Writing into the Truth about Black Mental Health
DW McKinney on finding the courage to write her memoir about her OCD, and finding inspiration in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
This essay is the third in a collaborative series between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation, Sherisa De Groot's excellent publication, featuring stories about writing as a transformative and liberatory practice. It is part of Literary Liberation's "Freedom Ways" series of essays and interviews. In Sherisa's words: "We seek to illuminate the ways in which writing can be a powerful tool for personal and collective liberation, challenging oppressive structures and creating new possibilities for understanding, resistance, and healing." New essays will appear in both publications every other month. Learn more about this series and how to submit your writing for consideration.
DW McKinney is an award-winning writer and editor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. A 2024 TORCH Literary Arts Fellow, she is also the recipient of fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Writing By Writers, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Ecotone, and TriQuarterly. She serves as the fellowship manager at Shenandoah.
Standing on the bathtub ledge in my grandmother’s bathroom, body statue-still as my toes gripped the cold porcelain, I craned my neck upward. Words floated through the high window above the tub to my perked ears. Grown folks’ conversation was happening on the backyard deck beneath the window, and as a girl of seven or eight, it wasn’t my place to listen.
My grandmother and her guest were sipping sun tea and enjoying the afternoon on my grandfather’s lounge chairs while they gossiped.
“You know, he’s kinda funny,” my grandmother said. “Something’s wrong with his mind. Can’t talk to him the way that you want to.”
“And when you try to talk about it with them—” the guest said.
“—they don’t want to hear it,” my grandmother replied.
Their conversation faded in and out on the breeze, but I had heard enough to understand that the man they spoke about was different in a way that was embarrassing to him and his family, and to my grandmother and her guest as well.
That wouldn’t be the last time I stood on the bathtub eavesdropping on grown folks’ conversations about someone being “funny” or “not quite all there” or how “their mind ain’t right.” Shame and disgust pressed between the spoken words. There was frustration too, as the conversations scrutinized how a person was supposed to act or how they were supposed to be. Too often those supposed to’s were about other people’s minds.
Years later, I heard a different version of that afternoon conversation but with a similar intent. I don’t remember the exact context, except that I was talking to my big sister, and I was speaking about myself.
“Them is white girl problems, white people problems,” my sister said with her nose scrunched in distaste. “That typa shit don’t happen to us. We’re Black!” The unsaid part? That “typa shit” shouldn’t have been happening to me.
Them is white girl problems, white people problems. Not our problems.
“Them” was depression, anxiety, and stress. “Them” was any issue that couldn’t be solved with a tablespoon of castor oil from the upper kitchen cabinet, fervent prayer to God, or lying down somewhere. “Them” were the things that made grown folks gossip on backyard decks.
***
In Maya Angelou’s seminal 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she described how Mr. Freeman, her mother’s live-in boyfriend, repeatedly sexually assaulted her when she was eight years old. Angelou’s disclosure of the assaults led to Mr. Freeman’s arrest and trial. A judge sentenced him to one year and one day in prison but inexplicably released him from custody after the trial. Vigilantes beat Mr. Freeman to death that night.
Because of Mr. Freeman’s previous threats and the beliefs passed down in her family about how people were supposed to behave, Angelou’s understanding of the assaults became distorted. She believed that she had lied and her words led to his death. She wrote:
Them is white girl problems, white people problems. Not our problems. “Them” was depression, anxiety, and stress. “Them” was any issue that couldn’t be solved with a tablespoon of castor oil from the upper kitchen cabinet, fervent prayer to God, or lying down somewhere. “Them” were the things that made grown folks gossip on backyard decks.
[A] man was dead because I lied. Where was the balance in that?... Obviously I had forfeited my place in heaven forever, and I was as gutless as the doll I had ripped to pieces ages ago. Even Christ Himself turned His back on Satan. Would He turn His back on me? I could feel the evilness flowing through my body and waiting, pent up, to rush off my tongue if I tried to open my mouth. I clamped my teeth shut, I’d hold it in. If it escaped, wouldn’t it flood the world and all the innocent people?
