Claudia Shivers, Gratitude Journalist

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Friends,

I am sharing a piece that I originally wrote and had published by The Winters Group. It was published on their website on April 1 2021. The link is included below.

You can also listen to the audio on the Liberated Love Notes podcast episode that aired on November 22, 2021 entitled “A Liberated Love Note to My Light-Skinned Sistas (w/ special guest Claudia Shivers)”.

I hope you enjoy reading and listening to it as much as I enjoyed writing and sharing.

Always in love and with infinite gratitude,

Claudia L. Shivers, Gratitude Journalist

A Point of View: My Black Ain’t Like Yours

Good morning Light Skinned Sister, 

I heard you talking about your Black experience. I appreciate that. I hold a place in my heart for you. I give you spiritual hugs and kisses every time the thought of you crosses my mind… and still, your Black ain’t like mine.

I listened with an open mind, as you recounted how the White students at your private school treated you as less. I remember you talked about how your University professors made you work harder for the “A” you deserved, while giving your White counterparts the same grade as a reward for their very minimal efforts. You were outraged. You were heated. You were passionate.   

I was shocked. I didn’t even know they were taking applications.  

You demanded justice. You demanded change. You demanded to speak to the University President.   

I quietly remembered that polite conversation I had with admissions. They said they would call me to follow-up when an opportunity to apply presented itself. I am still waiting on that call. I love you, Sis… and your Black ain’t like mine. 

I heard you talk about those times you used drugs recreationally. You said it was a trip like you never imagined. You needed to relax, unwind, just chill a little bit. You talked about it with such ease. I got a little jealous as I reminisced about how I tried marijuana in my early twenties. I was too paranoid to enjoy the experience because I was always so paranoid that I was going to catch a case. I could not sleep, so relaxing was not even a consideration. I am still hyper-vigilant when I see prescription pills, white powdery substances, or tiny, tightly round balls of grass. I am afraid that someone will mistake them for drugs and me for a drug addict. Using drugs to relax? You could talk to your parents about it? Now you have a Ph.D.? Nah, Sis, your Black ain’t like mine.

“You are a wonderful person.” I say that to you to reaffirm your acceptance on behalf of the Black community. You are Black enough. You are strong enough. You are fighting hard enough against racist systems. On behalf of the dark-skinned Blacks, here is your certificate of authenticity. You can keep it in your wallet and pull it out when your sincerity is in question. I wear mine. It goes well with my skin. Also, nobody told me how to take it off. I am giving you this card. Now we both have one… and still, trust me, baby, your Black ain’t like mine.

Now, let me be clear. I love you. I love you for your place in this world. As well, I love myself. I have had to learn how to express that, but it has always been true. I love my coffee-colored exterior. It reminds me of the motherland. It tells stories of experiences tailor made for me. I am a warrior of the light and a reclaimer of freedom, for light comes from darkness and restoration will be granted to those who have been in isolation. I am that understandable smooth shit that ancestors move wit. I am.  

You are…  You are my friend… You are my sister. With that being said, please honor me by acknowledging that your Black ain’t like mine. 

I write this as a call to action, a provocation, if you will. I ask that you hold a place in your heart for me different than the one you hold for yourself. Let me be different. Let me speak for myself. Make room for me at the table, the same table where you are eating your “just desserts.” Let me exist beside you and not just inside the limitations of your mind. You can only imagine what I tell you. You can relate to what you have heard, but I swear if you pass me the mic, I will sing a song so beautiful, so articulate, so moving, that they will play ours together as a Bad Boy style remix. I can hear us now kicking flavor in their ears

Thank you, Light Skinned Sister. Thank you for acknowledging that while our blues probably match, your Black ain’t like mine. 

Peace and Love, 

Claudia  

When my gut is filled with the heaviness of how to do what I need to do in the time I have to do, I reflect on what I have done. Almost 3 years ago, a little more than a month post-incarceration, and a little less than a year after I entered the mountains of Alderson, West Virginia I recorded this podcast with two of my dearest friends. I was updating my website and I thought I would share this with you. #gratitude

https://learning.wintersgroup.com/podcasts/the-inclusion-solution-live-2/episodes/2147883728

If I could make journals, I would make gratitude journals, and I would keep the best one for myself.

