How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(19)

See, this thing that we call “living” is as revolutionary as black gay Joseph Beam’s call for black men to love other black men, precisely because it is a command for us to counteract the very processes of annihilation that structural racism and patriarchy have taught us to love and replicate. We are experts in the art of killing because we know what it is like to be killed, maligned, have our spirits deadened, our bodies pillaged. We know. But we cannot demonstrate our knowledge by rearticulating the very violences that have been used to murder us.

I am a black man and I am still alive. And, yes, I am a revolutionary, because I daily choose to live! But I am a black man whose black mama’s body and spirit were terrorized by another black man’s hands and words. Sexism and patriarchy are not part of the revolution. I am a gender-maneuvering gay black man whose spirit was terrorized by other straight black men. Heterosexism and heteronormativity are not a part of our revolution. I am a black man who has ignored the plights of so many of my brothers. Separation because of difference and elitism based on class is not a part of the revolution. Indeed, my living is your living, is your father’s living, is my father’s living, is my mother’s living, is the stranger’s living, and it is the revolution.

If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee our survival.

More love,

Darnell Moore

***

DEAR DARNELL AND MYCHAL,

Your letter to Mychal took me back to a Baldwin essay. In “Alas Poor Richard,” an essay that I still find a bit too brutalizing of Richard Wright, Baldwin wrote, “Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes can ‘knock’ the other’s ‘hustle,’ can give his game away.”

Long before I read the Baldwin essay, and long before I remember Tupac Shakur, Nasir Jones, and Dwayne Carter giving lessons on how our love for brothers and riches was always more important than our love of black women, I understood the gendered expectation of that hustle Baldwin writes about. No matter what another black man I cared for did to a woman or a group of women or his male partner, I was never to call him out or tell other people about his game.

I want to change.

The black man with whom I spent most of my life was not my father. This black man had an aneurysm two weeks ago. Bad books would call this black man “a father figure.” (Like both of you, I try not to write bad books.) This black man never told me he loved me. He never called me his son. He never told me I could be better. And, truth be told, I never wanted or needed him to do any of that shit. I liked him and I think he liked me.

That was enough.

Femiphobic diatribes and other bad books have gassed us with this idea that black boys need the presence of black father figures in our lives. I’m sure I’m not the only black boy who realized a long time ago that my mother and her mother and her mother’s mother needed loving, generous partners far more than I needed a present father.

Mama disciplined me. She loved me.

Aunt Sue prayed for me. She loved me.

Grandma worked for me. She loved me.

That’s why I made it through the late 80s and 90s. That is why I am alive. Black children need waves of present, multifaceted love, not simply present fathers.

Anyway, I believed this black man loved how my mother made him feel…until he didn’t. He loved her mind…until he didn’t. He loved her persistence…until he didn’t. I know my mother loved him, and loved what he tried to teach me. This black man tried to teach me that white folks were never to be emulated, that black life came from black farmers, and that a love of black people necessitated a love of the land we toiled, picked, and raked. This black man tried to teach me to own myself, Darnell, to never work for a white man. I learned later that owning myself was very different and, really, a lot easier than loving myself.

This black man physically and emotionally brutalized my mother. I fought him for that, but I never told anyone. My mother broke up fights between us. I wiped her tears, put ice on her swollen eyes and split lips, and never ever talked about what this man did to her. This black man was respected in our community and I could have knocked his hustle by telling the truth to him, to my mother, or to anyone who knew us, but I never did.

I knew not to. I knew that telling was not only spreading my mama’s business; it was also a form of knocking this black man’s hustle. And that, I believed, was not how one black man should love another.

Darnell, your letter really made me think about how not knocking another brother’s hustle was seen as black men loving black men. Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn’t matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal. Your letter reminds me that when you don’t let love breathe, you can’t be surprised when you and those around you suffocate. We black men have suffocated our partners and ourselves for a long, long time. We black men have been suffocating. For a long, long time. And I’d like it to stop. I want to work on loving you and Mychal and Kai and Marlon, and I want all of you to work on loving me. Please knock my hustle, Darnell. Please remain my friend when I knock yours. Please love me, brother, and encourage me to be a healthy part of healthy relationships, no matter what. There is no proof that most of this nation has ever really wanted us to live with dignity and equal access to healthy choices, so we have to take better care of ourselves. We have to change.