Between
the World and Me (2016)
Ta-Nehesi Coates
And
one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled
upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms
And
the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the
world and me. . . .
-RICHARD
WRIGHT
I.
Do not
speak to me of martyrdom, of men who die to be remembered on some
parish day.
I
don't believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like
castanets will echo me.
-SONIA
SANCHEZ
Son,
Last
Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose
my body. The host
was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote
studio on the far west side of Manhattan.
A satellite closed the miles between us, but no
machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which
I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her
face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words,
written by me earlier that week.
The
host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she
turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it
specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking
about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their
request. Specifically, the
5
host wished
to know why I
felt that
white America's progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who
believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing
this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to
this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is
American history.
There
is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a
way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time,
stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and
America's heresies-- torture, theft, enslavement-- are so common among
individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In
fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When
Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must
ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth," he was not merely being aspirational;
at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of
the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether
Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country
has, throughout its history, taken the political term "people" to
actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother,
and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its
betrayal of "government of the people," but the means by which "the
people" acquired their names.
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This
leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans
implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans
believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of
the natural world. Racism-- the need to ascribe bone-deep features to
people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them-- inevitably
follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is
rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to
deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores
an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as
beyond the handiwork of men.
But
race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming
"the people" has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so
much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the
belief in the pre-eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these
factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper
attributes, which are indelible-- this is the new idea at the heart of
these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically,
deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
These
new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new
name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power.
The new people were something else before they were white-- Catholic,
Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite,
Jewish-- and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they
will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become
American
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and create a nobler basis for
their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the
process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the
belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice
cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty,
labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs;
the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of
mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and
foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own
bodies.
The
new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some
point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the
violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have
yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse
America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes
itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a
lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the
terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One
cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I
propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism
seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an
exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all
around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face
value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to
live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done
in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I
think you know.
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I
write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the
year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes;
because you know now that Renisha
McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for
browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive
by and murder Tamir
Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And
you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock,
someone's grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you
did not before, that the police departments of your country have been
endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if
the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does
not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter
if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes
without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the
people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a
dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will
rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And
destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose
prerogatives include friskings,
detainings,
beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And
all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
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There
is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment.
The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country,
correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face
this. But all our phrasing-- race relations, racial chasm, racial
justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy--
serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it
dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks
bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must
always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the
graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon
the body.
That
Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried to explain this as
best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment,
the host flashed a widely shared picture of an eleven-year-old black
boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about
"hope." And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had
expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness
welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and
walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the
streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I
was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for
all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I
realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my
body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her
10
from the most gorgeous dream. I
have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns.
It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The
Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like
peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.
And for so long I have wanted to escape into the
Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has
never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding
made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists
by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for
all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that
moment, I was sad for you.
That
was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go
free. The men who had left his body in the
street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was
not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were
young and still believed. You
stayed up till 11 P.M. that night, waiting for
the announcement of an indictment, and when
instead it was announced that there was none you said, "I've got to
go," and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in
five minutes after, and I didn't hug you, and I didn't comfort you,
because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you
that it would be okay, because I
11
have
never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your
grandparents tried to
tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this
is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black
body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life,
and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers
itself.
This
must seem strange to you. We live in a "goal oriented" era. Our media
vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of
everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This
rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console
me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained
American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of
my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live--
specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound
question because America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the
black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I
have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the
music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your
mother, your aunt Janai,
your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in
classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question
is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of
this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my
country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the
sheer terror of disembodiment.
12
13
And I
am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I
was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was
your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were
powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my
young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.
It was
always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys
of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big
puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their
armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak
and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin
Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those
boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding
themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi
mob gathered 'round their grandfathers so that the branches of the
black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their
practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the
calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and
garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm
possession of everything they desired.
I saw
it in their customs of war. I was no older than five, sitting out on
the front steps of my home on Woodbrook
Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close and buck
shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was a ritual to a street
fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very need, attested to all the
vulnerability of the black teenage bodies.
14
I
heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped
from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out
on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it
told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of
their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in
the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that
announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal
language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and
destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. "Keep my
name out your mouth," they would say. I would watch them after school,
how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks
on, and leaped at each other.
I felt
the fear in the visits to my Nana's home in Philadelphia. You never
knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner,
her rough voice. And I knew that my father's father was dead and that
my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each
of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who
loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My
father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather
belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat
me as if someone might steal me
15
away, because that is exactly
what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow,
to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost
girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that
these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their
lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear.
Have
they told you this story? When your grandmother was sixteen years old a
young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo's
boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and
wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there
first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother
terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she
could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small
hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that if l ever
let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to
life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped
from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious
minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I
knew would have done-- he reached for his belt. I remember watching him
in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense.
Later, I would hear it in Dad's voice--"Either I can beat him, or the
police." Maybe that saved
16
me. Maybe it didn't. All I know
is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I
cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love,
sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers
who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to
streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same
justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could
not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the
children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley
where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on
the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire
fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown,
laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything--
cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know
that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to
the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the
scourge.
To be
black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements
of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and
disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is
the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of
people forced for centuries to live under fear. The nakedness is the correct
and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced
for centuries to live under fear. The nakedness is not an error, nor
pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy,
the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under
fear.The law did not protect
us. And now, in your time, the law has become an
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excuse
for stopping and frisking
you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a
society that protects some people through a safety net of
schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can
only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at
enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much
darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the
criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those
forces is white or black-- what matters is our condition, what matters
is the system that makes your body breakable.
The
revelation of these forces, a series of great changes, has unfolded
over the course of my life. The changes are still unfolding and will
likely continue until I die. I was eleven years old, standing out in
the parking lot in front of the 7-Eleven, watching a crew of older boys
standing near the street. They yelled and gestured at ... who? ... another boy, young, like me, who
stood there, almost smiling, gamely throwing up his hands. He had
already learned the lesson he would teach me that day: that his body
was in constant jeopardy. Who knows what brought him to that knowledge?
The projects, a drunken stepfather, an older brother concussed by
police, a cousin pinned in the city jail. That he was outnumbered did
not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and
what do numbers matter? This was a war for the possession of his body
and that would be the war of his whole life.
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I
stood there for some seconds, marveling at the older boys' beautiful
sense of fashion. They all wore ski jackets, the kind which, in my day,
mothers put on layaway in September, then piled up overtime hours so as
to have the thing wrapped and ready for Christmas. I focused in on a
light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes. He was scowling at
another boy, who was standing close to me. It was just before three in
the afternoon. I was in sixth grade. School had just let out, and it
was not yet the fighting weather of early spring. What was the exact
problem here? Who could know?
The
boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a
gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as though in a dream. There the
boy stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked,
then untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage
that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was 1986. That year I
felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware
that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets
but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful
children-- fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of
rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until
the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body
in his small hands. The boy did not shoot. His friends pulled him back.
He did not need to shoot. He had affirmed my place in the order of
things. He had let it be known how easily I could be selected. I took
the subway home that day, processing the episode all alone. I did not
tell my parents. I did not tell my teachers, and if I told my friends I
would have done so with all the excitement needed to obscure the fear
that came over me in that moment.
19
I
remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the
nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West
Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my
cousins lived;
that the South Side of Chicago, where
friends of my father lived, comprised a
world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the
asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly
fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television
resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this
television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world.
There were little white boys with complete collections of football
cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only
worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless,
organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream
sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in
wooded backyards with streams and glens. Comparing these dispatches
with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country
was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West
Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed
over the distance between that other sector
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of space
and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies
were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other,
liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy
preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation
between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice,
a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to
unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
Do you
ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own.
The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known
thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen
so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants their homes, their
hobbies-up close. I don't know what it means to grow up with a black
president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women
everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed
the killer of Michael Brown, you said, "I've got to go." And that cut
me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was
exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to
imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was
Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and
narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.
Before
I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this
could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just
physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the
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array
of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the
asphalt itself The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions,
and every incorrect answer risks a beatdown,
a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the
heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of
near-death experience, is thrilling. This is what the rappers mean when
they pronounce themselves addicted to "the streets" or in love with
"the game." I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists, rock
climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to live on the edge. Of
course, we chose nothing. And I have never believed the brothers who
claim to "run," much less "own," the city. We did not design the
streets. We do not fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there,
nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protection of my
body.
The
crews, the young men who'd transmuted their fear into rage, were the
greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood,
loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that
they might feel any sense of security and power. They would break your
jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel
in the might of their own bodies. And their wild reveling, their
astonishing acts made their names ring out. Reps were made, atrocities
recounted. And so in my Baltimore it was known that when Cherry Hill
rolled through you rolled the other way, that North and Pulaski was not
an intersection but a hurricane, leaving only splinters and shards in
its wake.
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In
that fashion, the security of these neighborhoods flowed downward and
became the security of the bodies living there. You steered clear of JoJo, for instance, because he
was cousin to Keon, the don of Murphy Homes. In other cities, indeed in
other Baltimores, the
neighborhoods had other handles and the boys went by other names, but
their mission did not change: prove the inviolability of their block,
of their bodies, through their power to crack knees, ribs, and arms.
This practice was so common that today you can approach any black
person raised in the cities of that era and they can tell you which
crew ran which hood in their city, and they can tell you the names of
all the captains and all their cousins and offer an anthology of all
their exploits.
To
survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I learned another
language consisting of a basic complement of head nods and handshakes.
I memorized a list of prohibited blocks. I learned the smell and feel
of fighting weather. And I learned that "Shorty, can I see your bike?"
was never a sincere question, and "Yo,
you was messing with my cousin" was neither an earnest accusation nor a
misunderstanding of the facts. These were the summonses that you
answered with your left foot forward, your right foot back, your hands guarding your face,
one slightly lower than the other, cocked like a hammer. Or they were
answered by breaking out, ducking through alleys, cutting
through
23
backyards,
then bounding through the door past your kid brother into your bedroom,
pulling the tool out of your lambskin or from under your mattress or
out of your Adidas shoebox, then calling up your own cousins (who
really aren't) and returning to that same block, on that same day, and
to that same crew, hollering out, "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" I
recall learning these laws clearer than I recall learning my colors and
shapes, because these laws were essential to the security of my body.
I
think of this as a great difference between us. You have some
acquaintance with the old rules, but they are not as essential to you
as they were to me. I am sure that you have had to deal with the
occasional roughneck
on the subway or in the park, but when I was about your age, each day, fully one-third of my
brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise
number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or
what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not-- all of which is
to say that I practiced the culture of the streets-- a, culture
concerned chiefly with securing the body. I do not long for those days.
I have no desire to make you "tough" or "street," perhaps because any
"toughness" I garnered came reluctantly. I think I was always, somehow,
aware of the price. I think I somehow knew that that third of my brain
should have been concerned with more beautiful things. I think I felt
that something out there, some force, nameless and vast, had robbed me
of ... what? Time? Experience? I think you know something of what that
third could have
24
done,
and I think that is why you may feel the need for escape even more than I did. You have
seen all the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you understand
that there is no real distance between you and Trayvan
Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a way that he could
never terrify me. You have seen so much more of all that is lost when
they destroy your body. The streets were not my only problem. If the
streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to
comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to
comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later. I suffered at
the hands of both, but I resent the schools more. There was nothing
sanctified about the laws of the streets-- the laws were amoral and
practical. You rolled with a posse to the party as sure as you wore
boots in the snow, or raised an umbrella in the rain. These were rules
aimed at something obvious-- the great danger that haunted every visit
to Shake & Bake, every bus ride downtown. But the laws of the
schools were aimed at something distant and vague. What did it mean to,
as our elders told us, "grow up and be somebody"? And what precisely
did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline? To
be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant always packing an extra number
2 pencil and working quietly. Educated children walked in single file
on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the
lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when enroute. Educated children never offered excuses--
certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods
of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra,
Biology, and English
25
were not subjects
so much as opportunities to better
discipline the body, to practice writing between the lines, copying the
directions legibly, memorizing theorems extracted from the world they
were created to represent.
All of it felt so distant to me. I remember sitting in my seventh-grade
French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know
any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France
was a rock rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another
sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting in this
classroom?
The
question was never answered. I was a curious boy, but the schools were
not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I
loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any
of them. Some years after I'd left school, after I'd dropped out of
college, I heard a few lines from Nas
that struck me:
Ecstasy,
coke, you say it love, it is poison
Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison
That
was exactly how I felt back then. I sensed the schools were hiding
something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so
that we did not ask: Why-- for us and only us-- is the other side of
free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is not a
hyperbolic concern. When our elders presented school to us, they did
not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape
from death and penal warehousing.
26
Fully
60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go
to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, and while I
couldn't crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed
that the fear that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the
schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps
they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.
Unfit
for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them, and
lacking the savvy I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be
no escape for me or, honestly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would knuckle up, call
on cousins and crews, and, if it came to it, pull guns seemed to have
mastered the streets. But their knowledge peaked at seventeen, when
they ventured out of their parents' homes and discovered that America
had guns and cousins, too. I saw their futures in the tired faces of
mothers dragging themselves onto the 28 bus, swatting and cursing at
three-year-olds; I saw their futures in the men out on the corner
yelling obscenely at some young girl because she would not smile. Some
of them stood outside liquor stores waiting on a few dollars for a
bottle. We would hand them a twenty and tell them to keep the change.
They would dash inside and return with Red Bull, Mad Dog, or Cisco.
Then we would walk to the house of someone whose mother worked nights,
play "Fuck tha Police,"
and drink to our youth. We could not get out. The ground we walked was
trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our
growth. We could not get out.
27
A year
after I watched the boy with the small eyes pull out a gun, my father
beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat
me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough
could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We
could not get out. I was a capable boy, intelligent, wellliked, but powerfully
afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked
off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great
injustice. And what was the source of this fear? What was hiding behind
the smoke screen of streets and schools? And what did it mean that
number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems,
handshakes, and head nods were the difference between life and death,
were the curtains drawing down between the world and me?
I
could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries.
My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the
people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We
would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just
God was on my side. "The meek shall inherit the earth" meant nothing to
me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on
Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My
understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent
toward chaos then concluded in a box.
28
That
was the message of the small-eyed boy, untucking the piece-- a child
bearing the power to body and banish other children to memory. Fear
ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that
this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys,
to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly
beamed into our television sets.
But
how? Religion could not tell me. The schools could not tell me. The
streets could not help me see beyond the scramble of each day. And I
was such a curious boy. I was raised that way. Your grandmother taught
me to read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by which
I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of
paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was
in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write
about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I
feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not
believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want
someone to behave while I was talking? What would I do the next time I
felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? I have given you
these same assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they
would curb your behavior-- they certainly did not curb mine-- but
because these were the earliest acts
29
of
interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness.
Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was
teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the
most sympathy and rationalizing myself. Here was the lesson: I was not
an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And
feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other
humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this
mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they
built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?
Now
the questions began burning in me. The materials for research were all
around me, in the form of books assembled by your grandfather. He was then working at
Howard University as a research librarian in the Moorland Spingarn
Research Center, one of the largest collections of Africana in the
world. Your
grandfather loved books and loves them to this day, and they were all
over the house, books about black people, by black people, for black
people spilling off shelves and out of the living room, boxed up in the
basement. Dad had been a local captain in the Black Panther Party. I
read through all of Dad's books about the Panthers and his stash of old
Party newspapers. I was attracted to their guns, because the guns
seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented
the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary
language-- violence. And I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men
and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew.
30
31
Every
February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual
review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the
example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and
it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films
dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in
these films seemed to love the worst things in life-- love the dogs
that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their
lungs, the firehoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into
the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who
cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that
bombed them. "Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes
nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the
sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all
I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to
say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven
parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and "Yeah,
nigger, what's up now?" I judged them against the country I knew, which
had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery,
against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend
their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and
ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women
whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into
the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of
nonviolence?
32
I came
to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One
enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its
implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.
Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take
your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back
to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to
see these two arms in relation-- those who failed in the schools
justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, "He
should have stayed in school," and then wash its hands of him.
It
does not matter that the "intentions" of individual educators were
noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents,
"intend" for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play
defense-- ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few
Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people
being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do
all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that
schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great
number of educators spoke of "personal responsibility" in a country
authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of
this language of "intention" and "personal responsibility" is broad
exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were
enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. "Good intention" is a hall
pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
33
An
unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now
felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again.
I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an
answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father
were always pushing me away from secondhand answers-- even the answers
they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any
satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question
is refined. That is the best
of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being "politically
conscious"-- as much a series of actions
as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual,
questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty. Some
things were clear to me: The violence that undergirded the country, so
flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate
violence of "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" were not unrelated. And this
violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design. But what
exactly was the design? And why? I must know. I must get out ...
but into what?
I devoured the books because they were the rays of
light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there
was another world, one beyond the gripping fear that undergirded the
Dream.
34
In
this blooming consciousness, in this period of intense questioning, I
was not alone. Seeds planted in the 1960s, forgotten by so many, sprung up from the ground
and bore fruit. Malcolm X, who'd been dead for twenty-five years,
exploded out of the small gatherings of his surviving apostles and
returned to the world. Hip-hop artists quoted him in lyrics, cut his
speeches across the breaks, or flashed his likeness in their videos.
This was the early '90s. I was then approaching the end of my time in
my parents' home and wondering about my life out there. If I could have
chosen a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a portrait
of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie dangling, one hand
parting a window shade, the other holding a
rifle. The portrait communicated everything I wanted
to be-- controlled, intelligent, and beyond the fear. I would buy tapes
of Malcolm's speeches-- "Message to the Grassroots," "The Ballot or the
Bullet"-- down at Everyone's Place, a black bookstore on North Avenue,
and play them on my Walkman. Here was all the angst I felt before the
heroes of February, distilled and quotable. "Don't give up your life,
preserve your life," he would say. "And if you got to give it up, make
it even-steven." This was not boasting-- it was a declaration of
equality rooted not in better angels or the intangible spirit but in
the sanctity of the black body. You preserved your life because your
life, your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as
precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for
spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. You do not
35
give
your precious body to the billy
clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the
insidious gravity of the streets. Black is beautiful-- which is to say
that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded
against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be
guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected
against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must
never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original
self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.
I
loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the schools and their
facade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the
world of dreamers. I loved him because he made it plain, never mystical
or esoteric, because his science was
not rooted in the
actions of
spooks and mystery gods
but in the work of the physical world.
Malcolm
was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd
ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they
were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If
he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the
enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the
other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not
be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black
man above the laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with
him.
I knew
that had chafed against the schools, that he had almost been doomed by
the streets. But even more I knew that he had found himself while
studying in prison, and that when he emerged from the jails, he
returned wielding some old power that made him speak as though his body
were his own. "If
36
you're black, you were born in
jail," Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had
to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home
from school, in my lack of control over my body. Perhaps I too might
live free. Perhaps I too might wield the same old power that animated
the ancestors, that lived in Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Nanny, Cudjoe, Malcolm X, and speak--
no, act-- as though my body were my own.
My
reclamation would be accomplished, like Malcolm's, through books,
through my own study and exploration. Perhaps I might write something
of consequence someday. I had been reading and writing beyond the
purview of the schools all my life. Already I was scribbling down bad
rap lyrics and bad poetry. The air of that time was charged with the
call for a return, to old things, to something essential, some part of
us that had been left behind in the mad dash of it of the past and into
America.
This
missing thing, this lost essence, explained the boys on the corner and
"the babies having babies." It explained everything, from our
cracked-out fathers to HIV to the bleached skin of Michael Jackson. The
missing thing was related to the plunder of our bodies, the fact that
any claim to ourselves,
to the hands that secured us, the spine that braced us, and the head
that directed us, was contestable.
This
was two years before the Million Man March. Almost every day I played
Ice Cube's album Death Certificate: "Let me live my life, if we can no
longer live our life, then let us give our life for the
37
38
liberation and salvation of the
black nation." I kept the Black Power episodes of Eyes
on the Prize in my weekly rotation. I was haunted by the
shadow of my father's generation, by Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. I was
haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Malcolm, by Attica and Stokely. I was haunted because I
believed that we had left ourselves back there, undone by COINTELPRO
and black flight and drugs, and now in the crack era all we had were
our fears. Perhaps we should go back. That was what I heard in the call
to "keep it real." Perhaps we should return to ourselves, to our own
primordial streets, to our own ruggedness, to our own rude hair.
Perhaps we should return to Mecca.
My
only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University. I have tried
to explain this to you many times. You say that you hear me, that you
understand, but I am not so sure that the force of my Mecca--The
Mecca-- can be translated into your new and eclectic tongue. I am not
even sure that it should be. My work is to give you what I know of my
own particular path while allowing you to walk your own. You can no
more be black like I am black than I could be black like your
grandfather was. And still, I maintain that even for a cosmopolitan boy
like you, there is something to be found there-- a base, even in these
modern times, a port in the American storm. Surely I am biased by
nostalgia and tradition. Your grandfather worked at Howard. Your uncles
Damani and Menelik and your aunts Kris and
Kelly graduated from there. I met your mother there, your uncle Ben,
your aunt Kamilah and
aunt Chana.
39
I was
admitted to Howard University, but formed and shaped by The Mecca.
These institutions are related but not the same. Howard University is
an institution of higher education, concerned with the LSAT, magna cum
laude, and Phi Beta Kappa. The Mecca is a machine, crafted to capture
and concentrate the dark energy of all African peoples and inject it
directly into the student body. The Mecca derives its power from the
heritage of Howard University, which in Jim Crow days enjoyed a
near-monopoly on black talent. And whereas most other historically
black schools were scattered like forts in the great wilderness of the
old Confederacy, Howard was in Washington, D.C.- - Chocolate City-- and
thus in proximity to both federal power and black power. The result was
an alumni and professorate that spanned genre and generation-- Charles
Drew, Amiri Baraka,
Thurgood Marshall, Ossie Davis, Doug Wilder, David Dinkins, Lucille
Clifton, Toni Morrison, Kwame
Ture. The history, the location, the alumni combined to create The
Mecca-- the crossroads of the black diaspora.
I
first witnessed this power out on the Yard, that communal green space
in the center of the campus where the students gathered and I saw
everything I knew of my black self multiplied out into
40
seemingly
endless variations.
There were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits
giving dap to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs. There were the
high-yellow progeny of AME preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There were California
girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt. There were
Ponzi schemers and
Christian cultists, Tabernacle fanatics and mathematical geniuses. It
was like listening to a hundred different renditions of "Redemption
Song;' each in a different color and key. And overlaying all of this
was the history of Howard itself. I knew that I was literally walking
in the footsteps of all the Toni Morrisons
and Zora Neale Hurstons,
of all the Sterling Browns and Kenneth Clarks, who'd come before. The
Mecca-- the vastness of black people across spacetime--
could be experienced in a twenty-minute walk across campus. I saw this
vastness in the students chopping it up in front of the Frederick
Douglass Memorial Hall, where Muhammad Ali had addressed their fathers
and mothers in defiance of the Vietnam War. I saw its epic sweep in the
students next to Ira Aldridge Theater, where Donny Hathaway had once
sung, where Donald Byrd had once assembled his flock. The students came
out
with their saxophones, trumpets, and
drums, played "My Favorite Things" or "Someday My Prince Will Come."
Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain
Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping,
stepping. Some of them came up from Tubman Quadrangle with their
roommates and rope for Double Dutch.
41
Some
of them came down from Drew Hall, with their caps cocked and their backpacks slung through one arm,
then fell into gorgeous ciphers of beatbox and rhyme. Some of the girls
sat by the flagpole with bell hooks and Sonia Sanchez in their straw
totes. Some of the boys, with their new Yoruba names, beseeched these
girls by citing Frantz Fanon. Some
of them studied Russian. Some
of them worked in bone labs. They were Panamanian. They were Bajan. And
some of them were from places I had never heard of. But all of them
were hot and incredible, exotic even, though we hailed from the same
tribe.
The
black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that
world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe
they are white. "White America" is a syndicate arrayed to protect its
exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this
power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).
But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is
central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people"
would cease to exist for want of reasons. There will surely always be
people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all
history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have
been "black," and this points
to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose
our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with
enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up
with a one-drop rule that separated the "white" from the "black," even
if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash.
42
The
result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and
whose life stories mirror this physical range. Through The Mecca I saw
that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The
black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the
Western world itself.
Now,
the heirs of those Virginia planters could never directly acknowledge
this legacy or reckon with its power. And so that beauty that Malcolm
pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in
television, or in the textbooks I'd seen as a child. Everyone of any
import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your
grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white
faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books
that spoke of black people only as sentimental "firsts"-- first black five star general, first black
congressman, first black mayor-- always presented in the bemused manner
of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the
West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read
from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can't remember where I read it, or when-- only that I was
already at Howard. "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Bellow quipped.
Tolstoy was "white," and so Tolstoy "mattered," like everything else
that was white "mattered." And this view of things was connected to the
fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of
dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible
43
spectrum, beyond civilization.
Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our
bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be
accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be
better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some
legitimate Christian use?
Contrary
to this theory, I had Malcolm. I had my mother and father. I had my
readings of every issue of The Source
and Vibe. I read them not merely
because I loved black music-- I did-- but because of the writing
itself. Writers like Greg Tate, Chairman Mao, dream hampton-- barely older than me--
were out there creating a new language, one that I intuitively
understood, to analyze our art, our world. This was, in and of itself,
an argument for the weight and beauty of our culture and thus of our
bodies. And now each day, out on the Yard, I felt this weight and saw
this beauty, not just as a matter of theory but also as demonstrable
fact. And I wanted desperately to communicate this evidence to the
world, because I felt-- even if l did not completely know-- that the
larger culture's erasure of black beauty was intimately connected to
the destruction of black bodies.
What
was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of
our struggle. I had always known this, had heard the need for a new
history in Malcolm, had
seen the need addressed in my father's books. It was in the promise
behind their grand titles-- Children
of the Sun, Wonderful
44
Ethiopians of the Ancient
Cushite Empire, The
African Origin of Civilization. Here was not just our
history but the history of the world, weaponized to our noble ends.
Here was the primordial stuff of our
own Dream-- the Dream of a "black race"- -of our own Tolstoys who lived deep in the
African past, where we authored operas, pioneered secret algebra,
erected ornate walls, pyramids, colossi, bridges, roads, and all the
inventions that I then thought must qualify one's lineage for the ranks
of civilization. They had their champions, and somewhere we must have
ours. By then
I'd
read Chancellor
Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson-- writers central to the canon
of our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa Musa of Mali was
black, and Shabaka of
Egypt was black, and Yaa
Asantewaa of
Ashanti was black-- and "the black race" was a thing I supposed existed
from time immemorial, a thing that was real and mattered.
When I
came to Howard, Chancellor Williams's Destruction
of Black Civilization was my Bible. Williams himself had
taught at Howard. I read him when I was sixteen, and his work offered a
grand theory of multi-millennial European plunder.
The theory relieved me of certain troubling
questions—this is the point of nationalism-- and it gave me my Tolstoy.
I read about Queen Nzinga,
who ruled in Central Africa in the sixteenth century, resisting the
Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the Dutch. When the Dutch
ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by
ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her
body. That was the kind of power I sought, and the story of our own
royalty became for me a weapon.
45
My
working theory then held all black people as kings in exile, a nation
of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian
culture. Surely this was the message I took from gazing out on the
Yard. Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as
us?
I
needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest
collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center, where your grandfather once worked. Moorland held archives,
papers, collections, and virtually any book ever written by or about
black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca,
I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room
and fill out three call slips for three different works. I would take a
seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my
black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read,
while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new
vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention. I would arrive in
the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every
writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: Larry
Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore,
Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, Addison
Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Sterling
Brown. I remember believing that the key
46
to all
life lay in articulating the precise difference between
"the Black Aesthetic" and "Negritude." How, specifically, did Europe
under develop Africa? I must know. And if the Eighteenth Dynasty
pharaohs were alive today, would they live in Harlem? I had to inhale
all the pages.
I went
into this investigation imagining history to be a unified narrative,
free of debate, which, once uncovered, would simply verify everything I
had always suspected. The smokescreen would lift. And the villains who
manipulated the schools and the streets would be unmasked. But there
was so much to know-- so much geography to cover-- Africa, the
Caribbean, the Americas, the United States. And all of these areas had
histories, sprawling literary canons, fieldwork, ethnographies. Where
should I begin?
The
trouble came almost immediately. I did not find a coherent tradition
marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions.
Hurston battled Hughes, Du Bois warred with Garvey, Harold Cruse fought everyone. I
felt myself at the bridge of a great ship that I could not control
because C.L.R. James was a great wave and Basil Davidson was a swirling
eddy, tossing me about. Things I believed merely a week earlier, ideas
I had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another.
Had we retained any of our African inheritance? Frazier says it was all
destroyed, and this destruction evidences the terribleness of our
capturers. Herskovitz
says it lives on, and this evidences
47
the resilience
of our African spirit. By my second year,
it was natural for me to spend a typical day mediating between
Frederick Douglass's integration into America and Martin Delany's
escape into nationalism. Perhaps they were somehow both right. I had
come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching
in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of
dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away
from each other.