My gratitude journal would be five feet, nine inches tall because I work better with a life size canvas. I would use a gold pen to write my gratitudes, so I would make my canvas pecan brown. That particular hue would keep my words from getting lost on a blanch background and turning into white noise. Anyway, those colors are so majestic together. They spark my creativity. I have gratitude for this gratitude journal because it’s sparking me and my creativity.

I would lightly mist my gratitude journal with the warm, masculine scent of Tom Ford cologne so that it becomes my aroma therapist, emitting the smell of a safe spaces.  Safe spaces anoint the air and call me to articulate my mental and emotional confusion in a manner that brings me to rich, intoxicating enlightenment.  Sometimes, as I free myself from stifling insecurities, I see stars, and galaxies, and all that is in me, was before me, and will be after me. As time goes on, my gratitude for this fragrance intensifies bringing forth my consistent evolution toward greatness. I have gratitude for my gratitude journal because its mere essence pulls my feet along the bewildering path of greatness.

My gratitude journal would be smooth on its surface and rough around the edges. The look would call to mind a handsome being donning a fly suit with a dope pair of wheat Timberlands. That look that says, “I am refined, but don’t push me.” (Insert sinister smile here).

Spending time sharing my most sacred thoughts with my gratitude journal would bring about my maturation from a blindly arrogant girl fueled by foolish obstinance, to a confident woman of submission who seeks to serve at the behest of The Most High. My confidence would grow as I share all that has caused me self-doubt with my gratitude journal, every new entry, on every new day causing me to go deeper inside, so that I may understand the other thing that evoked the other thing that I interpreted as hurt, translated into anger and used as a weapon formed against Love so that I would never prosper. My gratitude journal would destroy my old drafting table so that I could no longer be the architect of my own demise.

Now I see that the subtle negative intangibility of hypervigilance was not my savior. It was, in fact, the villain holding me hostage, weighting my head such that when its burden was removed, I could finally wear my crown. My gratitude journal made me a queen.

Gratitude journal, you saved my life and I wish to honor that. With every verbal release of energy I expel, I wish to honor that. With every mental landscape I paint, I wish to honor that. With every swing of my hips that I use to play my feminine melodies, I wish to honor that.

Gratitude for my five nine with brown eyes, personification of the best version of my gratitude journal. My gratitude journal would be my confidence keeping, safe space providing, sojourner of gratitude, and I have gratitude for that.

Claudia Shivers, a Gratitude Practitioner and Gratitude Journalist

Love cuts, but when it does the feeling is tingly in the way I imagine fairy dusted fireflies would feel. Love’s cuts come clothed in a dressing of false remembrances, unforgivings, and mistakes perceived as malice. Love’s cuts seem to cause unresolvable agony as they lift us from despair, but that is not agony at all. Nah, love’s cuts are not able to produce such pain. That feeling is weakness leaving our bodies. It is all that was negatively familiar being cleansed with compassion, rinsed in understanding, and heat pressed to get out any remaining wrinkles. Love’s cuts leave us as crispy and straight as a pair of Pam Grier, blaxploitation bell bottoms.

Love’s cuts are for our healing.

Love, it cuts. It cuts out the words of melodic, painful prose that play in our mental periphery. That repetitious reiteration of wrong translations spewed from the mouths of human representations and decoded by childlike, fear filled translations, love cuts that out of our imaginations.

Love cuts us for our healing.

Maybe for our sexual healing. “Get up, get up, get up, get up,” says Brother Marvin Gaye, “let’s make love tonight”. Love done cut somebody for their sexual healing.

Love cuts us for our healing.

Love cut with a look that began as an unmoving gaze, remaining constant until the soul of its intended returned the gesture. Love asked for the keys to my car to go put air in my tire and gave me his number and then I called him and then… Oh, wait, this is about love, not about me. I just got so caught up that I made love about me again. Sorry y’all. I’m good now.

Love cuts us for our healing though.

