Finding Fertile Ground: Stories of Grit, Resilience, and Fertile Ground
Society & Culture
Jewels was born in Harlem Hospital as an only child to a single mom. Her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when Jewels was ten, so they moved to Georgia to be closer to family. Her mom wasn’t working while she was undergoing chemo, so they were couch surfers without their own home...not the first time in her life that Jewels would find herself houseless. From that experience, Jewels developed a resilience that has lasted her well.
I asked her if she had problems adjusting to Georgia, and she said the biggest difficulty was adapting because of colorism. When she came home speaking in Ebonics or AAVE, she was beaten because her family raised her to speak “properly” to fit in.
At a mostly white boarding high school, she remembers a three-year-old calling her the n-word and a white woman complimenting her for how she used utensils.
Although she married in her ‘20s and had three children, she always had this lingering feeling that something was not quite right in her life. Her family had been run by women, and she’d been attracted to girls as a young age. She suppressed her attraction to women until she was 30 years old, when she started reading books to explore the idea. Then one night a close gay friend said to her, “You know, you’re gay!”
Jewels did some soul searching and realized her friend was right. She asked her mom if she could take care of her three daughters so she could restart her life. Her mom suggested Jewels wait until her 3-year-old reached the age of 18. Jewels responded,
“No. I have waited roughly 30-some-odd years...if I don’t find out who I am, I will not be an effective parent..I will not live to my full potential, so I have to do this.”
She quit her job, got on a bus with $500, and moved to Portland. The first shock was not all the white people...it was the cold. She also began to experience the subversive racism and microaggressions experienced by people of color in the predominantly white Northwest.
Her kids joined her, but it took her 10 years to feel fully settled after more couch surfing and moving around in careers and homes. Jewels earned a degree in social work, but she realized she was not cut out for being a case manager...it didn’t help that she didn’t earn much more than the clients she was trying to help.
Jewels met her wife Amy in 2014...they were dating other people but in the same Facebook group with Pacific Northwest Lesbians. They met at a picnic, hit it off, and six to eight weeks later, they committed to monogamy. Amy later proposed, surprising Jewels with her mom’s engagement ring.
When I asked what it’s like to be a Black queer woman in Vancouver, she said, “I’m completely invisible. I rarely see other queer people, much less Black queer people outside of my own house..."
When I met Jewels last summer, she said that when people fondly recall Little House on the Prairie, she thinks about her people being enslaved around that time. This statement helped me put new lenses on everything I view now...it makes me question how Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color are represented. We talked about the racism in these books, which she reread a few years ago after loving them as a child. "This is the disconnect I feel we have as a nation...that Harriet Tubman’s time was also Laura Ingalls’ time.” I am grateful to Jewels for the insights she shared with me and how she helped me to look at things in a completely new light.
Jewels loves talking in front of people, and she shared news about her current projects.
I asked her what book or story that had inspired her. Her immediate response was Sofia in The Color Purple, and we discovered it is our shared favorite novel.
You can reach Jewels on Facebook or Instagram.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free