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Reviewers have raved, I was on the edge of my seat, I could not stop listing, binge, the entire series now, wherever you get your podcast, visit cellbloxto-mountain-tops.com For more information. Okay so there's a Welpy neighborhood, not too far from where I live. And I'm wandering over there on the day because I found out through some well placed sources where they hid this beautiful outdoor track. And this wonderful glorious pool of my exercise on.
Of course, a few folk kind of give me that eye. But I don't pay any never mind because I'm a central podcast. And this podcast, it's about this world. This world I tend to inhabit. The world I always inhabit. The show is called The Secret Adventures of Black People. And there's no plot twist, no big story, but I dig it. I really dig it because the creator, the Cole Hill, he just takes me there. And I want to take you there.
So to kick things off, I'm going to play just a few minutes of it for you right now. Once upon a time, they lived a woman named, well, my own Stephanie. One day in her 40, she found herself heartbroken and sunny California and had a crossroads in life. She decided to move back to her small factory town in Maine and swear off love for good. She's black, I'm black, there are black people in Maine, it's fine. Okay. Once there, she ran into the local carpenter named Eddie.
Many fell in love with her on sight. And he tried everything he could think of to get her attention, but none of it worked. My aunt was not having it. Then one day, as legend has it, he built her intricate oversized mirror, the most beautiful mirror in all the land for the most beautiful woman and my aunt Stephanie's heart started to warm. Only they became friends.
Then they fell in love, got married, settled in the main countryside and planted vegetables and raised chickens and looked happily ever after the end. That's a true story. Our visited Maine last fall and I wanted to drive into town, my aunt asked how my hallmark movie was coming along. I let her know it was looking a little different. Okay, so there's three apps that people use. I hate them all.
Okay. So I have like a ton of likes here, but I have to pay to see them, which I'm not going to do that. You have to pay to see them. I guess they have to make money somehow. So, go get some screenshots. What kind of world is this? What happened to people just just seeing somebody and just, hey, hello, hello, how are you just talking? You know, this is the only way. So then it's like looking for somebody I can't wait to see at the end of the day, looking to say stuff like that.
And so, and then I don't think I, you can get to know somebody on here and to meet up and see if the chemistry is there. I enjoy fishing, kayaking, visiting breweries, sci-fi movies and reading. Visiting breweries, huh? What's wrong with that? What is that signal to you? Drinking, drinking. I like to drink. Okay, I don't even know if it's for not saying it. Retired military grad students, star trek. You guys like star trek? Yeah, I'm just going to see a space. Michael, look at him.
He's a firefighter graphic designer. Very outgoing. And they all put their height. He's all into bodybuilding. Yeah, yeah. He's into bodybuilding. So what exactly is rugby? It's like a full massacar? Sorry, it just looks wiggly. But do you need judging people? I know, that's all I think about. Thank you. It needs to be very nice people, you know? You don't even know. Hi. Hello. You're totally a street boy. Okay, thank you. This guy is a boat. I got a visit. Thank you. Thank you.
My philosophy, it's difficult to get to know somebody on here. Do you ever see him? Yes, please. He likes it in the boat. Do you like boats? No, I've never been rich enough to have an affair. I've never been on it. I don't think I ever been on a boat. We spend the whole afternoon on a boat. It's beautiful. The sea sick is like, I'm ever going to do that. Oh really? It is gorgeous. It's like a whole different perspective. But I wouldn't want to spend my time on a boat.
Yeah, no, we don't want to bring him into the family. Too many boats. And then you just have to do this forever. You just keep going through it to see these guys. Yeah, where you go to it? I want to see what you like. I want to see what's going on. Okay, I'm going to try to find somebody. I would like to find you. Right, a couple that you would say, oh, okay. I might be interested in this person. I don't know. I don't know. To pick on this thing, he's cute. Like, I would get that spot.
I think he was cute, okay. Yeah, this guy, I don't know. You have a great sense of humor. Yeah, I'll have a great sense of humor. So do you mind, is it color or an issue with you? No, I don't care about that. Okay, good. Like, that's a good picture of you, but I know it's a trick. So it's going to be a nail. This guy's holding an alligator. Really? These are main people. Oh, you don't have to mean something. Although, Eddie and I went to Belfast and there was this guy there.
He was from Chicago and he had these dreadlocks. I thought about you because he was really cute. He was very nice and very educated. Was he white with thoughts? He was black, black and yet, black. He was very cute, very well dressed, very educated, carried himself very well, very well spoken, very friendly. In the future, you can just give those guys my number. Okay, and I thought about it. Go ahead, we're past dignity.
