Choosing Our Literary Kin: Remembering Valerie Boyd

“I’m not a gatekeeper; I’m a gatecrasher,” Valerie Boyd noted, laughing, during a panel I curated in January 2022. “It’s like, ‘Hey gang, I’ve got the key… Let’s go!’” Boyd, the author of Wrapped in Rainbows, an acclaimed biography of Zora Neale Hurston, and editor/curator of two forthcoming books—Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker (April 2022, Simon & Schuster) and Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (September 2022, Lookout Books)—ascended on February 12, 2022.

Valerie made it a point to mentor Black and Brown writers, and she modeled both community-building and coalition-building. In 2016, she joined the University of Georgia Press as series editor of Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction. That same year, after reading one of my essays, Val wrote to me. She is the editor responsible for bringing my debut essay collection to publication at the University of Georgia Press in 2020. She was my mentor, my friend, and more recently, my collaborator.

“She was one of the foremost scholars of Black women’s literature, a sterling teacher to scores of journalists and creative nonfiction writers, and a champion of American arts and letters,” Walter Biggins, editor-in-chief at the University of Pennsylvania Press and a former colleague of Valerie’s at University of Georgia Press, wrote on Twitter of her legacy.

When I met Valerie, there was this immediate pull, this recognition, as though we already knew each other and had been waiting to meet. It surprised me, and I didn’t act on it; I downplayed it. I never stopped thinking of her as EDITOR and feeling intimidated and anxious, even though she wasn’t intimidating. She did study a person, though—Val paid close attention, she was present, listening intently, and that sometimes made me self-conscious. We met in 2019 in Portland at the annual AWP conference, three years after Valerie first emailed me asking if I had a nonfiction manuscript-in-progress she could look at. Meeting felt like a blind date.

Valerie stood smaller than I imagined. During our 2022 panel she described herself: “I’m an African American woman. I’m peanut butter-colored and I have on a black top with a kind of red over-sweater and I have earrings and I have long dark hair in dreadlocks.” When I met Val, her face was more angular than in the photos I’d seen online, but still with that shine and warmth, something almost divine. Her skin looked like polished sandalwood—radiating kindness. Her head was covered with a black and silver scarf. She looked like someone who had gone through something, and I didn’t know what it was, but I could see it. We took selfies and shared wide smiles. She wore long silver-and-red earrings I later recognized from her headshot; they must have been a favorite. Valerie’s calm demeanor and her willingness to talk strategy disarmed me.

Afterward, I sent a text: “Thank you so much for making time for coffee. It was wonderful to finally meet and talk to you.” Val wrote, “My pleasure, Friend.”

The following year, Valerie invited me to a joyous Juneteenth celebration, my first ever, over Zoom. We all made these delicious cocktails: something with watermelon and mint. I saw some famous-to-me Black feminists, her friends, in the other squares. I didn’t know what I had done to be invited, but I was happy that she thought to include me. In an email, Valerie thanked us. Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm about our Juneteenth Jubilee tomorrow, June 19th! Master mixologist Tiffanie Barriere and I are excited to make cocktails with you and to toast to our heritage and freedom.

Valerie wrote, “In these troubled times, it’s crucial for us to seek out and privilege moments of joy and delight. This will be one of those moments.” She explained that in the interactive Zoom session, Tiffanie—aka The Drinking Coach—would walk us through the steps for making the Jazzy Bell, a cocktail Tiffanie created for the occasion. Val told us Tiffanie was passionate about the history of Black folks in the culinary and cocktail industries, and she would share some of that history, as well as her inspiration for the unique drink she’d conjured to celebrate Juneteenth.

On the day we met, Val invited me to the birthday party she was planning for Alice Walker’s 75th in Georgia. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, What are you talking about? ALICE WALKER?!!! It was like being invited to the moon—it didn’t seem possible. Valerie and I had just met in person for the first time and her generosity shocked me. Still, I could tell it was a genuine invitation. When I interviewed her last summer, Valerie told me she was 25 when she met Walker at the first Zora Neale Hurston Festival in 1989 in Eatonville, Florida. She mentioned several writers who had had a profound influence on her. However, she said Walker was in a different category.

Walker was just a generation above me speaking to me, and for me, as a Black Southern woman. Sometimes people ask me what it’s like to hang out with Alice Walker. And I say it’s like hanging out with the coolest of the cool aunties. So to me, Alice, Pearl Cleage, Toni Cade Bambara. Those are my literary aunts, who are too young to be my mother, but my elders who are also my friends. They accept me as I appear. It is an honor to be accepted as such by them.

In our conversation, Valerie elaborated: “For me to be invited to a dinner with Alice Walker, or to go to this birthday party for Toni Cade Bambara—when she’s turning 50 and I’m 25. Those were pivotal moments in who I became not just as a writer, but as a woman, as a human being. So, I think those things are hugely important.” That was when I understood what it meant that she invited me to Alice Walker’s birthday party. She was inviting me into her community.

Val talked about being nervous around Walker, which is how I was around Valerie.

