(ThySistas.com) Most Black women I know are generous with everything except their own time. The hours get handed out to children, work, and whoever calls in crisis, until nothing is left for themselves. What’s left is a bone-deep tiredness that shows up around nine at night. You spent the whole day answering people, fixing what they broke, and feeding whoever walked in hungry. Now you’re standing at the freezer realizing you forgot to pull out the chicken for tomorrow. Sistas carry a load that doesn’t get weighed or named. Full shift at work, kids to raise, a mama to check on, a girlfriend who calls crying about the same man again. Nobody says thank you. Consider this your permission slip to rebel a little. Open a novel. Let everything else sit there and wait.
I came back to reading a couple years ago, right when my youngest headed off to school and the house went quiet in a way that spooked me. At first I filled that silence with reruns I’d already sat through and a phone that buzzed over nothing much. Neither one helped. If anything the quiet felt better than both. Then it hit me how much I used to love books back before grown life got so loud, so I got in the car and drove to the library. Felt like I was finally keeping an appointment I’d canceled on myself a hundred times.
Something happens when you open a good book. You stop thinking about what you need from the store. That inbox stops yelling at you. For a span of uninterrupted calm, nobody needs a ride, a signature, a snack, or a solution, and the only voice in your head belongs to a character living somebody else’s drama for once. That quiet is not selfish. It’s medicine.
My cousin Imani figured this out before I did. She runs a book club out of her living room on the first Sunday of every month, eight of us deep, wine poured, phones face down in a basket by the door. This month we’re all buried in a sprawling family saga set across three generations down in Louisiana, the kind of thick paperback you hold with both hands. Last Sunday Imani texted me at midnight, furious at a character for a choice made on page 300, and I loved every word of that message. Two grown women hollering over fiction in the dark. That’s joy you cannot buy.
What sits on your nightstand right now, this very November? Maybe it’s a romance with a cover that makes you grin like a teenager. Could be a memoir by somebody who lived through what you lived through and wrote it down so you’d feel less alone. Some of us are rereading Toni Morrison for the third time, catching lines that flew clean over our heads at twenty five. Terry McMillan might be riding the bus with you this week. Whatever it is, claim it. Protect it the way you guard everything else you love.
Here’s the part nobody tells Black women often enough. Rest is not a reward you earn after the list is finished. The list is never finished. There’s always more laundry. Some email marked urgent that isn’t. A cousin who needs a ride on a Thursday for reasons that could’ve waited. That perfect empty afternoon you keep saving your book for? It isn’t coming, baby. You have to steal the time. I read in the car before I clock in. Sometimes a chapter in the tub, and I stay till the water turns cold. Right before sleep I’ll read instead of scrolling through other people’s bad news, and I notice the difference the next morning. Less frayed. More like myself.
Scrolling and reading are not cousins, whatever the thumb believes. Too much time scrolling through bad news can leave a person jittery. Before long, an ordinary Tuesday starts looking small beside everybody else’s highlight reel, while strangers on a screen become another source of worry. A good story can offer something different. Shoulders loosen. The mind opens up some. Books remind us that people have been making it through hard things, loving each other, and starting over for as long as anybody’s been telling stories. There is comfort in that long chain of human mess. Grandma knew it too. Maybe a worn Bible or a dog eared paperback sat near her favorite chair, and that corner belonged to nobody else.
College taught a lot of us to read for assignments, for grades, for a professor’s approval. Somewhere in all that highlighting and note taking, the plain pleasure of a good story got buried under obligation. You are allowed to dig it back up. Nobody’s grading you now. Want something trashy? Get it. Something churchy, something old, something that makes you laugh till you wheeze? Yours. Shame has no business anywhere near your reading chair.
If you don’t know where to start, start where Imani did. Find four or five Sistas you trust and keep it small. One title a month, no pressure, snacks required, opinions welcome and loud. A good club does more than march you through a stack of novels. It gives Sistas a standing appointment to be seen as thinkers, as feelers, as whole people with taste and views that reach well past the needs of the people who lean on them all week long.
I think about my own mother, who worked double shifts cleaning houses that weren’t hers. Still, she kept a romance novel tucked inside her worn purse for the long ride home. Nobody handed that woman free hours. Mama took them. Those stolen chapters were the one place the world could not reach in and demand a single thing. Watching her do that as a child, I didn’t fully understand it. I understand it completely now.
So this is my invitation, Black women, offered with love and a little insistence. Put the phone on a charger across the room. Tell the group chat you’ll holler back tomorrow. The dishes can sit one night out of a thousand while you hold something with a spine and real pages. Your people will live through forty five minutes without you. Close the door. Half of them will respect you more for it.
You’ve earned a corner that’s yours. A lamp, a warm mug, a story that asks for nothing except another turn of the page. That is not too much to want. Black women have given the world so much for so long, often with empty hands and full hearts. Turn a page tonight. Keep a little something for yourself.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.