Who's Reaching Back for Her?

This episode drops on my mother's birthday.

She would have been somewhere around Niecy and Annie's age. A Black woman navigating a world that had very specific ideas about what she was supposed to be and how far she was supposed to go. By her own accounts, she was popular. A cheerleader. Miss Cherry Blossom in college. She had the kind of presence that made rooms turn. And then life happened, the way life does, and her path changed in ways I won't detail here. But I think about her when I read books like Kin. I think about what she might have needed that she didn't have. I think about who could have reached back for her.

My aunt talks to me a lot about what it was like for Black women back then. The pressure. The performance. The way you could do everything right and still find yourself on the wrong side of someone's judgment. It wasn't so different from what Tayari Jones put on the page. Niecy and Annie weren't just fictional girls in a Louisiana town. They were real in the way that good literature is always real. You've met them. You might have been one of them.

What stayed with me after writing this episode was a question I asked out loud at the end: what are we going to do about the Annies we already know?

Because here's the thing. Niecy didn't make it to Spelman on talent alone. Women chose her. Imperfect women with their own agendas and their own damage, but they chose her. They reached back. And Annie, who needed that same choosing, got women who saw her but couldn't fully commit, or showed up from the margins where their reach only went so far. The difference between those two girls isn't just circumstance. It's investment. It's intentional, deliberate, somebody-decided-this-girl-was-worth-it investment.

My godmother talks about mentorship the way some people talk about breathing. Like it isn't optional. Like it is simply what you do when you've made it somewhere and you look back and see someone still trying to find the door. I've been thinking about that a lot lately.

We cannot control the families girls are born into. We cannot undo what a community decided about a child before she had any say. But we can decide, right now, to be the woman who reaches back. The one who sees her. Not as a project. Not as a reflection of ourselves. But as a whole person who deserves someone in her corner.

That's what this episode is really about. Not just two girls in 1950s Louisiana. Us. Right now. The women we pass every day who are still searching for proof that they matter to somebody.

Be that proof.

Happy birthday, Mom. And thank you to every woman who has ever reached back for me.