Love cuts the silence of white noise confusion with an invitation to enter and enjoy all the comforts you are due. Love cuts itself to attract its prey with a warm smell of “Welcome home. I am that you are looking for” so that you turn to investigate that faint, familiar aroma of belonging.
Love cuts into my mind and makes me think I am a stand-in for The Queen, Diana Ross, playing as Dorothy in the “Wiz”, and when I think of Rhone I think of a place where there is love overflowing… Wait, play that back. She said “home”, when she thinks of home. Oh well, they sound the same. And I’m from Lexington and he’s on Lexington and… Are y’all she’s not talking about… Well, somehow love cut my girl, and she’s thinking about how nice it would be to go back there. She sang to a listening God to please not make it hard and how the raindrops now have meaning. Love cuts for beautiful, innocent, serene healing.
I could do this all day, think of the ways love has cut me, and how I see it cutting you and describing the lunacy of avoiding what was meant to heal. I could do this all week, until I show you how what was meant to make you weak can end in a week, if you let me. With a Sinead Hartnett level of vulnerability I’ll show you how to love like you never ever loved somebody and give them things they didn’t even know they wanted. I could get Chapelle level good at it and give you the punchline first. “Love cuts and those cuts are meant to heal”. In the middle I would use quippy alliterations, hyperbolic illustrations, and poetic, multi-syllabic mutations of expressions you already heard from some other comedic incarcerations. And boom! At the end I hit you with it again. “Criminal minded, you’ve been blinded. Looking for a love like mine, you can’t find it”… Mmm, nasty!

That boom bap. That flavor in your ear. That was love as a cut, on a hot new track, a DOPE track, leaving lines on your arms, in your veins and coming out every time you breathe. Love is a DOPE that, even when it’s cut, it heals because only love is real. “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God” and God is Love.

“Hey.  Excuse me.  Have you seen my man?  He’s about this tall.  He got a little mustache.  Well, I don’t really know how to describe him, but he’s so handsome.  Wait, I know what he SMELLS like.  He smells like astral aspirations and grand phenomenal expectations, like newsworthy outcomes called forth by the ancestors’ drums.  Everything that I need to survive, that don king that keeps hope alive.  I can remember his breath.  Damn…  He smells like my favorite chocolate.  You know how the good chocolate smells, like it’s smooth, like it’s got some kind of cream in it.  It’s not too sweet, with a little bit of a bite to it.  I know, girl, he’s got some really nice lips.  Well, I don’t remember what they look like, but they feel like butter dipped rose petals, the red ones.  Never mind, you not feeling me.  I’ll just go look for him myself.  Can I borrow your flashlight?  What?  Excuse me.  I know it’s still daylight.  I wear glasses though.  I can’t hardly see.  Anyway…”

Where is my phone?  “Hello.  Is this information?  Listen, I need a phone number.  Yeah, no, I don’t know his last name.  Nah, I’m not sure how to spell his first name.  Ok, listen, you are asking too many questions.  I’m just trying to find him in case, well, so he won’t forget about me.  Never mind, but if somebody calls looking for me will you give them my number?  My number is 343-84-057.  My address is 13 Lower.  Oh and my name is Claudia.  That’s C-L-A-U-D-I-A and Shivers, like you’re cold.  And I have a website too.  Just tell him for me though.  Ok.  Thank you.”

I’m already in the car.  I might as well ride by his house.  I’m not a stalker though.  It was dark when I went the last time, but I feel like I’ll know it if I see it.  Alright, let me slow down.  Where are my glasses?  Never mind.  I can see well enough.  Ok, this is block 400… 500… 600, it’s around here somewhere.  I think that’s it right there.  Yeah, I think that’s it.  I’m just gonna get out and check.  How many houses have these kinds of flags in the yard anyway?  This has to be it.  I’m getting out.

“Hey.  I’m just trying to see is my man here.  Well, he ain’t my man, but… Can I just come in?  Wait, who is that back there? Behind you?  You know who I’m talking about.  Just turn around.  Bae! Bae!  It’s me.  I’ve been looking for you.  Tell him to let me in.”

“Hey babe.  Can we just go in your room?  I think I left something.  It was, well, you got some of that whatever you had the last time I was here?  I need it.  It was dope man, it was so dope man.  It felt like candy, like dark, honey, chocolate candy on my gums.  When I swallowed some of it went in my nose and now my nose is open.  Can I get a tissue? 

