Black Joy Series #2: Jonita Davis

February 2021 – An act linked with resistance throughout the centuries, Black Joy is the theme we are exploring as part of a new series on VERO to celebrate Black History Month: the Black Joy Series.

We commissioned four writers and artists from the VERO Community to pen personal essays, published weekly during the month of February, about what they see Black Joy as being, what it means to them and to wider society, the social rituals surrounding it and its personal history.

In the series opener, "Roots of Joy", Abi Ocia wrote about the joy that stems from - and is continually renewed by - the shared ritual of a mother helping her daughter with her hair in what she describes as an "unorthodox hair tutorial". In this, our second instalment, US-based film critic, professor and writer Jonita Davis shares a powerful, deeply moving account of pushing through pain and rejection and joyously unleashing her authentic voice. We hope you enjoy "Unearthing Joy" and keep an eye on VERO Featured for more essays throughout the month.

Jonita Davis

‘Unearthing Joy’

“Jonita, listen to me.”

We were 56 floors in the air, outside, on the balcony of a building so close to Lake Michigan you could almost taste the water. I was bent over, grasping a railing with one hand, trying to catch a breath. The other hand was on my chest, holding my heart as if it could pound its way through my blazer. The wave of panic that had washed over me was still cresting. Head down, staring at my untied black Converse was the only way to ride it out.

This was not about heights. No, my enemy was the glassy black cyclops eye of the studio camera wheeled out here to film our introductions. It might as well have been there to pierce my soul.

And I’m an entertainment reporter! Staring into the black eye of the camera is what I am supposed to do. That day, I was trying to do a 10-second intro when that panic wave hit. It caught my words as they tried to come out my mouth. Then it had reached around and threatened to steal my breath, turning me into a crying mess in front of three other reporters and a full camera crew.

“Jo, listen. Take a breath.” I sipped some air through my mouth so fast that it stung and turned into a fishy vapor in my mouth. I spat it out.

“Breathe.” This time, my lungs filled up on the cold air.

“Breathe.”

The air pushed the panic wave back out and I wished it out to the lake. I slowly lifted myself to find Lamar, aka “Xilla” of Global Grind fame, standing in front of me. Words of calm, cool, Xen, Xilla-Esque encouragement flowed my way. Rose from 'Out' and Keyiera from 'Hello Beautiful' stood together like a cheer squad at choir practice, ready to jump up and give me all the pep I needed.

The three of them stood between me and the black eye of that dragon of a camera. It was wielded by an operator and there was also a tech whose only job seemed to be keeping the wires from crossing. Both were riveted by the spectacle Xilla and I were making.

Xilla was unfazed. He was determined to see me through those 10 seconds of camera work. “You can do this, but you can’t do it like everyone else. You have to be YOU!”

Being “me” was the crux of my problem. I had spent more than three decades trying to be anyone else but me. In fact, the entire scene of me in front of a camera was like a dream, a dream I had as a young girl trying desperately to picture a life outside of the statistic she was living. Girls who are poor, nerdy, and already damaged by a world that abandons Black girls well before they are old enough to understand that their paths had been set way back in slavery, fully understand that breaking out is near impossible to do, but eleven-year-old me was stubborn. She knew the odds but had also peeped an escape route through the education system. That girl decided to be a famous writer, one whose work moved people and entertained them as much as Maya, Mildred, Toni, and Alice did. It was that the girl who had gotten to that marker in the concrete 56 floors up.

“I was a Black girl born in the 80s, raised into the 90s, and left to fend for myself in a system that sees us as too old, too aggressive, and too much trouble to care about.”

Xilla didn’t know any of this, but that didn’t stop him from talking. “YOU are a true nerd, the real thing! Use that s**t. People love seeing that you are real about yours.”

