War On Many Fronts

IN MEDIAS RES

There’s smoke everywhere. Fire has been burning for days. Fire has been burning for generations. Its stench infiltrates every opening — windows, vents, nostrils. Since 1965, since 1865, since 1776, since 1619, since the first trans-Atlantic wave of enslavement and genocide washed over sacred native lands. Since… since… since…

I imagine she will wake up to me with kindness in her heart and love me true to the core, through all fears and insecurities. I imagine the spectrum of my freedom will not be measured in cages and caskets and social constructions meant to protect the powers which oppress us. Our song and voice and behavior might become united in justice and liberty for all. Where the milk and honey flows in abundance for anyone in need of nourishment.

That’s my problem, I imagine too much. It keeps me within and away, even when you’re drowning in the center of it all. Even when drowning is how you’re trained to survive. It’s strange, these times we live in and lived through. The fact we still even exist gives testament to an unbroken glory. A glory that has carried our excellence into boardrooms and barbershops, kitchens and arenas, cane fields and White Houses.

A global pandemic magnifies the racism embedded into policing, and governance, and corporate prerogative. A global pandemic inspires a worldwide assertion that the lives and souls and bodies of Black folk are just as valuable as anyone else. It inspires a feeling that the age-old promises of change may actually be enforced.

But then we’re reminded. Of the depth of the powers whose entire agenda is established to thrive upon our exploitation. Of the depth of our plight and the twisted psyches which survive generational trauma. Of the depth of everyday harm that we commit upon each other and ourselves due to an eerie lack of value that we march and riot for. Is it possible to fight a battle on this many fronts and expect victory? What can motivate our weakest links to do the work against our oppression, or at the very least, not actively work against it?

FOR BREONNA AND ATATIANA AND OLUWATOYIN AND TRINA

She is visible on the front lines. She is visible in the kitchen before sunrise. She is visible in offices and laboratories and classrooms after sunset. She is visible in our robust collective fantasy. She is visible at the birth of every man and woman. She is visible everywhere we choose to pay attention, and yet her suffering and cries for equity, for humanity are unrecognizable. If we don’t recognize someone’s cries, do their tears even exist?

I saw her weeping the other day, in a silence profound enough to quiet stadiums. Tears flowed through the web of her bloodied fingers. Her defiant hair was tangled in mud and soot and smelled of smoke, of tear gas. The usual strength in her back was replaced by a sore arch, conditioned to curl over the bodies of fallen sisters and brothers. I asked her if there was anything that could be done to stop her tears.

It took her some time to even register my inquiry. It’s not like the madness which surrounded us ever stopped to consider our pain, our need for communication, our unending search for joy. She dropped her hands and looked at me. The weariness in her burning eyes carried the weight of generations. I wish I had milk to give her or a world class meal that could remove her hunger, or words that would inspire her to keep pushing, keep fighting, or the courage and stamina to lift her up and carry her the rest of the way.

“Why do I give my all for men who cause me so much harm? Will anyone ever empathize with me, riot for my justice, protect me from cops and predators and fuck boys, and-and… I’m tired. I’m just so tired.”

That moment, like many moments before and after, I can conjure no salve, offer no alleviant, in words or works or helpful deeds. I freeze. I am listening with my body, my mind is processing the depth of her disillusionment, the depth of her clarity that she is in a war with many sides and in this war, she is absolutely alone. I think of the work which must be done.

“Let me get you a ride home.”

“Home? What home?”

“Your residence. The place you stay.”

“What home do I have? Where am I safe?”

ANCESTRAL GROUNDS

Too many prisons in America are on the sites of former slave plantations. Ask Louisiana. Ask Mississippi and Texas and Alabama and Arkansas and the Carolinas (the correlation is unnerving). Slave plantations are the sites of ancestral spirits and unspoken cruelties. Slave plantations can occupy space in the physical and psychological realm. Black people have never escaped the plantation, it’s ingrained into our DNA.

Remember when they tried to justify the atrocities heaped upon us? That we scientifically had inferior qualities, smaller brains, therefore intellect, needing to be guided (controlled) by white saviors which made us the perfect specimen for enslavement. All that had to be done was keep our bodies strong and our minds weak, as Willie Lynch or the ideas that germinated his name prophesized. And yet Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, and Benjamin Banneker, and countless lesser known geniuses graced those fields, toiled those kitchens, cleaned master’s children and hogs for supper. Smart enough to open universities out of slavery. Smart enough to know slavery was not a position fit for humans and must be resisted. Smart enough to build our own communities under self-governance and manifest the beginnings of prosperity.

How can you explain the rise of a Greenwood or Treme or Harlem? How can you explain the ingenuity of Lewis Latimer or Bessie Coleman? Or the concept of jazz? Or the humanity in the heartbreak of Booker T. Washington’s compromise of civil rights for economic stimulus? The mass mobilization of Garvey, the relentless truth seeking of Malcolm, the brilliance of Dr. King’s dreams. The way Madame CJ Walker manipulated capitalism for coloreds.

