Bloom Where You’re Planted

How My Friend Lena Waithe Helped Me Get My Mind Right

Recently, I sat with my long-time friend Lena Waithe for the second season of her interview series “Legacy Talk.” While talking with her, I was soothed. And my goodness, did I need soothing. Good friends can do that. I’m grateful to her.

The Smithsonian and The Kennedy Center and the mocking of slavery and the general revisionist foolishness of the Trump regime really gets to me. Listening to the toxic gaslighting of our ancestors’ lived realities gets to me. Having to actively combat complete and utter nonsense as if it has any value or substance gets to me. Lena reminded me how to fight with simply this: Our stories survive because we continue to tell them. Period. And no one can truly take that away.

When she sits down and speaks to Black women artists like Debbie Allen, Taraji P. Henson, Loretta Devine, Tisha Campbell, Yvette Lee Bowser and more on her show, she’s engaging in an act of creative resistance. What she’s doing is creating a living archive. She and I talked for almost two hours about the creative process within my own work. A rare experience for me and one that reminded me of what we can do. Preserve each other.

Trump and his chorus of enforcers like Miller, Vance, Hegseth and Noem want our history unspoken and unpreserved. Not gonna happen. Our stories were born beyond their walls and will outlive these absurd decrees. Our memories have roots deeper than marble and steel. It rises through us and will not be erased. Our legacy does not sit on shelves. It moves in our mouths, our families, our art, our resistance and cannot be outlawed, defunded or undone as long as we remain undaunted, unbought and unbossed. Period.

Before the magnificent and constantly Trump-targeted National Museum of African American History and Culture ever existed, it was families, churches, Saturday schools, student groups and oral traditions that kept our history alive and taught us to feel pride and to know ourselves. Trump and team can try all they want, but they can’t change history. They can take it down from that building. Or this space. But they can’t take it out of our hearts and memories unless we let them.

What we WILL do is flourish and bloom where we’re planted. On our own shelves, in conversations at our own tables, in our performances and writing, in podcasts and transmissions like Lena’s, in our experiences and exchanges with loved ones, in our homes, in our meals, in our mentorship, in everything!

As Lena puts it, Legacy Talk explores “legacy-building in real time.” Real time! As in, right now! As in, starting with you! This is the work we can all commit to. Whether you have a podcast, a Substack, a social media account or not. What we do have is our voice. In any place you can, use it.

Yep, I am in despair about the erasure that the Trump regime is attempting. But I am also firm in my faith that they won’t succeed. Two things can be true at once. Every time Lena hits record on her “Legacy Talk,” every time we share our processes and our struggles with one another, every time we counter misinformation in a conversation or online, every time we listen to someone else’s story or tell our own, we’re blocking and tackling. We’re planting and harvesting. What we’re doing is ensuring that our legacies live beyond any single institution or archive or administration or man. We are beyond.

Let’s keep reminding each other: Our stories survive because we continue to tell them. Period. It’s my mantra these days.

Onward, Ava