Dr. Irma and I at the archives.
My job is very glamorous: I take things out of one box, arrange them into folders, and then put them into other boxes. Super sexy, huh? Well, even though it sounds simple, this is an arduous and extensive process. In my year or so here, I’ve probably processed about 60/400 boxes from Dr. Irma’s collection. Yes–400. This woman has never thrown anything away in her life, I’m convinced.
Pictured left to right: Yamuna Sangarasivam, Kara Ireland, Anaelle Cama, Dominick Braswell, Irma McClaurin.
Working at the Black Feminist Archives has been a dream. I am part of the original cohort of graduate students that get to work at the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archives at UMass, “an archival home for Black women and their allies.” The Black Feminist Archives is housed within the Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) at the W.E.B. DuBois Library–a mouthful, I know.
Working for Dr. Irma is like being locked in a room full of Russian Dolls. She’s got something in a binder, within a folder, within an envelope, folded up–which might actually belong in a box somewhere else. She’s meticulous, organized, and systematic… sometimes. It’s all a bit of organized chaos. This woman had a label maker and wasn’t afraid to use it!
So, my job is sifting through all of her manuscripts, essays, poems, books, photos, ephemera, applications, emails, cards, letters, love notes, party invitations,lesson plans, student critiques, administrative files—mementos of her life as a Black Feminist speaker, anthropologist, author, and educator. As a person. I like to think of her collection as a museum of her life.
This is absolutely the best job to have for nosey people like me. I was all up in her business. Her files have, as they say, tea, all helping me to put the pieces together. She kept a record of everything. I would find letters that informed her poetry, details tucked neatly between the labyrinth of papers. She is a very observant person, driven by the details. This collection is an homage to her, her colleagues, friends, and family and every person who helped her along the way. She dedicated much of her poetry to others, writing to and for them. It was a labor of love.
Now, I received all of this without context; I had to weave together the pieces of her story to produce something cohesive that I could make sense of. So that eventually, others might one day be able to find it through the click of a button. Every day, I was surrounded by piles of papers I thought might have meant something, struggling to string the narrative together. And y’all, there were so. many. papercuts. I also got my workouts in every shift because those boxes were heavy as hell! It was someone’s life I was carrying.
I was thrown into this job with zero experience and even less direction on how to begin. And while the folks at SCUA are very knowledgeable about archival practices, building collections, and creating finding aids, they also have their own jobs. That meant that I wasn’t trained beyond a few preliminary terms, basic guidelines, and a friendly knock on the door if I had specific questions. It was a whole lot of guessing and trying new things.
These days, I have pretty much gotten a handle on my own rehousing process. I come into work with my Airpods on, and I get lost in Dr. Irma’s world. I’ve gotten to know her colleagues, her “sistah-friends,” her student mentees. I know her poetry and dissertation work intimately. I know her academic history and her close friends from the letters they shared. I know her teaching pedagogies and content from her classroom materials (transparency films, lol!). Now, I can pinpoint these things in her vast timeline of events from her graduate career in the early 70s to her professorial endeavors in the mid-2000s. If you ask me, we’re basically best friends (but she doesn’t know it).
I met her back in October 2024 at the Black Feminist Archives Event. She’s now one of my mentors. Over lunch, she said to me, “you have autonomy over your things. You tell these people how to tell your story while you’re alive.“
I am grateful and honored that I, as a young Black Lesbian Feminist scholar, was chosen to be part of the process of preserving her legacy. I only have gratitude to participate in this transformative, innovative, and revolutionary work.
Pictured left to right: Anaelle Cama, Kara Ireland, Irma McClaurin. Front: Dominick Braswell, Yamuna Sangarasivam.
