from Survival is a Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“At the right time of year, just before a deciduous tree sprouts leaves again for the spring, the fluid moving up the cambium is so loud that if you place a stethoscope on the bark you can hear sap rushing upward into the naked branches.
When Audre said, “The love of women healed me,” she meant the care and the food and the support in her healing journey. She meant the gratitude and intellectual affirmation she found in women’s community and cultural spaces. But she also meant the erotic thrill and sensual excitement she felt about the women in her life. Those who were lovers, and those who were not.
Audre fully believed in the healing power of the erotic, in her own power as a healer, and in the possibility of being healed by touch. She didn’t separate the physical experience of desire from the theoretical work of Black feminism. Once, theorizing the ‘black female aesthetic’ in her journal, she heated up: “ Now I’m getting raunchy child, hot in the pants. The black woman moves her beauty into a cosmic force, into an orbit truth body wisdom can follow.”
As Barbara Smith said:
“Audre loved women. She really loved women. You know. She loved how they looked, she loved how they smelled, she loved everything about them. She loved their sense of humor, she loved their smiles, she loved the color of their skin, whatever that might be. I mean I’ve seen her flirt with EVERYBODY. I mean all races, one gender, I’ve seen her flirt regardless of previous condition of servitude. You know what I mean? She really liked women. But the bedrock was that she really respected women.”
And in some settings, Audre as Afrekete, the trickster daughter, engaged the power of energizing play in her community of women. The rush of erotic possibility was Audre’s definition of “alive”, and she felt safe to be alive in community..”
for each of you chapter pp 291-292