Notes from 'On Sundays, She Picked Flowers''s First Draft

or how i learned to relax into the uncertainty of imperfection and surrender to the story

I love a good excuse for not updating my Substack or Patreon, and there is no better excuse than ‘Sorry, I was working on my manuscript’. Like, yes, I haven’t had time to write an essay or even the tiniest of newsletters because I’ve been working, pounding them keys, absolutely tearing through my first draft of On Sundays, She Picked Flowers. I mean, I had a deadline, people! How could I justify asking for another extension, please I have to go home right now! ( Didn’t even need the extension, by the way, I ended up turning the draft in two days before schedule, but God, the bliss of telling people I couldn’t go places or stay places because I needed to Lock In™ is a high I’ll be chasing forever.)

Now that the writing is done, and I have nothing but free time on my hands (at least, until there’s a call for submissions from a magazine I’m interested in or until the next round of edits), I wanted to share a little of the work I’ve been doing. Usually, I’d post this sort of thing on Tumblr accompanied by screencaps from films or book quotes, bricolaging a mood I thought best captured the scene presented. Without Tumblr, I now turn to my new platforms.

I tried to take notes as I wrote to do this post, but I did only think of doing this around chapter fourteen (it’s a twenty-seven chapter book…) and I did not feel inclined to go back and start dissecting from page one. Anyways, that’s for the readers to do! I can now step back and let others analyze my work, something I’ve been looking forward to from the first time I saw a mile-long essay in the tags of a Tumblr post about like, Iron Man or something. (I think they compared him to Icarus, a god with metal wings… Corny, but it did change me fundamentally as a person.)

‘ON SUNDAYS, SHE PICKED FLOWERS’ + ITS REFERENCES, LITERARY + VISUAL

I had to be really strategic about what moments to include because there’s only so much I feel like divulging before this whole situation feels super spoiler-y, so you’ll be getting the most random assortment of scenes, wow.

^{“ In the beginning, her prayers were patient and pious. Every curse she heaped on her mother’s head was immediately corrected with apologies. If she ever once pleaded with the Lord to strike her dead, strike her dead, please lord strike the bitch dead, no one but Jesus knew.”}

^{“In the moment, Jude felt—Well, if she were being honest with herself, she’d say she felt a lot like the knife she held. It was nothing fancy, a simple cleaver, but it had a weightiness that Jude liked and a clean, sharp blade. The wooden handle fit perfectly into the curve of her palm, an easy extension of her arm. Whenever she honed it, she honed herself. Back and forth, back and forth, grinding down against the whetstone until they were both sharp enough to cleave and to slice.”}

When I first revamped On Sundays back in 2020 with Oni House Press, this was one of the first scenes I wrote where I felt I really grew as an author. Originally, Jude’s leaving was her peacefully leaving her mother’s house with nary a drop of blood shed, and then it was her injuring her mother and fleeing into the woods. Neither properly conveyed the anger and passion of the moment, the slow build up of jailed emotion.

I think in these previous attempts I was stymieing myself out of fear of being misunderstood. Ironic, I know, considering the song this scene is set to, but I really was afraid people would think I was doing too much or being too pretentious or too graphic. Rewriting the leaving scene now, I injected this moment and the moments after with Jude’s anger at her abuse at the hands of her mother, her aunts, her community, at how she is treated as a fat, tall Black woman living in the Jim Crow south.

Black women’s rage is all throughout this book, but the first taste we have of it is in the first two chapters. This passage from bell hook’s Killing Rage feels particularly germane!

^{“The greatest sight was that of the swamp. Noble cypress stood in a basin of black water, the light from her lamp the only proof of its green cover. Encircled entirely by trees, it was a world unto itself, fragrant and warm. At the peak of its beauty, it must’ve stank of leaves and moss, the complex funk of the fauna that lived within it. One of the trees was bent, its roots in the water but its head on the side of drier land. Despite her exhaustion, Jude set down her bag and climbed onto the trunk. From where she sat, she saw little through the wall of trees, but craning her neck up gave her an unobstructed view of the waning crescent moon.”}

One of my favorite things when reading is when authors give us long and lush descriptions of settings, especially natural settings such as parks or woods. As someone who sees images clearly in their mind when they read, I love when I’m transported into these gorgeous places of twisting trees and wildflowers. I hope my own readers get the same zing! of passion that I do when they meet these woods. I hope it inspires you to pick up a highlighter or a pencil, and I hope you’re pushed to look up images of these stunning cypress domes. They’re literally divine and so old, almost as old as the Appalachian moments, wow!

