What's the Word?

i rescued myself to write this

Jeida K. Storey

Feb 17, 2025

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I'm sitting inside a room,

inside a circle of chairs and beautiful Black people.

Queer,

neurodivergent,

trans,

fat,

chronically ill

Beautiful. Beautiful.

Every single one of them.

And the room is silent but buzzing with energy

that can be felt by a chill down the spine,

hairs standing on end.

I make eye contact with as many of these beautiful Black people and they wait, they wait for me to speak.

Beneath our feet are hardwood floors

where just the night before we'd been in this very room, ring shoutin’,

on hands and knees,

screaming

for help, screaming

for mercy, screaming

for joy.

Breakthroughs. Breaking through,
through breaking

and

the warmth and the heat of the Congos and the Ancestors and the people who could fly

were there

as folks wailed and convulsed

and surrendered

to themselves.

The floors, those same hardwood floors, wept

and rocked us.

I remember reaching down to touch the floors,

swiping a finger, against the grain, feeling the wet

on my fingertips,

peeling the socks from my feet to wring the tears

to ring

shout.

I shuffle my feet across those floors.

Jesus isn't the only one who can walk on water.

I bring myself back to the present and see.

Everyone is waiting still.

I lean forward in my chair then lean back and say, “What's the word?

Everybody got one. What's the word?

Everybody got a word.

You ain't gotta wait on me to speak. You got a word.”

It don't gotta be a pretty sermon.

It don't gotta be a pretty poem.

It don't gotta be a clever haiku.

It don't gotta be English. It don't gotta be intelligible.

Baby, you could make a sound and move mountains.

So, what's the word? What's the word?

There should never be a time when I ask you what's the word? and nothing comes from you.

You are a universe. Within a universe. Within a universe. There is nothing void in you.

I look around at the gods sitting in that circle.

The Hoodoos

that shape and reshape and reshape again.

The Conjurers

who make everything, all right? all right!

The Waymakers

who don't wait

on nobody to tell them what it is.

Dem Hoodoos see it coming a long way off.