dear elizabeth

my flight has no wi-fi so it’s a great time to write you a letter processing some of my thoughts and ideas

i realize from the symposium and josephine’s and josephine the importance of starting things and trying things and inventing and failing and trying again

and in many ways this process of having a bookshop which is really just the process of starting and having an institution is so important so one can have a place to design, build, fail, innovate, engineer, share safely—like a science lab

not that individuals don’t have voices of course, but that when i was outside on the corner of broad and cecil b moore selling books or in front of the university of the arts selling books, very few saw that as noteworthy or important. no news articles lol

similarly when i was a school teacher, working daily with youth who were called dropouts, using art and culture as a tool to get them to come to school and work on their GEDs, it went virtually unnoticed

same thing when i was living in an abandoned house trying to finish my degree with a small child

but i believe it was in the process of starting and maintaining an institution, a lab, that i found the confidence to speak in rooms that one i never knew existed or two assumed i had no place in and/or three i wasn’t invited to

when i was selling books on the corner i was innovating—i created a place of beauty and community on a corner and sold books, sometimes more books than i sell at harriett’s or ida’s in a day, but also gave folk an open air place to congregate and chat and connect

when i was helping young people pass their GEDs by sitting with them in the hospital after they’d been drugged, or standing on tables teaching them about ntzoke shange, or hosting community dinners so i knew they ate dinner, or creating a citywide amazing race so they could see their city, or creating an entrepreneurial incubator and giving them seed money to fund their ideas, i was engineering, thinking about what pieces were missing, connecting nontraditional dots, designing and failing and redesigning—but who cared?

when i was writing the human rights curriculum for DC public schools and or conflict resolution curriculum for violence prevention, or racial reckoning curriculum for youth across the globe, i was just engineering —ideating, designing, implementing, failing, redesigning, rebuilding, over and over again…

but my own institution—untethered by the limitations imposed by predominately colonial-minded leadership, not having to beg to realize my ideas, accelerated  my ability to ideate and enact with speed.

i see this also in my other friends and colleagues who’ve had the experience of being able to start and run their own institutions and how much more social impact they’ve had not being under the boot of antiquated practices, antiquated leadership, antiquated belief systems, that tend to dominate many institutions and old regimes—even those who hire a DEI person or host an anti-racist training, change in those spaces is VERY difficult because the issues are built into the system, the design flaw is a part of the actual machine, it’s in the engine and to redesign those institutions would mean having to take them a part completely

without the boot of the old regime on your neck, without the overseer watching, it’s easier to design and build and fail and redesign and rebuild at your own pace. that’s what allows one to follow their gut and play the game of what if… what if there was a bookshop that was also kinda like a monument and kinda like art gallery? what if instead of one brick and mortar we had two?? what if instead of brick and mortars we starting having literary art installations? what if universities made us their school bookstore? what if we set forth legislation to make the first federal holiday named for a woman? what if we all existed locally and globally? what if we took people who never left their neighborhoods out of the country on book trips? what if large institutions “adopted” smaller ones? what if Paris? what if Nairobi? what if we’ve been thinking too small? what if we’ve been living our entire lives in a cage (either self imposed or socially imposed) and what if we just got out?

side note —no one bats an eye that amazon is a global institution, tesla is global, coca cola, kfc, mcdonald’s -global—but it’s like mind blowing when someone who looks like me or someone who comes from where i come from (the projects) creates work that’s global.

like i said to you earlier, i don’t want it to be shocking to see Blk girls from North Philly, Phillying up Paris, or Phillying up Nairobi, or Phillying up Mexico City, nor vice versa. i don’t want us waiting and waiting to see the world (and for the world to have to wait to see us) —that’s what Jo did, she allowed herself to be seen and heard —she opened that door so long ago —i’m sure she’s like just fly already

so i flew—overnight—for 3 days—i’ve never hosted a symposium, i didn’t fully know all that it takes, but what if we designed one and built one and failed and redesigned and rebuilt it until we got it to look like how we wanted it to look and feel how we wanted it to feel and what if there were more spaces for that in the world

because my professor, took that on with me as a project that i believe transformed us both and i don’t know if when i was in his class he could ever imagine all that would unfold from that brief interaction where he pushed me so hard as a writer and took me to gardens and made me read and excavate and analyze and write write write (i wrote an unpublished book in that class) that in a years time we’d be making history together at AUP, a university that has NEVER hosted a symposium dedicated to a woman who looks like you and has NEVER celebrated Blk women scholars, Blk women performers, Blk women media makers, and thinkers in this way—NEVER.

And did we fail at somethings?

definitely, the food (or lack there of was a total failure), but then i met jenea a Blk woman pastry chef who attended and agreed to cook next year, the bookshop lacking in books (which i tried to ship from the U.S. for hundreds of dollars and they still didn’t arrive in time was a failure—books across borders is hard hard hard)—i literally brought books in my carry on and clothes in my book bag—so now i know i need a european distributor and more used and rare more books

tech failures, time failures, financial failures —at one point i couldn’t pay for my taxi cause my card wouldn’t work, me with these stupid fevers that i keep getting—health failure, but who said we can’t fail? what’s this silly insistence on Blk excellence or bust that weighs folk down and makes it hard to invent and innovate because fear of failure keeps folk from beginning or finishing asking or taking risks

tech ventures get to fail all the time with millions of dollars of investment on the table, movies fail with million dollar budgets, governments fail everyday—don’t even get me started on the failures of the child welfare system, the health care system, the prison system, the mental health system, the education system…and they be failing with our money, then turn around and take more

where is that grace for the social engineer? the small business innovator? the activists? the organizers? the educators? the artists?

because after failure, if we do it right, there is the redesign, the  rebuild, the retry

so for our first time, i thought it was an awesome experience, i loved seeing the young folk physically build the shop in paris—40 minutes before the symposium was set to begin—because that’s when everything arrived, that’s who built harriett’s with me outside on the corner during the height of covid, thats who attended the protests with me and gave out books, that’s who sustains the work, it’s glorious to co-create with young minds who are full of energy.

i loved seeing my friends, like Brian, present in an academic setting, though he’s used to giving tours and cabarets

i loved having our matriarch, ms. sylvia come after 40 years of researching and writing and still she’s passing on history to young minds—40 years of dedication to sharing these stories about Blk women and Blk history, how could we ever repay her—all she wants is an english translation of her book

i loved having josephine baker’s daughter, Marianne next to me, saying how much she missed her mother, how loving she was, how many people get her mother wrong, how she’d come back every year if we’d keep hosting—build the bookshop she insisted to me in a heavy french accent

or young folk like Nia James presenting to other young folk like yo here’s an experimental thing i made where i let AI create a convo between Josephine Baker and James Baldwin—what do you think? and having folks question that and congratulate that

and having a dancer in the middle of a symposium, Bakering all over people to live music

or having a lifestyle fashionista say—here’s Baker as a Lifestyle—it’s ok to be Baker-esque—use the good plates, be your full self, enjoy the quality, take your time, connect at the boulangerie

or having a scholar share where she wants to take her Baker research next

having Blk music and Blk tradition take up space in places where we are typically told to keep quiet, be perfect, look but don’t touch, sit still, don’t disrupt, don’t make waves

and then dinner with my french friends and expat friends and american friends and students and graduates

there were many parts of the design that worked and many parts that get to be reworked but in all, i feel the path with no beginning is worth beginning and like i’ve said to the great mothers—i’ll do my part and i trust they will do theirs—and they always do

so glad you get to have paris and all these beautiful connections for your 50th birthday

with love

jeannine