This particular scene is Jude’s first time in nature-nature after leaving her mother’s house—I think, personally, what’s really touching about this scene is the surrender to nature, to have gone through hell and then to just sit and take in the world around you. Lovely, gorgeous, to toot my own horn.

^{“There was nothing sweet for them so Nemoira searched the area for berries and returned with two handfuls of fat, black muscadine grapes. From her periphery, Jude watched Nemoira peel back the black skin with her teeth, watched the fuchsia of her tongue swipe juice off her brown lips. Warmth pooled in Jude’s belly and she forced her eyes away.”}

I originally planned on doing this experiment of working through my feelings with writing as a day-by-day thing, starting with Chapter 14, but it changed, obviously. This scene were the first I screenshotted to comment on, and I’m so giddy because I’m so proud of what I’ve done and how I’ve been influenced, ah!

Obviously, there’s so much to say about lesbian eroticism and Black women being erotic with one another. The muscadine scene in particular in inspired by a scene that was in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde, a very interesting scene with a plantain. I was also thinking about the dentistry scene from The Handmaiden (dir. Park Chan-wook), how purely through directorial choices and stellar acting you got the sense of closeness, the warm and sugared puff of Hideko’s breath, Sook-hee’s own breathlessness … Ugh! I simply have to swoon!

Also, more broadly the eroticism and tenderness between Shug Avery and Celie from The Color Purple by Alice Walker (who sucks by the way, she’s transmisogynistic and an antisemite, yikes), as well as the early days of Louis de Point du Lac’s and Lestat de Lioncourt’s (AMC version, of course) relationship and courtship.

^{“Before Jude could ask if Nemoira would like to wet her feet, the woman was ankle-deep in the pond, mossy scum at her shins, tights in one hand and the hem of her dress bunched in the other. Her never-ending laughter, constantly flowing from some secret font of mirth, echoed through the dome as she kicked her feet and splashed, teasing Jude with water until she came to join her. Together, they giggled and threw mud, squealed at the feel of bugs and small fish swimming over their toes, captured and released frogs, chased lizards and chased each other. If Jude could be a child again, she’d bring Nemoira back with her so they could be girls together, wild, cackling, mud-daubed girls.”}

(I think this is actually before the part I just showed, but like, whatever! No one else is seeing this until 2026, so what does it matter if the Substack post is out of order! You dig?)

I absolutely adore the playfulness of this moment. We are so rarely given examples of Black women, especially older Black women being silly and care-free. We are expected to be stoic, strong, serious, never to show our vulnerabilities or goofiness. It’s not just with fun; Black female singers are routinely criticized for writing and singing over-emotional songs, of being “birds” and foolish for submitting to the drama of the blues. There’s this gorgeous line in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange, where she says,

^{we deal wit emotion too much so why dont we go on ahead & be white then/ & make every thin dry & abstract wit no rhythm & no reelin for sheer sensual pleasure/yes let's go on & be white/ we're right in the middle of it/no use holdin out/holdin onto ourselves/lets think our way outta f eelin ("no more love poems #3" – Lady in Blue)}

So, keeping in mind how Black women and young Black girls are robbed of the opportunity to be messy, to be angry, to be sad, to be silly, to sweat out their perms and dirty their church dresses, it felt really good to be able to write a scene with two grown women playing like children. It felt good to bring to life the joy of playing with a sister-friend, a girl-friend (and a girlfriend, hello!), chasing one another, playfighting, wrassling. Like, 2024 and beyond, Black women go outside and run and play tag, play hide-and-go-seek, have a sleepover with your friends and play games and be fools together, ah!

Whew, okay, so thats’ all I have to give (and all I want to give before things start getting spoiled and revealed, especially when I’m trying to enter my life, quiet era)! Originally, I was going to show you all my absolutely bonkers search history which included hits such as how to skin a bear and what’s bear blood taste like and how soon should you treat an eye injury, but then I like, I thought about surveillance culture and how it’s like, kinda crazy to show these things and how maybe by exposing ourselves + sharing too much personal information I’m perpetrating that culture. Anyways. No search history!

I hope you enjoyed this, yup, and um! See you next time I have something long and dramatic to say, which will probably be extremely soon. I still want to write that think piece/op-ed/diary entry about how entwined Blackness and gothicism is!

Ciao ciao!