So I remember meeting Alice Walker and you know, going up with trembling hands and asking her to sign a copy of The Color Purple and she signed it. And she saw me and looked at me, and I just remember feeling that connection. I don’t know what I said. I was too nervous to say anything. And you know, that was when I was just a trembling fan like everybody else. But then over time, after I decided, or it was decided for me that well, let me just tell you the story…

I remember at the book party for Wrapped in Rainbows in the Bay Area, everybody was scared of Alice Walker. So nobody was talking to her. Like everybody, she was sitting by herself, literally at this party, because everybody was scared to talk to her. So I was like, “Oh, this is messed up.” Since it was my party, I decided to be brave and go over and talk to her. And I sat with her. And that to me—I have to tell Alice this, but she may not remember it—but to me that marked the beginning of our friendship. It was like I was able to let go of my fanship enough to just be a friend and to start listening and talking and not being scared. And that was the beginning of us becoming friends.

After we checked the proofs for our conversation to be published in Creative Nonfiction, one of the editors asked me to summarize our relationship for the introduction, and I said I couldn’t. Now I understand why: she was a cross between a sister and an aunt, a mentor and a friend. Not exactly a friend, because I was still too anxious around her. For the interview, Valerie suggested “friendly collaborators.” I had hoped she would say friends. I was too scared to relax into friendship.

*

Valerie advised me on the most important part of my book: the introduction. I was a little frustrated at first that Val wasn’t offering line edits. I wanted an introduction or a preface by some well-known person—a scholar who is also an artist. I think Valerie thought it was important for my authority as a writer that I introduce my book. I see that now and am grateful. She looked at drafts and she gave me feedback, but it wasn’t heavy. I wasn’t used to that. She trusted that I would figure it out. And I did.

During my conversation with Valerie in 2021, she talked with me about her dear friend, Farah Jasmine Griffin, whom she called “an amazing scholar at Columbia,” and how it was through her that Val got her first agent. How the two of them would quote that line from Sula—“We was girls together”—because they met when they were in college.

I told Val I had once heard Griffin speak at a retreat for early career Asian American Studies faculty hosted at Columbia. Griffin said something that stayed with me. She said, “I’ll tell you a secret. You can get the thing you want. You can do the thing that you want in your life, but you just have to know what it is or you’ll end up doing other people’s work.”

Val said, “I’m glad you just shared that with me. That’s the truth. That’s been the truth of my life. I’ve gotten distracted by doing other people’s work. But I’ve always still known what I wanted to do. I think that’s the secret. I think that’s really profound.”

Last year, Valerie agreed to be on a virtual panel I curated on the topic of Black and Brown Collaboration. The organizers postponed the conference until 2022. We recorded our panel on January 8, 2022—at 6 pm on a Saturday evening—one month before she passed on February 12. Val’s face looked tired and drawn, and I didn’t know why she looked tired. But we did it, and Valerie spoke so elegantly.

During our conversation, I grabbed the Mississippi Masala soundtrack CD from my desk and held it up. We had talked about Mississippi Masala before and how important it was to both of us. Valerie saw what I was trying to do. She spoke about the movie so beautifully and what it meant to her and what it meant to us. Val said:

It was one of the first examples of showing Black and Brown communities, not just in proximity to each other, but loving each other: friendship across Black and Brown lines, love across those so-called lines and so it was a hugely important movie… the impact of that kind of movie just showing the friendship and love across those communities was extraordinarily important.

At the end of our panel, Val asked what I had prepared for us to eat and I said I hadn’t—I said I’d make my aloo chole. Something I didn’t know was that she was a foodie, that she was on the advisory board of the Southern Foodways Alliance. I suggested we have Zoom cocktails when the panel aired two weeks later. My last text to her: “Thank you, Val!! That was great [emoji of two brown hands raised in the air].”

Valerie wrote back, “Thank YOU for organizing us!” Two days later, I texted our panel members about a Mississippi Masala mention on NPR. No response. Two weeks later, I texted again, suggesting that we all have drinks after our panel aired in late January. Silence. She must be busy with the semester and two books coming out. I didn’t want to bother her. Only later did it occur to me that Val had never not replied to my texts.

*

In August 2019, Valerie wrote to me: “I am mourning and celebrating Toni Morrison’s ascendance to ancestor. Imagine her power in that realm! Even if you don’t believe in that stuff, just imagine the gifts she’ll give us an ancestor… My summer has been wonderful. Peru was amazing, and the Alice Walker 75 celebration was transcendent. I just spoke with AW and she was again thanking me for the beautiful day. As if it wasn’t my absolute honor and delight!”

When I learned Valerie had left us, I read through our correspondence wanting to see more of her words. In the summer of 2020, her father passed away. I asked how she was doing. Val’s text is a poem:

July 19, 2020

I’m doing well. Just
finished a live-
streamed yoga class.
Cooking dinner soon.
Just being kind to
myself, a little
Indulgent, allowing
myself to have
whatever I want. Doing
a fish fry this evening.
I may even have a beer!
Look out! And my
family and I have been
texting or talking every
day. This is actually
bringing my brothers and
me closer. So, I just
trust that The Creator
Has a Master Plan, as
the song says.

During our panel, Valerie said, “I feel that we get to choose our literary kin. We get to choose our mentors and influences.” She said, “I imagine myself the love child of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. Someone like Alice Walker is my favorite auntie and someone like Zora Neale Hurston is my literary grandmother. I think it’s not just okay, but necessary for us to not only make these choices, but to claim our own literary ancestry.”

You told me, “We get to choose our literary kin.” I choose you.

I chose these lines from a poem by Walker as an epigraph in my story collection. I chose these lines before Valerie passed, but I chose them because of her.

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

–“Be Nobody’s Darling”