But what would those people think if they knew where it all came from? I wanted to ask him but didn’t. Instead, I listened as part of me reached back to the age all of this started. By 11, I was already one of the girls that they wrote about in 'Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood' - a 2017 study by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality which examined how Black girlhood becomes preyed upon, abandoned or erased from as early as five years old.

I was five when my parents split up. Ten when they divorced and both remarried. My mother had immersed us in the evangelical Black church. These changes, coupled with undiagnosed ADHD, a high IQ, and a massive hunger for books made me ripe for an interrupted, lost girlhood.

They also helped me pick up a certain set of skills that other girls couldn’t claim. By 11, I knew how to hide money my dad sent me through his dope runners, so my mom could have it after the food stamps ran out. I could tell you the top three things you needed to do - and say - to keep those funds from being discovered by a crack addict stepdad feening for a fix. Eleven-year-old me could school you on the many ways to lie to “the people” about the “business” my father ran. I could hide a bruise and show you how to sit all day on a hard school chair, less than 24 hours after a fresh beating. (It’s all about layering.) I could’ve told the IRS where the church money truly went because I was the “smart” kid who sometimes helped with the “paperwork."

Like every other lost girl, by age 11, I had been “touched” by a predator (and subsequently labeled a “Jezebel”), belittled for having a darker skin tone than my sister, and beaten for asking too many questions on several occasions. I had also felt the isolation of telling someone about it all and being left behind to figure out how to save myself.

I did figure out how to save myself. That was the year after I was placed in “Gifted and Talented” classes. The school system bussed us to a white school across town twice a week for “special instruction”. That year, my school librarian turned me on to Victorian-era romance novels and Russian dramas. I had read everything else in the school library. The special classes, the books, and the rest cemented my nickname “Urkel” after the famous nerd Jaleel White played on ABC’s ‘Family Matters’ (the glasses I needed for severe nearsightedness did not help). Being a nerd was never an asset, though.

But Xilla was telling me that it was. An asset.

You are awkward as HELL. Use that! You are so nervous right now. Tell the people that. You aren’t Rose, or Keyiera, or me. You are not those fancy news people that just left. You are the NERD. People follow you because you are real and someone they can relate to. So, tell them you are nervous, lean into that awkwardness, and be the nerd!” Rose and Keyiera were practically clapping, standing just close enough to cheer me. Xilla was smiling too. And still talking.

“Be the NERD!”

No one else had ever told me to be my awkward, nerdy, black self. The weight of decades of ridicule, microaggression, and just plain erasure was pressing down on me, threatening to pull that panic wave over my head again. Warning signs flashed as my old coping method broke and fell away. This was a new frontier.

“No one else had ever told me to be my awkward, nerdy, black self.”

When people ask me when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, these are the things that go through my mind. At some point, amid all these events, the seed was planted. I wanted to be a person who got paid putting words down on paper. Words that did things to the people who read them. I told my mother once. She told me that was “White folks’ stuff and I needed to stop dreaming.” (It would be two decades before I ever shared my writing with her again.)

I was a Black girl born in the 80s, raised into the 90s, and left to fend for myself in a system that sees us as too old, too aggressive, and too much trouble to care about. After being oversexualized, unjustly criminalized, and deemed too broken to matter, I took a page from my favorite writers Maya, Mildred, Toni, and Alice. I stepped off the busted path I was expected to travel and made my own.

Xilla’s voice broke through once more. “We are on the 56th floor of a tall ass building. You just interviewed Viola Davis and Liam Neeson. They loved you! You, the nerd. Geek the f**k out and let’s kill this intro!”

“Okay,” I told them and myself. My nervous smile crept up on my face and I didn't even attempt to wipe it away. I moved to my mark. The cameraman, whose face snapped to serious the moment my feet hit that mark, pushed in. I stared down its black eye and unleashed more than 30 years of pain and rejection into its bottomless depths.

“Hey Black Girl Nerds fans. I’m Jonita Davis, standing here in my city, nervous as hell and excited to tell you about the footage y’all are about to see…”