The Debt We Owe to Those Who Led the Way

Or Black Women, Depression, and What We Can Learn from the Past

In high school, I got a name for what I’d been feeling most of my life — not necessarily every day, but not rare enough that I had to think about it – even if I never used it as often as I probably should.

I was fine.

I was just tired.

I was okay.

I was sad.

                  But I didn’t know why.

“I’m happy. This is just how I smile.”

In reality, I was depressed.

And at the beginning of A Blue Note, so is our main character, Pauletta. We meet her mere months after a suicide attempt she’s healed from only just enough to finish her dissertation and graduate with her PhD. We meet her when she’s locked herself down emotionally in a way Black women so often do simply so they can make it through the day.

In her essay, “The Death of Dry Tears,” historian Ula Taylor recounts how the deaths of her father and colleagues, Barbara Christian and June Jordan, shaped that moment in her career. The short essay moves through months of her depression in a few short, powerful pages, just like all the other essays in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower. This book was recommended to me in graduate school and now I recommend it to my own students, colleagues, and friends. Throughout the book, historians I’ve met, women whose work shaped my decision to stay in History and the work I produced later, talked about surviving academia intact — or as close to that as possible. These women laid a very specific path for me and other historians to follow — but even they couldn’t insulate us from many of the same slights and pains.

When I wrote A Blue Note, I was thinking of a specific historian who died by suicide and how that information lived alongside what I knew of the field and what I wanted for myself, especially as a woman who’d lived with depression longer than I could remember. But the person whose life helped inspire Pauletta was just one of the stories of Black women, depression, and suicide that shaped why I wrote this character and how. I read the articles about Black girls’ suicide rates rising, and the ones about depression presenting differently in Black women. I recognized some of the symptoms in myself and others from conversations with friends in the academy in the US and abroad.

And then, in 2024, Dr. Antoinette Candia-Bailey died by suicide, after experiencing “severe” workplace bullying from her supervisor. “Concerned about Dr. Candia-Bailey’s anxiety and depression, her doctor signed a request for Family Medical Leave (FMLA). The FMLA request was denied by her supervisor.” At the time, I’d already contemplated my own leave of absence and was frustrated by the FMLA process. By then. I’d already written A Blue Note, queried it, and set it aside, waiting for when I felt ready to release it. And hardest of all, I was already deep in my own depressive episode, exacerbated by issues at my university, in my personal life, and all culminating in the sudden and traumatic death of my cat at the end of 2023. This wasn’t intentional research. Believe me, if I could have filtered these stories about Black women’s mental health out of my newsfeed, I would have, but I couldn’t because even without the study, I knew these things in my bones.

I knew the “privilege” of being able to work from home a few days a week, grading my students’ essays from my laptop, logging into departmental meetings from Zoom because it was easier to turn my camera off and cry than excuse myself to cry in the bathroom across the hall from the departmental copy room. It was easier to feel all that alone because the depression told me no one else would care and common sense made me worry that showing any sign of weakness would negatively affect how I was perceived at work.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a meeting while a white man yelled at colleagues — red-faced and angry — or had to sit through a white woman overcome with tears — usually out of frustration or embarrassment — while I was stone-faced and frustrated because they got to be emotional without repercussion. I did not. All the while, the point of the conflict was buried under my colleagues’ emotional outbursts waiting for someone to get us back on track. Eventually.

Black women in academia, on the other hand, “learned how to weep without visible evidence.” (Taylor)

I spent months in Pauletta’s head, wanting the sinking melancholy and isolation of her depression to feel real. I’ve written about the stresses of academia for Black women in Office Hours, Sabbatical, and From Scratch, but in each of those books, I gave the main character a soft place to land (Deja’s friend community, Toni’s home, and Sea Port for Mary). In some ways, I gave Pauletta similar safety nets, but her depression made them all hard to see/feel/understand. The stories Pauletta’s depression told her aren’t complete, but they hurt and isolate her all the same.

Because that’s the thing about depression — mine at least. I can be in a room surrounded by people and still feel alone. That’s just a fact I live with, and writing that for Pauletta was both deeply painful and cathartic. As was finding out, just last year, that my grandmother — who’s immortalized in my mind as a woman with big cheeks, an elegant gap, and a wide smile, all things I inherited from her — was institutionalized at least once for her own depression. Again, I’d long since written A Blue Note, but like Pauletta, I found a kind of peace and belonging in discovering that someone else in my family had lived through a version of this.

Pauletta’s depression can’t be cured by anyone else — maybe it, like mine, will linger, ebbing, flowing, and shaping the way she moves through the world in tiny ways. But this book isn’t about her curing her depression, it’s about finding out how to live — TRULY LIVE — with it. And her research into Paule’s life (and love) is like a lifeline.

The past speaks to Pauletta when other voices can’t penetrate the fog — her best friend, her Great Aunt Adelaide who reminds me of my Great Aunt Dear, her parents, a new potential lover. None of them can touch her brain and heart the way Paule’s story does in a moment where she needs connection the most.

Over a century apart, Pauletta’s research into Paule’s life is like a “spiritual renewal,” emotionally and intellectually. By the end of the book, Pauletta joined the scores of Black women historians who hold a tender spot in my heart. I hope she does the same for you. (Taylor)