Angelou vowed never to speak again. It didn’t help that her grandmother also demanded that their family never mention “the situation”—a pitiless euphemism for Angelou’s rape—or speak Freeman’s name again. Her grandmother’s shame-induced censure was a classic example of an enduring Black family narrative that we never talk about family business, that we only focus on the good things.
“In the first weeks my family accepted my behavior as a post-rape, post-hospital affliction,” Angelou wrote. “They understood that I could talk to Bailey, but to no one else.” That grace was fleeting as her disability and psychological distress disconcerted them. Her family soon became offended by her mutism, which lasted nearly five years. They called her “impudent” and “sullen.” Angelou was sometimes punished and beaten for being “uppity.”
“There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child,” she wrote.
I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in high school. It was around the time my mother had threatened to enroll me in charm school after she confronted me about my demeanor during a drive home from track practice.
“Why do you look like that all the time,” she shouted, as she pounded her fists into the steering wheel. “Why are you always so sad? What do you have to be sad about?”
Whenever I appeared unhappy, my parents would say, just as my mother had in the car, “What do you have to be sad about? What do you have to worry about?” It was less a genuine question and more an insistence that I acquiesce to their perception of happiness. I had, according to them, everything. A roof over my head, food to eat in the kitchen, my own bedroom, and no bills to pay. I learned from other Black friends that these were common beliefs in many other Black households. What more could I—we, as Black children—want when we seemingly had everything? We were supposed to be happy. What I wanted was simple. I wanted peace. I wanted to be seen and heard. I wanted safety.
I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in high school. It was around the time my mother had threatened to enroll me in charm school after she confronted me about my demeanor during a drive home from track practice. “Why do you look like that all the time,” she shouted, as she pounded her fists into the steering wheel. “Why are you always so sad? What do you have to be sad about?”
Instead, I hid from haints and avoided looking at shadows because looking at them would evoke creatures that wanted to harm me. I used special magic to free myself from rooms and whisperings of bad tidings. I laced my breath with prayers to the Almighty to ensure my salvation. I lived in chaos and doom and death.
Angelou’s autobiography was a life raft on a turbulent sea. I was mentally struggling, and I couldn’t tell anyone because I was constrained by my own magical thinking and the rigid beliefs engrained in my family and community. Her words from a life nearly seventy years in the past, at the time, was where I found understanding and peace.
The act of not talking about the difficult and uncomfortable in our Black communities, the act of keeping family business to the family or erasing those events that cause shame, the act of not addressing what rattles our minds means that we have historically erased a catalogue of what makes us human. We have effectively created a superhuman lineage, deteriorating and unhealthy, that is impossible to live up to.
***
My mental health became more erratic in my 20s and 30s. Obscene and violent images blotted my thoughts. Sometimes I “forgot” how to breathe or how to walk, as if that information had suddenly become erased from my DNA while sitting at my computer or walking down the street. I often lost time to never-ending cycles of walking in and out of rooms, flicking light switches, unlocking and locking doors, and checking that everything that could be opened was closed and everything that could be turned on was shut off.
If no one in my family suffered like I did and these were not Black people problems, then the only explanations left were from misguided church folks who proclaimed that mental health issues stemmed from unrepentant sins, demonic influences, and generational curses. So, for a time, I believed my bloodline was cursed and that curse came from my late biological father, a career criminal, who passed away when I was six.
Digging into my father’s past to uncover this supposed curse only encouraged me to write about him and my family. I cobbled together memories and stories to begin understanding how we came together and broke apart, and how what presented as curses were really the collision of consequences and redacted histories.
***
Urgency propelled me to begin writing my memoir in 2015. I was pregnant with my first child and thought, I still have so much to do, as if I had suddenly stumbled into a nine-month deadline for all that I would ever be capable of doing. I had written before, but my words had always been for other people. This was the first time that they truly would be for me.
I had always wanted to write my memoir because of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book left me with a profound sense of kinship. It was rife with possibilities and truths, and I recognized that I could write a book of my own possibilities and truths that, in turn, might resonate with someone else in need.
In those early book drafts, I wrote around the chaos that shaped my childhood and adolescence and how it was still affecting me. I didn’t have the language to completely define what I endured. I was also afraid of who would read my words (my family, my friends) and what they would discover (my mind was unstable). I was also afraid people would deem me unfit for motherhood, and I would lose my child before I had even had a chance to know what motherhood was.