I
would take breaks from my reading, walk out to the vendors who lined
the streets, eat lunch on the Yard. I would imagine Malcolm, his body
bound in a cell, studying the books, trading his human eyes for the
power of flight. And I too felt bound by my ignorance, by the questions
that I had not yet understood to be more than just means, by my lack of
understanding, and by Howard itself. It was still a school, after all.
I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the
means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of
professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to
declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of
books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was
a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering
myself. The best parts of Malcolm pointed the way. Malcolm, always
changing, always evolving toward some truth that was ultimately outside
the boundaries of his life, of his body. I felt myself in motion, still
directed toward the total possession of my body, but by some other
route which I could not before then have imagined.
48
I was
not searching alone. I met your uncle Ben at The Mecca. He was, like
me, from one of those cities where everyday life was so different than
the Dream that it demanded an explanation. He came, like me, to The
Mecca in search of the nature and origin of the breach. I shared with
him a healthy skepticism and a deep belief that we could somehow read
our way out. Ladies loved him, and what a place to be loved-- for it
was said, and we certainly believed it to be true, that nowhere on the
Earth could one find a more beautiful assembly of women than on Howard
University's Yard. And somehow even this was part of the search-- the
physical beauty of the black body was all our beauty, historical and
cultural, incarnate. Your uncle Ben became a fellow traveler for life,
and I discovered that there was something particular about journeying
out with black people who knew the length of the road because they had
traveled it too.
I
would walk out into the city and find other searchers at lectures, book
signings, and poetry readings. I was still writing bad poetry. I read
this bad poetry at open mikes in local cafes populated mostly by other
poets who also felt the insecurity of their bodies. All of these poets
were older and
wiser than me, and many of them were well
read, and they brought this wisdom to bear on me and my work. What did I mean, specifically, by the loss of
my body? And if every black body was precious,
49
a one of one,
if Malcolm was correct
and you must preserve your life, how could I see these precious lives
as simply a Collective mass, as the amorphous residue of plunder? How
could I privilege the spectrum of dark energy over each particular ray
of light? These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to
think. The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of
possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the
enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing. And it
became clear that this was not just for the dreams concocted by
Americans to justify themselves but also for the dreams that I had
conjured to replace them. I had thought that I must mirror the outside
world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was
beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself. I
had forgotten my own self interrogations pushed upon me by my mother, or rather I had not yet
apprehended their deeper, lifelong meaning. I was only beginning to
learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger-- I
didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make
you delusional as it is to ennoble.
The
art I was coming to love lived in this void, in the not yet knowable,
in the pain, in the question. The older poets introduced me to artists
who pulled their energy from the void-- Bubber
Miley, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, C. K. Williams, Carolyn Porche. The older poets were
Ethelbert Miller, Kenneth Carroll, Brian
Gilmore. It is important that I tell you their names, that you know
that I have never
50
achieved
anything alone. I remember
sitting with Joel Dias-Porter, who had not gone to Howard but whom I
found at The Mecca, reviewing every line of Robert Hayden's "Middle
Passage." And I was stunned by how much Hayden managed to say without,
seemingly, saying anything at all-- he could bring forth joy and agony
without literally writing the words, which formed as pictures and not
slogans. Hayden imagined the enslaved, during the Middle Passage, from
the perspective of the enslavers-- a mind-trip for me, in and of
itself; why should the enslaver be allowed to speak? But Hayden's poems
did not speak. They conjured:
You
cannot stare that hatred down
or chain the fear that stalks the watches
I was
not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so much of what I'd
felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the immortal wish, and the
timeless will, I saw in Hayden's work. And that was what I heard in
Malcolm, but never like this-- quiet, pure, and unadorned. I was
learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of
what my mother had taught me all those years ago-- the craft of writing
as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth-- loose and
useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and
useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry
was not simply the transcription of notions-- beautiful writing rarely
is. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my
mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own
rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the
slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel
truths of life.
51
These
truths I heard in the works of other poets around the city. They were
made of small hard things-- aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex,
girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the
black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture and thus
reflected the spectrum I saw out on the Yard more than all of my
alliterative talk of guns or revolutions or paeans to the lost
dynasties of African antiquity. After these readings, I followed as the
poets would stand out on U Street or repair to a cafe and argue about
everything-- books, politics, boxing.
And their arguments reinforced the discordant tradition I'd found in
Moorland, and I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even
fear, as a kind of power. I
was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in
the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was
not an alarm. It was a beacon.
It
began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of
discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial
Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of
Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with
humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out
there, even among us. You must understand this.
52
Back
then, I knew, for instance, that just outside of Washington, D.C.,
there was a great enclave of black people who seemed, as much as
anyone, to have seized control of their bodies. This enclave was Prince
George's County "PG County" to the locals-- and it was, to my eyes,
very rich. Its residents had the same homes, with the same backyards,
with the same bathrooms, I'd seen in those televised dispatches. They
were black people who elected their own politicians, but these
politicians, I learned, superintended a police force as vicious as any
in America. I had heard stories about PG County from the same poets who
opened my world. These poets assured me that the PG County police were
not police at all but privateers, gangsters, gunmen, plunderers
operating under the color of law. They told me this because they wanted
to protect my body. But there was another lesson here: To be black and
beautiful was not a matter for gloating. Being black did not immunize
us from history's logic or the lure of the Dream. The writer, and that
was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation,
even his own nation. Perhaps his own
nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.
I
began to feel that something more than a national trophy case was
needed if I was to be truly free, and for that I have the history
department of Howard University to thank. My history professors thought
nothing of telling me that my search for myth was doomed, that the
stories I wanted to tell myself
53
could
not be matched to
truths. Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized
history. They had
seen so many Malcolmites
before and were ready. Their method was rough and direct. Did black
skin really convey nobility? Always? Yes. What about the blacks who'd
practiced slavery for millennia and sold slaves across the Sahara and
then across the sea? Victims of a trick. Would those be the same black
kings who birthed all of civilization? Were they then both deposed
masters of the galaxy and gullible puppets all at once? And what did I
mean by "black"? You know, black. Did I think this a timeless category
stretching into the deep past? Yes? Could it be supposed that simply
because color was important to me, it had always been so?
I
remember taking a survey class focusing on Central Africa. My
professor, Linda Heywood, was slight and bespectacled, spoke with a
high Trinidadian lilt that she employed like a hammer against young
students like me who confused agitprop with hard study. There was
nothing romantic about her Africa, or rather, there was nothing
romantic in the sense that I conceived of it. And
she took it back to the legacy of Queen Nzinga--
my
Tolstoy-- the very same Nzinga whose life I wished to
put in my trophy case. But when she told the story of Nzinga conducting negotiations
upon the woman's back, she told it
without any fantastic gloss, and it hit me hard as a
sucker punch: Among the people in that room, all those centuries ago,
my body, breakable at will, endangered in the streets, fearful in the
schools, was not closest to the queen's but to her adviser's, who'd
been broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she'd
ever seen, could sit.
54
I took
a survey of Europe post-1800. I saw black people, rendered through
"white" eyes, unlike any I'd seen before-- the black people looked
regal and human. I remember the soft face of Alessandro de' Medici, the
royal bearing of Bosch's black magi.
These images, cast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were
contrasted with those created after enslavement, the Samba caricatures
I had always known. What was the difference? In my survey course of
America, I'd seen portraits of the Irish drawn in the same ravenous,
lustful, and simian way. Perhaps there had been other bodies, mocked,
terrorized, and insecure. Perhaps the Irish too had once lost their
bodies. Perhaps being named "black" had nothing to do with any of this;
perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the
bottom, a human turned to object,
object turned to pariah.
This
heap of realizations was a weight. I found them physically painful and
exhausting. True, I was coming to enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that
must come with any odyssey. But in those early moments, the unceasing
contradictions sent me into a gloom. There was nothing holy or
particular in my skin; I was black because of history and heritage.
There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed,
and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn't
black; black skin wasn't even black. And now I looked back on my need
for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul
Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again--
fear that "they," the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were
right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of
civilization and humanity.
55
But
not all of us. It
must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph
Wiley in which he responded to Bellow's quip. "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy
of the Zulus," wrote Wiley. "Unless you find a profit in fencing off
universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership." And
there it was. I had accepted Bellow's premise. In fact, Bellow was no
closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga.
And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of
destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted
someone else's dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the
need for escape, and the invention of race-craft.
And
still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe-- on
one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out
there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that
every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad
diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party. I remember those
days like an OutKast
song, painted in lust and joy. A baldhead in shades and a tank top
stands across from Blackburn, the student center, with a long boa
draping his muscular shoulders. A conscious woman, in stonewash with
her dreads pulled back, is
56
giving
him the side-eye and laughing.
I am standing outside the library debating the Republican takeover of
Congress or the place of Wu-Tang Clan in the canon. A dude in a TribeVibe T-shirt walks up,
gives a pound, and we talk about the black bacchanals of the season-- Freaknik, Daytona, Virginia
Beach--and we wonder if this is the year we make the trip. It isn't.
Because we have all we need out on the Yard. We are dazed here because
we still remember the hot cities in which we were born, where the first
days of spring were laced with fear. And now, here at The Mecca, we are
without fear, we are the dark spectrum on parade.
These
were my first days of adulthood, of living alone, of cooking for
myself, of going and coming as I pleased, of my own room, of the chance
of returning there, perhaps, with one of those beautiful women who were
now everywhere around me. In my second year at Howard, I fell hard for
a lovely girl from California who was then in the habit of floating
over the campus in a long skirt and head wrap. I remember her large
brown eyes, her broad mouth and cool voice. I would see her out on the
Yard on those spring days, yell her name and then throw up my hands as
though signaling a touchdown-- but wider-- like the "W" in
"What up?" That was how we did it then. Her father was from Bangalore,
and where was that? And what were the laws out there? I did not yet
understand the import of my own questions. What I remember is my
ignorance. I remember watching her eat with her hands and
feeling
57
wholly
uncivilized with my fork. I remember
wondering why she wore so many scarves. I remember her going to India
for spring break and returning with a bindi
on her head and photos of her smiling Indian cousins. I told her,
"Nigga, you black" because that's all I had back then. But her beauty
and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she
kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right
there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to
me-- the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal
off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she
held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her
black body.
I fell
again, a short time later and in similar fashion, for another girl,
tall with long flowing dreadlocks. She was raised by a Jewish mother in
a small, nearly all-white town in Pennsylvania, and now, at Howard,
ranged between women and men, asserted this not just with pride but as
though it were normal, as though she were normal. I know it's nothing
to you now, but I was from a place-- America- where cruelty
toward humans who loved as their deepest instincts instructed was a
kind of law. I was amazed. This was something black people did? Yes.
And they did so much more. The girl with the long dreads lived in a
house with a man, a Howard professor, who was married to a white woman.
The Howard professor slept with men. His wife slept with women. And the
two of them slept with
58
59
each other.
They had a little boy who must be off to college
by now. "Faggot" was a word I had employed all my life. And now here
they were, The Cabal, The Coven, The Others, The Monsters, The
Outsiders, The Faggots, The
Dykes, dressed in all their human clothes. I am black, and have been
plundered and have lost my body But perhaps I too had the capacity for
plunder, maybe I would take another human's body to confirm myself in a
community.
Perhaps
I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch
illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not,
illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated
strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe. But my tribe was
shattering and reforming around me. I saw these people often, because
they were family to someone whom I loved. Their ordinary moments--
answering the door, cooking in the kitchen, dancing to Adina Howard--
assaulted me and expanded my notion of the human spectrum. I would sit
in the living room of that house, observing their private jokes, one
part of me judging them, the other reeling from the changes.
She
taught me to love in new ways. In my old house your grandparents ruled
with the fearsome rod. I have tried to address you differently-- an
idea begun by seeing all the other ways of love on display at The
Mecca. Here is how it started: I woke up one morning with a minor
headache. With each hour the headache grew. I was walking to
my job when I saw this girl on her
way to class.
I looked awful, and she gave me some Advil and kept going. By
mid-afternoon I could barely stand. I called my supervisor.
60
When
he arrived I lay down in the stockroom, because I had no idea what else
to do. I was afraid. I did not understand what was happening. I did not
know whom to call. I was lying there simmering, half-awake, hoping to
recover. My supervisor knocked on the door. Someone had come to see me.
It was her. The girl with the long dreads helped me out and onto the
street. She flagged down a cab. Halfway through the ride, I opened the
door, with the cab in motion, and vomited in the street. But I remember
her holding me there to make sure I didn't fall out and then holding me
close when I was done. She took me to that house of humans, which was
filled with all manner of love, put me in the bed, put Exodus on the CD
player, and turned the volume down to a whisper. She left a bucket by
the bed. She left a jug of water. She had to go to class. I slept. When
she returned I was back in form. We ate. The girl with the long dreads
who slept with whomever she chose, that being her own declaration of
control over her body, was there. I grew up in a house drawn between
love and fear. There was no room for softness. But this girl with the
long dreads revealed something else- that love could be soft and
understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
And I
could no longer predict where I would find my heroes. Sometimes I would
walk with friends down to U Street and hang out at the local clubs.
This was the era of Bad Boy and Biggie, "One More
61
Chance"
and "Hypno-tize." I
almost never danced, as much as I wanted to. I was crippled by some
childhood fear of my own body. But I would watch how black people
moved, how in these dubs they danced as though their bodies could do
anything, and their bodies seemed as free as Malcolm's voice. On the
outside black people controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their
bodies, which could be commandeered by the police; which could be
erased by the guns, which were so profligate; which could be raped,
beaten, jailed. But in the clubs, under the influence of two-for-one
rum and Cokes, under the spell of low lights, in thrall of hip-hop
music, I felt them to be in total control of every step, every music, I
felt them to be in total control of every step, every nod, every pivot.
All I
then wanted was to write as those black people danced, with control,
power, joy, warmth. I was in and out of classes at Howard. I felt that
it was time to go, to declare myself a graduate of The Mecca, if not
the university. I was publishing music reviews, articles, and essays in
the local alternative newspaper, and this meant contact with more human
beings. I had editors-- more teachers-- and these were the first white
people I'd ever really known on any personal level. They defied my
presumptions-- they were afraid neither for me nor of me. Instead they
saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be
treasured and harnessed. And they gave me the art of journalism, a
powerful technology for seekers, I reported on local DC., and I found
that people would tell me things,
62
that
the same softness that once made me a target now
compelled people to trust me with their stories. This was incredible. I
was barely out of the fog of childhood, where questions simply died in
my head. Now I could call and ask people why a popular store closed,
why a show had been canceled, why there were so many churches and so
few supermarkets. Journalism gave me another tool of exploration,
another way of unveiling the laws that bound my body. It was beginning
to come together-- even if I could not yet see what the "it" was.
