

It was a hell of a way to die.

All those small surrenders.

All those swallowed words.

All those versions of me I buried in the name of safety.

But here’s what I know now:

I ain’t actually dead.

I was dormant.

Like seeds underground waiting for rain.

And the rain came in the form of sisterhood. Education. Self-love. Rage turned righteous.

Now when I visit my inner graveyard, it don’t look tragic.

It look fertile.

Each headstone a lesson.

Here lies the girl who thought she had to be smaller.

She taught me how to recognize shrinkage.

Here lies the girl who doubted her beauty.

She taught me to define it myself.

Here lies the girl who split her tongue in two.

She taught me integration.

I honor them.

But I don’t live there.

These days, I ask questions in sanctuaries again.

I challenge narratives in classrooms and boardrooms.

I let my midnight skin gleam under whatever light I’m in.

I refuse to apologize for brilliance.

And when little Black girls watch me—because they are always watching—I make sure they see fullness.

Not fragments.

Because I don’t want them attending their own funerals before they hit double digits.

I don’t want them mistaking silence for safety.

Or smallness for maturity.

Or assimilation for success.

If something in me gotta die now, let it be fear.

Let it be the need for validation from systems that weren’t built with me in mind.

Let it be the lie that I am only acceptable when edited.

But the rest?

The loud laugh.

The sharp question.

The velvet midnight skin.

The language that taste like home.

That lives.

It lives big.

And breathing like this—unfolded, unfiltered, unafraid?

That’s heaven compared to the polite little deaths I used to accept.

So yeah.

It was a hell of a way to die.

But it’s a holy way to live.