Omission became my (a) form of truth telling in my writing. I continued to write around the fact that I refused to eat certain foods while I was pregnant because I believed they would poison my body and kill me and my unborn child. I didn’t write that I couldn’t handle knives because my mind told me that I would harm myself or others. Or that I couldn’t stop believing that every day would bring nuclear war. Every inhalation threaded contaminated air through my body that tainted the blood of the future life inside of me. I still lived in chaos and doom and death, only this time I had a child in my womb.
Angelou’s autobiography was a life raft on a turbulent sea. I was mentally struggling, and I couldn’t tell anyone because I was constrained by my own magical thinking and the rigid beliefs engrained in my family and community. Her words from a life nearly seventy years in the past, at the time, was where I found understanding and peace.
After I gave birth, I discovered that I had obsessive-compulsive disorder. The diagnosis only confirmed what I had suspected for a few years. This uncovering of the truth encouraged me to be more honest in my writing. I wanted to show that “white people problems” were really our problems, collectively.
I crafted essays about the anxiety and catastrophizing that came after every news report detailing police brutality against unarmed Black men and women. I wrote about how troublesome it was to talk about my mental health to friends who only delved into passive explorations of our lives through text messages. I wrote about the terrors that plagued my nightmares and how our political and social landscape negatively influenced my hope for the future. I wrote about how racism agitated my anxiety and seeded some of my intrusive thoughts.
Then, in my memoir, I finally crafted language describing my beginnings—“The compulsions, as automatic as breathing, began in childhood.”
When it came to crafting my future, I read Bassey Ikpi’s memoir-in-essays, I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying. In detailing her life living with anxiety and bipolar II disorder, Ikpi handed me a contemporary lens to view myself as a woman breaking free of silences that had hindered her self-understanding.
As Ikpi wrestled with her relationship with her mother, I saw the need to write more openly about how my obsessive-compulsive disorder shaped my own motherhood, especially since mothers too are hindered by responsibility and perfectionism discourses. Ikpi wrote, “My mother mistakes questions for attacks and accusations. She weaponizes her silences.” When I read those words, my daughter had already begun to ask me why I frequently washed my hands and about my behaviors around objects that I believed were dirty. I was reminded of Mrs. Bertha Flowers, the teacher who helped Maya Angelou gain the confidence to speak again. Mrs. Flowers told her, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”
I could’ve reprimanded my daughter, told her not to talk about grown folks’ business or ignored her in the way that I had learned. Instead I chose to rewrite the narrative. I removed the sharp edge of silence. I removed the blade from how things were supposed to be.
***
Each sentence—spoken or written—restructured the boundaries around my mind, my life, and my personal truths.
The public and private responses to writing about my mental health have been wonderfully, and overwhelmingly positive. Instead of people calling me crazy or a bad mother, I’ve received messages from others who told me they had the same fears about speaking publicly about their mental health. Then came messages from other Black women who admitted that they had obsessive-compulsive disorder or felt in community with my words. We were no longer isolated by the falsehoods that once encircled us.
The act of not talking about the difficult and uncomfortable in our Black communities, the act of keeping family business to the family or erasing those events that cause shame, the act of not addressing what rattles our minds means that we have historically erased a catalogue of what makes us human. We have effectively created a superhuman lineage, deteriorating and unhealthy, that is impossible to live up to.
It’s also a strange gift to have a family elder tell me that they read my words and were finally able to understand a younger family member. They still fumbled over directly naming the disorder, but there was a seed of understanding, a building of respect. Some of my family members are still hesitant to admit that I have OCD. I am “particular” now, instead of “overly sensitive” and “having issues,” but they respect my journey. My truths are unfamiliar and difficult to acknowledge, but they don’t outright deny them.
The path to normalizing mental health issues in our community is still arduous, but so much progress is made by simple admission. I won’t stop talking or writing about my anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I won’t stop showing the vibrant ways we can live and thrive with turbulent mental health. I won’t stop revealing the complexity of our truths.
Beautiful, powerful, important.
Thank you 🙏
Gorgeous writing. Thank you.