06 Jul 2026 10 min read

You Gotta Keep the Master at the Door

We are at 7, the Ghost (The Presence of the Past) in my exploration of Audre Lorde’s: The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. I do the mind-map first. That gives me the lead image. The lead image gives me my title.

Title. You Gotta Keep the Master at the Door

Object. The Ruins of the Big House

12 associations

The table
Manifestation
Tyres for my patio
Mirror
Blending In the Ruins of the Big House and MY MUM IS WHITE
Cutting the chains
Generational wealth
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome
Memorial wall
In the Ruins of the Big House stairs lead directly down to the Reno
Persian in a 2025 interview
Clay pot

Prem Rawat is in Brighton. The guy who gives me Knowledge that I practise every morning for one hour. He has been giving satsang every evening. Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 6pm. The rest of the time I have been reading Joy Degruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. That’s quite a heady mix.

2024. Factory International. (FI) When they are building In the Ruins of the Big House, (ITROTBH) the bespoke mirrored table feels too high. I feel a cunt saying it has to be changed. It is not the random old lorry driver with excavation cabins, which would be nothing to me now. No, it is the white designers, Ella and her sister Abbey, who I have gone out of my way to get onside, so things will be what I want and not what FI want. I try to say it gently and at the same time hold my ground.

Ella measures. ‘3 centimetres. ‘

‘But it feels off when I sit down. ‘

Crestfallen, I go upstairs. I am wearing the bottom half of my ball gown; getting used to sitting in the hooped petticoat. I decide not to go under. To quietly manifest that this is what will happen. They will want it to be as perfect as I do. It’s not Ella who is the problem, as I think, it is forceful white working-class Adam, who is fucking marvellous at arranging everything, keeping all the balls in the air, but I can’t see him dismantling the 6-part bolted mirror table, to cut down the legs, after waiting for Ella and Abbey to dismantle the entire silverware, grapes, candelabras, everything.

Ella enters the greenroom, smiling. ‘Look out the window.’

In the North Warehouse, they have already taken every stitch off the table, and Adam and the set builders are turning it over, then they use some sort of grinding tool to take the centimetres off. ‘Adam said it should be perfect.’

It makes me a mistress. Them listening, Adam wanting to make my wishes perfect, their tool, make me the mistress of my plantation ITROTBH. FI is metaphorically the ruins of the big house. It is actually sitting on top of the ruins of the big house where the sugar was stored. I don’t care if anybody else gets it. I get it. All the layers, I get them.

My FI producer Rochelle has arranged for FI AD John to watch my dress rehearsal. I only know cos they have set out a row of chairs. I don’t care what John thinks. I don’t care what goes down. I don’t care what the people at the table think. I don’t care. The point of the experiment is to burn down the master’s house inside me. How the fuck am I gonna achieve that if John is sat there judging me? Judging my performance. This is not a performance. It is my real ‘dinner’ in my real ‘plantation’. I am the real mistress there is no way on fucking earth anyone can sit in my soiree and judge me. I don’t stop it though. I’m too cowardly. And it does what I knew it would do. I am a fake. This is a performance. I must please you.

John asks, ‘Can I sit in the sound box when you do your first performance?’ Politeness makes me say yes. Rochelle can see furious written all over my face. She takes me for a coffee to explain. I have a few major problems now. I’m willing to be stroppy with Rochelle who is not white, who is in fact a descendant of enslaved people like me. But I’m too cowardly to say jack-shit to FI AD, white John. Now I fucking have to.

But for the first time, I don’t enter a rage to get the courage and accuse him of anything. I just explain the dynamics simply. He can’t watch me. I don’t want to be judged. But he can come in if he sits at my table.

Prema my lighting designer is in his office when he receives my text. He has just said to her I have to leave in a minute because he has to see my first performance. But now he doesn’t. Cos he can’t be seen to sit at my table in his kingdom. It has so many layers to it. I understand. And am pleased that he has to consider implications too. I congratulate myself. My level of ownership heightens. I really am the mistress. I have the power to keep the master at the door.

I manifest ITROTBH table while smoking on my doorstep. I had no idea it will look like Beauty and the Beast. I just know 3 years before it happens, they must sit at my table. My table. My table. All the heads of the Manchester arts must sit at my table. I don’t even know why. I light a cig. It flashes in my mind. I want to tell them. I want to tell them how to engage people that are not white, people that are not from their walk of life. I want to tell them about the tools I have developed. But they can’t listen. They don’t listen at my table either. They disrespect me on the journey to my table. I think, cos I’m an idiot, that excavating the Reno has made me a star. I can do anything I want. No, I can show them my tools, that will make a difference to how people like me engage. Cos, I know they work. I genuinely know. They work in prisons. Excavating the Reno. Exhibiting its finds in the Whitworth. Writing TWELVE WORDS. And a few hours ago, a few hours ago, suggestions in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome agrees with me. One of the suggested healing techniques is to tell our story, both the good and the bad.

‘Telling our stories can be redemptive. Telling our stories can free us. Telling our stories can help lift others. I believe an integral part of racial socialisation is learning the histories of those in our family and community. Storytelling is an important part of our education; it strengthens us and helps us build resilience. It helps us put things in perspective.’ Joy Degruy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing.

‘It’s very simple — you told the story of people whose stories are not told in the media, not that I’ve seen. I understand where my grandad came from what he lived through with my white grandma and all the crap they probably had to put up with. Learning about how they lived was like understanding a family tree which normally stops at England. Learning their stories passed the shores really gave me and no doubt everyone something white British people take for granted because they know their stories in detail. Also growing up with very little (nothing, sometimes no food freezing) from the inner city (in many ways richer because of the neighbours) with a family whose names and faces didn’t match with stories nothing like the friends I eventually grew up with elsewhere. With stories ‘worse’ but sometimes very funny and buried — your project introduced me to my people where I’ve come from, the inner city very very great people — with stories I recognise experiences I remember — I gained a massive sense of pride because there was a gap of knowledge — from this from seeing my people — I’m now proud of my childhood and where I’ve come from because it’s from amazing people and an amazing time. I can see where I’ve come from and it’s changed me. I've seen stories similar to mine. I’m no writer Linda but I hope this goes some way to explaining.' xxx Natalie.