I think it’s in my veins.  Look at my arm.  Come on Zaddy, you got it, stop being selfish.  I would give it to you if I had it.  Just give me a little bit.  I came all the way over here to get it.  I’m chasing it, that, that up in the clouds, I’m a beast smoke you keep blowing in my ear.  It sort of smells like gas.  No, I don’t have a problem.  I can quit at any time.  It’s just, well, when I get it I feel so fly, like a bird in the sky.  Ohh Papi, that’s it.  Thank you…. I’m just gone lie back for a minute.  It’s so good.  I’m on the clouds, I love these clouds.  Oh, dang, I got something on your covers.  Sorry about that.  I’ll get it up.  I didn’t mean for you to see that anyway.  That’s just my vulnerabilities, insecurities, and intricate defense barriers that I built up over time.  I’ll get it up.  You don’t have to worry about it.  I’ll keep it in my bag until it starts to hurt my back.  I’m good.  I can control myself.  I’m about to leave.  Can I just get it one more time?  What did you say it was called?  Unconditional Love and Benevolent Acceptance…” 

Why social justice? Why healthy re-entry options? Because before there was a #GeorgeFloyd there was #DarrylHunt and he told us, and nobody listened. The police did not kill him, our silent indifference did. Our souls tone deaf to the pain of brothers and sisters because “that’s not my…”.

My mans said he was innocent and because he cried in solitary in muted bass tones, it was easy for us to ignore. His accusers sang in a high treble soprano chorus so loudly we were intimidated. Anyway, it sounded good. It sat right with our spirit. It got the world back to normal. We were willing to sacrifice one man to get back to normal. What about when one becomes one million? Where do we stop?

Why social justice? Because social silence let my man die in a shopping center parking lot, alone, of a self inflicted gunshot wound.

Not why social justice, but why NOT social silence? Lift EVERY voice and sing. Every voice friends. Til earth and heaven ring. Well the phones lines of earth and heaven have been lighting up for far too long from the cries of the indifferents. I’m calling now. I’ll hold… “Hello. This is Sista Number 34384-057 and I have a message. My mans wanted to let you know that it’s a war going on outside no man is safe from. Oh yeah, I’ll hold. Yeah, you can transfer me. I got time. Is help on the way though? I’ll just have a cup of hot, strong, burn the back of your throat, put hair on your chest while I wait. Yeah, He can call me back. Tell him Queen Coffee Bean is calling.”

Ring, ring, ring. Yeah, that’s the sound of liberty calling me back. Not why social justice, but why not social silence. Because the only way to save every man is to save every man, one man at a time.

