Who is deserving of assistance?
An open letter to Kelly's Beloved Community
Dear Kelly’s Beloved Community,
I am writing this letter to you in a state of emergency.
As you already know, our sister Kelly is in a dire state. You can read more about her condition here .
I write extensively about Kelly in my latest book, “Blackgirl on Mars” where she played an integral role in the travels I describe. I write about her work and her beloved community – whom she has talked about ever since I met her. Kelly has been and continues to be a special person to me, and I know so many others. The question is, how can we help her?
Truthfully, what I saw this past summer when I visited her was someone struggling with overwhelm by a debilitating condition and the financial realities that come with it.
I'm afraid of the consequence if Kelly doesn’t receive the assistance she’s asking for. Kelly needs your help.
I am appealing to all of you who consider Kelly a part of her beloved community.
Kelly is now facing the reality of too many Americans - especially Black Americans. The pandemic further marginalized those of us already barely holding on - the reality is Kelly needs financial resources to heal. Her condition warrants acute medical care, a clean living place, and assistance.
The more of us there are, the better we can serve our sister in great need.
The time is now.
Here is an excerpt from my latest memoir Blackgirl on Mars where I write about Kelly:
4. Colonialism 2.0
On the second day of my arrival, Kelly drives up from the border to meet me. Like during the “migrant crisis” in Europe just five years before, these migrants from the Northern Triangle of Central America — El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — are fleeing violence, whether that of gangs, poverty or government regimes that are probably financed by our tax dollars. The conditions they are running from, Doctors without Borders tells us, are comparable to those of war. Kelly had gone to the border as soon as the news hit about children being separated from their families in detention centers. “I can’t stop thinking about those babies,” she told me. “I just have to go.” But Kelly finds inspiration even in these dark times. She tells me about the community she witnessed there and the love and care those seeking refuge have for one another. She tells me about the border agents, their hostilities and aggression, and the courage these people meet them with. “They’re the local peace economy,” she tells me. “They are exercising all of the values we need to have to survive these challenges.”
I will later be told about what happens behind the scenes — how various agencies show up like cartels, government militias and border agents, and how these various entities coordinate the separation of these people, of children from families, women from men — some murdered, some trafficked; some children, like under the policies of residential schools, are farmed out to American families.
It hadn’t been that long ago that Kelly had visited me in Copenhagen to celebrate the publication of my book and to share her own, Until the Streets of the Hood Flood with Green, documenting the beginning of her work with the Electric Smoothie Lab Apothecary (TESLA). Based in Oakland for over ten years, she’s been engaged in her TESLA project, modeled after the direct action of the Black Panthers. Kelly’s goal is to get the nutrients straight to the community. No corporate structures/intermediaries; just plain, localized, personal activism whereby she makes smoothies and chats with her community about the various nutritional benefits her smoothies provide. Through TESLA, Oakland students can now work at a smoothie bar where they also do silk screen printing.
The summer before, she had traveled with me to Berlin for Alanna Lockward’s Black Body Politics (BE.BOP) — what would be, unbeknownst to everyone, our last meeting with Lockward, who unexpectedly passed in early 2019, right before I embarked on my trip. Kelly traveled with me first to Birmingham, and then to Berlin. Now here we were, some months after, meeting up in Los Angeles as we had planned.
Kelly’s lineage includes a father who sharecropped as a child but would go on to work with one of the leading advertising companies in America. “That’s when they started targeting the Black middle class as a consumer market,” she’d tell me, mentioning the short 1954 film The Secret to Selling the Negro. In this film, the narrator says, “It’s a well-known fact that negro customers are influenced by the opinions of others.” She’ll tell me about the day her father, a major ad executive, tried to explain to her the complexities of selling. “It’s like boiling a frog,” he told her and went on to explain the slow, tragic inevitable death that will befall the frog. She tells me how this analogy was enough to make her cry. Her father shook his head. “Never mind,” he said, realizing the nature of her heart. “This meeting is over. You’d never survive in advertising.”
Kelly was born in Chicago, and split her time between there, New York and Connecticut. She remembers family dinners that included neighborhood children from around the globe, and how her mother would tell her that she was a home run. “They not ready for you!” she’d lovingly tell her little daughter. Her mother, Betty Ann, was a homemaker, and greatly influenced Kelly in her understanding of the many intersections of oppression and the importance of cultivating joy, instilling in her the legacy of kindness.
Kelly’s mother passed in 2005. I once asked her what the best lesson she ever learned from her mother was. “I remember I came home from school one day. We had a history lesson about slavery, which got me all riled up. So I went home and used the word ‘cracker.’”
“Oh, I see,” her mother said, looking at her. “You’re becoming like them.” She told her that they couldn’t fight racism with racism. “It’s a valuable lesson,” Kelly says as she proceeds to heat up some tortillas, “because if you can’t talk to White folks, then the battle is over.”
I once had the privilege to interview an octogenarian who lived in Florida and it was one of the most interesting interviews I had encountered. My subject was born in Alabama but had moved to Florida as a young wife with her new husband, who was also from the same town as she. They lived on a fruit farm and worked as fruit pickers up and down the east coast, according to the various seasons. “We always traveled as a family, and insisted that we all lived together,” she told me. “We knew that there were horrible things that could happen to fruit pickers, so we stuck together,” she said with no small amount of pride resonating from her voice.
She and her family ended up doing well for themselves. She told me how she was able to go on to become a nurse and of her first day working. “My first patient was so rude to me. When she saw me, she immediately screamed that she did not want a N-word nurse. I was shocked and went to get my boss.” I couldn’t imagine such a thing, the indignity of it all!
“I told my boss what had happened,” she said in that proper way many of our elders speak. “My boss went into the room to the patient. She was in there for a long time. Finally she came back and told me I could return to my duties with that patient. The patient didn’t say a word to me, she was even nice.”
