I’m seventeen. I’ve just finished another closing shift at American Apparel. Time is bending towards ten o’ clock. I pull on jeans under a spandex skirt & a hoodie over my crop top, hoping to look a little less ‘teenage dream’ for the two bus rides and uphill walk I’m about to take home. My mother thinks I’m getting a ride from a friend. I’m not, but it’s fine because if the bus comes on time I’ll make it home by 11:30. After all, she knows I need the money and it’s only an hour trek back to Oakland. I know she will never call my friend to confirm I’ve been picked up. No one will.
Years ago when this scene played out, my logic seemed infallible and the task simple enough. As long as I could make it home, everything would be fine. The only things standing in my way were time, AC Transit, and International Boulevard — the bus stop nearest my house and one of the biggest child sex trafficking hubs in America.
In my mind, I was just a seventeen year old girl trying to make it home. I had a seventeen year old mind, seventeen year old face, and contrary to popular belief, a seventeen year old body.
Though the years have wedged themselves between her and I, I feel a familiar pain mounting as I see the numbers rise and flyers circulate of black and brown girls missing across America. I am at once filled with anxiety and fury.
How many times does a girl go missing before she’s truly “Missing?” How many times had I gone unaccounted for, where my location and well-being were taken at face value. Times when I skipped class and no one called home to see where I’d been. Times I was not quite anywhere- work, school, or home. Times I was stuck in a realm of grey-matter: in-transit, nearly there, or simply on my way.
While the imminent and pressing question remains, “Where are our girls?” deeper and more difficult hands press against the fold asking, “Where is our girlhood?” Where was our chance to just exist — without the confusing demands of vigilance and vulnerability overlaid with the guilt of hyper-sexualization. Was I ever allowed to just be— young, black, full attitude, new license, heavy rhythm, short skirt me?
I remember vividly my own innocence and ignorance, which too often failed to bridge action with consequence. I remember the cruel male gaze, which denied me girlhood every time I walked out the door — always insisting I be more than seventeen. What was this risky business of colored girlhood? Why was everyone looking at me, but no one looking for me?
I am reminded of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
In this time of panic, we stand before the same broken mirror. In our reflection we see the collective shortcoming of a village that has failed to protect the girl.
In it I see not only myself, seventeen again, but all of her friends, fans, and spectators. I can now recognize the complicity of trauma. How many bus drivers had to drop me off on lonely, dangerous avenues? How many teachers had to mark me absent without asking why? How many times did my manager watch her teenage employees exit the store, heading towards darkened streets?
The most painful contradiction remains knowing history will likely mark these folks “innocent bystanders,” and that it was me who was actually guilty. It was me, in my seventeen year old body, mind, and blackness who was perpetually guilty of growing up too fast, running the streets too early, and switching my hips too strongly.
But that is a narrative I refuse. I know now that what is at stake with these girls is not simply thirty-four, two hundred, or even a thousand missing bodies. What is at stake is the fundamental ability for society to become, if we do not protect them with all we have. If girlhood goes missing, there can be no storehouse for dreams — the groove is dead, the funk will cease, the music can not go on.