Every month for The Stranger, Eva Walker writes a letter to her daughter, Hendrix, to share wisdom learned from her experiences—and her mistakes. by Eva Walker Dear Hendrix, One Saturday morning, without telling your father, I wen t into the bathroom of our tiny studio apartment and pissed on a stick.  It was just a few days after attending the Sawtooth music festival in Idaho. While there, I felt so good from performing in the mountains, seeing all our friends, soaking up the sunshine, and listening to all the good music that I thought, “You know what? I'm in a good mood. I want to try acid!” Until then, I’d never really tried any drug besides weed and expired, ineffective mushrooms. Still, I had always been curious about psychedelics. Maybe it's the unreal colors people claim to see? The floating feeling they talk about? I don’t quite know. But my anxiety was always the reason I stayed away from the stuff. Because if I know one thing about those drugs, it’s that you should be in a good headspace when you dive in. (And, don’t forget, never with losers.)   At Sawtooth, I was feeling great. Happy and more relaxed than I had felt in a while. But just as I asked my close friend how to safely get some, I suddenly remembered: Your dad and I had been trying to have a baby. I blurted out, “Wait! I can’t try psychedelics right now! I might be pregnant!”  Fast-forward to that fateful Saturday morning with the pee and the stick. I placed the newly dampened pregnancy test on the counter and waited. Butterflies swirled in my stomach. Then, boom! There it was. The second blue line. The blue line that confirmed what I had suspected: I had a baby growing inside me. At the time, your dad and I had just started writing our book, The Sound of Seattle: 101 Songs That Shaped a City. (Available at bookstores everywhere! And a great holiday gift!) As I walked out of the bathroom, he looked at me and started talking about this band or that artist and how the book should maybe go this or that direction… blah blah blah… All I could say was, “I’m sorry, I’m totally distracted right now!” “Is everything ok?” he asked. “Yeah… um… I’m pregnant.” We both paused for a moment. I was stoked, but also shocked. Your dad was, well, shocked and then stoked. He stopped what he was doing with the book, said some nice supportive shit that I can’t remember, and hugged me. And then, his back seized up. Like, totally froze. The news of being a new dad went directly to his shoulders, and he couldn’t move! It was like a scene straight from a sitcom. We laugh about it now. Not long after that, we were lying in bed thinking of baby names. For a boy, we had names like Davidson (my maternal grandfather’s last name), Thurgood (the first Black Supreme Court justice), Warsaw (literally because of a street I used to drive past as a kid), and Michael. For a girl, we agreed we liked more masculine-sounding names. Austin, Payton, Hudson, and Thompson (the names of two of the members of the local band THEM). I did like some classic girl names, too—Rose, Stella, and Estelle. But then it came to me. “If she’s a girl, what if we named her Hendrix?” Your dad immediately responded in the surest tone, “That’s fucking awesome!”   Does it have something to do with the legendary guitar player? Fuck yeah it does! But it’s deeper than that. This may come as a surprise to you, but your outspoken indie-rocker radio DJ mother was a rather socially awkward and quiet teenager. I had friends, but didn’t hang out with many of them outside of school. When I did, we would just play music or watch Alice in Chains videos. Or I would opt to hang out with the 60-to-70-year-old Black men who gathered every early evening at a coffee shop on 23rd and Jackson. I was the dorky kid who lugged a guitar with me everywhere, and, Henny, I even had a wallet chain. It was far out. But what comes with being a Black teenage girl in the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s who likes rock and wears wallet chains is that everyone around you tells you how white you are. They say things like, “You play guitar? That’s super white!” Or “You’re like the whitest Black person I know!” Or, my favorite, “Blacks don’t play guitar!” That last one came from a Black girl. These ideas come from all sorts of people who were—and are—ignorant of the diversity of Blackness, as well as Black people who don’t know their own history. (I’m here to pick on EVERYONE. This wasn’t limited to just white people. I heard it from all walks of life.)  At the time, though, I didn’t realize how wrong they were. I thought they were right. Not because I wanted to be white, but because all of the guitarists I’d seen on TV were white guys—from grunge to those acoustic jam band boys. So maybe it is a white thing. Maybe I should stop. Maybe this wasn’t meant for me… Then I was introduced to the music of Jimi Hendrix. I can’t remember my music life before knowing him. I was hooked. I was flabbergasted. I was broken in the best sense of the word. Everything I thought I knew about life and being Black with a guitar went up in a purple haze. That was the realization that made me say out loud, “Black people DO play guitar!” I. Was. OBSESSED. I began listening to the Smash Hits compilation that your grandma got me one Christmas. Like any guitar player, my ego obviously made me believe I was Jimi reincarnated. I mean, it just made sense, right??? We were both skinny, awkward, born and raised in Seattle, and Black… I mean, come on! He died in 1970, and I was born in 1989, giving him 19 years to reincarnate as me… not crazy at all. Totally normal, like my tinfoil hat! I even started dressing like him, and wearing loud red velvet pants and velvet vests… I wore lots and lots of velvet. I also wore psychedelic colors (before my all-black phase began, which continues to this day). Most of the clothes I had were my mom’s. Either she would hand them down to me, or I would sneak into her closet after she left for work—shout-out to moms!  Jimi Hendrix was the first person who made me feel seen. His presence, his music, his whole goddamn existence flipped a switch in my brain that made me go, “I can absolutely pursue this guitar thing!” Before, I’d considered putting the guitar down because I felt so out of place and discouraged by the outside world, from my peers to MTV. I don’t know if I would be where I am today had I not been introduced to Hendrix, the guitarist. Since then, of course, I’ve learned about a whole giant bunch of Black guitarists, and I would have eventually heard of Jimi because he’s the greatest of all time, but I really needed him at that point in my youth, and he got me through some hardcore self-doubt. When people say representation is important, this is example No. 1 for me.  He was the spark I needed to stay persistent in the thing I loved doing—playing the guitar. So, when you came around, I felt as if I owed him my firstborn child. But, since he died decades ago, I thought that giving you his name was an acceptable alternative. We hope you like it!  (Oh, by the way: I still haven’t tried acid, and at this point, I'm no longer interested. Although I did tell myself that if I make it to 80 years old, I might give it a second thought. Check back in with me then!)  Eva Walker is a writer, a KEXP DJ, one-half of the rock duo the Black Tones, and mom to her baby girl, Hendrix. She also cowrote the book The Sound of Seattle: 101 Songs That Shaped a City, which was released in 2024. Every month for The Stranger, she writes a letter to Hendrix to share wisdom learned from her experiences—and her mistakes. Read all installments here. ...read more read less