Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do by Pearl Cleage

return some papers to the weasel. He had included a note congratulating me for making my last payment early, which I thought was a nice touch. When human beings drop their insane, territorial bullshit, they can work out almost anything.
    The line was moving slowly at the post office, and thereweresixpeopleaheadofme, butIneverfussabout long lines. Waiting gives me an opportunity for some uninterrupted people-watching. As folks pulled up to drop off their mail in the slot outside, I saw Aretha walk into the parking lot and head for the door. I was happy to see her and hoping she was still coming to Flora's brunch tomorrow.
    “Hey!” she said, looking as pleased to see me as I was to see her. “I was just thinking I need to come up and see you!”
    “You conjured me up.”
    “How's everything going? I haven't been playing the music too loud, have I?”
    “I haven't even heard it,” I said. “Everything's fine. What did you want to see me about?”
    She was wearing a little cap pulled down low over her eyes and six individual earrings without a matching pair among them. “I told you I'm doing a lot of photographs now?”
    I nodded. The smiling faces of the children on the walls of my apartment brighten the place up as much as the sunshine.
    “Well, I'm working on a project now with some women who are working as strippers.”
    I liked the way she said that: “women who are working as strippers.” Not “strippers.” She made stripping what they did for a living, not who they were.
    “A photography project?”
    “I'm taking two shots of each one. First, they pose in what they wear to work. Hair, nails, makeup. Everything. Then they pose in something that reflects who they are offstage. It's really amazing to see what they pick for their real-self shots. They bring everything from church outfits, complete with hats, to jeans and a T-shirt with their kid's face on it.”
    I wondered how many of the women had children and if the men who wanted lap dances ever thought about the fact that they were grinding up on somebody's mama.
    “That sounds interesting,” I said. “How's it going?”
    “Great. A lot of the women are referring their friends because they really like the pictures, but they don't always get the apartment number right. So if any of them come up to your place, just send them on downstairs. It doesn't matter how late. Sometimes they like to pose when they first get off work.”
    “No problem,” I said. “I don't think I've ever met a strip … a woman making her living as a stripper.”
    “You probably have. You just didn't know it. When I was at Spelman, there were always a couple of girls earning their tuition at the strip clubs.”
    A quick mental scan of my classmates at Howard didn't turn up any likely candidates for secret strippers, but there's ten years between Aretha and me. In that one little decade, thanks to music videos, the character of the fantasy stripper, and her fantasy sister, the sexually rapacious, unapologetically materialistic ghetto goddess, with all the latest clothes and cars and no visible means of support, have emerged and become the dominant symbols of black women in the popular culture.
    I don't think this is necessarily a positive development in the ongoing struggle for women's liberation, but it clearly impacts everything from clothing styles to the sexual expectations of adolescent boys who think there is actually a place where women are always perfectly coiffed, scantily clad, and ready for sex. Sometimes they even sing.
    The line moved a few steps forward, and so did we.
    “A woman came in the other day,” Aretha said. “She was six months pregnant and getting ready to stop until her baby was born, so she wanted me to get a picture.”
    The idea of a pregnant stripper was new for me. “Isn't six months kind of late to be stripping?”
    Aretha shook her head as we moved another few inches forward. An old woman at the middle window was slowly counting out the money