He said he was just out, he said I wanted to just come see mains, I just took a road trip. I mean, well, he gets on up there, okay? No, I like it. It should have got the man's number. Next time I will. Just getting random calls, I'm like, yeah, it's fine. I have a niece. More and more people have been talking about wanting to come out to Maine. Yeah, people are doing it. They want to come and he said I wanted to come see what it was like. I used to go to Maine.
I love tagging along in the cold world. The secret adventures of black people, subscribe to the podcast, amazing stories, celebrating the fact that all black lives, about the ordinary and the extraordinary, it all matter. Peace was written by Nicole Hill, production assistant from Shante Hill, and story editing assistant from Polly Abender, the music, from Epidemic Sound, the secret adventures of blackpeople.com. And I love it so much. I love it so much.
In fact, that I thought today we take you on a journey through this space. Snapstyle. We probably present the secret adventures of black people. I know it's been Washington. Today, I'm afraid I'm going to have to step out of the car because you've picked a description when you're listening to SnapDudging. Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Progressive you aren't just listening right now, you're driving, cleaning, even exercising.
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Welcome back to SnapDudgment, the secret adventures of black people. For our next story, one of my favorite storytellers of all time, Sonya Nate Taylor takes a SnapDudgment live stage and we save you the very best scene in the house. SnapDudgment live. My mama has sweaty knees. If you were a little black girl, it is likely that you knew your mama has sweaty knees too.
And we knew this because for nearly a decade, we sat between our mama sweaty knees to have any married of atrocities committed to our scouts. My mama braided ponytailed, pulled my hair every single day of the week and every six weeks I got a relaxer. I can assure you there is nothing relaxing about having eight year old black girl hair. Actually, I was pretty certain there was nothing that could be worse.
See, first there were the commercials, the ones with people who never had faces or hair like mine. And then there was my mother shared this day and short temperedness every time I sat between her sweaty knees to have my hair pulled brushed and snatched back. My mother, five foot four inches on a good day had the hands of hercules. I swear she could rip the steel beams from beneath the very flesh of the Empire State building, but instead she used those hands to braid my hair.
And if I squirmed in the seat while she did it, stop all that moving around. And if I reached to touch my hair, get your fingers out your head. And if I cried, crap, shut it up, chow, stop all that moving around before I pop you in the head with this brush. I know it sounds awfully abusive. It was. But the truth is, my mother just wanted her daughter to be beautiful. And when she finished, my hair was a work of art.
I was an African princess, a black goddess queen of the pretty girls everywhere until I went to school. See, the first thing to die under the heavy weight of my mother's palms were my hair follicles. My mother pulled my hair so tightly that by third grade, I had permanent bald spots on the side of my head. Now not only did I have short hair, but in some places it was non-existent.
And every day I got on the school bus to headed to Wool Slayer Elementary School to be reminded of how far from beautiful I truly was. See there was Tanya Twyman, awful name. Tanya, four years older than me and mean as they made him, I swear, she breathed to make my life sad. And she always started the school bus ride with a chant that was very quiet at first. Sanya, Sanya, Sanya, Sanya Bucks Bucks. And the whole bus would join in.
Sanya, Sanya Bucks Bucks. While I sat in the front and wept closest to the bus driver, they became the soundtrack of my most visceral insecurities, the music of my adolescence. My first date, Sanya, Sanya Bucks Bucks. The first time I kissed a boy, Sanya, Sanya Bucks Bucks. The first time I fell in love. Sanya, Sanya Bucks Bucks. They would be singing just behind my back. I was beginning to believe that there would be no respite from the chasm of hair, shame. That is until the 1990s.
LL Cool J told me he wanted a girl with extensions in her hair and I thought, finally, and realized that I could add hair to my head and that's what I did. See, I had never heard of weave until ninth grade when I realized that black girls all over the land were sprouting shoulderless looks. No one would have to know the shame lurking beneath the piles of possibly human hair on the top of your head.
I knew that I had found my panacea but quickly my hair heaven turned into a hair hell as I spun in a decade-long cyclone that always lived out the same pattern every year. Get a relaxer, usually leaving painful chemical burns in my scalp. Use glue, add weave, watch my own hair break off like splintered wood as a result of the glue. Now, relaxer and start the process all over again until 2001 when I discovered the holy grail of hair solutions I discovered wigs.
Well, actually, it's more like wigs discovered me. See, you could put them up until then I thought of wigs as some sort of terrible 1970s relic, something my grandmother would wear but no, not these wigs. These wigs were beautiful and these were my ticket to being beautiful. They allowed me to forget about the chemical burns and my mama's sweaty knees. They let me forget that I wasn't beautiful.
That is until I took them off and then like Cinderella at the end of the ball, I was nine years old and on a bus headed to Wohlslayer Elementary and I promised myself I would never go back there. So I took them off less and less to walk my dog, I grabbed the wig. To go to the grocery store, I grabbed a wig, I had lovers that knew me for years and never saw me without my wig.
