Circumcising the Grape

When I was 16, I was madly in love with a graffiti-artist slash rapper from Queens. With Hip-Hop making its way to the mainstream, I snubbed my Luke Skywalker-Me-So-Horney roots for Tribe Called Quest’s “Midnight Marauders” as I was obsessed with all things New York. My mother and I recently discussed that whimsical season over a couple glasses of Manischewitz Grape Concord wine, the season when her daughter added hundreds of gray hairs to her precious, Pentecostal head. Queens and I broke up during my spring break visit from Howard University. It was a dramatic ending complete with a bonfire of all the artistic pieces he had given me. “He circumcised me from his life,” I cried to my mother, weeping and wailing, Jamaican-style, my singed, teenage heart leaning on the biblical words I wanted so much to abandon. I remember my mother, who was dually mortified and impressed, sitting with me as I waded through the miry clay of my first heartbreak. She pulled out her holy oil (Pompeian olive oil) from her nightstand drawer, poured a little on her fingers and made the sign of the cross on my forehead. I had de-Pentecostalized myself after I left home, but I still loved when my mother prayed for me. With my forehead cupped in her slick hand, she prayed that the pain would subside and that I would I finish college. Both prayers were answered (eventually lol).