My mama’s rice field, my daddy’s blues They ask me to choose, I refuse to lose Black in the front, Asian in the back They see a puzzle, I see a fact
The Black Valley wasn’t a place on any map. It was a feeling. A humidity-thick pocket of the Virginia Tidewater where the pines grew twisted and the creek ran the color of sweet tea. For the girls who carried its name— BlackValleyGirls —it was a birthright of tangled hair, Sunday sermons, and secrets whispered through window screens.
She got the name from her grandmother, who took one look at her newborn skin—“like honey left in the sun, rich and slow”—and the thin gold chain that appeared around her neck the day she was born, as if the universe had already clasped it there. By sixteen, Honey had grown into the name. She was tall, with her Vietnamese mother’s sharp cheekbones and her Black father’s fierce, lioness eyes. Her hair was a crown of dark curls that she sometimes straightened, sometimes left wild, but never apologized for.
But being just anything was impossible when you were Blasian in the Black Valley. The older women would cup her face and say, “Pretty, but she got that look—not quite ours.” The Vietnamese aunties at the nail salon would whisper in rapid-fire Cantonese: Too tall, too loud, too Black. Honey learned early that belonging was a language she’d have to invent herself. -BlackValleyGirls- Honey Gold - Blasians Like I...
Honey Gold was the queen of them.
“You see?” the old woman whispered. “The Valley’s yours too. Always was.”
She wrote it in her grandmother’s kitchen, the old woman nodding from her rocking chair. My mama’s rice field, my daddy’s blues They
And in the Black Valley, where the pines grew twisted and the creek ran sweet, a new song became an old truth: Honey Gold had never been a puzzle. She had always been the answer.
The boys in the Valley called her “exotic.” She hated that word. It felt like a cage made of compliments.
“What’s it called, baby?”
Then came the festival.
Blasians like I. We don’t fit in boxes. We build our own houses.