Black Women's Lives

“There must be both the fight and the surrender in every woman’s life”---Kristal Brent Zook

Last week, I finished a book that satisfied the soul and twisted my emotions a bit (in a great way though) -- the book is “Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power & Pain” by Kristal Brent Zook.

The women in Zook’s text are of either two types of Women. One on hand, she presented Women who have moved from places of fear to carving out places in their community where they have yielded resources and wisdom to other Black Women; there was the activist Sandra Anderson who worked to inform her small community of Quincy, Florida about the rapid rate HIV/AIDS in their small town to Sarah White and the Sistahs of the UFCW of the Delta who fought against inhumane work conditions in catfish and poultry plants. Then there were the other extreme, where some of the Women in Zook’s text have fallen victim to the pessimisms (i.e. drugs, prostitutions, HIV/AIDS) of society and now as adult Women they had to come face to face with their demons or Women whom the community let down like the young transgendered Lesbian Sakia Gunn. Whatever the story may have been and the life that they lived, what Zook went about doing in these essays, was to have all of these Women (whether living or dead) tell their story.

While I have yet to be on either extreme, heroine and feeling hopeless and I have not quite figure myself nor life out yet, I do know that I have a story to tell, every Sista has one and has the right to have her story be heard…. So I encourage Sistas and all Women of Color to write their stories and speak themselves into existence, because if we don’t know one will.

“We need only to look to each other to find the missing, hurt, and neglected pats of ourselves”
---Kristal Brent Zook