And even when I became a performance poet and started telling people how to unapologetically love their bodies, I did it all in my wig. Until one day, let's call it today. I woke up and realized I'd been living in a tiny prison of synthetic hair that the wigs had made me a liar. I was really just a little girl pretending to be a woman who actually loved herself. But some deep knowing in the center of my belly kept asking me, what would it be like if I let myself out of that prison?
What would it look like if I told the truth to myself, to my world? I think it would look like this. And I would walk back to that school bus and grab nine-year-old sonya by the hand, walk her off of that bus and into womanhood with me, whispering, you have always been beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, sony-nate Taylor performed for a sold out amazing DC crowd for SnapDash at High Won Us Canada Live!
In her world, as well as the video of this performance in all of its technical and majesty, it's Snap Judgment, got a war G. When Snap Judgment, the secret adventures of black people continues, we're not leaving the capital. No, we're going to skip cross town for another story that you will not believe. Snap Judgment, stay true. Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the secret adventures of black people for our next story. We're going to jump on stage with L'Heteep Domen.
When T. Store begins, when he is just a youngster, living in Philadelphia, with T. Take it away. They're not with that. When I was eight years old, obviously, wasn't this tall on the microphone. They had to be this hard. When I was eight years old, our teacher gave us an assignment. We had to write a vote report about an American hero.
My parents relished these sorts of assignments because it gave them an opportunity to put into my otherwise mainstream public education a bit of their cultural beliefs in their historical perspective. Now, my parents are typical at, in fact, they're prototypical, North Philadelphia and parents. They met in college. That's where they fell in love. In fact, they met in college at a recruitment round for the Black Panther Party.
They started dating after the party and fell madly in love in several weeks after that. My father gave a bit of notoriety by climbing on top of the water tower at James Day University and protest to some sort of school administration policy that he didn't think was appropriate. My mother, she did her revolutionary domestic thing by bringing him sandwiches every day. He was up all the time. She would cut off the corn and spread.
Now, having said that, obviously, my family is not the typical American family, but they are. And every day, my father would come home and he would pull us together as a family. Now, my parents married in an African ceremony. No one can do my sister's. She's taking my picture. My parents married in an African ceremony and it was that attitude that they brought to their parenting of their children. My sister and I, Layland Libby, we learned Swahili as we were growing up.
I learned to play the tambale. Before I pulled Christmas gifts out from under Christmas tree, I was lighting candles at quantum. My father would come home from work every day just like any other family. He would put his key in the lock and the three of us would run to the door to greet him. He would come in the door and we'd be so excited. He would greet us in Swahili. He would say, Uhuru, which means freedom. And our response would be, Sasa, which means now.
And he'd say, Uhuru, Sasa, Uhuru, Sasa, Uhuru, Sasa, Freedom now. And after we met him at the door, we'd go in the house and we should at the table that my mother had prepared for us and we'd have dinner. My father would sit at the table and he would lead us in prayer. And he would thank God for the food in the table. But he'd also thank the patron saints of the black family. He would thank Mark and King, Malcolm X, Mark is Garvey and of course, Mark and Gay.
And after dinner, we'd retire to the dining room and my mother and I are sometimes who would play Scrabble or sometimes I play chess with my father. Or more often than not, my father would break out his old records of revolutionary recordings of like Angela Davis and Julie Newton. And we sit there and we listen to this rhetoric that I so much love. But that was my family.
And we did this report and you can imagine that growing up from these parents, my mother kid, an American hero that was black, black Moses, Harriet Tubman. Now Harriet Tubman, many of you probably know, is one of the most prolific conductors on the underground railroad. She's probably less well known for being very active and very vocal with women's suffrage.
But this woman who was born illiterate and born a slave, escaped from slavery that she's known all her life from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia where I grew up. So I wrote this report and my mother would want you to know that I got mad. But more important than that, hey, what I took away from this assignment was that this incredible person had so much courage that at eight years old, even then I knew I would never have and I didn't certainly have it at that time.
And that even though she couldn't read, she knew that she could read the stars and follow that to this place called the North, this place called the North. And that she was going to this place and pursuit of this thing called freedom, just this thing called freedom. And that when she got there, this thing that she had never experienced that she didn't know anyone who had experienced that she wasn't by law entitled to have, she wanted that.
And in order to get that, she was willing to go in the dead of winter in the dark of the night by Starland, travel miles for almost three weeks from someplace that we could get to in two hours. And trust, people with black as her who would have sold her out for a scrap or bacon and people as white as the slave master that she was running away from. And I as that eight year old child had my first understanding of the meaning of faith. And so I wrote that report.
Now I want to tell you that the report, I mean that story, move me in a way that I had never been moved before and any child that learned something new tells everybody that they know about that story. And so everyone I met, I told this story, did you know that Harriet Tubman did a round trip, tripped trip between the South and the North 19 times to save 300 slaves?
