A YARD IS A SPACE, AFTER BERNARD TSCHUMI
1.0 And every rose raised the fist of her manifesto: sick folk need a rose.
1.1 Make it a story problem: how many Black girls will fit in an average front yard?
2.0 Standing alone in her backyard, a woman renames the constellations. Orion she calls Sojourner’s Truth. The Milky Way: Black Girl Sitting in a Saucer. The Big Dipper she tips, licks its dark rim, and hangs it back again.
3.0 Curtilage. Courtyard. La cour. Give me twelve yards of mulberry silk to bind around your hips, and I will unwind you slowly, slowly.
4.0 Tschumi asks if space is the product of historical time. In her yard: the invention of the progressive assembly line, the post-war 50s and the brick barbecue grill, redlining and white flight, and all around her the decline of Black homeownership.
4.1 In the sideyard, she stands legs wide, swinging her mattock against a deep root. She believes she can change something.
4.2 This corruption of Tschumi: A yard, its social relevance and formal invention, cannot be dissociated from the events that happened in it.
4.3 An eight-year-old Black girl, Jada Page, shot to death in her front yard.
4.4 In other yards: Aniyah Nettles. Demetrius Stevenson. Antoine Roberts, Jr. Vincent Jeffcoat. Zamar Jones. Devante Bryant . . .
