“I sell the shadow to support the substance.” — Sojourner Truth, printed on her carte de visite photographs, circa 1864
Sit with what that means for a moment.
A woman born into slavery in New York in 1797. A woman who was property before she was a person, whose body had been owned and labored and sold and survived — who escaped on foot with an infant daughter and then watched a legal system that had not yet decided whether she was fully human nonetheless return her son from Alabama when she sued for his freedom. A woman who had every reason to understand institutions as instruments of her destruction.
That woman learned to use a camera.
She understood, in a way that should astonish us, that her image was currency. That the dominant culture’s fascination with her — with what she represented, with what her survival meant, with the specific gravity of a Black woman who had endured everything and was still standing and still speaking — was a resource she could manage. She sat for photographs. She sold them. She put the legal language of copyright on each card — I own the rights to this image, you do not — and used the money to fund her movement work, her travel, her voice.
The audacity of that. The self-knowledge required. The love of self that it takes to look at a world that has been telling you your whole life that your body is not your own and decide — practically, strategically, with full understanding of the legal framework involved — that your image belongs to you and you will profit from it on your own terms.
She was not selling herself. She was selling the shadow to support the substance. The image — the performance of visibility — in service of the interior life, the work, the self that no institution had ever granted and no institution could take.
I have been thinking about her while writing these essays.
The first series I wrote was about the body. My body — Black, non-binary, fem — as a political site, a social paradox, an intimate memory, a landscape of survival. I wrote about what has been done to it and what it has learned to do in order to survive and what the surviving cost. About the orange shower curtain and the room full of laughing people and the lake filling slowly with soot that wasn’t mine. About the way I gave legibility to rooms that gave me nothing in return. About beauty as the only currency I was permitted to use without being permitted to own it. About my grandmother and my mother, Black women from Leland, Mississippi, who left every situation that tried to reduce them and handed me something forward that I am still learning to hold.
Those essays were the shadow. The image. The performance of visibility in service of naming what the dominant culture had decided to look through rather than at.
This new series is about the substance.
What Sojourner Truth understood — and what my grandmother understood when she left Mississippi, and what Nina Simone understood when she sat down at that piano — is that the personal and the political are not two different arguments. They are the same argument, told at different scales. The body and the body politic are not metaphors for each other. They are the same apparatus, operating at different levels of the same system. What is done to the individual body in a room full of people who decide the harm doesn’t qualify — and what is done to the collective Black body through a Supreme Court ruling that 100,000 invalidated ballots don’t constitute an emergency — these are not analogous violences. They are the same violence, wearing different administrative clothing.
The first series was about learning to see that. To name it without softening it. To write from inside the experience without making the experience smaller than it was so that the reader could be more comfortable holding it.
This series is about watching the apparatus operate at the level of law and policy and democratic infrastructure — and bringing to that analysis the same refusal to perform neutrality. The same insistence that what is technically occurring is also actually occurring. The same understanding that the room’s decision to look away is itself a political act.
Sojourner Truth sold the shadow to support the substance. She turned the world’s fascination with her image into fuel for the work. I am trying to do something similar. The essays you have read — about the body, about visibility, about the flesh and its memory and its unearned, irrevocable right to deserve — those essays are the shadow. The foundation. The personal authority from which everything that follows is written.
What follows is the substance.
ebonyicons 
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