Peace

April 1, 2020 was our Independence Day. Will Smith did not come to make the announcement, but it was a fact, nonetheless. The free population of the United States of America would not celebrate until July 4th, but we quietly celebrated just the thought of our freedom. We celebrated a notion. We celebrated that our basic human right to be free would soon be restored. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. might have said, “We may not have known the day. We may not have known the hour, but according to Attorney General William Barr, we would be ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty! We would be free at last”.
The warden came through after 4 o’clock count on March 30th to let us know that we were going on full lockdown, a change from the modified movement plan we had been under since mid-March. Her information to us was that we would do this for 14 days and then a team would re-evaluate the situation. Her words grazed our ears but carried the same value as a penny with a hole in it. The coronavirus had spread and spread rapidly. Thousands of Americans had lost their lives to it, and thousands more had been infected. A virus we had previously just heard whispers about was now, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a full-blown pandemic. While you all were becoming anxious and disheartened, we were feeling the hopefulness of a Barack Obama rally. “Can we go home early? SÍ, se puede! Yes, we can!”
The pandemic produced two types of inmates. Inmate 1 had so little time left on their sentence, a relatively short sentence, or had been down so long that they felt they deserved a chance to go home soon. Inmate 2 had pending charges somewhere, had just started a long sentence, or did not have a place to go no matter when they were being released.
Inmate 1 got up early every morning for their time to go in the TV room to watch CNN. How many more people were infected, and how many more people had died while #1 slept, were almost the only questions on their minds. They used mathematical precision to calculate at what point the mortality rate need to increase, while their sentences decreased to put them in the optimal position of getting back to people they loved, or at least, living situations they understood. 1 quietly rejoiced at the lack of urgency the United States government exhibited when it came to this now, global pandemic. Inmate 1, well, they were actually women, humans, treated as embarrassments to society. It was so easy to forget, but on that day, April 1st, women gathered by the hundreds to fill out “cop outs”, or a Communication to Staff Forms, to let the warden know that they needed to be on any list of people going home early. They formed a united front. There was strength in numbers, whether the people who made up of those numbers were dead or alive.
Number 2 was annoyed with the disruption of our schedules. Incarceration is all about schedules and any disruption was enough to make a person go crazy. A schedule was the last safe haven for a mind and spirit that had lost all other control of itself, and the world around it. Most of the women who fell into this category were the ones who ironed their clothes at the same time every week, were always up early for work, and took at least three showers a day. They needed be in control of how they were perceived, because no matter what society said, they were human citizens to be respected. That rite was earned and exhibited by their pride in appearance and rigidity. And so now, they were restless because they wanted to go back to their prison jobs.
I fell into neither one of these categories. I was still trying to figure out what was happening and how I got there. Every day welcomed me with a new revelation that I articulated with the, “Wait a minute, you mean that was…?” or “What the hell is that?!” set of questions I became well-known for after some time. There was so much I did not understand about prison culture and criminal culture that I lacked the mental space to decide if going home was a fantasy or not.
I was dazed, but not too dazed to notice the excitement and enthusiasm with which my group 1 sisters pranced to the TV room. The way they watched church every morning, and then CNN brought on their daily coverage of pandemic mishandling USA. They praised the Lord with their hands in the air and thunderous shouts about the glory of God and how no man could keep them imprisoned if God did not say so. Every message from every televangelist was for them and spoke their freedom and without it the destruction of America would surely come. Evidence came like clockwork with the beginning of the daily news cycle started. Governor Cuomo was almost in tears because his citizens were dying at such an alarming rate. Evidence came when George Floyd was murdered. Evidence came as the country broke out into protest. Sister 1, Sister 1, I saw you praising your god for his ability to show forgiveness to you and offer you early release while smiling out loud at the destruction of so many people, death in biblical numbers, because the options to keeping incarcerated citizens safe were getting more limited by the day. Sister 1, I understand, I know that all you wanted was the Malcolm X Get You Home Plan, “by Any Means Necessary”.
I was on my bunk, doing nothing at all. I was just trying not to think too much about “outside” and not too much about “inside”, when an administrative staff member came into my cube. “Shivers, 13 Lower”, was all she said initially. It was not a question, more of a miscategorized statement. I always thought the gatekeepers asked questions that way intentionally. It gave the impression that they already knew the answer, they were just checking to see where you were on the integrity spectrum.
Ms. Gatekeeper had papers in her hand. She looked at me and said nothing for a moment. I almost immediately started defending myself. I did not know what she wanted, or who had given her the evidence she had documented and was bringing me to review, but I was postured to tell her it was all a lie. Then my subconscious intellect kicked in, from where I had no idea. I simply sat up on that twin, metal bunk bed and waited for what was to come next. She signaled for me to walk over to her as she leaned in to show me a sticky note. There was a list of names on it, maybe nine. Mine was on it. The list was people who met the criteria to go home earlier than expected to complete your sentence there.
On July 8, 2020, four days after the Independence Day of the American descendants of Britain, I was released to my oldest daughter and my son. Less than a year since I had become a resident of Alderson, West Virginia, and ten and a half months into a twenty-one month sentence, I was on the way home. The aggressive spread of the coronavirus had made it abundantly clear that there was no efficient way to protect members of our society who were left without a way to take care of themselves. The prison population had to be reduced drastically and quickly so the government would not be left with thousands of dead bodies on their hands.
So, friends, I have heard your cries and sad stories about the loss of loved ones, the loss of being able to walk outside without protective gear, the loss of whatever you perceive you have lost. For so many, the pandemic about loss. I tell you now though, there always has been, and always will be two sides to every coin. That coin, worthless penny, on the other side of it was the freedom for so many American citizens who cried themselves to sleep at night and medicated themselves to sleep in the day. April 1st was our Independence Day.