Judith Meyerowitz

by Judith Meyerowitz

As a very small child, Jasmine had watched her grandmother fold the piece of cloth into a rectilinear shape and knot it on top of her head. It looked like a crown. It was very old. She loved to hear the story again and again of how it had been passed down from generation to generation. However, she never saw her mother wear it. When she asked her why, she would firmly say, “We are in America. Not Africa! We are in the North. Not the South!”

As she entered her teenage years, Jasmine was increasingly drawn to the beauty of the headwrap and curious about how it was made. Threads of multiple colors intertwined to create the traditional design. Her eyes followed with wonder the thin black and green cone shapes which rose into the gold and red sky. She thought about the weaving process.

She had watched with fascination on YouTube, men working the loom. The threads of different colors wrapped around their toes, the red brown soil and sweat of Africa mixed in with the colors.

She couldn’t figure out the spacing of the design. It was as if the weavers’ bodies knew where to place the threads, as if their feet danced the rhythm of mathematics. It was a striking piece of Kente cloth from Ghana.

Jasmine’s family was part of the Great Migration. Her great-grandparents had journeyed from Mississippi to Chicago following WW1, while the headwrap had journeyed from Africa to the South with slavery. It had gone from expressing African identity to symbolizing white power and enslavement.

She had seen the headwrap taken over once again by white America in the form of “Black Mammy” in old pancake ads and on servants in old movies. She felt demeaned not only as an African American but as a young African American woman.

She struggled with her own thoughts while also trying to understand her mother’s discomfort. She was in America and the North but how she saw herself was bound to the history and diaspora of her people. She had recently seen an exhibition on representing the Black model at a local art gallery. The theme was portrayed over time and between continents- Europe and America. She read the introduction: the purpose was to “explore aesthetic, political, social, and racial issues”. Beautiful and strong women looked out at her from the walls in headwraps.

Jasmine had never worn the headwrap. She went to the mirror and as if part of her body memory, her grandmother’s movements came back to her. She completed the crowning knot and got on the “L” that would bring Jasmine to her first class at the University of Chicago.

Judith has taken several writing and poetry study groups since joining. She thanks Voices and particularly the members of the Flash Fiction writing workshop for which this piece was written.

by Judith Meyerowitz

Four men ages forty-eight to eighty-three enter the night together. They are a band of brothers, related not by blood but by experience and homelessness. Banished from the kingdom, three huddle together while another lies down nearby. Having no home, they seek a safe dry place and sleep outside the city walls.

The four pass around a cheap flask and the moon reflects off the surface, a swig of whiskey their remaining comfort.

They recognize a young man from the streets, as much outcast as they from the towers of granite.

He is yelling crazily and brandishing a pipe:

“This is my land. Get out of my country. “

The metal object glistens in the moonlight. He raises it above and crashes it down on their heads.  

The four fall through the night.

Never to awaken

Suddenly out of the dark, an odd figure emerges cloaked in silver armor. All are blinded by the shimmering silverlight as if a mirage.  

He wears a chain mail necklace made from soda can tabs, tin plates show through beneath. He draws his sword— an umbrella with metallic spokes poking through. He wears his helmet— a shoebox adorned with foil and pieces of colored glass.

An urban knight on a quest for justice, his mission to avenge the deaths upon the Bowery. He rides through the streets of lower Manhattan on his bicycle, shielded by a garbage can lid, sweeping by the powerless who alone can visualize him.

They cheer as he chases the devil dressed in black, still holding the pipe with the blood of brothers and slays him under a full moon.

This work was developed for the Writing Workshop study group in the fall of 2019 and Judith thanks the coordinator and its members. The work is in memory of the four homeless men murdered as they slept on the Bowery in October of that year.