A Story: Layli I became a womanist the moment I read Michele Russell’s “Black-Eyed Blues Connections: Teaching Black Women” in Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Russell 1982). At the time, I was a single-parenting, food stamp-getting, ’hood-living graduate student in supposed preparation for a high-powered, mainstream, solidly middle-class career in teaching and research. Before I read Michele Russell’s essay, my life was the story of polarities: going back and forth between the food stamp line and the graduate seminar, between the WIC appointment and the halls of academe. I tried as hard as possible to keep the two worlds separate, to act as though my less than optimal grades (despite my “stellar” intellect) had nothing to do with the fact that I could not aff ord the textbooks and had no food in the refrigerator, and as though my “strange” way of raising my kids had nothing to do with the fact that I was being trained as a developmental psychologist and was, by virtue of the nature of graduate school, spending most of my time around considerably older, better-heeled, and “diff erently cultured” colleagues/models of parenthood than with other young sister-mothers with young children like myself. It was a schizophrenic existence, and “Black-Eyed Blues Connections” came to the rescue.