How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(11)

My saying yes to life meant accepting the beauty of growing up black, on parole, surrounded by a family of weird women warriors in Mississippi. It also meant accepting that George Harmon, parts of Millsaps College, parts of my state, much of my country, my heart, and mostly my own reflection, had beaten the dog shit out of me. I still don’t know what all this means but I know it’s true.

This isn’t an essay or a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and sift all this into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.

I want to say that remembering starts not with predictable punditry, or bullshit blogs, or slick art that really asks nothing of us; I want to say that it starts with all of us willing ourselves to remember, tell, and accept those complicated, muffled truths of our lives and deaths, and the lives and deaths of folks all around us over and over again.

Then I want to say that I am who my grandma and Aunt Sue think I am.

I am not.

I’m a walking regret, a truth-teller, a liar, a survivor, a frowning ellipsis, a witness, a dreamer, a teacher, a student, a failure, a joker, a writer whose eyes stay red, and I’m a child of this nation.

I know that as I got deeper into my late twenties, and then my thirties, I managed to continue killing myself and other folks who loved me in spite of me. I know that I’ve been slowly killed by folks who were as feverishly in need of life and death as I am. The really confusing part is that a few of those folks who have nudged me closer to slow death have also helped me say yes to life when I most needed it. Usually, I didn’t accept it. Lots of times, we’ve taken turns killing ourselves slowly, before trying to bring each other back to life. Maybe that’s the necessary stank of love, or maybe — like Frank Ocean says — it’s all just bad religion, just tasty watered-down cyanide in a Styrofoam cup.

I don’t even know.

I know that by the time I left Mississippi, I was twenty years old, three years older than Trayvon Martin will be when he is murdered for wearing a hoodie and swinging back in the wrong American neighborhood. Four months after I leave Mississippi, San Berry, a twenty-year-old partner of mine who went to Millsaps College with Gunn and me, will be convicted for taking Pam McGill, an amazing social worker, into the woods and shooting her in the head.

San confesses to kidnapping Ms. McGill, driving her to some woods, making her fall to her knees, and pulling the trigger while a seventeen-year-old black boy named Azikiwe waits for him in the car. San will eventually say that Azikiwe encouraged him to do it. Even today, journalists, activists, and others folks in Mississippi wonder what really happened with San, Azikiwe, and Pam McGill that day. Was San trying to swing back? Swinging back at what? Were there mental health issues left unattended? Had Ms. McGill, San, and Azikiwe talked to each other before the day? Why was Azikiwe left in the car when the murder took place? How could someone as committed to people as Pam McGill die so violently? Was the eventual pardon of Azikiwe an act of justice?

I can’t front, though. I don’t wonder about any of that. Not today.

I wonder what all three of those children of our nation really remember about how to slowly kill themselves and other folks in America the day before parts of them died under the blue-black sky in Central Mississippi.





Our Kind of Ridiculous


WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FOUR, I FLEW PAPER airplanes past the apartment of a thirty-two-year-old white boy named Kurt in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Kurt rocked a greasy brown mullet, bragged about ironing his bleached Lee’s, and said the word “youse” a lot. Even with caked-up cornbread sealing the cracks of his teeth and a raggedy mustache that looked like it was colored by a hyper six-year-old, Kurt always reminded me of somebody cute.

Kurt, whose apartment was directly above mine, lived with two women. One was his girlfriend. She could see. One was his wife. She could not.

Three little boys lived in the apartment with Kurt and his two partners. The youngest boy was Kurt’s girlfriend’s child. This miniature Viking loved to run his muddy hands through his blond hair and grin when he wasn’t growling. The other two boys looked like they rolled around naked in a tub of melted Tootsie Rolls before coming out to play.

I was in Pennsylvania working on my graduate thesis while Nicole, my girlfriend at the time, interned at Rodale Press. Though I had spent most of my life in Mississippi close to black folks who were thirty cents away from a quarter, that summer in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, was the most intimate I’d ever been with white folks who barely had a pot to piss in.

After paying our rent, food, and utilities, Nicole and I had about $140 left in disposable income every month.

That $140 had me feeling quite bougie.

It was the first summer I hadn’t worked as a phone book delivery man, a waiter at Ton-o-Fun, a health care assistant at Grace House, a knife salesman at Cutco, a bootleg porter at the Buie House, a counselor at Upward Bound, or a summer school teacher at Indiana University. I was on a fellowship, which meant for the first time in my life, my job was simply to collect a small check in exchange for not wasting reading’s and writing’s time.

During the day, when I wasn’t reading and writing, I made paper airplanes and talked outside with Shay, our eight-year-old neighbor; Barry, her six-year-old brother; and Kurt’s kids. For most of the summer, Kurt’s kids looked into our empty apartment through a huge sliding glass door. At first, they would stand about a foot from the door, looking directly at their reflections and our empty living room. A week or so into the summer, all three of Kurt’s kids started smashing their faces against the door and running their muddy hands up and down the glass.