Friday Feature: Audrey P. Williams

Audrey Patricia Williams (she/her) is a queer Caribbean writer and journalist whose work lives at the intersections of culture, identity, and womanhood. Moving between features, interviews, and cultural commentary, her storytelling holds a magnifying glass to the Black experience, exploring its tensions as much as its beauty. As a Brooklyn native raised by Guyanese immigrants in the American South, Audrey’s perspective is rooted in both curiosity and connection. Her work has appeared in ESSENCE, Inc. Magazine, New York Magazine, Refinery29, and Bustle. Audrey is also a co-director of the award-winning short documentary Black Girl Church. Currently, she is working to create supportive spaces for Black writers and build community as organizer of The Word, a literary salon series based in Atlanta.

Pottery Lesson

I was a lump of clay once. An unformed thing: soft, pliable. Passed from hand to hand, I began to take shape, though I didn't know it was happening at the time. Truthfully, I didn't know much about any of what was happening to me then. Only that I was, and if I was going to continue to be, I would have to learn what each push and pull required of me.

During that throwing time, a kind of childhood, I was wedged between heavy hands and rigid surfaces. I was centered by the steady spin of women made to care for me. In their palms and under curled fingers, I felt the clutch of a people who'd had too much taken away to allow themselves a weak grasp. Weakness, too close to slackness, was a forbidden state for anything in their reach—children included. Girl children especially.

It was a thing I learned in small ways and big ways: you do not kick your shoes off and leave them anywhere you please (you slide them neatly, side by side, under the bed); when you bathe, don't just stand under the water (scrub well with soap so you don't become a dirty-skinned red girl); look at me when I talk to you (to do so is to show respect and to not is to get a swift slap each time until you remember).

The women found weakness in me in places I'd never think to look, and mostly, I hated them for it. But what I felt more than hate, or maybe just tangled up within it, was awe. I wanted to shape myself. I wanted hands like theirs. Hands that knew what to do. The first thing I asked to be taught was how to wring a washcloth dry.

There was nothing a young woman was judged by more than her cleanliness. Being in charge of my own was the first responsibility they gave me once I graduated from the protection of childhood. At six, I could wash my own face, I could brush my own teeth, I could wipe my own ass. They just had the final say as to whether I'd done it right. Every morning, I got myself ready for school, and every morning I presented myself for approval. The greased-face, pink-tongue, clean-tail, were fine. The bathroom, the place I’d done it all, rarely ever was.

The most consistent complaint: water, in collected pools and puddles, around the sink. The washcloth I left hanging always held more water than my hands could squeeze out, and the drip-drip-drip of what was left betrayed me. Its wet mess turned me dirty in my caregivers’ eyes. When I could no longer bear the suck-tooth, cut-eye disgust of the women who knew how to control water, I sent myself to the wheel.

"That’s what you does call dry?”

Twisting soaked terrycloth, I looked at the stern-faced Trinidadian woman I called grandmother standing behind me, over me, through the bathroom mirror. Worry whirred inside me. I tried to center myself against the flattened tone of her sing-song island patois. Her eyes, ringed with the milky blue-gray of their years, were still sharp. Even translated by a reflection, they told me the question didn’t call for an answer, just an action.

“Fold it over and do it again.” 

The weight of being watched by a woman who missed nothing made my body stiff with uncertainty. My hands, small enough to fit in hers twice, were already red and raisined. As far as I knew, the towel was dry. I saw the water gush, I heard it squelch. Still, she pushed. And so, I gave, the fibers digging into me with each opposing turn—my left hand away from me, my right hand toward me, wrists pleading—until the damp cloth stung my palms, now raw. Water quietly trickled through my fingers. I untwisted the towel and turned to hold it up before her. She looked at it (I prayed not a drip would fall), then looked at me (I prayed I didn't look too proud), and took it.

I studied her hands as she retwisted the cloth. They’ve held me since I was a two-month-old baby, motherless and new. The first things I knew were what they sounded like against a Sunday tambourine—staccato, sure—and what they felt like against my face—hot, hard. Hers were the only hands I’d ever seen lift steaming buss-up-shut right from the ghee-slick tawa pan and clap-clap the roti, revealing its flaky, papery layers. And though I hadn’t seen them do this myself, I believed when she told me they used to take heavy, cotton linens from rich, British houses and wash them—“scrub, scrub, scrub, like so, here”—with lye and hot, soapy water against ridged steel washboards. 

Her hands were both hope and haunt. And when she unfurled the washcloth, not able to extract any more water from its exhausted fibers, mine had become the same. This was the way it went with all of the women who shaped me. Daughters and mothers and daughters-turned-mothers, many of whom are now long dead or long gone, told me how to be, and I was. Each one my maker, yet none quite my mother, entrusted with the soft earth of an unclaimed girl, appointed with giving her a form worthy of fire. 

But even after the kiln, clay has memory. It warps, it twists, it bends, the tension of the firing at odds with the tension of its many-handed shaping. What you end up with is an imperfect vessel struggling to remember what was against what must be. I’m beginning to remember. Maybe because I have a daughter now, and she, too, is an unformed thing. I see her—plastic, workable—and wonder whose hands I am using. 

My sink hasn’t been dry since she could reach it, but on her own, she can get her ass close to clean. She understands a tongue, when properly brushed, should be pink, though I still ask her to stick her tongue out after brushing to show me. “Ahhh,” she goes. “Ahhh,” I reply, our twin tongues lolling about. We go through jars of Palmer’s cocoa butter by the scoopful, her face glistening from forehead to chin in excess.

“Baby, I told you you don’t need that much, you’re wasting it,” I warn, feeling my grasp tighten, seeing her contract in response.

I stop myself from telling her, “at your age, I had to…” because at her age I know I was only being shaped, not loved. And now, a daughter-turned-mother myself, I want her to know my heart before she knows my hands. So if I must warp and twist and bend after all this time, I will warp and twist and bend myself into a mother who knows how to hold her child in both. 

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