In the Reno memoirs we tell our story. We tell them to me. Not interrupted by what the master wants. Not to a non-white person wearing a top hat. Non-white people in institutions fucking hate when anyone points that out. But let’s face it if you are getting a fucking salary every month from an institution you are gonna do what that institution wants. Including calling someone when you have decided what the Reno was. And asking them to use all their hard work to colour in your painting by numbers.

When I am manifesting the excavation through writing the Arts Council Application, I visualise the ghosts of our childhood sweeping out of the ground and into our chest and reuniting with us. Blowing life back into us. So, we are laughing. Holidaying in front of the green cabins. Like the summer we all holidayed at Chorlton Marina. The non-white top hats don’t wanna know any of that. They only want to know their performance. Like the fucking French TV. They don’t wanna know about the mixed-race daughter, up from London on a train, who hasn’t seen her dad for 30 years, being reunited with him on the Reno at The Whitworth Memorial Wall.

‘That’s my dad.’

'Fucking hell, it isn’t’.

It’s a Saturday. There are quite a few of us mixed-race on the couches. We are laughing. This is the modern Reno. I’ve gone out of my way to raise the dough to get lighting made moody. So, we don’t feel on show. So, we feel like we would have felt down the Reno on a Saturday afternoon. And Suzy M’s great idea to plaster a life-size photo of the Reno — not just any photo — but one with the door open, the newel of the stairs on show, inviting you down the Reno. Us who know. Us who want to know. Not us who want to be patted on their back for overseeing.

And Gail, the Reno excavation number one fan doesn’t understand. She rebukes me in the middle of the night for rejecting the French TV and saying we want to be buried again. But they don’t. She’s right. It’s just me. She doesn’t get that they are colonising the Reno with their fake narrative. Then I see a quick flash of 2025 Persian the Reno DJ looking really young, younger than 2018 when he leaves his lung cancer chemotherapy bed to play the celebration marquee beside the excavated Reno. Revived. But that is different. Persian can do what he likes with the Reno. There would be no Reno without Persian. I love that Persian is benefitting by it. Persian is telling his story. No fucking way will Persian allow them to tell a fake narrative. That’s very fucking different from the Science and Industry Museum, and the French TV writing their own narrative for months and asking me to decorate it for them.

Gail is white too. No disrespect, Gail. You know I love you. But you’ll never get it. What it feels like to see loads and loads of people the same colour as you, when you have no white cousins. But you do. But it’s rare if they acknowledge you. One of the big Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome studies talks about the need to build relationships. Relationships are big where we come from. Building relationships in Africa. You’ve heard me wax on about meeting my Jamaican cousins. But now, here in the Reno is my real cousins. They really are like me. I don’t have to keep my lighter skin a secret. Or my white mum not fitting in with the black mums of the black cousins. None of that matters in the Reno. We are just us, half-caste, in the Reno. When I walk down my Bette Davis stairs to my purposefully lowered mirrored table, a part of me keeps on walking down the stairs into the Reno. Pushing the red vinyl doors. Taking a sideways quick glance at the throbbing crowd that weren’t there the minute before I look, and now I can’t wait to check my hair to join them. It takes weeks, months, to join them properly. We have to earn our stripes. First by the cig machine opposite the toilet. No, not the first night. The first night, we are Martini drunk. It is the Thursday 18.12.76. We are Martini drunk. We tell them about themselves. These hard, tough, streetwise half-caste fuckers who we don’t fear at all. ‘I can’t believe she said that to you.’ We’ve been in gangs for years. ‘It was like feminism walked down the stairs,’ says Stella cos she has kids to one of them.

You don’t want to know any of that cos the single clay pot you think we unearthed holds one story. The Reno was important to the West Indian and African community. No, two clay pots, the Reno was resistance cos we couldn't get into clubs in town. Your individual fabricated story. The only Africans I can remember is Phil, the owner. And supercool Lati, his partner, on the door, and Cola, Phil’s idiot nephew that thinks he holds some power. Does he fuck. Sometimes we get a drink out of him. And a laugh at his expense. And the West Indians’ favourite name for us is breeds. Half breeds. We were always going to clubs in town. But we'd always end up home in the Reno.

Anyway, fuck all that. As Prem Rawat just said, time is running out. And the only way to make it feel longer is to do things I want to do. I love to do. Things the tools I have developed are perfect for. I’ve publicly tested them now. There are no flaws. I am using my tools to manifest my generational wealth, by blending ITROTBH with MY MUM IS WHITE to make THE DRESS. You just have to get intentional. Like the other day, I’ve been wanting old tyres to keep my parasol stable on my patio. So, before I leave my house I tell the universe, I want my tyres today. Lo and behold when I get off the bus there are 2 perfect tyres on the roadside. I just wheel them home. All of it, I’ve manifest from this barleycorn legged table. My first play will be at the Royal Court. It happens. Published by Methuen. It happens. THE DRESS, my friends, has manifestation at its core. Has fuck all to do with colour. Race. Racism. Did you hear that chink? That was me cutting the chains.

It’s too big a subject to open out at this moment. Next week I’m gonna pull it all together by mind-mapping all 7 essays including this to give me 8. The Sword (The Final Choice/Resolution.) It can stab me to death. Or like Arthur, I can pull it from the stone.