This Thread of Gold: A Celebration of Black Womanhood - Hardcover

White, Catherine Joy

9780593475164: This Thread of Gold: A Celebration of Black Womanhood

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059347516X ISBN 13: 9780593475164

Verlag: Tiny Reparations Books, 2024

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**Winner of the 2025 Zora Award for Nonfiction**

“Beautiful… A gift to ourselves and to the world.”— Mikki Kendall, New York Times bestselling author of Hood Feminism

From gender adviser to the UN Catherine Joy White comes This Thread of Gold, a lyrical celebration of the history of Black women who challenged stereotypes through film, politics, activism, and beyond.

This immersive and empowering read blends history, reporting, and personal stories to weave a gorgeous tapestry from the resilience of Black women. As White writes, “Black women are not victims. Black women are alchemists, spinning gold from a life of hardship. . . . This book is dedicated solely to Black women surviving, thriving, and glowing.”

White’s book features revolutionary women from across time and space, liberating them from reductive stereotypes like “the strong Black woman,” and allowing space for emotional nuance, individual motivation, and richness of expression. White offers fresh insights into the work of Beyonc� and Nina Simone, Shirley Chisholm and Meghan Markle, as well as the work of those who resisted in secret—in kitchens, in churches, and through trusted networks. By weaving these women together, White reveals new ways to understand Black womanhood and she is sure to inspire new generations of readers.

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�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Catherine Joy White is an actor, writer, filmmaker, and founder and CEO of the award-winning Kusini Productions, a company established to champion the voices of Black women. She is a gender adviser to the United Nations, and she has been honored as a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2022. She starred in Amazon Prime’s Ten Percent (the UK adaptation of Call My Agent!) and worked on the latest season of Black Mirror alongside Salma Hayek Pinault. Her films have been funded by the BFI and the BBC, and have won awards at BAFTA and Oscar-qualifying festivals worldwide. She wrote and directed To My Daughter, a film starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, which was adapted from a chapter in This Thread of Gold. She has a master’s degree in women’s studies from the University of Oxford and an undergraduate degree from the University of Warwick. She lives in Oxford and this is her debut book.

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Chapter One

Silence

This thread of gold that ties me to my mother, my grandmother, and the women who came before looks a lot like the color purple. Like the purple hibiscus as it opens, entering a space that's never been seen before. It is yellow as the fruit of the lemon, it is yellow as the bus that we shall not be moved from, yellow as the lemonade that we make as we take one pint of water and half of a yellow sun and transform the sour into something sustaining. It is red as the umbilical cord that once physically held us, and red like the blood that we bleed. It is green like the gardens of our mothers that we are still in search of and black like the flags that we wave as we frown, buckle down, and plant: bending as we sow, reaching as we climb. It is brown as the soil left down on the ground from the trees that we lift, leaving space for the seedlings to reach to the sun and to grow and to glow as they bask in its shine. Golden. Gold. This thread of gold that ties me to my mother, my grandmother, and the women who came before looks a lot like the color purple.

I am my mother's daughter. I am raised by lionesses. Women as fierce and as mighty as they are brave, as vulnerable and sensitive as they are proud, and as beautiful as they are strong. Sometimes they speak truthfully to those with the power and sometimes they prefer to sit quietly and say nothing at all. Sometimes they say no to expectations and sometimes they say yes and break as they cry, down on the bathroom floor. They are ballet dancers, cat lovers, and video gamers. They are introverts, pioneers, and hopeless romantics. They tell it like it is, but sometimes they don't want to hear it.

I am indelibly linked to a tapestry, rich in its colors and delicate, complex detail. Running through each square is a thread of gold, spun from the silk of the sea-the salt of tears and the sweat that accompanies each loving, labored breath. This thread of gold seems delicate but it cannot and shall not ever be broken, for it holds the tapestry together and it belongs solely to womankind. It is our light. Without this thread of gold, the tapestry is just colors and squares, isolated patchwork cocoons. Without this thread of gold, the tapestry does not exist. It is nothing at all.