In
Moorland I could explore the histories and traditions. Out on the Yard,
I could see these traditions in effect. And with journalism, I could
directly ask people about the two--or about anything else I might
wonder. So much of my life was defined by not knowing. Why did I live
in a world where teenage boys stood in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven
pulling out? Why was it normal for my father, like all the parents I
knew, to reach for his belt? And why was life so different out there,
in that other world past the asteroids? What did the people whose
images were once beamed into my living room have that I did not?
The
girl with the long
dreads who changed me, whom I so
wanted to love, she loved a boy about whom I think every day and about
whom I expect to think every day for the rest of my life. I think
sometimes that he was an invention, and in some ways he is, because
when the young are killed, they are haloed by all that was possible,
all that was plundered. But I know that I had love for this
boy,
63
Prince
Jones, which is to say that
I would smile whenever I saw him, for I felt the warmth when I was
around him and was slightly sad when the time came to trade clap and
for one of us to go. The thing to understand about Prince Jones is that
he exhibited the whole of his given name. He was handsome. He was tall
and brown, built thin and powerful like a wide receiver. He was the son
of a prominent doctor. He was born-again, a state I did not share but
respected. He was kind. Generosity radiated off of him, and he seemed
to have a facility with everyone and everything. This can never be
true, but there are people who pull the illusion off without effort,
and Prince was one of them. I can only say what I saw, what I felt.
There are people whom we
do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and
when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark
energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.
I fell
in love at The Mecca one last time, lost my balance and all my boyhood
confusion, under the spell of a girl from Chicago. This was your
mother. I see us standing there with a group of friends in the living
room of her home. I stood with a blunt in one hand and a beer in
another. I inhaled, passed it off to this Chicago girl, and when I
brushed her long elegant fingers, I shuddered a bit from the blast. She
brought the blunt to her plum-painted lips, pulled, exhaled, then
pulled the smoke back in. A week earlier I had kissed her, and now,
watching this display of smoke and flame (and already feeling the
effects), I was lost and running and wondering what it must be to
embrace her, to be exhaled by her, to return to her, and leave her high.
64
She
had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater
number of everyone I'd known. I felt then that these men-- these
"fathers"-- were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt that the
galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards
in our ranks. The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she
understood something more-- that all are not equally robbed of their
bodies, that the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I
could never truly know. And she was the kind of black girl who'd been
told as a child that she had better be smart because her looks wouldn't
save her, and then
told
as a young woman that she
was really pretty for a dark-skinned girl. And so
there was, all about her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same
knowledge I'd glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach for
his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living room, watching the golden-haired boys with
their toy trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great barrier between
the world and me.
Nothing
between us was ever planned-- not even you. We were both twenty-four
years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but
among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage parents.
With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we planned to
marry.
65
Marriage
was presented to us as a
shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of
dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and I knew too many people
who'd married and abandoned each other for less. The truth of us was
always that you were our ring. We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and
you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all
the protection we could muster. Everything else was subordinate to this
fact. If that sounds like a weight, it shouldn't. The truth is that I
owe you everything I have. Before you, I had my questions but nothing
beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all
because I was a young man, and not yet clear of my own human
vulnerabilities. But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact
that should I now go down, I would not go down alone.
This
is what I told myself, at least. It was comforting to believe that the
fate of my body and the bodies of my family were under my powers. "You
will have to man up," we tell our sons. "Anyone can make a baby, but it
takes a man to be a father." This is what they had told me all my life.
It was the language of survival, a myth that helped us cope with the
human sacrifice that finds us no matter our manhood. As though our
hands were ever our own. As though plunder of dark energy was not at
the heart of our galaxy. And the plunder was there, if I wished to see
it.
66
One
summer, I traveled out to Chicago to see your mother. I rode down the
Dan Ryan with friends and beheld, for the first time, the State Street
Corridor-- a four mile stretch of dilapidated public housing. There
were projects all over Baltimore, but nothing so
expansive as this. The housing occurred to me as a moral disaster not
just for the people living there but for the entire region, the
metropolis of commuters who drove by, each day, and with their quiet
acquiescence tolerated such a thing. But there was so much more there
in those projects than I was, even in all my curiosity, prepared to see.
Your
maternal grandmother once visited us during the pregnancy. She must
have been horrified. We were living in Delaware. We had almost no
furniture. I had left Howard without a degree and was living on the
impoverished wages of a freelance writer. On the last day of her visit,
I drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was her only
child, as you are my only child. And having watched you grow, I know
that nothing could possibly be more precious to her. She said to me,
"You take care of my daughter." When she got out of the car, my world
had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer
of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past
seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was
after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had. I submitted
before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something
more than survival's sake. I must survive for you.
67
You
were born that August. I thought of the great spectrum of The Mecca--
black people from Belize, black
people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers from Bangalore,
black people from Toronto and Kingston, black people who spoke Russian,
who spoke Spanish, who played Mongo Santamaria, who understood
mathematics and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the
enslaved. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I
wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its
entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the
streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole
world, as it is. I wanted "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus" to
immediately be obvious to you. And yet even in this cosmopolitan wish I
felt the old power of ancestry, because I had come to
knowledge at The Mecca that my ancestors made, and I was compelled
toward The Mecca by the struggle that my ancestors made.
The
Struggle is in your name, Samori--
you
were named for Samori
Toure, who
struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black
body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that struggle and others
like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often
true, escapes our grasp. I learned this living among a people whom I
would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not
always self-evident. We are, as Derrick Bell once wrote, the "faces at
the bottom of the well." But there really is wisdom down here, and that
wisdom accounts for much of the good in my life. And my life down here
accounts for you.
68
There
was also wisdom in those streets. I think now of the old rule that held
that should a boy be set upon in someone else's chancy hood, his
friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating
together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living.
None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to
the sky. We could not control our enemies' number, strength, nor weaponry. Sometimes you just
caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together,
because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do
is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends.
That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the
street, but despite that, we could-- and must-- fashion the way of our
walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name- that the struggle,
in and of itself, has meaning.
That
wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning
to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off
and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect
every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect
into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a
particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own,
whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the
light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing
where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves
69
her
mother in her own complicated
way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a
favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself,
that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. "Slavery" is this
same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom
and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these
same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her
father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back
into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for
more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she
dies, the world-- which is really the only world she can ever know--
ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It
is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our
history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than
we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were
born into chains-- whole generations followed by more generations who
knew nothing but chains.
You
must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and
humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting
narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some
irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and
their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were
people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not
destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance-- no
matter how improved-- as
70
the
redemption for the lives
of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of
dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.
Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we
have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his
world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no
promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all.
This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself:
verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
The
birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know,
each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. The
world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men
and women. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I
love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy,
and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys
cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of
other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And
you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful-- the policeman
who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your
furtive movements. And this is not reducible to just you-- the women
around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you never
will know. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot
lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they
transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.
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II.
Our
world is full of sound
Our
world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each
other
and
sometimes fail to walk the air
We
are beautiful people with african
imaginations
full
of masks and dances and swelling chants
with
African eyes, and noses, and arms,
though
we sprawl in grey chains in a place full of winters,
when what we want is sun.
AMIRI
BARAKA
73
Shortly
before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the
same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached
on both sides of the car, shining their flashing lights through the
windows. They took my identification and returned to the squad car. I
sat there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my teachers
what I'd learned about PG County through reporting and reading the
papers. And so I knew that the PG County police had killed Elmer Clay
Newman, then claimed
he'd rammed his own head into the wall of a jail cell. And I knew that
they'd shot Gary Hopkins and said he'd gone for an officer's gun. And I
knew they had beaten Freddie McCollum half-blind and blamed it all on a
collapsing floor. And I had read reports of these officers choking
mechanics, shooting construction workers, slamming suspects through the
glass doors of shopping malls.
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And I
knew that they did this with great regularity, as though moved by some
unseen cosmic clock. I knew that they shot at moving cars, shot at the
unarmed, shot through the backs of men and claimed that it had been
they who'd been under fire. These shooters were investigated,
exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened,
they shot again. At that point in American history, no police
department fired its guns more than that of Prince George's County. The
FBI opened multiple investigations-- sometimes in the same week. The
police chief was rewarded with a raise. I replayed all of this sitting
there in my car, in their clutches. Better to have been shot in
Baltimore, where there was the justice of the streets and someone might
call the killer to account. But these officers had my body, could do
with that body whatever they pleased, and should I live to explain what
they had done with it, this complaint would mean nothing. The officer
returned. He handed back my license. He gave no explanation for the
stop.
Then
that September I picked up The Washington Post
and saw that the PG County police had killed again. I could not help
but think that this could have been me, and holding you-- a month old
by then-- I knew that such loss would not be mine alone. I skimmed the
headline-- their atrocities seemed so common back then. The story
spread into a second day, and reading slightly closer, I saw it was
a
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Howard
student who had been killed.
I thought perhaps I knew him. But I paid it no further mind. Then on
the third day a photo appeared with the story, and I glimpsed
at and then focused on the portrait, and
I saw him there.
He was dressed in his formal clothes, as though it were his senior
prom, and frozen in the amber of his youth. His face was lean, brown,
and beautiful, and across that face, I saw the open, easy smile of
Prince Carmen Jones.
I
cannot remember what happened next. I think I stumbled back. I think I
told your mother what I'd read. I think I called the girl with the long
dreads and asked her if it could be true. I think she screamed. What I
remember for sure is what I felt: rage and the old gravity of West
Baltimore, the gravity that condemned me to the schools, the streets, the void. Prince Jones had made
it through, and still they had taken him. And even though I already
knew that I would never believe any account that justified this taking,
I sat down to read the story. There were very few details. He had been
shot by a PG County officer, not in PG County, not even in D.C., but
somewhere in Northern Virginia. Prince had been driving to see his
fiancée. He was killed yards from her home. The only witness to the
killing of Prince Jones was the killer himself The officer claimed that
Prince had tried to run him over with his jeep, and I knew that the
prosecutors would believe him.
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Days
later, your mother and I packed you into the car, drove down to
Washington, left you with your aunt Kamilah,
and went to the service for Prince at Rankin Chapel on Howard's campus,
where I'd once sat amazed at the parade of activists and
intellectuals-- Joseph Lowery, Cornel West, Calvin Butts-- who preached
at that pulpit. I must have seen a great
number of old friends there, though I cannot recall precisely who. What
I remember is all the
people who spoke of Prince's religious zeal, his abiding belief that
Jesus was with him. I remember watching the president of the university
stand and weep. I remember Dr. Mable Jones, Prince's mother, speaking
of her son's death as a call to move from her comfortable suburban life
into activism. I heard several people ask for forgiveness for the
officer who'd shot Prince Jones down. I only vaguely recall my
impressions of all this. But I know that I have always felt great
distance from the grieving rituals of my people, and I must have felt
it powerfully then. The need to forgive
the officer would not have moved me, because even then, in some
inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so
much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have
marked it from birth.
At
this moment the phrase "police reform" has come into vogue, and the
actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention
presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity,
sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and
applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this
country to pretend that there is real distance
78
between
their own attitudes and those
of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police
reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make
of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it
was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed
from these policies-- the sprawling carceral state, the random detention
of black people, the torture of suspects-- are the product of
democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the
American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same
self generated fears that compelled the people who think they are
white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the
police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled
by majoritarian pigs.
I knew
some of this even then, sitting in Rankin Chapel, even if I could not
yet express it. So forgiving the killer of Prince Jones would have
seemed irrelevant to me. The killer was the direct expression of all
his country's beliefs. And raised conscious, in rejection of a
Christian God, I could see no higher purpose in Prince's death. I
believed, and still do, that our bodies are ourselves, that my soul is
the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is
my flesh. Prince Jones was a one of one, and they had destroyed his
body, scorched his shoulders and arms, ripped open his back, mangled
lung, kidney, and liver. I sat there feeling myself a heretic,
believing only in this one-shot life and the body. For the crime of
destroying the body of Prince Jones, I did not believe in forgiveness.
When the assembled mourners bowed their heads in prayer, I
was divided from them because I believed that the void would not answer
back.
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Weeks
wore on. Nauseating details slowly dribbled out. The officer was a
known liar. A year earlier he had arrested a man on false evidence.
Prosecutors had been forced to drop every case in which the officer was
involved. The officer was demoted, restored, then
put out on the street to continue his work. Now, through additional
reports, a narrative began to take shape. The officer had been dressed
like an undercover drug dealer. He'd been sent out to track a man whose
build was five foot four and 250 pounds. We know from the coroner that
Prince's body was six foot three and 211 pounds. We know that the other
man was apprehended later. The charges against him were dropped. None
of this mattered. We know that his superiors sent this officer to
follow Prince from Maryland, through Washington, D.C., and into
Virginia, where the officer shot Prince several times. We know that the
officer confronted Prince with his gun drawn, and no badge. We know
that the officer claims he shot because Prince tried to run him over
with his jeep. We know that the authorities charged with investigating
this shooting did very little to investigate the officer and did
everything in their power to investigate Prince Jones. This
investigation produced no information that would explain why Prince
Jones would suddenly shift his ambitions from college to cop killing.
This officer, given maximum power, bore minimum responsibility. He was
charged with nothing. He was punished by no one. He was returned to his
work.
80
There
were times when I imagined myself, like Prince, tracked through many
jurisdictions by a man in a criminal's costume. And I was horrified,
because I knew what I would have done with such a man confronting me,
gun drawn, mere feet
from my own family's home. Take care of my baby, your grandmother had said, which was to say Take care
of your new family. But I now knew the limits of my caring, the reach
of its powers, etched by an enemy old as Virginia. I thought of all the
beautiful black people I'd seen at The Mecca, all their variation, all
their hair, all their language, all their stories and geography, all
their stunning humanity, and none of it could save them from the mark
of plunder and the gravity of our particular world. And it occurred to
me then that you would not escape, that there were awful men who'd laid
plans for you, and I could not stop them. Prince Jones was the
superlative of all my fears. And if he, good Christian, scion of a
striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever
bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince
alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for
Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the
treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and
Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of
the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on
babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft.
Think of checks written for
81
family
photos. Think of credit cards charged
for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits,
chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the
embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all
the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that
vessel of flesh and
bone. And think of how that vessel was
taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that
had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your
mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by
her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father.
And think of how Prince's
daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her
birthright-- that vessel which was her
father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love
and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy.
Now at
night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American
generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old
mantra-- "Either I can beat him or the police." I understood it all-- the
cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love
their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you
come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves
before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a
philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can
protect nothing, who are made to fear not just
82
the
criminals among them but the police
who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.
