Thiy Parks

Unknown

Story: If I could go back and change anything about how I grew up, the one thing I’d never change is being from Harlem.

From being draped in gold as a baby, to sitting in a peacock chair, to having a Black Santa at my 6th birthday party, Harlem raised me with richness, culturally and spiritually. On that same birthday, I begged my mother to let me dress like the Lost Boyz, complete with neat plaits. That’s what fly looked like to me.


I met my first tribe in Harlem. Some of us had known each other since we were 3 in pre-K. Most of us met in first grade and stuck together until we started leaving New York one by one. We were brilliant and beautiful, singing every Lil’ Kim lyric our parents hated, but flexing our vocabulary, multiplication tables, and conversational Spanish when the elders came around—just to prove we were both things—smart and from around the way.

People always assume that my HBCU made me this way. But the truth is, Bowie State refined what Harlem had already instilled. I didn’t need to be taught how to love my people—I already did. I’d grown up around aunties and OGs who reminded us daily of who we came from and what we were capable of. We weren’t at the fancy Catholic schools. We didn’t take ballet at elite studios. We took dance on the site of the original Cotton Club. We studied our history in community centers and overheard it on stoops.

We learned about Baldwin and Hughes, Dapper Dan and Sylvia, the Nicholas Brothers, the actors, the storytellers. We were the kids whose families sent them down South every summer--or bought produce from the folks who came up from the Carolinas with trucks full of greens and $1 crabs.

“On 139 and Lenox Ave, there’s a big park. And if you’re soft, don’t go through it when it gets dark…” But in the daytime? We sat on the steps and cracked open those crabs with our bare hands. We giggled in the lobby of the Schomburg. We also knew what it meant to step over vials on the way there.

It was complex, but it was ours. Even with all of it—the beauty and the grit—I wouldn’t change a single thing.

Creative Field: Writer

Connect: @official_iloveus

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