LOVING V. KITTEN By CD Collins

 

LOVING V. KITTEN

By CD Collins



I am often asked if my writing is autobiographical.

How to answer. I search for the most raw and exquisite outliers in our galaxy. I endeavor to lasso them onto a page. I summon my own marrow. I write a line. I write another line like hoeing a row of beans.

I squeeze the words out like a baker pumping a confectioner’s cone. Shimmering letters on the nutty terrain of a German chocolate cake, the smooth cream cheese frosting on a red velvet cake.

I script with a quill pen dipped in the mineral grit of a slick slate sidewalk after a summer rain.

Here is the rough diamond I found deep in the mine. Working alongside my brothers, breathing in black dust as we go down, traveling four miles into the earth. We rise terrified, our faces stained in our cage of sunset.

Here, a garnet turned from the earth with my spade. Here, a seed from the heirloom tomato I purloined from the garden of childhood. My aunt and brother gathered tomatoes at noon and fled into the woods. We carried a pocket of coarse salt and a kerchief with Lucky Strikes we’d stolen from the kitchen table. Three Strike Anywhere matches.

The wall-mounted match holder, the bottle opener, the boot hook, all destined for the Jim Crow Museum of racist memorabilia. My grandfather’s ashtray, a tiny replica of an Asian woman, her legs swinging on wires. Open your bottle on my teeth; clean your boots between my spread legs; crush your cigarettes out on my porcelain breasts. Those breasts. What my grandfather saw. What I saw at seven.

What I write. What you read. What I say. What you hear.

When Bernhard Schlink’s novel “The Reader” was made into a movie, the author himself appeared on a panel discussion. When an audience member asked him if his book was autobiographical, he replied furiously. “Everything is autobiographical."

Why not tell me if you were moved. Did anything within you tremble with recognition? What happened in that that space of wonder between what I said and what you heard?

Every year, my friend Babette orders a cake for my birthday. She calls me “kitten.”

When I turned 50, she asked the bakery to write “Loving the Kitten.”

The baker thought she said, “Loving V. Kitten”

As though Loving was against Kitten. Loving vs. Kitten

As in Loving V. Virginia.

The state of Virginia found that Richard Loving, who was White, and Mildred Jeter, who was Black, had violated its anti-miscegenation statue, which criminalized Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. The ACT established a legal definition of a white person as "one who has no trace of any blood other than Caucasian." The purpose of the law was to prevent interracial marriage and to protect the "whiteness" of the race. The couple was sentenced to a year in jail.

In 1967, in a unanimous Supreme Court decision, the justices held that laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated both the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus overturning Virginia's Racial Integrity Act and Virginia's andand Virginia's Sterilization Act.


In Loving V. Virginia, the Supreme Court proclaimed that miscegenation was “odious to a free people.”

What I write, what you read. What you write. What I read. What you say. What I hear.

“Loving V. Kitten,” Babette and I now say to each other. Loving less what she said than what the baker heard.





“Loving V. Kitten,” Babette and I now say to each other. Loving less what she said than what the baker heard. Sterilization Act.

In Loving V. Virginia, the Supreme Court proclaimed that miscegenation was “odious to a free people.”

What I write, what you read. What you write. What I read. What you say. What I hear.

“Loving V. Kitten,” Babette and I now say to each other. Loving less what she said than what the baker heard.