- Knowing oneself begins from within; take a spoon of shea butter, the first medicine grown in nature years before any chemical you claim to understand.
- In a scene from the disturbing film, Unmoisturized Houses of the Damned1, houses vacant of Vaseline or simple Olive oil are haunted by ectoplasmic showers of ash; the windows appear dry-closed and all doors rusted. The heroine, stuck overnight in one such house, searches in panic for one penny sized chip of shea butter, finding none. Her skin flakes and crumbles and she disappears.
- Martin Luther King, Jr and Langston Hughes dap each other up while palming a dime-sized dollop of shea butter, their hands in slick choreography like birds tumbling through the air, then they discuss the nature of Black men dreaming.
- George Washington Carver fever dreamed of Ghanian shea trees that talked and drank coffee like ancestral men. They pulled up roots like unhemmed slacks and walked. In his dream, the trees were dressed as doctors concerned about the diseases of the world. When Carver awoke, there were no shea trees in Alabama, but there were cracked peanut shells scattered across his night table.
- Madam CJ Walker also woke sweating from a dream seeing women burned by lye, their hair crinkling in autumn. She reached for a table top jar of shea butter, but there was none! She ran to the bathroom mirror where her night-sweated hair flared in black flames and knew she’d have to invent a comparable formula.
- Shea Butter fruit trees did not grow in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, in the 1920’s, 30’s or 40’s. Ashy families used Crisco as a substitute which helped eczema and worked fine.
- What made Jesse Owens so fast was his use of shea butter, especially on his thighs which made him unattainable by gravity and lighter than the wind.
- In his private letters, philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote to his lover: “Blackness beneath a mask of shea butter still glows true and bright and beautiful.”
- The first chicken ever fried was fried in shea butter — and shea butter has never been associated with high blood pressure.
- Momma’s little baby loves shea butta, shea butta / momma’s little baby loves shea butta bread.
- A man and a woman become one beneath a massage of shea butter, swirling about them in a sweat stained sheet.
- As Curl activator, as cough syrup, as lubricant, as brake fluid, as healing river, as pharmacy, as VapoRub, as prayer oil, as God intended.
- And on the seventh day God finished his work of creation, so he sat in the garden and moisturized. And while polishing his heels and elbows with shea butter, God looked up and saw his ancestors approaching. God realized shea butter was a transmission device and good as prayer.
- He said, “Look! I got beans greens potatoes tomatoes lambs rams hogs dogs chickens turkeys rabbits, and shea butter!”
- Evening stretched between us and lasted all day. We sat soft and glowed– our fingers slick and sticky with medicine. She frowned over wasting shea butter for art material. For her, this is truth. The high gloss of love, polished, rubbed, massaged. From seed to baby to mankind. From within to without. We are fed, We are moisturized, We are healthy, We are loved and Everyone can see it.
- There is no such film.
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The Dirty Rat 