It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood
the grip of my mother's hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could
kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy
spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to
account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault
of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of
"race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of
invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will
not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to
his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature,
the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.
This
entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then,
animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my
days. I still had my journalism. My response was, in this moment, to
write. I was lucky I had even that. Most of us are forced to drink our
travesties straight and smile about it. I wrote about the history of
the Prince George's County police. Nothing had ever felt so essential
to me. Here is what I knew at the outset: The officer who killed Prince
Jones was black. The politicians who empowered this officer to kill
were black. Many of the black politicians, many of them twice as good,
seemed unconcerned. How could this be? It was like I was back at
Moorland again, called by great mysteries. But by then I didn't need
any call slips; the Internet had bloomed into an
83
instrument
of research. That must strike you
as novel. For all of your life, whenever you've had a question you have
been able to type that question out on a keyboard, watch it
appear in a rectangular space bordered by a corporate logo, and within
seconds revel in the flood of potential answers. But I still remember
when typewriters were useful, the dawn of the Commodore 64, and days
when a song you loved would have its moment on the radio and then
disappear into the nothing. I must have gone five years without hearing
the Mary Jane Girls sing "All Night Long." For a young man like me, the
invention of the Internet was the invention of space travel.
My
curiosity, in the case of Prince Jones, opened a world of newspaper
clippings, histories, and sociologies. I called politicians and
questioned them. I was told that the citizens were more likely to ask
for police support than to complain about brutality. I was told that
the black citizens of PG County were comfortable and had "a certain impatience" with
crime. I had seen these theories before, back when I was researching in
Moorland, leafing through the various fights within and without the
black community. I knew that these were theories, even in the mouths of
black people, that justified the jails springing up around me, that
argued for ghettos and projects, that
viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to the
preservation of order. According to this theory "safety" was a higher
value than justice, perhaps the highest value. I understood. What I
would not have given, back in Baltimore,
84
for a
line of officers, agents of my country
and my community, patrolling my route to school! There were no such
officers, and whenever I saw the police it meant that something had
already gone wrong. All along I knew that there were some, those who
lived in the Dream, for whom the conversation was different. Their
"safety" was in schools, portfolios, and skyscrapers. Ours was in men
with guns who could only view us with the same contempt as the society
that sent them.
And
the lack of safety cannot help but constrain your sense of the galaxy.
It never occurred to me, for instance, that I could, or should even
want to, live in New York. I did love Baltimore. I loved Charlie Rudo's and the sidewalk sales at
Mondawmin. I loved sitting out on the porch with your uncle Damani waiting for Frank Ski to
play "Fresh Is the Word." I always thought I was destined to go back
home after college-- but not simply because I loved home but because I
could not imagine much else for myself And that stunted imagination is
something I owe to my chains. And yet some of us really do see more.
I met
many of them at The Mecca-- like your uncle Ben, who was raised in New
York, which forced him to understand himself as an African American
navigating among Haitians, Jamaicans, Hasidic Jews, and Italians. And
there were others like him, others who, having gotten a boost from a
teacher, an aunt, an older brother, had peered over the wall as
children, and as adults became set on seeing the full view.
85
These
black people felt, as did
I, that their bodies could be snatched back at a whim, but this set in
them a different kind of fear that propelled them out into the cosmos.
They spent semesters abroad. I never knew what they did or why. But
perhaps I always sensed I was going down too easy. Perhaps that
explains every girl I've ever loved, because every girl I've ever loved
was a bridge to somewhere else. Your mother, who knew so much more of
the world than me, fell in love with New York through culture, through Crossing Delancey,
Breakfast at Tiffany's, Working Girl, Nas,
and Wu-Tang. Your mother secured a job, and I followed, stowed away
almost, because no one in New York, at that time, was paying for me to
write much of anything. What little I did make, reviewing an album or a
book, covered approximately two electric bills every year.
We
arrived two months before September 11, 2001. I suppose everyone who
was in New York that day has a story. Here is mine: That evening, I
stood on the roof of an apartment building with your mother, your aunt
Chana, and her boyfriend, Jamal. So we were there on the roof, talking
and taking in the sight-- great plumes of smoke covered Manhattan
Island. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who was missing. But
looking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold. I had
disasters all my own. The officer
who killed Prince Jones, like all the officers who regard us so warily,
was the sword of the American citizenry. I would never consider any
American citizen pure. I was out of sync with the city. I kept thinking
about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They
auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly
named, financial district.
86
And
there was once a burial ground for the auctioned there. They built a
department store over part of it and then tried to erect a government
building over another part. Only a community of right-thinking black
people stopped them. I had not formed any of this into a coherent
theory. But I did know that Bin Laden was not the first man to bring
terror to that section of the city. I never forgot that. Neither should
you. In the days after, I watched the ridiculous pageantry of flags,
the machismo of firemen, the
overwrought slogans. Damn it all. Prince Jones was dead. And hell upon
those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter. Hell for
ancestral fear that put black parents under terror. And hell upon those
who shatter the holy vessel.
I
could see no difference between the officer
who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters
who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they
were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm,
which could-- with no justification-- shatter my body.
I saw
Prince Jones, one last time, alive and whole. He was standing in front
of me. We were in a museum. I felt in that moment that his death had
just been an awful dream. No, a premonition. But I had a chance. I
would warn him. I walked over, gave him a pound, and felt that heat of
the spectrum, the warmth of The Mecca. I wanted to tell him something.
I wanted to say-- Beware the plunderer. But when I opened my mouth, he
just shook his head and walked away.
87
We
lived in a basement apartment in Brooklyn, which I doubt you remember,
down the street from Uncle Ben and his wife, your aunt Janai. These were not great
times. I remember borrowing two hundred dollars from Ben, and it
feeling like a million. I remember your grandfather coming to New York,
taking me out for Ethiopian, after which I walked him to the West
Fourth Street subway station. We said our goodbyes and walked away. He
called me back. He had forgotten something. He handed me a check for
$120. I tell you this because you must understand, no matter the point
of our talk, that I didn't always have things, but I had people-- I
always had people. I had a mother and father who I would match against
any other. I had a brother who looked out for me all through college. I
had The Mecca that directed me. I had friends who would leap in front
of a bus for me. You need to know that I was loved, that whatever my
lack of religious feeling, I have always loved my people and that broad
love is directly related to the specific love I feel for you. I
remember sitting out on Ben's stoop on Friday nights, drinking Jack
Daniel's, debating the mayor's race or the rush to war. My weeks
felt
88
aimless.
I pitched to various magazines with no success. Your aunt Chana lent me
another two hundred dollars; I burned it all on a scam bartending
school. I delivered food for a small deli in Park Slope. In New York,
everyone wanted to know your occupation. I told people that I was
"trying to be a writer."
Some
days I would take the train into Manhattan. There was so much money
everywhere, money flowing out of bistros and cafes, money pushing the
people, at incredible speeds, up the wide avenues, money drawing
intergalactic traffic through Times Square, money in the limestones and
brownstones, money out on West Broadway where white people spilled out
of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police. I would see
these people at the club, drunken, laughing, challenging breakdancers to battles. They
would be destroyed and humiliated in these battles. But afterward they
would clap, laugh, order
more beers. They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I
looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing
double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts
and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other,
mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with
their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was
communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.
And so
when I remember pushing you in your stroller to other
parts of the city, the West Village for instance, almost instinctively
believing that you should see more, I remember feeling ill at ease,
like I
89
had borrowed someone else's
heirloom, like I was traveling under an assumed name. All this time you
were growing into words and feelings; my beautiful brown boy, who would
soon come into the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts of
his galaxy, and all the extinction-level events that regarded you with
a singular and discriminating interest.
You
would be a man one day, and I could not save you from the unbridgeable
distance between you and your future peers and colleagues, who might
try to convince you that everything I know, all the things I'm sharing
with you here, are an illusion, or a fact of a distant past that need
not be discussed. And I could not save you from the police, from their
flashlights, their hands, their nightsticks, their guns. Prince Jones,
murdered by the men who should have been his security guards, is always
with me, and I knew that soon he would be with you.
In
those days I would come out of the house, turn onto Flatbush Avenue,
and my face would tighten like a Mexican wrestler's mask, my eyes would
dart from corner to corner, my arms loose, limber, and ready. This need
to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow
siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our
bodies. So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules
designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort
your body to address
the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and
contort again so
90
as not
to give the police a reason.
All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to
"be twice as good;' which is to say "accept half as much." These words
would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken
quality, some undetected courage, when in fact
all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket.
This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to
smile. No one told those little white children, with their tricycles,
to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them to take
twice as much. It seemed to me that our own rules redoubled plunder. It
struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the
black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we
spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much,
could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in
lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have
just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss that you do
not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the
raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.
One
afternoon your mother and I took you to visit a preschool. Our host
took us down to a large gym filled with a bubbling ethnic stew of New
York children. The children were running, jumping, and
91
tumbling.
You took one look at
them, tore away from us, and ran right into the scrum. You have never
been afraid of people, of rejection, and I have always admired you for
this and always been afraid for you because of this. I watched you leap
and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me
and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, "We
don't know these folks! Be cool!" I did not do this. I was growing, and
if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew that there was
nothing noble in it. But now I understand the gravity of what I was
proposing-- that a four-year-old child be
watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you
submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the
boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children,
I am ashamed.
New
York was another spectrum unto itself, and the great diversity I'd seen
at Howard, solely among black people, now spread across a metropolis.
Something different awaited
around every corner. Here there were African drummers assembling in
Union Square. Here there were dead office towers, brought to life at
night by restaurants buried within that served small kegs of beer and
Korean fried chicken. Here there were black girls with white boys, and
black boys with Chinese-American girls, and Chinese American girls
with Dominican boys, and Dominican boys with Jamaican boys and every
other
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imaginable
combination. I would walk
through the West Village, marveling at restaurants the size of living
rooms, and I could see that the very smallness of these restaurants
awarded the patrons a kind of erudite cool, as though they were
laughing at a joke, and it would take the rest of the world a decade to
catch on. Summer was unreal-- whole swaths of the city became fashion
shows, and the avenues were nothing but runways for the youth. There
was a heat unlike anything I'd ever felt, a heat from the great
buildings, compounded by the millions of people jamming themselves into
subway cars, into bars, into those same tiny eateries and cafes. I had
never seen so much life. And I had never imagined that such life could
exist in so much variety. It was everyone's particular Mecca, packed
into one singular city.
But
when I got off the train and came back to my hood, to my Flatbush
Avenue, or my Harlem, the fear still held. It was the same boys, with
the same bop, the same ice grill, and the same code I'd known all my
life. If there was one difference in New York it was that we had more highyellow cousins here in the
Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. But their rituals were so similar, the way they walked and
gave clap, it was all familiar to me. And so I found myself, on any
given day, traveling through several New Yorks
at once-dynamic, brutal, moneyed, sometimes all of those at once.
Perhaps
you remember that time we went to see Howl's
Moving Castle on the Upper West Side. You were almost five
years old. The theater was crowded, and when we came out we rode a set
of
93
escalators
down small to the ground
floor. As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a
child. A white woman pushed you and said, "Come on!" Many things now
happened at once. There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger
lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own
insecurity in my ability to protect your black body. And more: There
was my sense that this woman was pulling rank. I knew, for instance,
that she would not have pushed a black child out on my part of
Flatbush, because she would be afraid there and would sense, if not
know, that there would be a penalty for such an action. But I was not
out on my part of Flatbush. And I was not in West Baltimore. And I was
far from The Mecca. I forgot all of that. I was only aware that someone
had invoked their right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to
this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my
history. She shrunk back, shocked. A white man standing nearby spoke up
in her defense. I experienced this as his attempt to rescue the damsel
from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son. And he
was now supported by other white people in the assembling crowd. The
man came closer. He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said, "I could
have you arrested!" I did not care. I told him this, and the desire to
do much more was hot in my throat. This desire was only controllable
because I remembered someone standing off to the side there, bearing
witness to more fury than he had ever seen from me-- you.
94
I came home shook. It was a mix of
shame for having gone back to the law of the streets mixed with rage-- " I could have you arrested!"
Which is to say: "I could take your body."
I have
told this story many times, not out of bravado, but out of a need for
absolution. I have never been a violent person. Even when I was young
and adopted the rules of the street, anyone who knew me knew it was a
bad fit. I've never felt the pride that is supposed to come with
righteous self-defense and justified violence. Whenever it was me on
top of someone, whatever my rage in the moment, afterward I always felt
sick at having been lowered to the crudest form of communication.
Malcolm made sense to me not out of a love of violence but because
nothing in my life prepared me to understand tear gas as deliverance,
as those Black History Month martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement did.
But more than any shame I feel about my own actual violence, my
greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact,
endangering you.
"I
could have you arrested," he said. Which
is to say, "One of your son's earliest memories will be watching the
men who sodomized Abner Louima
and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase,
and break you." I had forgotten the rules, an error as
dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the Westside of
Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file.
Work quietly. Pack an extra number 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
95
But
you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will
yell. You will drink too much. You
will hang out with people you shouldn't. Not all of us can always be
Jackie Robinson-- not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson.
But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your
countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a
black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error, real
or imagined-- with Eric Garner's anger, with Trayvon Martin's mythical
words ("You are gonna
die tonight"), with Sean Bell's mistake of running with the wrong
crowd, with me standing
too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.
A
society, almost necessarily, begins every success story with the
chapter that most advantages itself, and in America, these
precipitating chapters are almost always rendered as the singular
action of exceptional individuals. "It only takes one person to make a
change," you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person
can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your
body to equality with your countrymen.
The
fact of history is that black people have not-- probably no people have
ever-- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In
every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hand of
events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not
unalloyed goods. You cannot disconnect our emancipation in the Northern
colonies from the blood spilled in the
96
Revolutionary
War, any more than you
can disconnect our emancipation from slavery in the South from the
charnel houses of the Civil War, any more than you can disconnect our
emancipation from Jim Crow from the genocides of the Second World War.
History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to
struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you
an honorable and sane life. I am ashamed of how I acted that day,
ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a
bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made
an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.
This
is the import of the history all around us, though very few people like
to think about it. Had I informed this woman that when she pushed my
son, she was acting according to a tradition that held black bodies as
lesser, her response would likely have been, "I am not a racist." Or
maybe not. But my experience in this world has been that the people who
believe themselves to be
white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the
word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then
something just as fantastic-- an orc, troll, or gorgon. "I'm not a
racist," an entertainer once insisted after being filmed repeatedly
yelling at a heckler: "He's a nigger! He's a nigger!" Considering
segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon concluded, "Strom
is no racist." There are no racists in America, or at least none that
the people who need to be white know
97
personally.
