Stormy Weather....

Guys, I can't cope with this loss. Blacktress and icon Lena Horne passed away last night, at the age of 92.

Without Lena, I wouldn't be here, y'all. As the first blacktress to sign a long-term Hollywood contract, Lena paved the way for every actress of color.

As I sit here on the plantation, reading the NY Times article on her, there are so many things about Lena that resonate with me.

At 92 years old, she’s 2 years younger than my grandmother—I called up G-Unit to see if she’d heard about it (of course she had—she’s got the news on 24-hour loop) and she remembers Lena’s first movie!! That is so out of control, y’all.

Lena, like Sojo, had a main gay who she loved dearly. When speaking of musician and accompanist Billy Strayhorn, Lena said he was, “the only man I ever loved,” but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”
I been there, Lena!!!

She, too, found a group of cool Caucasians who could handle a blacktress: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.” Lena, girl, I know how that goes. Growing up as a young blacktress at an NYC private school, it was often an awkward clip from the yet-to-be-released film “Guess Who’s Coming to Seder?”

I think this final paragraph in the article is what warms my heart the most:

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Even though you’re speaking Sojourner’s Truth, you are indeed like no one else, Ms. Horne. RIP.