Did you know that in the eight years that she was a conductor and the underground railroad that she had a 40,000 dollars of bounties on her head and did you know that she carried a gun at five feet tall, not the protector from the slave catchers who were trying to collect those bounties, but to discourage the men who were twice as big as she was who were afraid to go for this future in the North and were willing to go back to the misery of the plantations that they had known.
So I wanted to pay tribute beyond just writing a report about this woman. I didn't know what to do so I just kept telling stories and I kept telling this story to my best friend Rodney. He was my best friend by virtue of the fact that he lived next door to me and neither of us could get off of our stew. We weren't permitted to leave the stew. So I must have told him this story a hundred times.
Well in the 101st time I happened to be telling him this story and I noticed out of the corner of my eye that in the window was his cat, this big white fluffy cat makes snowball. And snowball all day long would sit and watch our street. He would watch our parents go to work and come home. He would watch the delivery men come up and down the street and drop off our packages. He would see us play in the street and on the sidewalk on the street.
On this particular day as I was telling this story one more time I felt that snowball wanted to be running free in the street. And in that moment I knew exactly how I was going to pay tribute to Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman had freed the slaves from the evil Southern plantation only. But I, Lateef Domingue, was going to save the pets from the evil parents in North Philadelphia.
And so I gathered together all the kids from the neighborhood and suddenly my parents, my father's records, his revolutionary rhetoric came in handy. And I said, I have a dream that one day cats and dogs will walk down our street, paw and paw. And they will be liberated through our efforts by any means necessary. Because if there is no justice there will be no peace. And one of the kids said very quickly, he said, where are we going to take them?
And I said without hesitation to the promised land. Now, this book that my mother bought from me by Harriet Tubman did not come with a Google man, right? So, for Harriet Tubman, the promised land was Philadelphia. For most of the people that she saved, it was Canada. For me, eight years old, my logic was if I were willing to go through the dead of night and the cold of winter, running from people who were chasing me, this place would have to be something special.
This place would have to have no rules and candy all the time. This place would have to be heaven on earth. In other words, this place was grandma's house. So, the plan was hatched. We were going to meet on Sunday after church and we were going to wait until the parents were preoccupied. Mother's cooking Sunday dinner, fathers watching football and while they were distracted, we were going to release the pets. But we had to do it before our street light curfew.
You know, you need to buy a new girl up in the city, you know street light curfew means you have to be back in the house before the street light came on. So we had to do all of this before the lights came on. And so, Sunday came and apparently we had no traders because no one discovered it. And the Eagles kicked off and I'm told if my mother says we were playing the redskins and we won, right? But the kickoff can and we started releasing the pets and there were dogs and there were cats running.
There were birds and there were paster's and this moment was absolutely gloriously, wondrously pandemonium. And in the middle of this bedlam was this kid to read who lived across the street who was raised by his grandparents and he was standing there holding these two leaky bags with his gold face.
And the girls were running from the dogs because they were scared of these big dogs, street dogs and the boys were having a great time and suddenly the parents started rushing out of the house and the parents were capturing the animals again and they were capturing the children and they took us all and put us back in the bondage.
And the parents had gathered us all up and they ran up and they had us standing there and they said, what were you guys doing who organized this and slowly all has turned our parents and children towards me because I guess I had a bit of a reputation and my father stepped out of the crowd of people and he said son, what were you thinking? And I said father, who saw son? Three to nine. Big, big banks of the teeth dome and story district for sharing this performance with the staff.
There is a story district podcast and yes you should subscribe. Find out more about what the teeth and story district have going on at our website at snapjudgment.org. Production assistance is by Regina Santiago. Yes, yes, it happened again. If you miss even a moment of the day, show here's the deal. Ask yourself. You want to carry around a community of amazing storytellers that keep you company day and night play or no play real people offering to take you on their journey.
If you do, take up your phone device situation right now and subscribe to the snapjudgment podcast. Watch your life and prove for the better I guarantee it. If you want to hear the story behind the story, follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, snapjudgment.org. Snap is brought to you by the team that goes on adventures with black people all the time. Except for the Uber Ruser, Mr. Mark Ristich.
He's still on probation after trying to do that moonwalk and a suspicoranzo gorio, John Faseel, Shayna Shealy, Pat Maschine Miller, Ursudard Nica Singh, Taylor DeCott, Leon Morimoto, Flow Wiley, Nancy Lopez and Regina Betty Acault. This is not the news. No way it's a news in fact. How many of you called it a local station and said it's wrong to call a show of a secret adventure to black people? It should be called the secret adventures of all people. Yes, that will happen.
100% chance and you will still. Not the as far away from the news as this is, but this is PRX.