In the era of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifically, served as
executioner that such deaths were often reported by the press as having
happened "at the hands of persons unknown." In 1957, the white
residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania, argued for their right to keep
their town segregated. "As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens,"
the group wrote, "we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating
in our wish to keep our community a closed community." This was the
attempt to commit a shameful act while escaping all sanction, and I
raise it to show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did
their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.
"We
would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't
any," writes Solzhenitsyn. "To do evil a human being must first of all
believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a
well-considered act in conformity with natural law." This is the
foundation of the Dream-- its adherents must not just believe in it but
believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is
the natural result of grit, honor, and good works. There is some
passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which, by the way, were not
so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. The mettle that it
takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police
forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black
body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing
out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands. To acknowledge
these horrors means turning
98
away
from the brightly rendered version of your country
as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier
and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this.
But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of
your mind.
The
entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of
who you are. I think of that summer that you may well remember when I
loaded you and your cousin Christopher into the back seat of a rented
car and pushed out to see what remained of Petersburg, Shirley
Plantation, and the Wilderness. I was obsessed with the Civil War
because six hundred thousand people had died in it. And yet it had been
glossed over in my education, and in popular culture, representations
of the war and its reasons seemed obscured. And yet I knew that in 1859
we were enslaved and in 1865 we were not, and what happened to us in those years
struck me as having some amount of import. But whenever I visited any
of the battlefields, I felt like I was greeted as if I were a nosy accountant conducting
an audit and someone was trying to hide the books.
I
don't know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg
Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset
of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour
dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor
seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore
rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested
in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been
marshaled to achieve. You
99
100
were
only ten years old. But
even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you
into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves
would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning
and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it
always was.
At the
onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion
dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads,
workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by
our stolen bodies-- cotton-- was America's primary export. The richest
men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made
their riches off our stolen bodies. Our bodies were held in bondage by
the early presidents. Our bodies were traded from the White House by
James K. Polk. Our bodies built the Capitol and the National Mall. The
first shot of the Civil War was fired in South Carolina, where our
bodies constituted the majority of human bodies in the state. Here is
the motive for the great war. It's not a secret. But we can do better
and find the bandit confessing his crime. "Our position is thoroughly
identified with the institution of slavery," declared Mississippi as it
left the Union, "the greatest material interest of the world."
Do you
remember standing with me and your mother, during one of our visits to
Gettysburg, outside the home of Abraham Brian? We were with a young man
who'd educated himself on the history of
101
black people in Gettysburg. He
explained that Brian Farm was the far end of the line that was charged
by George Pickett on the final day of Gettysburg. He told us that Brian
was a black man, that Gettysburg was home to a free black community,
that Brian and his family fled their home for fear of losing their
bodies to the advancing army of enslavement, led by the honored and
holy Confederate general Robert E. Lee, whose army was then stealing
black people from themselves and selling them south. George Pickett and
his troops were repulsed by the Union Army. Standing there, a century
and a half later, I thought of one of Faulkner's characters famously
recalling how this failure tantalized the minds of all "Southern"
boys-- "It's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even
begun...." All of Faulkner's Southern boys were white. But I, standing
on the farm of a black man who fled with his family to stay free of the
South, saw Pickett's soldiers charging through history, in wild pursuit
of their strange birthright-- the right to beat, rape, rob, and pillage
the black body. That is all of what was "in the balance," the nostalgic
moment's corrupt and unspeakable core.
But
American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made
enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the
mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could
conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage honor and
elan. This lie of
the Civil
102
War is
the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream.
Hollywood fortified Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure
stories. John Carter flees the broken Confederacy for Mars. We are not
supposed to ask what, precisely, he was running from. I, like every kid
I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard.
But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving
a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as "just
some good ole boys, never meanin'
no harm"-- a mantra
for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one "means" is neither
important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the
officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All
you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power
of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they
necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and
disproportionate number of them will be black.
Here
is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to
destroy the black body-- it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the
antiseptic borrowing of labor-- it is not so easy to get a human being
to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so
enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings,
the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body
seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There
is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old
Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which
are
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destructible--
that is precisely why
they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not
steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco,
and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created
the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured
through the bashing of children with stovewood,
through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.
It had
to be blood. It had to be nails driven through tongue and ears pruned
away. "Some disobedience," wrote a Southern mistress. "Much idleness,
sullenness, slovenliness....Used the rod." It had to be the thrashing
of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip.
It had to be some woman "chear'd
... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday
again." It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron
pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to
break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black
nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with
insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land,
a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the
men who needed to believe themselves
white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break
the bodies was the mark of civilization. "The two great divisions of
society are not the rich and poor, but white and black," said the great
South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. "And all the former, the poor
as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and
treated as equals." And there it is-- the right to break the black body
as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always
given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the
valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.*
* Thavolia Glymph,
Out of the House of Bondage
104
You
and I, my son, are that "below." That was true in 1776. It is true
today. There is no them
without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily
fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the
Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs
on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward
something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy
independent of cannibalism. But because they believe themselves to be
white, they would rather countenance a man choked to death on film
under their laws. And they would rather subscribe to the myth of
Trayvon Martin, slight teenager, hands full of candy and soft drinks,
transforming into a murderous juggernaut. And they would rather see
Prince Jones followed by a bad cop through three jurisdictions and shot
down for acting like a human. And they would rather reach out, in all
their sanity, and push my four-year-old son as though he were merely an
obstacle in the path of their too-important day.
105
I was
there, Samori. No. I
was back in Baltimore surrounded by them boys. I was on my parents'
living room floor, staring out at that distant world, impenetrable to
me. I was in all the anger of my years. I was where Eric Garner must
have been in his last moments-- "This stops today," he said and was
killed. I felt the cosmic injustice, even though I did not fully
understand it. I had not yet been to Gettysburg. I had not read Thavolia Glymph.
All I had was the feeling, the weight. I did not yet know, and I do not
fully know now. But part of what I know is that there is the burden of
living among Dreamers, and there is the extra burden of your country
telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for
seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur. For their innocence,
they nullify your anger, your fear, until you are coming and going, and
you find yourself inveighing against yourself-- "Black people are the
only people who ... "-- really inveighing against your own humanity and
raging against the crime in your ghetto, because you are powerless
before the great crime of history that brought the ghettos to be.
It is
truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your
country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about
ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who
surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this
madness. By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had
been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this
was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying
to me. I
106
knew- and the most important thng I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to
think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having
understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to
think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the
woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can't promise it.
The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only
portion of this world under your control.
I am
sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you--
but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability
brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest
to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite
their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own
vulnerability becomes real-- when the police decide that tactics
intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed
society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes
against their cities-- they are shocked in a way that those of us who
were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I
would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in
which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your
heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference
is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this
essential fact.
I am
speaking to you as I always have-- as the sober and serious man I have
always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings,
who does not make excuses for his height, his long
107
arms, his beautiful smile. You are
growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no
need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of
that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good
as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of
your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they
are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you
descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of
this terrible and beautiful world.
One
day, I was in Chicago, reporting a story about the history of
segregation in the urban North and how it was engineered by government
policy. I was trailing some officers of the county sheriff as they made
their rounds. That day I saw a black man losing his home. I followed
the sheriff's officers inside the house, where a group of them were
talking to the man's wife, who was also trying to tend to her two
children. She had clearly not been warned that the sheriff would be
coming, though something in her husband's demeanor told me he must have
known. His wife's eyes registered, all at once, shock at the
circumstance, anger at the officers, and anger at her husband. The
officers stood in the man's living room, giving him orders as to what
would now happen. Outside there were men who'd been hired to
108
remove
the family's possessions. The man was humiliated, and I imagined that
he had probably for some time carried, in his head, alone, all that was
threatening his family but could not bring himself to admit it to
himself or his wife. So he now changed all that energy into anger,
directed at the officers. He cursed. He yelled. He pointed wildly. This
particular sheriff's department was more progressive than most. They
were concerned about mass incarceration. They would often bring a
social worker to an eviction. But this had nothing to do with the
underlying and relentless logic of the world this man inhabited, a
logic built on laws built on history built on con tempt for this man
and his family and their fate.
The
man ranted on. When the officers turned away, he ranted more to the
group of black men assembled who'd been hired to sit his family out on
the street. His manner was like all the powerless black people I'd ever
known, exaggerating their bodies to conceal a fundamental plunder that
they could not prevent.
I had
spent the week exploring this city, walking through its vacant lots,
watching the aimless boys, sitting in the pews of the striving
churches, reeling before the street murals to the dead. And I would,
from time to time, sit in the humble homes of black people in that city
who were entering their tenth decade of life. These people were
profound. Their homes were filled with the emblems of honorable life--
citizenship awards, portraits of husbands and wives passed away,
several generations of children
109
in cap
and gown. And they had
drawn these accolades by cleaning big houses and living in one-room
Alabama shacks before moving to the city. And they had done
this despite the city, which was supposed to be a respite, revealing itself to simply be a more
intricate specimen of plunder. They had worked two and three jobs, put
children through high school and college, and become pillars of their
community. I admired them, but I knew the whole time that I was merely
encountering the survivors, the ones who'd endured the banks and their
stone-faced contempt, the realtors and their fake sympathy-- ''I'm
sorry, that house just sold yesterday"-- the realtors who steered them
back toward ghetto blocks, or blocks earmarked to be ghettos soon, the
lenders who found this captive class and tried to strip them of
everything they had. In those homes I saw the best of us, but behind
each of them I knew that there were so many millions gone.
And I
knew that there were children born into these same caged neighborhoods
on the Westside, these ghettos, each of which was as planned as any
subdivision. They are an elegant act of racism, killing fields authored
by federal policies, where we are, all again, plundered of our dignity,
of our families, of our wealth, and of our lives. And there is no
difference between the killing of Prince Jones and the murders
attending these killing fields because both are rooted in the assumed
inhumanity of black people. A legacy of plunder, a network of laws and
traditions, a heritage, a Dream, murdered
110
Prince
Jones as sure as it murders
black people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity.
"Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered
the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built
the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not
surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in
its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has
become an heirloom, an intelligence,
a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days,
we must invariably return.
The
killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by
the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely
upon those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this.
To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him
for bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing fields--
the reduction of the black body-- is no different than the premise that
allowed for the murder of Prince Jones. The Dream of acting white, of
talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it
murders black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do not
accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red
lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto.
I did
not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you
forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was
to grow into consciousness. I resolved to hide nothing from you.
111
Do you
remember when I first took you to work, when you were thirteen? I was
going to see the mother of a dead black boy. The boy had exchanged hard
words with a white man and been killed, because he refused to turn down
his music. The killer, having emptied his gun, drove his girlfriend to
a hotel. They had drinks. They ordered a pizza. And then the next day,
at his leisure, the man turned himself in. The man claimed to have seen
a shotgun. He claimed to have been in fear for his life and to only
have triumphed through righteous violence. "I was the victim and the
victor," he asserted, much as generations of American plunderers had
asserted before. No shotgun was ever found. The claim still influenced
the jury, and the killer was convicted not of the boy's murder but of
firing repeatedly as the boy's friends tried to retreat. Destroying the
black body was permissible-- but it would be better to do it
efficiently.
The
mother of this murdered black boy was then taking her case before
journalists and writers. We met her in the lobby of her Times Square
hotel. She was medium height with brown skin and hair down to her
shoulders. It had not even been a week since the verdict. But she was
composed and wholly self-possessed. She did not rage at the killer but
wondered aloud if the rules she'd imparted had been enough. She had
wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And
he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music
loud, to be American teenagers. Still, she was left wondering. "In my
mind I keep saying, 'Had he not spoke back, spoke up, would he still be
here?"'
112
She
would not forget the uniqueness of her son, his singular life. She
would not forget that he had a father who loved him, who took him in
while she battled cancer. She would not forget that he was the life of
the party, that he always had new friends for her to shuttle around in
her minivan. And she would have him live on in her work. I told her the
verdict angered me. I told her that the idea that someone on that jury
thought it plausible there was a gun in the car baffled the mind. She
said that she was baffled too, and that I should not mistake her calm
probing for the absence of anger. But God had focused her anger away
from revenge and toward redemption, she said. God had spoken to her and
committed her to a new activism. Then the mother of the murdered boy
rose, turned to you, and said, "You exist. You matter. You have value.
You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as
you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you
from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be
you."
I was
glad she said this. I have tried to say the same to you, and if I have
not said it with the same direction and clarity, I confess that is
because I am afraid. And I have no God to hold me up. And I
113
believe
that when they shatter
the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us--
Christians, Muslims, atheists-- lived in this fear of this truth.
Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the
orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is
intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew,
way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The
demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive
passivity, our conversation restrained in public quarters, our best
manners on display, our hands never out of pockets, our whole manner ordered as if to
say, "I make no sudden moves." Disembodiment. The serpent of school
years, demanding I be twice as good, though I was but a boy.
Murder
was all around us and we knew, deep in ourselves, in some silent space,
that the author of these murders was beyond us, that it suited some
other person's ends. We
were right.
Here
is how I take the measure of my progress in life: I imagine myself as I
was, back there in West Baltimore, dodging North and Pulaski, ducking
Murphy Homes, fearful of the schools and the streets, and I imagine
showing that lost boy a portrait of my present life and asking him what
he would make of it. Only once-- in the two years after your birth, in
the first two rounds of the fight of my life-- have I
114
believed
he would have been
disappointed. I write you at the precipice of my fortieth year, having
come to a point in my life-- not of great prominence-- but far beyond
anything that boy could have even imagined. I did not master the
streets, because I could not read the body language quick enough. I did
not master the schools, because I could not see where any of it could
possibly lead. But I did not fall. I have my family. I have my work. I
no longer feel it necessary to hang my head at parties and tell people
that I am "trying to be a writer." And godless though I am, the fact of
being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being
remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes
me.
I have
spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I
might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not
spent my time studying the problem of "race"-- "race" itself is just a
restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time
to time when some dullard-- usually believing himself white-- proposes
that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only
when we are all beige and thus the same "race." But a great number of
"black" people already are beige. And the history of civilization is
littered with dead "races" (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later
abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose-- the organization
of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights.