“Til this day, I don’t really know what my boss said to her.”
“But weren’t you angry?” I asked, sitting in my own rage about the story. Thinking about the indignities that our elders and ancestors were forced to endure.
“No,” she said to me, calmly. Something shifted inside of me; I was interested.
“As a nurse, I’m there to take care of people who are sick. I know that when I’m sick, I’m not my best. I know that when I attend to my patients, they’re not at their best either.” It was at that moment that I understood the power of maintaining one’s dignity in the face of discrimination. Maintaining one’s dignity could look many different ways. It could mean extending a great amount of grace to the sick, as in my interviewee’s experience. For others, I suppose, it could mean throwing a Molotov cocktail.
Kelly is all heart, as her beautiful, open face attests. With both feet firmly planted on the ground and a being that insists on the transformational dynamic of love (I know this is how she lives, for I have been with her), she has become a capable teacher to me. It is one thing to talk about community and a completely other thing to participate in it. How do we relate to each other, support each other in these neoliberal times? How do we dismantle the ego, the narcissism that has had to be developed, to “survive” in these times? These are all questions worth asking.
I first met Kelly in the mid-Nineties when she was in the throes of creating the iconic Freedom Rag, a magazine that garnered the respect of everybody. When I first heard of TESLA (and still to this day), I felt inspired by the direct action of her project. Although this settler colony is supposedly one of the wealthiest countries in the world, thirty-eight million people faced hunger in 2020. TESLA is about autonomy, starting with our bodies. Learning about the agency that we have access to in regards to our health is vital.
Kelly is instrumental in my healing journey. I feel honesty, love and safety in my friendship with her that’s been integral to both of our growth. Kelly doesn’t call me out; she calls me in with love and patience. She conjures my grandmother’s spirit, the spirit of my childhood hero Willie Mae, in whose home I was always welcome (“Lesley, you’re my girl”), in a way no one else ever has, with so much love and respect, despite my wayward ways.
Through Kelly, I’ve been introduced to the work of Gabor Maté, Thích Nhất Hạhn and many other inspirational people committed to creating a better world. Together, we listen to old interviews with Angela Davis, Alice Walker, bell hooks and Audre Lorde. I always think about Kelly whenever I come across the Nina Simone clip where she describes “girl talk” — “it was always Marx, Lenin and revolution.” Our friendship grants a space to talk about the state of our world, of our hearts and of our souls.
As in my conversations with friends such as Ida and Gillian, Kelly often speaks about the trauma we as Black and Indigenous people may experience in our relationship with the land. She’s acutely aware of the importance of returning to plant intelligence — whether it’s through her smoothies or various other herbal concoctions. I’m grateful for her sisterhood. There is no judgment in our friendship, only loving space. Kelly encourages me and seems to welcome critical conversations about the state of the world, particularly in connection to the US. Her work and dedication continue to be a source of inspiration for me. I am thankful that I can say she is part of my community.
Together we spend days walking in Echo Park, talking about liberation and making corn tortillas and jicama. Together we make an altar where we hang her pink bandana. “Magic is totally real,” it says. With Kelly, I found some spiritual home. Kelly not only talks about community, she also lives it. From her work with TESLA to her participating in various community gardens, doing the hard work of being in a community with others often entails loving call-ins and (as mentioned before) showing up at the border to offer support to those who find themselves attacked by worshippers in the cult of death. “I just don’t know,” Kelly would one day lament. “What is wrong with us? People seem so, I don’t know... in pain.”
I also learn of the many struggles that Oakland is experiencing. With rents rising, many poor people and their families have found themselves without housing. “The other day, I saw this little girl come out of a tent,” Kelly told me once. “It was in the morning, and I saw how she fixed her little dress before walking. It broke my heart, seeing her come out of that tent.”
As Kelly and I load up her car to head back to Oakland, the rains continue to fall. My next stop is San Francisco, which Kelly drives us to in her late father’s Chevy HHR. On our way, we stop at Westlake Village to pay our respects to her parents, Charles Curry and Betty A. Curry. As we stand there, I feel so much gratitude for the legacy that Charles and Betty Curry consciously planted in Kelly’s soul. Standing there and looking at the plaques that bear their names, I can’t help but think about a Neolithic Aztec poem I had heard the scholar Ivan Illich recite. The poem, he told us, was written by a Spaniard, using Spanish letters, but in Nahuatl. The poem, which was written for a god, says:
For just a fleeting moment, we are lent to each other.
We live, because you draw us.
We have color because you paint us.
And we breathe because you sing us.
But for just a fleeting moment, we are lent to each other.
Because we erase ourselves, like a drawing,
Even one made in obsidian.
We lose color, as even the quetzal,
The beautiful green bird, loses its color.
And we lost our sound and our breath,
As does even the water’s song.
For just a fleeting moment, we are lent to each other.
I had been to San Francisco a few times, but never to Oakland, and never over an extended period. However, this will change in a few months when I fly over from New York during the height of the pandemic. Through Kelly, I learn about Oakland’s rich political history. As we drive through the rain along the Pacific coastline, Kelly tells me about the deep historical roots of resistance in Oakland. Aside from being the birthplace of the Black Panthers, it was also one of six cities across the country where the Pullman Porters conducted their strike after World War II, and how this marked the beginning of the country’s labor movement. Oakland was also the site of Bruce Lee’s second martial arts school, with Seattle being the home of his first.
Kelly drives in from Oakland to pick me up from the tiny house I booked in San Francisco for the night, and takes me to the airport.
“I’ll see you soon!” we promise each other, although we both have no idea what the future holds for us, or even for the world. I board the Alaska Airlines plane to Portland, and sit back with a feeling of much gratitude.