Taking Up Space

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• Taking Up Space
• Regina N. Bradley

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Untitled, by Minnie Evans, 1960. Colored pencil on paper, 11 3/4 × 8 3/4 in. North Carolina Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. D. H. McCollough and the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. P. Phifer Bequest, 87.2).

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I'm in edenton, north carolina. I'm here to do some sacred work. I slowly turn the bowl of white rose petals in my hands. They are moist from freshly fallen tears after hearing Lois Deloatch sing "It Is Well with My Soul." That was my Nana's favorite song, and it still broke me to hear it. It was approaching the two-year anniversary of Nana's death and her entering the ancestral realm. I turn the bowl again and look out at the water next to Molly Horniblow's resting place. Horniblow hid her granddaughter Harriet Jacobs in her attic for nearly seven years to protect her from the oppressions of slavery. Harriet Ann Jacobs was a freedom fighter, writer, and businesswoman and the author of the exceptional and heart-wrenching autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). There's something special about a grandmother's love and protection. Hot tears fell as our grandmothers' loves overlapped.

It is well with their souls, and mine is working on it. I throw petals into the water. Prayers, blessings, tears. Prayers, blessings, release. A hand gently supports my lower back. I breathe out and let go of the rest of my flower petals. A duck swims by, head high, slowing down enough to watch our ritual of love and attention to the ancestors and grandmothers. She wades through the flowers like they belong to her.

Asé.

_______

later that day, I stood in front of a True Value hardware store. The two-story brick building sported a sign and an unremarkable concrete parking lot with an equally unremarkable wooden fence. Or so I thought.

The site was where Molly Horniblow's house once stood. "Had the least suspicion rested on my grandmother's house, it would have burned to the ground," Jacobs wrote. "But it was the last place they thought of. Yet there was no place where slavery existed that could have afforded me [End Page 113] so good a place of concealment." I just couldn't imagine how Jacobs endured such a daunting space. The stifling lack of movement of her body and the air, the vermin that crawled on and around her, and the rigidity of the wooden garret that refused to bow to the world rotating around it had to be a Herculean task. Her concealment was life and death. Her grandmother's and her family's love also hid her and sustained her through the ordeal.¹

Now, there was no concealment, just tar, brick, and memory. "Chiiiiiile …" I sighed. How could such a spectacular act of resistance be physically erased?

Michelle Lanier, director of the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites, called for my touring group's attention as she stood by the wooden fence in a hand-dyed indigo dress. Lanier's presence is commanding but not daunting. She got a calling on her. Lanier nimbly addressed our disappointment that Jacobs's hiding place no longer existed in the physical realm. She smiled and urged us closer to her and into her world-making, pointing to a small hole in the fence. She challenged us to think of the hole in the fence as similar to the gimlet-drilled holes Jacobs made herself in the same spot where the fence stood. Each hole represented a possibility of promise for Jacobs to see the world and, perhaps most longingly, her children. Each drilled hole was an adamant and intentional choice to fight back against her oppression, a chance to claim her autonomy.

The overlap of worlds, both spiritual and physical, past and present, was a powerful excursion of imagination and will. Lanier's encouragement to reimagine the hole in the fence was an exercise in what she coined "womanist cartography," the "recenter[ing] of Black women and femmes by rendering...