Your great grandmother sips gin slow in a
speakeasy in Chicago or Detroit.
Stokes the flame of a pot bellied stove in Alabama or Arkansas.
She is cigarette fixed at precipice of red lips.
Tells a suitor maybe your great grandfather, maybe not, what she expects from his courting.
There will be no hoarding pleasure in her house.
Your great grandma was fast.
Ain't it what we call a woman well acquainted with the topography of a hostile world
yet unbowed to its back hand.
A jook joint majesty.
A siren of her own fire, a thing this world has endlessly tried to expire but could not,
which is why you are here, today.
Your grandmother, cursed or never cursed.
Drank or never drank.
Knew men the way Job knew trials or never knew sin at all.
She was a country girl or familiar with the infinite heat of a New York City street.
She was sweet on a woman once, they kissed and never told.
She was Dominican or Irish or golden brown as a Mississippi dirt road glinting in the sun
She has labored whether with hand or with heart.
She has known part and parcel of struggle.
Knew she was done birthing after birthing the child that birthed you or knew others would follow.
She has swallowed decades of discarded promises made to look like men or money.
She was choice made flesh long before we flung a pro around its neck and called those words
movement.
Movement is what she has always known.
Prone to survival.
Which is why you are here, today.
Your mother was never only your mother.
Never only lover or law clerk or domestic worker.
Your mother was defiant in a bathrobe and slippers, in a boardroom, in a bedroom where
she said no or yes or more.
With a body like the one she taught you to own like your own good name.
She is failed and flawed and fortune forged in flame.
The best of what could be made out of this starshine and clay an inheritance of blood
and grace which is why you are here, today.
We call this evolution.
How one person becomes billions by splitting an idea like an atom.
How a notion as simple as “every woman should be the absolute mistress of her own body”,
could collect us like rainwater deliver us here.
Queer and trans man and none of the above.
But out loud love and the certainty that a true word spoken one hundred years later is
still true.
You deserve every option available to you in service toward your best life.
There is no light brighter than the blaze of resistance.
Evolution is the insistence that we must grow or die.
Which is why, we are here today.
Redefining the way we see each other; with wider vision.
Carrying a great grandmother’s mission forward, like a seed tucked in the pocket
of humanity.
We are not tasked with the awesome calling of making a tree.
We are tasked with the noble work of nurturing good soil; a place where we each might grow
and toil toward a self-determined truth.
Where trans women, undocumented youth, little black boys playing alone in parks each make
it home safe at night.
Where the light of morning kisses them awake.
The work of evolution is not to figure out what the next one hundred years will make.
The work of evolution is to plant the seed that will grow into something that from this
precipice of history we simply cannot see or know.
Nevertheless, will grow until you are the furthest point on the map of a future that
looks one hundred years back, perhaps through tears of gratitude to a crowd that looks exactly
and nothing like you or us but nevertheless, I trust, will say,
"That is why I am here today.”
And we will call this evolution.