TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

In college, my friends and I took up photography. We were prone to taking pictures in black and white. It felt like a very hip thing, especially for those of us who considered ourselves burgeoning arty types. We purchased 35mm cameras and walked the city, searching for anything visually interesting. We snapped skyscrapers, fire hydrants, people at city bus stops. Mostly we snapped each other. 

I recently unearthed pictures from those years. There’s one of my college roommate Monique sitting in an IKEA chair, a Keith Haring “Free South Africa” poster in the background. There’s another of my friends Daryl and Mike standing next to each other, yet facing opposite directions. Mike’s shoulders are near his ears. His hands in his pocket. They had just met. I notice the awkwardness in their bodies. Less so Daryl; he is stylish, dressed as cool as the first day I met him in high school. I so wanted his swagger. I can tell in one – graffiti tagged beneath an underpass near the Schuylkill River – I was going for a social realist vibe. 

I eventually switched to color film, hung a drop cloth in my apartment, set the timer, then ran to jump into the frame. I shot myself. It’s disconcerting seeing the younger me all these years later. I notice the sensitive, mildly insecure yet intellectually hungry me. I was trying to see a hidden world through the camera’s lens, my inner life in concert with the world around me. These pictures reveal how I strained to feel worthy. 

Time has cloaked that younger me in layers of earned confidence and extensive growth. I am not sure anyone in my life today would recognize that overly conscious, shy young man. 

Today’s poem heralds the power of pictures to preserve; they invite questions of how we are the same, and how we have grown.  

Ode to My Mama and “The Purple Dress,” circa 1992-1993
by Brittany Rogers

In this picture,        my mama know she fine
lavender sweater clinging             all her curves sitting right.
Glory be her exposed thigh          earrings licking her shoulders
her hand a cocked smirk at her hip.

I squint when I see lavender sequins        fitting her curves like lingerie.
Teenaged me couldn’t picture my mama a woman        dressed to pull
her hand a cocked smirk at her hip             cabernet-colored lip
curved like a fishhook             dragging men behind her.

Before this picture I didn’t see her as just  a woman
though I know she must have been              those hips 
curved like a fishhook              dragging men behind her.
We don’t discuss who she was      before children

though I know           she belonged to herself      once.
She says she is too old to wear miniskirts, run the streets      now
that we wore her down. We don’t discuss who she was before.
What picture will I show my kids to prove       I still got it

once I’m tricked into thinking I’m too old for miniskirts,
the glory of exposed thighs, large hoops? I imagine 
my children              squinting at old photos     proof that I was a woman
before  them, thinking in this picture     my mama know she fine. 

"Ode to My Mama and 'The Purple Dress,' circa 1992-1993" by Brittany Rogers from GOOD DRESS © 2024 Brittany Rogers. Used by permission of Tin House.