How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(26)
Mama doesn’t know about my RBG T4 Obama shirt.
Anyway, I wear the shirt three times a week and I’ll definitely rock it tomorrow morning when I vote. Tonight, I’m imagining wearing the shirt while driving home to Mississippi for Christmas:
RBG T4 Obama shirt and I are hauling ass through Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama, in late December, our backseat covered with fifteen folded RBG T4 Obama shirts I plan on giving away to my family and friends in Jackson. I’m bumping this Mahalia Jackson/Andre 3000 duet as I pull up to a dusty Amoco in Northern Alabama. I open the door of my truck as fourteen working-class white locals look at me and my Obama shirt with hate in their mind, envy in their hearts, and “Niggers these days” on the tips of their thin wet lips.
Within seconds, the locals are wearing my Obama shirts, sipping on Faygos, and talking that good shit with some other black Alabamans and me about the underrated importance of moral imagination and local activism in carving the policies that will mitigate the economic and social problems of our region in 2008. We’re also coming up with a list of real questions we want to ask at the next presidential election in 2012.
I hardly sleep, but love to dream.
When I was younger, Mama said that lack of moral imagination on the part of most white folks was exactly why black girls and boys needed to be twice as good to get half as much of white Americans in our country. She said you have to pity an entitled group of people who believe black and brown folks are getting more than they deserve when they themselves have twenty times more wealth, better access to good health care, are far less likely either to go to prison or to grow up in poverty, and are five times more likely to go to college. “Don’t ever let them beat you,” Mama and Grandma repeated with their daily, “I love you.”
Both neglected to tell me there was also a bruising, terrible price to pay for being better than intellectual white folks drunk off of American white liberal entitlement.
I learned that on my own, way up at good ol’ liberal Vassar College.
“Mama,” I say over the phone. “I gotta go, but I hear you.”
I hang in the grainy silence, hoping that Mama will change the subject to Serena Williams or my insomnia or her recent surgery. I’m hoping Mama will tell me that God won’t give us anything we can’t handle or some other bloated cliché.
Instead, Mama eventually sighs and says again, “Kie, people who never learned to lose will do anything to see us not win. When they lose to Obama, they’ll figure out a way to win anyway. It’s just too much.”
“You way too cynical, Mama,” I tell her. “We got this.”
“I love you, Kie,” she says. “Stay safe, and pray for Michelle, Barack, and those kids.”
“Mama, I thought you were saying that we should pray for us.”
“It’s just too much,” Mama says. “This has nothing to do with politics, or public policy. Goodnight, Kie.”
Mama hangs up the phone and I pull the RBG T4 T-shirt out of my closest and put it next to my red Pumas, an army-green sweatshirt, and some baggy black shorts I’ll wear early tomorrow morning when I go to vote.
I’m playing it off, imagining the celebrations that will follow the election of our first black President. But not even deep down, though, I know Mama is right.
We know Mama is right.
Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered. And it’s all just too much.
***
November 5, 2008, 2:15 a.m.
Earlier tonight, I wore my RBG T4 Obama shirt as Barack Obama beat John McCain into a pile of All-American dust. Hundreds of Vassar College students celebrated in front of my apartment on campus. Some kids streaked, while others unknowingly remixed a traditional lynch scene by hoisting a life-size cardboard Barack Obama into the moonlit sky. Joyful sounds echoed for hours as young Americans who would never call themselves hipsters, rich, or racist morphed into patriots with chants of “USA! USA!”
One of my wonderful first-year white students walked up to me in the midst of the celebration and said, “Congratulations,” like he knew I had just hit the Mega Millions or paid off my student loans.
I had done neither.
“Oh,” I said. “Congratulations to you, too.”
Really, I just registered it as one of those slick things “good” white folks do when confronted with splendid black American achievement. Honestly, I didn’t know what the victory, the celebration in that space, or the congratulations given to us black Americans meant. I didn’t know if we were celebrating Obama’s victory, McCain’s defeat, the end of Bush’s regime, our deliverance, the possibility of a post-racist America, triumph for African-Americans, or a little bit of all those things.
When the dry, pulpy feeling got to be too much to bear, I got in my car to drive downtown, where most of the black and brown folks in Poughkeepsie live, and where a good number of folks live way below the poverty line.
The mile and a half drive from the corner of Main and Raymond to the waterfront was as quiet a drive as I’d ever experienced. No human beings were outside. There were no signs or sounds of shared celebrations.
There was no echo.
Inside those apartments, houses, and buildings, I assumed folks were smiling from the inside out. I also assumed most of those folks were wondering how retribution for this splendid black American achievement would be played out on their bodies, pockets, spirits, and minds. I wondered if the right questions could ever really change anything, and the right questions seemed further and further away.