If my
life ended today, I would tell you it was a happy life-- that I drew
great joy from the study, from the struggle toward which I now urge
you. You have seen in this conversation that the struggle has
115
ruptured and remade me several times
over-- in Baltimore, at The Mecca, in fatherhood, in New York. The
changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no
longer be lied to, when
you have rejected the Dream. But even more, the changes have taught me
how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I
see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions
matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
But
oh, my eyes. When I was a boy, no portion of my body suffered more than
my eyes. If I have done well by the measures of childhood, it must be
added that those measures themselves are hampered by how little a boy
of my captive class had seen. The Dream seemed to be the pinnacle,
then-- to grow rich and live in one of those disconnected houses out in
the country, in one of those small communities, one of those
cul-de-sacs with its gently curving ways, where they staged teen movies
and children built treehouses, and in that last lost year before
college, teenagers made love in cars parked at the lake. The Dream
seemed to be the end of the world for me, the height of American
ambition. What more could possibly exist beyond the dispatches, beyond
the suburbs?
Your
mother knew. Perhaps it was because she was raised within the physical
borders of such a place, because she lived in proximity with the
Dreamers. Perhaps it was because the people who thought they were white
told her she was smart and followed this up by telling her she was not
really black,
116
meaning
it as a compliment.
Perhaps it was the boys out there, who were in fact black, telling her
she was "pretty for a dark-skin girl." Your mother never felt quite at
home, and this made the possibility of some other place essential to
her, propelling her to The Mecca, propelling her to New York and then
beyond. On her thirtieth birthday she took a trip to Paris. I am not
sure you remember. You were only six. We spent that week eating fried
fish for breakfast and cake for dinner, leaving underwear on the
counter, and blasting Ghostface
Killah. It had
never occurred to me to leave America-- not even temporarily. My eyes.
My friend Jelani, who came up the same as me, once said that he used to
think of traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check
on a pink suit. And I felt much the same, then. I was bemused at your
mother's dreams of Paris. I could not understand them-- and I did not
think I needed to. Some part of me was still back in that seventh-grade
French class, thinking only of the immediate security of my body,
regarding France as one might regard Jupiter.
But
now your mother had gone and done it, and when she returned her eyes
were dancing with all the possibilities out there, not just for her but
for you and for me. It is quite ridiculous how the feeling spread. It
was like falling in love-- the things that get you are so small, the
things that keep you up at night are so particular to you that when you
try to explain, the only reward anyone can give you is a dumb polite
nod.
117
118
Your
mother had taken many pictures, all through Paris, of doors, giant
doors-- deep blue, ebony, orange, turquoise, and burning red doors. I
examined the pictures of these giant doors in our small Harlem
apartment. I had never seen anything like them. It had never even
occurred to me that such giant doors could exist, could be so common in
one part of the world and totally absent in another. And it occurred to
me, listening to your mother, that France was not a thought experiment
but an actual place filled with actual people whose traditions were
different, whose lives really were different, whose
sense of beauty was different.
When I
look back, I know that I was then getting the message from all over. By
that time my friends included a great number of people with ties to
different worlds. "Make the race proud," the elders used to say. But by
then I knew that I wasn't so much bound to a biological "race" as to a
group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform
color or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they
suffered under the weight of the Dream, and they were bound by all the
beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and
music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that
they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the Dream. Not long
ago I was standing in an airport retrieving a bag from a conveyor belt.
I bumped into a young black man and said, "My bad."
119
Without
even looking up he said, "You straight." And in that exchange there was
so much of the private rapport that can only exist between two particular
strangers of this tribe that we call black. In other words, I was part
of a world. And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other
worlds-- the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or
gay men,
of immigrants, of
Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination
of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though
I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that
nothing so essentialist as race stood between us.
I had read too much by then.
And my eyes-- my beautiful, precious eyes-- were
growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the
world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by
people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have
named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In
America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller
lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after. In
that single exchange with that young man, I was speaking the personal
language of my people. It was the briefest intimacy, but it captured
much of the beauty of my black world-- the ease between your mother and
me, the miracle at The Mecca, the way I feel myself disappear on the
streets of Harlem. To call that feeling racial is to hand over all
those diamonds, fashioned by our ancestors, to the plunderer. We made
that feeling, though it was forged in the shadow of the murdered, the
raped, the disembodied, we made it all the same.
This is the beautiful thing that I have seen with my
own eyes, and I think I needed this vantage point before I could
journey out. I think I needed to know that I was from somewhere, that
my home was as beautiful as any other.
120
Seven
years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first
adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner. I wish, when I was back
in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and
gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what
that class really was-- a gate to some other blue world. I wanted to
see that world myself, to see the doors and everything behind them. The
day of my departure, I sat in a restaurant with your mother, who'd
shown me so much. I told her, "I am afraid." I didn't really speak the
language. I did not know the customs. I would be alone. She just
listened and held my hand. And that night, I boarded a starship. The
starship punched out into the dark, punched through the sky, punched
out past West Baltimore, punched out past The Mecca, past New York,
past any language and every spectrum known to me.
My
ticket took me to Geneva first. Everything happened very fast. I had to
change money. I needed to find a train from the airport into the city
and after that find
another train to Paris. Some months earlier, I had begun a halting
study of the French language. Now I was in a storm of French, drenched
really, and only equipped to catch drops of the language-- "who;'
"euros," "you," "to
the right." I was still very afraid.
121
I
surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that I was one wrong
ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Alpine village that no one I knew
had ever heard of It happened right then. The realization of being far
gone, the fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it-- the horror,
the wonder, the joy-- fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was not
wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over me in Moorland.
It was kin to the narcotic shot I'd gotten watching the people with
their wineglasses spill out onto West Broadway. It was all that I'd
felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized
that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion,
were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not
only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing,
but that I had long been alive-- even back in Baltimore. I had always
been alive. I was always translating.
I
arrived in Paris. I checked in to a hotel in the 6th arrondissement. I
had no understanding of the local history at all. I did not think much
about Baldwin or Wright. I had not read Sartre nor
Camus, and if I walked past Cafe de Flore or Les Deux Magots
I did not, then, take any particular note. None of that mattered. It
was Friday, and what mattered were the streets thronged with people in
amazing configurations. Teenagers together in cafes. School-children
kicking a soccer ball on
the street,
122
backpacks
to the side. Older couples
in long coats, billowing scarves, and blazers. Twentysomethings leaning
out of any number of establishments looking beautiful and cool. It
recalled New York, but without the low-grade, ever-present fear. The
people wore no armor, or none that I recognized. Side streets and
alleys were bursting with bars, restaurants, and cafes. Everyone was
walking. Those who were not walking were embracing. I was feeling
myself beyond any natural right. My Caesar was geometric. My lineup was
sharp as a sword. I walked outside and melted into the city, like
butter in the stew. In my mind, I heard Big Boi
sing:
I'm
just a playa like that,
my jeans was sharply creased.
I got a fresh white T-shirt and my cap is slightly pointed east.
I had
dinner with a friend. The restaurant was the size of two large
living rooms. The tables were jammed together, and to be seated, the
waitress employed a kind of magic, pulling one table out and then
wedging you in, like a child in a high chair. You had to summon her to
use the toilet. When it was time to order, I flailed at her with my
catastrophic French. She nodded and did not laugh. She gave no false
manners. We had an incredible bottle of wine. I had steak. I had a
baguette with bone marrow. I had liver. I had an espresso and a dessert
that I can't even name. Using all the French I could muster, I tried to
tell the waitress the meal was magnificent. She cut me off in English,
"The best you've ever had, right?" I rose to walk, and despite having
inhaled half the menu I felt easy as a featherweight.
123
The
next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musee Rodin. I stopped in a
bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at
a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was
about four o'clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was
bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a
strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a
single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never
sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something
that I'd want
to
do. And
all around me there were people who did this regularly.
It
occurred to me that I really was in someone else's country and yet, in
some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was
part of an equation-- even if it wasn't a part I relished. I was the one
the police stopped on Twenty-third Street in the middle of a workday. I
was the one driven to The Mecca. I was not just a father but the father
of a black boy. I was not just a spouse but the husband of a black
woman, a freighted symbol of black love. But sitting in that garden,
for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor-- landless and
disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular
loneliness before-- that I had never felt myself so far outside of
someone else's dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational
chains-- my body confined, by history and policy, to certain
zones.
124
Some
of us make it out. But the game is played
with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished I had known
it sooner. I remember, that night, watching the teenagers gathering
along the pathway near the Seine to do all their teenage things. And I
remember thinking how much I would have loved for that to have been my
life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart from the fear. I
did not have that past in hand or memory. But I had you.
We
came back to Paris that summer, because your mother loved the city and
because I loved the language, but above all because of you.
I
wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear-- even apart from
me. I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one
world and then chained me in the next. I think of your grandmother
calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try
to "test me." And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it
come, as the total failure of fatherhood because if all I had over you
were my hands, then I really had nothing at all. But, forgive me, son,
I knew what she meant and when you were younger I thought the same. And
I am now ashamed of the thought, ashamed of my fear, of the
generational chains I tried to clasp onto your wrists. We are entering
our last years together, and I wish I had been softer with you. Your
mother had to teach me how to love you-- how to kiss you and tell you I
love you every night. Even now it does not feel a wholly natural act so
much as it feels like ritual. And that is because I am wounded. That is
because I am tied to old ways,
125
which I learned in a hard house.
It was a loving house even as it was besieged by its country, but it
was hard. Even in Paris, I could not shake the old ways, the instinct
to watch my back at every pass, and always be ready to go.
A few
weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English
as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day out in the
crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop.
Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of
red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this
dinner? Did people
do this? I had not even known how to imagine it. And more, was this all
some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me?
My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left I
made sure he walked out first. He
wanted to show me one of those old buildings that seem to be around
every corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me, I was
sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes
would be waiting to strip me of ... what, exactly? But my new friend
simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonne soiree, and walked off into the
wide open night. And
watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience
because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my
eyes were blindfolded by fear.
126
What I
wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear
as possible. I wanted you to see different people living by different
rules. I wanted you to see the couples sitting next to each other in
the cafes, turned out to watch the street; the women pedaling their old
bikes up the streets, without helmets, in long white dresses; the women
whizzing past in Daisy Dukes and pink roller skates. I wanted you to
see the men in salmon colored pants and white linen and bright
sweaters tied around their necks, the men who disappeared around
corners and circled back in luxury cars, with the top down, loving
their lives. All of them smoking. All of them knowing that either
grisly death or an orgy awaited them just around the corner. Do you
remember how your eyes lit up like candles when we stood out on Saint-Germain-desPres? That
look was all that I lived for.
And
even then, I wanted you to be conscious, to understand that to be
distanced, if only for a moment, from fear is not a passport out of the
struggle. We will always be black, you and I, even if it means
different things in different places. France is built on its own dream,
on its collection of bodies, and recall that your very name is drawn
from a man who opposed France and its national project of theft by
colonization. It is true that our color was not our distinguishing
feature there, so much as the Americanness represented in our poor
handle on French. And it is true that there is something
127
particular
about how
the Americans who think
they are white regard us-- something sexual and obscene. We were not
enslaved in France. We are not their particular "problem," nor their
national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in
this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge.
Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the
children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness
that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never
ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic. Remember the Roma you saw
begging with their children in the street, and the venom with which
they were addressed. Remember the Algerian cab driver, speaking openly
of his hatred of Paris, then looking at your mother and me and
insisting that we were all united under Africa. Remember the rumbling
we all felt under the beauty of Paris, as though the city had been
built in abeyance of Pompeii. Remember the feeling that the great
public gardens, the long lunches, might all be undone by a physics, cousin to our rules
and the reckoning of our own country, that we do not fully comprehend.
It was
good to have your uncle Ben and your aunt Janai
there-- someone else who had to balance the awe of what these people
had built and the fact of whom they built so much of it upon; someone
else who'd learned to travel in adulthood; people who'd been black in
America and were mostly concerned with the safety of their bodies. And
we were all aware that the forces that held back our bodies back at
home were not unrelated to those that had given France its wealth. We
were aware that much of what they had done was built on the plunder of
Haitian bodies, on the plunder of Wolof bodies, on the destruction of
the Toucouleur, on the taking of Bissandugu.
128
That
was the same summer that the killer of Trayvon Martin was acquitted,
the summer I realized that I accepted that there is no velocity of
escape. Home would find us in any language. Remember when we took the
train up to Place de la Nation to celebrate your birthday with Janai and Ben and the kids?
Remember the young man standing outside the subway in protest? Do you
remember his sign? VIVE LE COMBAT
DES JEUNES CONTRE LE CRIMES RACISTES! USA: TRAYVON MARTIN, I7 ANS
ASSASSINE CAR NOIR ET LE RACISTE ACQUITE.
I did
not die in my aimless youth. I did not perish in the agony of not
knowing. I was not jailed. I had proven to myself that there was
another way beyond the schools and the streets. I felt myself to be
among the survivors of some great natural disaster, some plague, some
avalanche or earthquake. And now, living in the wake of a decimation
and having arrived at a land that I once considered mythical,
everything seemed cast in a halo-- the pastel Parisian scarves burned
brighter, the morning odor wafting out of the boulangeries was hypnotic,
and the language all around me struck me not so much as language but as
dance.
129
Your
route will be different. It must be. You knew things at eleven that I
did not know when I was twenty-five. When I was eleven my highest
priority was the simple security of my body. My life was the immediate
negotiation of violence-- within my house and without. But already you
have expectations, I see that in you. Survival and safety are not
enough. Your hopes-- your dreams, if you will-- leave me with an array
of warring emotions. I am so very proud of you-- your openness, your
ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little
time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom.
Part of that wisdom is understanding
what you were given-- a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer
team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am
saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is
not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal
amount of security in your black body.
Perhaps
that is why, when you discovered that the killer of Mike Brown would go
unpunished, you told me you had to go. Perhaps that is why you were
crying, because in that moment you understood that even your relatively
privileged security can never match a sustained assault launched in the
name of the Dream. Our current politics tell you that should you fall
victim to such an assault and lose your body, it somehow must be your
fault. Trayvon Martin's hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis's loud
music did the same. John Crawford should never have touched the rifle
on display. Kajieme
Powell should have known not to be crazy. And all of them should have
had fathers-- even the ones who had fathers, even you. Without its own
justifications, the Dream would collapse upon itself. You first learned
this from Michael Brown. I first learned it from Prince Jones.
130
Michael
Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed. And still the
questions behind the questions are never asked. Should assaulting an
officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with
the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization
to be? And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for
municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and
their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the
Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for
the weak and the biggest guns for the strong. Each time a police
officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not
enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals. The moment
the officers began their pursuit of Prince Jones, his life was in
danger. The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as
currency, because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this
country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the
ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the
unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country's
second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their
finished basement. And today,
131
with a sprawling prison system,
which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program
for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8
percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have
refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in
America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.
132
III.
And
have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they
are white.
