She arrives at Kinfolx Cafe in a hot-pink, crocheted two-piece\u2014off the shoulder, hand-knitted\u2014and the outfit tells the crowd something. Oubria Tronshaw does not show up in borrowed clothes. She makes the thing herself and wears it loud. Neither does she write in borrowed language.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not supposed to tell you this,\u201d she whispers to the crowd, and then she tells them everything.<\/p>\n
Tronshaw\u2019s parents were co-workers who had an affair. \u201cMy father, his wife and their child formed a family,\u201d she says. \u201cMy father, my mother and I formed a situation.\u201d Custody was split like a backdoor deal: the first through the 10th with her father, his wife Gigi and her sister Tootsie Toot. The rest of the month with her mother and older sister, Sharonda.<\/p>\n
Her father\u2019s house was an education in hypervigilance, the terrain \u201ca patternless minefield\u201d for a child living in the the consequential war zone of her father\u2019s unchecked emotions. When they heard his keys, \u201ctinkling like a warden\u2019s chain,\u201d heartbeats went into space. She tucked misery under her tongue until bedtime, survived by reading her father like weather. Her intuition grew \u201cwild like bamboo.\u201d<\/p>\n
That intuition became her compass. And like any compass, it showed her where she was headed\u2014even when she went the wrong way.<\/p>\n
Eight days after graduating from undergrad in Santa Fe and driving home to Chicago, Tronshaw met \u201chim.\u201d She\u2019d told her mother: \u201cIt feels like I\u2019m gonna meet a man and have a baby instead. It isn\u2019t what I want, but I feel like once it happens, it\u2019s all I want.\u201d Her mother listened. Then it happened.<\/p>\n
On their first date, he made his politics clear\u2014a Black man, he told her, cannot trust a Black woman who wears the white man\u2019s toxins instead of her own natural hair. She knew this game, and pulled a single lock past her shoulder to prove her five years of growth. He traced her bottom lip with his finger. Stared. Kissed her deeply, wrapping his fingers in her hair. The warnings were dressed beautifully, and she walked right in.<\/p>\n
She called him the Professor\u2014because not only did he teach her a thing or two, he thought he knew every fucking thing. Within three weeks, they\u2019d moved in together. Within a month, she was pregnant. Five children followed, one by one\u2014gorgeously brown, a small tribe. And eventually, because the grind is real and life breaks even the well-intentioned, Tronshaw and her husband divorced.<\/p>\n
Book Smart Dick Dumb is not a book of pure sorrow. It\u2019s built on a lattice of humor. \u201cI think I just come from a funny family. If you have a lot of trauma, everybody\u2019s funny to you,\u201d Tronshaw says. The memoir became a place to release every smart-ass observation she\u2019d sat on for years. \u201cThis is my book now. I can say what I was really thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019d always wanted to write\u2014especially about her life, which irritated her mother. Then one day, her mother said plainly: \u201cSome things you only write when your mother\u2019s dead.\u201d She passed in 2017.<\/p>\n
\u201cI miss her terribly,\u201d Tronshaw says, \u201cbut I don\u2019t know if I would have the strength to be this honest if I knew she\u2019d just pick up this book and read it.\u201d<\/p>\n
When she\u2019s not writing from a caf\u00e9, she writes in a walk-in closet, children knocking. \u201cAll of this that I\u2019ve done, I\u2019ve done around motherhood,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd motherhood just always brings me back to the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n
She met her current husband through her Melanated Classic Tarot Deck. He ordered one, then emailed to thank her. She laughs, recounting how she tried to blow up his thumbnail to see his face, says, \u201cWe never let each other go after that original email.\u201d Everything she makes\u2014the deck, the memoir, all of it\u2014lives at oubria.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Growing up between two households, no one place ever felt entirely hers. She always said she\u2019d know home when she saw it. Something in Oakland\u2019s Dimond District is settling\u2014the neighbors, playdates, familiar faces.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel more at home here,\u201d she says, \u201cthan I have felt in a very, very long time.\u201d<\/p>\n