There’s a particular kind of silence Black women know—the one that settles in after we’ve “handled it.” Again.

We carry the weight: of the room, of the rage, of the history. We patch up what others break, we speak truth with trembling lips, and we hold ourselves together with straw—sometimes literal, sometimes emotional. From Zora Neale Hurston’s sharp-tongued women to Tyler Perry’s character Janiyah Wilkerson in Straw, to the quiet labor of today’s Black daughters, we trace the ancestral threads of survival, the cost it extracts, and what happens when we finally dare to put it down.

This is a meditation on memory, inheritance, and the reckoning that comes when we realize that strong isn’t the whole story.