My grandmother showed me how to laugh-and keep laughing, no matter what comes my way. My mother taught me humility. My aunties gave me my self-worth, showed me that I was a rare and precious jewel and people should walk across hot coals for me. My cousins taught me how to defend myself, first with my words and then with my fists when necessary: right, left, right (rarely necessary). My sisters taught me when to say sorry, that I do not need to be right all the time. My friends taught me to take care of myself: to rest and to eat and to be gentle, that it mattered less what I did than who I was. These are the threads that are a part of me, woven into the tapestry that is mine, both of me and in me. I hang on to these threads. I cherish them as I understand that one day I will become matriarch of my own pride. I am because of them. They are and they will be because of me. And so, while any good story starts at the beginning, this isn't the beginning because I come from so many women. From the sky to the seabed and every little grain of sand on the shore, this is our story. It is alchemy. It is magic. It is the orchestra soaring in perfect harmony and it is joined together, piece to piece, by this glittering thread of gold.

I've noticed, as I've moved out of my teens and into the complexities of adulthood, that I have started to choose silence. Silence was never something that I chose before. I spoke frequently and loudly, even when I didn't have much to say. In fact, I have lost count of the times that a housemate or a family member remarked on what it is like living with an elephant (annoying, apparently) as I sprint around or thump my way about whichever house I happen to be living in. My mum likes to laugh at me when I go home now, rolling her eyes and telling me, "We do know you're here, Catherine!" And, as usual, after some time reflecting on it, I think she's right. It is as though I like to remind others and reassure myself that I. Am. Here. I can't be forgotten because look what a vibrant and dazzling human being I am. I want to be seen and I want to be heard. I demand it.

This is why I am perplexed by the fact that in recent years I seem to have stopped talking. I'm not trying to say that I'm suddenly shy. I don't think I ever could be; it's a part of who I am to thrive off human connections. And yet, there has been something subtle and gradual that has happened, leaving me feeling slightly more measured and perhaps a little more timid. I am more careful about what other people are thinking, wondering if they approve, and this has been transformed, somewhere along the way, into me stopping talking. Looking at myself objectively, as though I were a specimen in a test tube, I think there are a number of reasons for this. There was the manager at work who, as I shared my excitement with him about an idea that I'd had, cut me off mid-sentence and told me that I shouldn't speak so quickly or it would put people off because they would realize how young I was. Then there was the boyfriend who would draw me in close just to see how far away he could throw me, telling me disdainfully that I appeared to have ADHD as I was talking so much and couldn't I just "chill"? Then I had the long months on my own working and traveling, followed by the drama school experience that branded me a troublemaker for asking questions of an outdated institution in a space that didn't encourage them. You name it, I can see where it came from. Whether this was deserved or not and whether I should have listened to the requests that I button my lip and bite my tongue are different questions. What I am clear on, though, is that my newfound silence was directly and causally linked to the more space that I felt I was taking up. In a world that didn't really set out to listen, I was always flirting with the danger of being too loud. And so I learned to arm myself, to opt out and choose silence in certain spaces. The fact that the spaces where I found myself being silenced were both white and almost all male was, until recently, beside the point. Thinking about this now is uncomfortable. I had entered the world and been raised by the lionesses in my family to be exuberant-Catherine Joy White. I lived up to my name. Somewhere along the way I had lost that exuberance. In a world of black and white, I had adopted a decidedly measured shade of gray.

I often think about what happens in the in-between. In the space between infancy, childhood, and adulthood. How do we become? What forms us? If we are created by outside influences that are not our own, then how do they take hold? Where do they come from? Of course, to a certain extent this can be answered by the nature-versus-nurture debate. We are influenced by where we are raised, who we are raised by, and how they raise us. And yet it is far more complex than that. We are also influenced by what people expect of us: where they expect us to live, who they expect us to be, and how they expect us to be that. If we really tried to tune in and listen to all the voices seeking to lay a claim over who we are, it would be deafening. If we tried to answer back and defend ourselves against every misjudged assertion or claim, our voices would be hoarse. Inevitably silence is easier. And yet silence in this context-when it doesn't feel as though it has come around organically-can often taste an awful lot like defeat. It takes a great deal of bravery, and outright defiance, to hear the noise and yet choose silence or to embrace the noise and keep talking regardless.

This has been an ongoing dilemma for me in recent years. It is as though once I...

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