HEY AUNTIE!

Are you listening to the world instead of someone that loves you? The younger women who are letting social media guide them may want to talk to an Auntie.

Auntie can be used as a term of endearment or as a nice/nasty way of putting an older woman down. Either way you want to use it, sometime Aunties have sage advice. We Aunties have been there and done that. We know that there is an expiration date to bootie shorts and dropping it like it’s hot.

Back in my day a menage-a-trois was the most adventurous thing that a guy would try to talk you into. Now, menage-a-trois are quite pedestrian. Girls today are letting guys talk them into doing all matters of things sexually. Polyamory is being sold as a sophisticated form of sexuality whereby all parties involved are sexually free, happy, and honest. But Aunties will tell you that polyamory is a pimp move. Polyamory is just another word for dating. If a man tells you that he’s dating other people; he is telling you that he is having sex with other people. And that’s fine in a dating situation, that’s being honest. But if a man tells you that you’re his woman and he want to be in a committed relationship with you and have sex with other people… Baby, he’s just using pimpology on you. He isn’t committed to you; he’s committed to himself.

Aunties would probably tell you to respect yourself enough to not go for the okey doke. Aunties have lived life and have been down the road that you are travelling. They can tell you about the emotion harm, trauma, unwanted pregnancies, and sexual diseases that may also be waiting for you if you choose that path.

When I was coming of age my mother didn’t talk to me about womanhood and relationships. I had to figure it out on my own. Even my peers didn’t talk about our worth, we were not that enlighten. But with age hopefully there is wisdom. So, seek out an older woman that you respect and ask her how it is that she made it to where she is now. That woman if she is not your mother will be affectionately known as Auntie.

CONGO SQUARE

Congo Square is located inside Louis Armstrong Park in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, LA. It is a place where enslaved and free people of color could gather on Sundays. In 1817 the mayor of New Orleans made it the only acceptable place where black people could congregate.

On Sundays Congo Square would have been a loud, lively place where enslaved people that had family on other plantations could possibility visit with each other. Congo Square

was many things for many people. It was an open-air market where people bought and sold goods, it was a place where people socialized, and practiced their religion. Africans would have been beating the bamboula drums, and the Haitian would have been beating the tambou drums. Drums, bells, banjos and other rhythmic instruments would have been played. Imagine sellers yelling for people to come and see their wares, child running around laughing and yelling to each other; joyful greetings intermixing with the drumming and children laugher.

The morning that I visited Congo Square it was quiet, a solitary man was dancing and worshipping in the middle of the square. That’s when it hit me that Congo Square was also a sacred place, Voudon, not Voodoo was practiced in Congo Square. I got emotional as I realized that it was possible that my ancestors gathered in Congo Square. I walked around Congo Square just wanting to walk in the same space that they walked in as they enjoyed their one day away from slave labor. I was solemn as I walked out of the park because I couldn't imagine what they felt as they left the one place where they could be happy if only for a moment.

Although I was sad to leave that sacred place, I was grateful that Congo Square had been preserved by the city of New Orleans.

LOST FRIENDS

After the civil war millions of formerly enslaved desired to find the people that they lost in slavery. Parents wanted to find the children that were taken from them and sold. They wanted to find the man or woman that they fell in love with. Children longed to locate their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. How do you find someone that was sold years ago, or someone who escaped? The need to be reunited with or at the very least to know what happened to a loved one was something that some people carried to their graves. People died never knowing what happened to their loved ones. It is a desire that lives within a lot of people today. It lives in me.

The Southwestern Christian Advocate published in New Orleans was a newspaper (1877-1929) that ran a column called, “Lost Friends.” Two dollars brought you a one-year subscription where you could run an ad in an attempt to locate loved ones. The paper was distributed to 500 preachers, 800 post offices and more than 4,000 subscribers in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The paper asked Pastors to read the column from the pulpit. Below is an ad that was placed in the newspaper. I want you to put yourself in that person’s shoes, imagine how it would feel not knowing what happened to the people that you loved. For fifty-two years people placed ads trying to find out what became of the people lost in slavery.

LOST FRIENDS

Mr. Editor: Sister Liba Penny is anxious to find her children. She was owned by Richard Rosell, of Gaston county, N.C. Her children, Thomas, and Patty Rosell, or Roswell, were sold to trader Davis, who took them down South some years before the war. She has never heard from them since. Her husband’s name was Tom Penny. After the surrender she took her husband’s name. God grant that you may be successful in finding her children for her. Sarah A. Daloy, Greensboro, N.C.