PRISM: Bare Bones of a Trailer
PRISM is a storytelling series amplifying the experiences, creativity, and imagination of Black, Brown, and Indigenous storytellers based in Kentucky.
By Mo Viviane
a cotton candy sky
a trailer park dream
a love that never left
a heart with welcoming peace
the truth of it all
and on metamorphosis….
bell hooks stated, “We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go of grief about the love we lost long ago….”
Momma used to braid my hair every morning before my sister was shipped off to school. Swatches of pink oil would slide across my forehead as she took the fine-toothed comb to part my hair in small sections. She wove the strands of hair together like a spellbinder. I could smell the cigarette smoke lingering from her hands. She’d lean my head backward, dipping her two middle fingers into the Blue Magic hair grease and smooth down the parts on my scalp. It tingled, and a lot of times, I would sneeze from the smell.
Doing my hair was a long feat, especially with it being down my back in curls. The amount of patience a person had to have to deal with me moving around at four years old is beyond me. We lived in a trailer at Goff Trailer Park in Lebanon, Kentucky. We hopped through many trailers, but I only remember the one in the front of the park. It felt like a mansion to me. But I guess things always seem more significant when you’re a toddler.
I remember many moments from that trailer. Everything was so innocent then. But growing up not yet knowing how society sees mixed kids is a distinct kind of naïveté. We didn’t know what was said behind closed doors; sometimes, we’re only left with the bare bones of a trailer.
xxx
When I turned five, I got my first bike. It was a Blues Clues bike with training wheels. I tried to ride it around the house many times but was unsuccessful – the prospect of falling always scared me. One day, Dad took me to the edge of the road, and I was filled with so much joy when I looked back, but he was no longer holding onto the bike. I was steering alone!
This birthday was monumental. Summer’s end was quickly approaching – school was starting soon, and I’d be there with my sister.
On the first day of school, I was afraid I wouldn’t make any friends because I had only been around family members, my babysitter’s kids, and a few kids from the trailer park. But as time passed, I met a girl in school and started to feel some magic within me. She had the softest laugh and, at first, treated me like I was a part of something bigger than myself. Based on my small knowledge of relationships, sexuality, or gender structures, I didn’t have descriptors then. I had never heard of another girl like another girl, but I witnessed the intimacy of my mother with some of the women she would invite to the trailer.
In October, I got invited to my friend’s birthday party. It was nice at first. Then I started looking around. I was different from everyone else. They were all white girls with thin, straight blonde hair, and then there was me – a mixed black girl with curly, puffy hair running down my back with pink ball-balls on. One girl approached me and asked why I was there, and I answered, “I got a paper saying I could come.”
When we returned after winter break, I tried talking to my friend, and she told me she didn’t want to be friends with someone like me anymore. I didn’t ask for clarity, but I felt my core shake. My entire inside felt shattered, and I wondered if this was what heartbreak felt like.
xxx
Now, I’m thirty. After some time away, I recently moved back near my hometown and am wearing my hair as long as I used to. Mom passed seven years ago, but I still think about her braiding and putting the oil on my scalp when I feel alone in the woods. For a long time, I have been afraid of falling so much that I have become a runner. Being heartbroken is something I feel that I’ve gotten used to, especially looking down the street and seeing rebel flags posted up in people’s yards; racist slurs on the back of bumpers; constant discourse about mixed folks being planet-ruiners; family feuds on identity; and so on.
The thing is – other people do not define freedom for me. It is liberating to surrender and accept myself with an open heart, allowing love to present itself where I am. I had been looking for ways to be rid of me, when I have been whole this entire time.
Mo Viviane (she/they) – Born in Lebanon, Kentucky and co-host of the Coffee, Gems, & Sex Podcast. She assists creative entrepreneurs on their paths to expansion while using ancestral tools of storytelling, sound frequency, and much more. Her work focuses on the abstraction of life and death and the correspondence to the creativity process. She utilizes laughter and crying as medicine, hoping to make the world a more sustainable and loving place.
Want to read more? Find Mo on Buy Me A Coffee.
