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The Creative

Black Woman’s

Playbook

by Veronica Camille Ratliff 


I want to dedicate this workbook to every single one of my benevolent ancestors who sacrificed for me to one day create freely, and to my grandmothers who sowed seeds of intention through strength, ingenuity, and hard work. To my aunts who reminded me of my light even when I didn’t see it. To my radiant mother who taught me how to read, write, and take pride in who I was destined to be. To all the black women working to dismantle systems of oppression, and to all the little creative black girls yet to reincarnate into this dimension. I pray you are born into a limitless reality and have the freedom to just be.

INTRODUCTION

About me

In a busy city with the mighty Mississippi River in view, my earliest childhood memory was my mother and I walking with my brother to the nearby art gallery. With my little brother gliding in a stroller, and my little sister, not yet born, I clutched my mother’s heavy baby bag as I counted the stones on the sidewalk leading to our destination.

When we got to the giant glass door with golden trim, my mother (knowing her inquisitive whimsical daughter) looked me dead in my eyes and with a grin said, “Now don’t touch anything when we get inside and stay by me.” I remember the very moment I walked in. I felt so small compared to the sculptures, and the giant faces on the wall. My mother took me to each photo that day and asked how each made me feel. She explained to little five year old me that several artists created these faces and I could too if I wanted. After exploring the gallery, we walked next door where we caught the last few moments of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra doing their thang. There I was, entranced, as the violinist seemed to sway like tall grass to the music while the conductor played God. At that moment, I knew who I wanted to be. I knew my purpose. I knew I was born to create.

My name is Veronica Camille Ratliff, also known as V.C.R, and just like you I was born a creative black woman. I have worked in the creative world for 10 years in various positions including artist management, a staff writer for major publications, a freelance violinist, a recording artist, and performer. I am the granddaughter of two powerful creative women. One a hair specialist, a nurse practitioner, a chef, a master gardener, and a scholar. The other a dynamic orator, an entrepreneur, a Bishop (one of the first woman bishops in our city), a singer, and philanthropist. I am a daughter to a prolific writer, a Harvard scholar, and a niece to seven singers and orators. As a descendant of southern women who somehow lived to tell stories of chattel slavery, rape, and blatant atrocities that could make the strongest stoic tear up, I feel it is my duty to create by any means necessary and yours too. Not just because I can, but because so many black women before me could not.

INTRODUCTION

The Creativity of Black Women

“How was the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years Black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a Black person to read or write? .... Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our ‘crazy,’ ‘Sainted’ mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short Story Writers, who died with their real gifts stifled within them ...Therefore we must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers knew, even without ‘knowing’ it...”

ALICE WALKER

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, 2004

Imagine a world where you are less than human. Blood stained hands from cotton picking that had to be done by sundown. Swollen eyes and upper lips, paired with puss-filled gashes curated by the headmistresses’ angry lash or boredom. How did black creative women find ways to express themselves when they weren’t allowed to read or write? Women that were bred like cattle, who lived in fear of their children being sold to the highest bidder or used in a heinous science experiment with a 100% mortality rate. All praise to my ancestors. Women who shriveled slowly, and died suffocated by a system of hatred they were born into.

My grandmother Clitheal L. Ratliff was a brilliant orator and entrepreneur who created a life for herself and her nine children centered around creativity and entrepreneurship. Before she passed on, not only did she build and fund her own church in the segregated and misogynistic South, she also started a scholarship fund for young students going to college that still operates to this day. Although she left a legacy that I hold dear, my mother always tells me stories of her secretly wanting to leave the comfort of her hometown and move to Los Angeles to become a singer. As a black woman living in the 1940s and 50s, she wasn’t able to pursue that dream. Little did she know that her grandbaby would do just that in 2017 and I haven’t looked back since.

I am overflowing with gratitude for all my experiences so far but I have made so many mistakes along the way. These mistakes taught me valuable lessons that I hope to pass on to you in hopes that your journey will be a little less bumpy than mine.

Now truth be told, we are all born creators, but that’s another tangent for my next workbook. For now, I would like to remind you, my reflection, of who you are in order to get your mind prepared for the information I’m going to give you. For starters, the fact that you either decided to pick up, was gifted, or accidentally stumbled on this workbook, lets me know a little bit about your soul’s intentions.

INTRODUCTION

Your Soul’s Intention

Your soul’s intention is the vibrational signal you send out every moment of the day. This intention is mirrored back to you through what you are drawn to, what is drawn to you, and what you create. Whether we know it or not, we as women—specifically black women—are creating all the time and have been since the beginning of time. Through cooking a meal from scratch, our beautiful experimental hairstyles, managing a team at work, writing a poem, paint-ing a canvas, or having a child, we as black women have an innate need to create. This innate need is not only biological but it is ancestral. Imagine your creativity being suppressed for thousands of years. We are practically bursting at the seams. That need can be expressed in so many ways and all those ways are not only valid, but they are worthy of an equal and adequate energy exchange. An energy exchange is a creative transaction made between two living beings that can be mental, financial, physical, emotional and/or sexual. This exchange has built civilizations, started fortune 500 companies, entertained the masses, and birthed nations. These transactions are so important because energy is neither created nor destroyed and since the dawning of civilization, black women’s creations, thus our energy, has been siphoned, sold, stolen, and taken for granted.

The problem is that navigating a capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal, racist industry, with only your talent, work ethic, and little industry knowledge (not to mention brown skin) can get tricky.

After countless conversations with my peers, I realized I wasn’t alone in feeling discouraged by these challenges. Looking for funding, creative resources, or even a community to support you in your specific endeavors can take forever and can be disheartening.

After conducting research studies with fellow black femme creatives and working in the creative world all over the country, I have identified five common hurdles women of color face everyday.

Some are: sexism and misogyny, covert and structural racism, financial and mental health, resources, wage exploitation and colorism.

In response to this I’ve created a play-by-play, outlined here, of five rules that will help any black women be successful, dominate the creative workforce, and feel confident while doing it.