The thousands of forgotten names lost in the pages of a whitewashed history. The thousands of martyrs who became strange fruit for white mobs to dissect and celebrate. Ida B. Wells bravely preserved their memory in her book of horrors, but there was no method to account for the lynchings that would follow for generations after her death. The thousands of souls gone too soon.

They are calling us. The ones that walked before us and built everything we love about our home. Telling us they’re with us always, and they are so proud of what we’ve become. And they know why we’re tired. And they understand that we’re lost and energized and jaded and ready and weary. They understand our long, long journey, in many ways, has only begun. And that makes their calls rise from beyond.

MAN-CHILDREN

There’s an incurable turmoil that comes with black manhood. You are deemed inferior yet an overwhelming threat wherever you may be found. You are conditioned to place value in absentminded ambitions, depreciating pursuits, empty fulfilments, the latest sneakers, the most sex partners, the cleanest whip and iciest chain, the biggest name on the yard, or block, or court or field. You are conditioned through mass media programming, public policy, and barriers to exposure that your worth is arbitrary. You’re conditioned to believe not only are emotions for the weak, they are deadly, they will get you killed. They make you less than a man. They make you a female. We hate women.

More and more that’s the way it appears and feels and is. We hate women. But our hate doesn’t stop there. This hatred seeps into how we see (or don’t) another man with our same skin. This hatred seeps into how we view ourselves. We are conditioned to believe we have no meaning, no history, no future, no promise of greatness unless it’s balling, rapping, or hustling. If we can’t make it in those boxes who are we? When we make it in those boxes, who are we?

There are many small, scared little boys who occupy the dangerous bodies of men. I walked by a group of these little boys outside of a popular Chinese restaurant. They were laughing and dancing and eating and before they could reach the apex of their joy, they were surrounded by squad cars. They did not run away or hide illegal contraband or get aggressive. They simply looked on as every other nearby witness on that humid, summer day. The officers were swift to confront the boys and make clear their presence was not appreciated and they needed to disband and go home.

“It’s a free country,” one of the boys said through his black mouth covering, a gold dollar sign imprinted front and center.

“Loitering is not a freedom,” one of the cops said, “You can remove yourself or you can be removed.”

“We’re paying customers. What loitering we doing?”

“Nah homie, let’s just go. Let’s just go. Shits not worth it.”

“Ayo dead-ass, shits not worth it. Let’s be out.”

With reluctance and animosity and defeat, the boy steps away. Onlookers who were filming the interaction stop recording. The cops linger for some time before patrolling another corner, policing another group of melanated bodies.

Later that night, on my return home, I see a young lady with appealing features. Her eyes are bright and curious, her hair is healthy and curly, her skin radiates even in the darkness, her body is strong and full. Her focus is on the toddler by her side, tying his shoestrings.

The sky cracks open with a colorful blast of professional fireworks. The toddler looks up and is amazed. The young lady looks up to see a man approach. A boy who occupies the body and age of a man approaches. He wears a black face covering with a dollar sign in the center. I remember his face, and gait and muscles and skin. Skin the color of mine, as if we came from the same womb.

“Damn ma, you dead wrong for coming out the crib looking that good.”

His boys enjoy this interaction from their stoop, ready to revel in his failure.

“Ayo ma, I know you hear me talking to you.”

“I don’t know you. And I’m not ever trying to get to know you.”

Before she can gather her belongings, her son, herself, it’s already too late. The upset boy crosses the young lady’s mouth with a hard smack. She is brought to her knees, eye level with her frightened son. The sting causes her to rub her face, making sure she can still feel. Blood trickles from her nose, leaving a red smear across her fingers.

“Stupid bitch, nobody wanted your ugly ass anyway.”

There’s a gang of laughter from the stoop, the kind that starts in the stomach and travels miles into the air. I can still hear their laughs as these words are being written. I can only imagine the depth of her pain and humiliation. I can only imagine because a woman has never slapped the taste out of my mouth because I declined to engage.

An older woman parks her grocery basket between the boy and the young lady. Behind her square glasses are the eyes of someone who has seen many generations pass and for every innovation, not much has changed. She reads into the boy’s wild eyes. He scoffs down upon them and retreats to the safety of his comrades.

“Yooo why you had to violate shorty? My guy, you’re sick.”

The older woman pulls a napkin from her purse to give the young lady.

“I’m good. Okay. I’m good.”

She hurries to her feet and takes a deep look for the boy in the dollar sign mask. He’s lost in the expanse of laughing bodies. Her son starts to bawl, filling the street with pain. It syncs with their laughter.

“Wait until the police get here,” the older woman said, “They’ll take care of him.”

The young lady fixes her mask, and our eyes lock. She puts her son over her shoulder, and begins another way home.