In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly edged in a merciless light, and what I most regretted with my silences. Of what I had ever been afraid? To question or to speak^[1] as I believed could’ve meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death on the other hand is the final silence and that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.^[2] And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge^[3] that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear^[4] into perspective gave me great strength.

* * *

And of course I am afraid because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent^[5][6], because there’s always one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

In the cause of silence each of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgement or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.^[7] Within this country where racial difference creates constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable^[8], our blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson that we were never meant to survive.^[9] Not as human beings and neither were most of you here today, black or not.^[10] And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our Earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles and we will still be no less afraid.