Women Who Walk Alone At Night

Danger is everywhere, but maybe it always has been since we stepped outside the Garden.

When I walked out of the Farm at eighteen, I thought, “What an adventure my life is going to be!” Books. Music. I had no idea what kind of music I wanted to listen to, but it wasn’t Handel, which was the main music of the Farm. I was looking forward to reading books other than the Bible.

I soon found out, during one of my first times hitchhiking, that part of the adventure was that bad things can happen to girls alone. I wasn’t sure what was about to happen, but it did not seem right. I climbed out of a moving truck, landed on a snowbank, and took off running. After that, I didn’t hitchhike with strange men. 

At college, I started dating. Sometimes I climbed out bathroom windows, took off into the night. Left frat parties in a hurry. In a short time and with no one to guide me, I was learning what wiser young women knew. Living in a female body is risky. Men experience a degree of privilege, and the first privilege is safety. When you walk into a room. A bar. When you walk down the street. When you travel in a foreign country.  

On September 10, 2024, Red Hen Press released a book called Now You Owe Me, a thriller about a young woman who comes head to head with a pair of serial killing twins. When I first read this manuscript in our submission pile, I immediately thought of all those first moments of danger and shock at how constantly vigilant I had to be over my own body. I wasn’t pretty, didn’t know how to dress, so it wasn’t that I was hot. I was young. Female. That was enough.

In Now You Owe Me, the young protagonist walks into a bar and senses danger. She is young. I read that and remembered. Being a college student. Walking into a bar.  Untaught by older sisters or by normal high school, I tried to feel the air. The looks. The way a man cocked his head. For danger. For the knowledge that something could go wrong. Our protagonist knows. The difference between myself and this protagonist is that she is a Black woman.

Danger to a white girl is one thing. Danger for a Black girl is another. In our culture, white privilege shields some of us from certain hateful and dangerous experiences. But the female experience of unsafety around strange men branches through all of us.  If you’re female, how many times have you sat on a bus crossing and uncrossing your legs hoping not to fall asleep from fear that the stranger beside you might decide to touch you?

Now You Owe Me reminds us that the first danger is the body we live in. Aliah takes us on a wild journey, crowded into her fierce storytelling of America’s twisted family. The American dream is parents, children, the house, the yard. Eden. But sometimes, it’s more Paradise Lost: What was this country but stolen land? We’re living in someone else’s stolen paradise, and for Aliah, stuffing God down our children’s throats doesn’t make them grow up to be godlike. Danger is everywhere, but maybe it always has been since we stepped outside the Garden.

For women, it isn’t safe when you step out your front door, and for some women, it isn’t safe in their own house. For Black people, America has never been a safe place.  Aliah asks the reader to experience this danger and root for a different outcome, a different future for Black girls and Black women in this country, where they survive and define their own stories.

Aliah Wright read with DC Frost at Politics and Prose on Friday the 13^th. 

Now You Owe Me is available everywhere great books are sold.