warmth (happy birthday audre lorde)
That’s Audre in the middle between her sisters Helen and Phyllis.
Audre Lorde was born on a very cold day. February 1934 was one of the coldest months on record in New York City up to that point. Unprecedented snowfall, but on February 18th, 1934 there was no snow, no wind, just a deep cold. Linda Belmar Lorde gave birth to her third daughter under cold conditions. Nothing like the warmth she was born into. Linda’s mother (Audre Lorde’s grandmother) Elizabeth Belmar gave birth to all her children in Carriacou, traveled from Grenada to the small island of her own birth so that her sister, the midwife Annie could hold her, tend to her and welcome her babies. Sometimes warmth is more than a climate.
But in February 1934 during the Great Depression Linda Belmar Lorde gave birth in a cold city at Sloane Maternity Ward, a facility funded by the Vanderbilts and managed by Columbia’s Medical School, testing ground for a legion of white doctors committed to what they thought was the noble sanitizing mission of eradicating midwifery and imposing birth on their own terms. Cold. Institutionalized weather.
Time-traveling back to that day, I want to hold Linda Belmar Lorde’s hand. Hold the back of her neck. Whisper warmth into her ear. I want my breathing alongside her to mean remember. Remember warmth. I want to pace alongside Byron Lorde waiting for the baby who is, quiet as its kept, at least his fifth daughter. I want to look into the eyes of a man so disappointed by his own father that he changed the spelling of his name and say it. Warmth. I want to tell him he was always worthy of love. That he is strong enough to offer more than four walls and the heat bill. He has claim to a deeper warmth.
And now, come with me back to a different hospital, decades later where Audre Lorde is meeting with the surgeon who tells her that since her cancer has metastasized there is only one option, his knife. He tells her that even with surgery she only has a few more months to live. And watch with me in wonder as it flickers in her, warmth. A healing spark that we can recognize in daughter soon to be doctor Elizabeth, named after Ma Liz, Audre’s grandmother. Witness it. The possibility of rebirth as warmth. That night she will go home and write in her journal a promise to write until fire comes out of every opening in her body. She will craft her own second, but really primary opinion through her own research on the liver and “alternative” treatments for cancer. She will leave New York City for the warmth of the Caribbean and gift herself not months, but many years of life. She will form lasting connections with entire new communities of Black women, in the Caribbean, in South Africa, in Germany. Warmth. When the doctors ask she will say “It is the love of women that has kept me alive this long.”
I am writing this in the midst of an ice storm in Durham. Across the United States the human-caused climate chaos of unprecedented cold weather and the cruel capitalist structural neglect of communities of color means that many of us are cold right now in a way we don’t have to be. And so my gift to you on this Audre Lorde’s 87th birthday is warmth. The warmth we need, which is the precondition to the climate healing we are all responsible for in our lifetimes. It is the warmth that comes from remembering how worthy we are of love, how capable we are of giving it. It is the warmth that comes from trusting the healers, especially the black, brown and indigenous women healers in our midst. It is the warmth that comes from reclaiming the externalized authority of systems that never earned our loyalty. It is the warmth we make by loving each other with the heat of more than one lifetime.
Audre Lorde’s birthday is as good a day as any to clarify our relationship to heat, light and possibility. May you experience that warmth that is your birthright. May you move towards what lights you up. May you say yes to the gift already radiating within you. With gratitude to the Lorde our flame, as ever lighting the way deeper into who we are.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Continue the celebration with us on 2/21 at 11am EST at Mobile Homecoming’s Sunday Service where I will be doing an oracle in honor of Audre Lorde! https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/live
P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.