About a month ago, just before another serious winter storm hit NYC, I made it to the Harlem Fine Arts Show (HFAS18, for its eighteenth year).

It was a welcome opportunity to get to learn about and meet artists operating across a range of mediums and disciplines — including collage and ceramics. And I appreciated being surrounded by stylish, colourful, unbothered Black aunties. I could imagine their living rooms, if not their lives.

My nieces and nephews (in the Caribbean context of both blood and kinship) range from less than a year old to entering the double digits to about to be in college; I get to buy them interesting board books and to introduce them to fountain pens and to watch as they figure out who they are trying to be.

Growing up, aunts — again, a term used to encompass women officially related to me as well as close friends of my parents and the mothers of my own closest high school friends — were important to me. They meted out discipline, support, counsel, transportation, solicited and unsolicited fashion and wellness advice; their homes were gathering spaces and places of retreat and inspiration. There were a handful of key uncles, too, but the aunts were more numerous and more often around. Through them I learned so much about what was expected of me, and of them.

On Thursday one of my aunts — by blood, this time — delivered a eulogy for her husband that I will be thinking about for a long time. Not only because it was a wonderful testimony to a life well-lived, but because it was brilliantly written and expertly delivered. This aunt is a former high-school principal, the keeper of much of the family lore, the person who introduced me to the music of David Rudder, and someone who — when I once dared to challenge her on a point of grammar — glowered at me and said, “you would be correct if this weren’t a noun in apposition.” I was, I think, 10 or eleven years old at the time. I have never forgotten the lesson or her expression.

I sometimes joke that everything I do is in the service of getting to be a good aunt. Every year I realise just how much I actually mean it.

Attribution

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

— The Uses of Sorrow by Mary Oliver in Thirst: Poems (2006)