How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(18)

It’s okay.

I’m not sure that what Mississippi artists are saying today is the most meaningful work in the world. I know that it is the most meaningful work in my world. And without the historic and contemporary sounds, sayings, and doings of Southern Black Boys like Charlie Braxton, K.R.I.T., Kamikaze, Mychal Denzel Smith, Tito Lopez, Skip Coon, Pyinfamous, Banner, Jay Electronica, and 3000, and Southern black girls like Jesmyn Ward, Missy Elliot, Imani Perry, Erykah Badu, Josie Pickens, Nathalie Collier, Beyonce, Jessica Young, Gangsta Boo, Regina Bradley, Josie Duffy, and Natasha Trethewey, hip-hop and American art would be sleek, conventional, heady, pallid, and paltry as the blank piece of paper on the last page of this book, and probably just as hollow as the center of the next cipher.

Shh…listen. Go ahead and listen hard. Can you hear us? Can you see us? Does that look like blue to you?

It don’t even matter no more, cousin. We hear us. We hear you, too. Exactly. And that’s all I should have ever had to say about that.





Echo: Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai, and Marlon


PEACE FAM,

I’m just waking up on the anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, the birthday of Nina Simone, and I feel small. I’m not comparing my life’s accomplishments to either of them. I’ve learned enough to stop making that mistake. But I still compare myself to who I think I should be by now and the vision is incomplete.

I’m twenty-six now, and for the first time I feel comfortable enough calling myself a man, but can’t help thinking of all the years I was confused about what that meant. I got into an argument with my pops when I was twenty-one, I can’t remember what it was about, and he asked me, “Do you think you’re a man now?” and through my whimpering I admitted, “No.” I was answering on his terms. I was still in school. I didn’t have any real bills, or a job, a place of my own...you know, man shit. And the longer I went without any of those things, the less I felt like I would ever become a man, with his eyes constantly on me, asking without saying, “When are you going to get it together?”

Hell if I knew. I had this vague idea about being a writer because that’s the only skill I had (still is, but don’t sleep on my cookie-baking abilities), with no earthly idea of how to make that happen. The days I didn’t have an appointment with my therapist I spent in bed watching cable news and writing really horrible poetry. When I wasn’t having a panic attack, I was thinking about the last panic attack and anticipating the next. All the while, the disappointment in my pops’s eyes was palpable. He was wondering where he went wrong and I was being crippled by the thought that I’d never be enough of a man to make him proud.

I’m trying to pinpoint the moment I stopped worrying and started living. I can’t, really. I still worry, but it doesn’t overwhelm me. Something broke along the way and I’m free. I can call myself a man now because I love and feel loved. And for me that’s all it takes.

I think of all the time I wasted not knowing that and I feel small. I’m looking at my text messages now. Yesterday, my pops told me he loved me. I’m twenty-six, he’ll be fifty-two soon, and I think he’s told me he loves me more in the last year or so than during the entire rest of my life. I can’t help but think of what we missed.

I wish I had that time back. I wish I knew my worth a long time ago. But here I am.

With love,

Mychal Denzel Smith

***

DEAR MYCHAL,

I cannot help but think that this performance called “living” is the most radical act that we black men can commit ourselves to.

Unlike you, I did not (and still do not) spend a lot of time in therapy, even though I graduated with a master’s degree in clinical counseling, and even though I knew, the first time that I tried to end my life, that I needed help more than the helping profession needed me. But like you, I spent a lot of time in bed during my early twenties. Dreams, when I could actually sleep, were a welcome escape from…

Life: Staying awake, staying alive, meant that I needed to figure out how the hell I would persuade other folks in my life that I was straight and, therefore, acceptable and honorable as a black man. Fuck trying to live for my father, who didn’t know that I wanted to die…who didn’t know what undergrad institution I was in at the time…who didn’t really know me...probably because he too was most likely trying just as hard as me to live. Nah, I was too worried about living for the Father, that other God, who apparently hated me enough to let me burn eternally in hell because I preferred to love other men. Ain’t that torture? But my black mama knew best. She told me that I should not keep anyone in my life who refused to love me.

Yet, if I were to adhere to my mom’s advice, I would have had to drop out of school years ago (since a lot of folks in our inequitable educational system refuse to love us), quit engaging public health offices (because I walked in as a human in need of medical services and walked out as a patient whose subjective world was made invisible by research lingo: “MSM,” otherwise known as “men who have sex with men”), sleep in my bed all damn day (knowing it is more likely that I would be stopped by police when walking to the store in Camden or Bed-Stuy while rocking a fitted cap and carrying books than my white male neighbors would be while walking around in ski masks in the middle of summer and dropping a dime bag on the ground in front of a walking police and his dog)…