JAMES BALDWIN
133
In the
years after Prince Jones died, I thought often of those who were left
to make their lives in the shadow of his death. I thought of his
fiancée and wondered what it meant to see the future upended with no
explanation. I wondered what she would tell his daughter, and I
wondered how his daughter would imagine her father, when she would miss
him, how she would detail the loss. But mostly I wondered about
Prince's mother, and the question I mostly asked myself was always the
same: How did she live? I searched for her phone number online. I
emailed her. She responded. Then I called and made an appointment to
visit. And living she was, just outside of Philadelphia in a small
gated
135
community
of affluent homes. It was a rainy
Tuesday when I arrived. I had taken the train in from New York and then
picked up a rental car. I was thinking of Prince a lot in those months
before. You, your mother, and I had gone to Homecoming at The Mecca,
and so many of my friends were there, and Prince was not. Dr. Jones
greeted me at the door. She was lovely, polite, brown.
She appeared to be somewhere in that range between forty and seventy
years, when it becomes difficult to precisely ascertain a black
person's precise age. She was well composed, given the subject of our
conversation, and for most of the visit I struggled to separate how she
actually felt from what I felt she must be feeling. What I felt, right
then, was that she was smiling through pained eyes, that the reason for
my visit had spread sadness like a dark quilt over the whole house. I seem
to recall music-- jazz or gospel-- playing in
the back, but
conflicting with
that I also remember a deep quiet overcoming
everything. I thought that perhaps she had been crying. I could not
tell for sure. She led me into her large living room. There was no one
else in the house. It was early January. Her Christmas tree was still
standing at the end of the room, and there were stockings bearing the
name of her daughter and her lost son, and there was a framed picture
of him-- Prince Jones-- on a display table. She brought me water in a
heavy glass. She drank tea. She told me that she was born and raised
outside of Opelousas, Louisiana, that her ancestors had been enslaved
in that same region, and
that as a consequence of that enslavement, a fear echoed down through
the ages. "It first became clear when I was four," she told me.
136
My
mother and I were going into the city. We got on the Greyhound bus. I
was behind my mother. She wasn't holding my hand at the time and I
plopped down in the first seat I found. A few minutes later my mother
was looking for me and she took me to the back of the bus and explained
why I couldn't sit there. We were very poor, and most of the black
people around us, who I knew were poor also, and the images I had of
white America were from going into the city and seeing who was behind
the counter in the stores and seeing who my mother worked for. It
became clear there was a distance.
This
chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways. A little girl
wanders home, at age seven, after being teased in school and asks her parents, "Are we niggers and what
does this mean?" Sometimes it is subtle-- the simple observation of who
lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it's all of
it at once. I have never asked how you became personally aware of the
distance. Was it Mike Brown? I don't think I want to know. But I know
that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are
privileged and yet still different from other privileged children,
137
because you
are the bearer of a body more fragile
than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is
not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility. It is
your responsibility because you are surrounded by the Dreamers. It has
nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style
your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as
the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient
sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the
enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food.
Dr.
Jones was reserved. She was what people once referred to as "a lady,"
and in that sense reminded me of my grandmother, who was a single
mother in the projects but always spoke as though she had nice things.
And when Dr. Jones described her motive for escaping the dearth that
marked the sharecropper life of her father and all the others around
her, when she remembered herself saying, 'Tm not going to live like
this," I saw the iron in her eyes, and I remembered the iron in my
grandmother's eyes. You must barely remember her by now-- you were six
when she died. I remember her, of course, but by the time I knew her,
her exploits-- how, for instance, she scrubbed white people's floors
during the day and went to school at night-- were legend. But I still
could feel the power and rectitude that propelled her out of the
projects and into homeownership.
It was
the same power I felt in the presence of Dr. Jones. When she was in
second grade, she and another girl made a pact that they would both
become doctors, and she held up her end of the bargain.
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But
first she integrated the high school in her town. At the beginning she
fought the white children who insulted her. At the end they voted her
class president. She ran track. It was "a great entree," she told me,
but it only brought her so far into their world. At football games the
other students would cheer the star black running back, and then when a
black player on the other team got the ball, they'd yell, "Kill that
nigger! Kill that nigger!" They would yell this sitting right next to
her, as though she really were not there. She gave Bible recitations as
a child and told me the story of her recruitment into this business.
Her mother took her to audition for the junior choir. Afterward the
choir director said, "Honey, I think you should talk." She was laughing
lightly now, not uproariously, still in control of her body. I felt
that she was warming up. As she talked of the church, I thought of your
grandfather, the one you know, and how his first intellectual
adventures were found in the recitation of Bible passages. I thought of
your mother, who did the same. And I thought of my own distance from an
institution that has, so often, been the only support for our people. I
often wonder if in that distance I've missed something, some notions of
cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physical perception of the
world, something beyond the body, that I might have transmitted to you. I wondered this, at that
particular moment, because something beyond anything I have ever
understood drove Mable Jones to an exceptional life.
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She
went to college on full scholarship. She went to med school at
Louisiana State University. She served in the Navy. She took up
radiology. She did not then know any other black radiologists. I
assumed that this would have been hard on her, but she was insulted by
the assumption. She could not acknowledge any discomfort, and she did
not speak of herself as remarkable, because it conceded too much,
because it sanctified tribal expectations when the only expectation
that mattered should be rooted in an assessment of Mable Jones. And by
those lights, there was nothing surprising in her success, because
Mable Jones was always pedal to the floor, not over or around, but
through, and if she was going to do it, it must be done to death. Her
disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the
opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the
championship is one game away.
She
called her son-- Prince Jones-- "Rocky" in honor of her grandfather,
who went by "Rock." I asked about his childhood, because the fact is
that I had not known Prince all that well. He was among the people I
would be happy to see at a party, whom I would describe to a friend as
"a good brother," though I could not really account for his comings and
goings. So she sketched him for me so that I might better understand.
She said that he once hammered a nail into an electrical socket and
shorted out the entire house. She said that he once dressed himself in
a suit and tie, got down on one knee, and sang
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"Three
Times a Lady" to her. She said
that he'd gone to private schools his entire life-- schools filled with
Dreamers-- but he made friends wherever he went, in Louisiana and later
in Texas. I asked her how his friends' parents treated her. "By then I
was the chief of radiology at the local hospital," she said. "And so
they treated me with respect." She said this with no love in her eye,
coldly, as though she were explaining a mathematical function.
Like
his mother, Prince was smart. In high school he was admitted to a Texas
magnet school for math and science, where students acquire college
credit. Despite the school drawing from a state with roughly the
population of Angola, Australia, or Afghanistan, Prince was the only
black child. I asked Dr.Jones
if she had wanted him to go to Howard. She smiled and said, "No." Then
she added, "It's so nice to be able to talk about this." This relaxed
me a little, because I could think of myself as something more than an
intrusion. I asked where she had wanted him to go for college. She
said, "Harvard. And if not Harvard, Princeton. And if not Princeton,
Yale. And if not Yale, Columbia. And if not Columbia, Stanford. He was
that caliber of student." But like at least one third of all the
students who came to Howard, Prince was tired of having to represent to
other people. These Howard students were not like me. They were the
children of the Jackie Robinson elite, whose parents rose up out of the
ghettos, and
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the
sharecropping fields, went out into the
suburbs, only to find that they carried the mark with them
and could not escape. Even when they succeeded, as so many of them did,
they were singled out, made examples of, transfigured into parables of
diversity. They were symbols and markers, never children or young
adults. And so they come to Howard to be normal-- and even more, to see
how broad the black normal really is.
Prince
did not apply to Harvard, nor
Princeton, nor Yale, nor Columbia, nor Stanford. He only
wanted The Mecca. I asked Dr. Jones if she regretted Prince choosing
Howard. She gasped. It was as though I had pushed too hard on a bruise.
"No," she said. "I regret that he is dead."
She
said this with great composure and greater pain. She said this with all
of the odd poise and direction that the
great American injury demands of you. Have you ever taken a hard look
at those pictures from the sit-ins in the '60s, a hard, serious look?
Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor
sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past
their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything
known to me. I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I
cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is
all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all.
Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you to take the
assaults heaped upon you now and pay down the debt later. Whatever
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it
is, that same look I see in those pictures, noble and vacuous, was the look I saw in Mable
Jones. It was in her sharp brown eyes, which welled but did not break.
She held so much under her control, and I was sure the days since her
Rocky was plundered, since her lineage was robbed, had demanded nothing
less.
And
she could not lean on her country for help. When it
came to her son, Dr. Jones's country did what it does best-- it forgot
him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the
Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in
slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the
vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have
forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful
Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world.
I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would
rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers,
Prince Aragorn, an
entire race of Skywalkers.
To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like
all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is
to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable
humans.
Dr.
Jones was asleep when the phone rang. It was 5 A.M. and on the phone
was a detective telling her she should drive to Washington. Rocky was
in the hospital. Rocky had been shot. She drove with her daughter. She
was sure he was still alive. She paused several times as she explained
this. She went directly to the ICU. Rocky was not there. A group of men
with authority-- doctors, lawyers, detectives, perhaps-- took her into
a room and told her he was gone. She paused again. She did not cry.
Composure was too important now.
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"It
was unlike anything I had felt before;' she told me. "It was extremely physically
painful. So much so that whenever a thought of him would come to mind,
all I could do was pray and ask for mercy. I thought I was going to
lose my mind and go crazy. I felt sick. I felt like I was dying."
I
asked if she expected that the police officer who had shot Prince would
be charged. She said, "Yes." Her voice was a cocktail of emotions. She
spoke like an American, with the same expectations of fairness, even
fairness belated and begrudged, that she took into medical school all
those years ago. And she spoke like a black woman, with all the pain
that undercuts those exact feelings.
I now
wondered about her daughter, who'd been recently married. There was a
picture on display of this daughter and her new husband. Dr. Jones was
not optimistic. She was intensely worried about her daughter bringing a
son into America, because she could not save him, she could not secure
his body from the ritual violence that had claimed her son. She
compared America to
Rome. She said she thought the glory
days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days
were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. "And we
can't get the message," she said. "We don't understand that we are
embracing our deaths."
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I
asked Dr. Jones if her mother was still alive. She told me her mother
passed away in 2002, at the age of eighty-nine. I asked Dr. Jones how
her mother had taken Prince's death, and her voice retreated into an
almost-whisper, and Dr. Jones said, "I don't know that she did."
She
alluded to 12 Years a Slave. "There
he was," she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. "He had means. He had a
family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him
back. And the same is true of me. I spent years developing a career,
acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It's
all it takes." And then she talked again of all that she had, through
great industry, through unceasing labor, acquired in the long journey
from grinding poverty. She spoke of how her children had been raised in
the lap of luxury-- annual ski trips, jaunts off to Europe. She said
that when her daughter was studying Shakespeare in high school, she
took her to England. And when her daughter got her license at sixteen,
a Mazda 626 was waiting in front. I sensed some connection to this
desire to give and the raw poverty of her youth. I sensed that it was
all as much for her as it was for her children. She said that Prince
had never taken to material things.
He loved to read. He loved to travel. But when he
turned twenty-three, she bought him a jeep. She had a huge purple bow
put on it. She told me that she could still see him there, looking at
the jeep and simply saying, Thank you, Mom. Without interruption she
added, "And that was the jeep he was killed in."
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After
I left, I sat in the car, idle for a few minutes. I thought of all that Prince's mother had
invested in him, and all that was lost. I thought of the loneliness
that sent him to The Mecca, and how The Mecca, how we, could not save
him, how we ultimately cannot save ourselves. I thought back on the
sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I'd once
scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps
they had known something terrible about the world. Perhaps they so
willingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body
because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place. And
all those old photographs from the 1960s, all those films I beheld of
black people prostrate before clubs and dogs, were not simply shameful,
indeed were not shameful at all-- they were just true. We are captured,
brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this
has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we
cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is,
the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the
facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to
think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the
design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.
But
you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the
Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies
are too precious. And you are here now, and you
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must live-- and there is so much
out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your
own home. The warmth of dark energies that drew me to The Mecca, that
drew out Prince Jones, the warmth of our particular world, is
beautiful, no matter how brief and breakable.
I
think back to our trip to Homecoming. I think back to the warm blasts
rolling over us. We were at the football game. We were sitting in the
bleachers with old friends and their children, caring for neither
fumbles nor first downs. I remember looking toward the goalposts and
watching a pack of alumni cheerleaders so enamored with Howard
University that they donned their old colors and took out their old
uniforms just a little so they'd fit. I remember them dancing. They'd
shake, freeze, shake again, and when the crowd yelled "Do it! Do it! Do
it! Dooo it!" a black
woman two rows in front of me, in her tightest jeans, stood and shook
as though she was not somebody's momma and the past twenty years had
barely been a week. I remember walking down to the tailgate party
without you. I could not bring you, but I have no problem telling you
what I saw-- the entire diaspora around me-- hustlers, lawyers, Kappas, busters, doctors,
barbers, Deltas, drunkards, geeks, and nerds. The DJ hollered into the
mic. The young folks pushed toward him. A young man pulled out a bottle
of cognac and twisted the cap. A girl with him smiled, tilted her head
back, imbibed, laughed.
And I felt myself disappearing into all of their bodies. The birthmark
of damnation faded, and I could feel the weight of my arms and hear the
heave in my breath and I was not talking then, because there was no
point.
147
148
That
was a moment, a joyous moment, beyond the Dream-- a moment imbued by a
power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill. This power, this black
power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark
and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of
Monticello-- which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black
power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies
in their truest colors. Even the Dreamers-- lost in their great
reverie-- feel it, for it is Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what they holler in
boldness, and Isley
they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last
sound they hear before dying. We have made something down here. We have
taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us
into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here at The Mecca, under
pain of selection, we have made a home. As do black people on summer
blocks marked with needles, vials, and hopscotch squares. As do black
people dancing it out at rent parties, as do black people at their
family reunions where we are regarded like the survivors of
catastrophe. As do black people toasting their cognac and German beers,
passing their blunts and
debating MCs. As do all of us who have voyaged through death, to life
upon these shores.
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That
was the love power that drew Prince Jones. The power is not divinity
but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything-- even the Dream,
especially the Dream—really is. Sitting in that car I thought of Dr.
Jones's predictions of national doom. I had heard such predictions all
my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that
the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the
words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of
vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The
Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the
Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them.
Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could
author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private
prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder
much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of
cheap gasoline.
Once,
the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of
horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the
damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of
oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known
precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not
just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth
is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us.
And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky.
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Something
more fierce than
Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all
our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are
known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained
hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent
them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport
through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, are the automobile,
the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers
themselves.
I
drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I
drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can
stop them, Samori,
because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to
struggle.
Struggle
for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the
warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for
your name.
But do
not struggle for
the
Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are
so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The
Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that
the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves
white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that
endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away
in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr.
Jones's home.
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They
were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the
same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised.
Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos-- the abundance
of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing-- and I
felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in
sheets.
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