There Are Black People In The Future
It's been almost four months since I wrote a letter and what a decade it's been!
Right now, I am in my living room in Brooklyn, and the sound of the box fan is competing with the whirring of helicopter rotor that's been above my little corner of the borough, seemingly all day. My insomnia is worse in the summer but even before it started getting warm, I had been averaging about four hours of sleep a night, and finding myself sluggish by mid-afternoon. The news keeps me wide-eyed with a steady combination of rage, fear and terrifying resignation. I cycle through these three moods with occasional guest stars like sudden anxiety, general unexplained tears, a furious and profound sadness. Plus every month, like clockwork, fucking cramps.
Horrifyingly, for all the noise of the uprisings across America this past week, the homicide of George Floyd in Minneapolis, does not feel unfamiliar or singular. That it was caught on video was not novel; that among his stark final words was an echo of the last recorded words of another unarmed black man—Eric Garner—dying in eerily similar circumstances, was somehow horribly apt (imagine reusing your protest banner from all those years ago, and changing nothing); that it took recorded material filmed by a bystander to get any movement was somehow to be expected; that citizens and other residents took to the streets with an anguished howl was somehow correct.
What felt different is the reality of the moment: there is a global pandemic on (had you heard the bad news?) and the coronavirus has been decidedly choosy about who it's picking off, and so a good number of us had been practicing social distancing as a result. But then there was, for large swathes of the population, suddenly ample reason to defy those health-preserving rules. And as for the people who hadn't been too keen on social distancing and mask-wearing in the first place? Well, they didn't seem to be the type who would march in protest at the death of a black person at the hands of police at this or any other time. For haircuts, though? Yeah, why not.
There is nothing new to be said. I have no new insights; I'm mostly sad, especially today. I am thinking about George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and David McAtee as well as all the other black people who died suddenly and violently in recent weeks, and those who died in years much older than this one. I am thinking about their families, whose lives have been turned into a stage on which strangers act out these old roles for one another and the world to see. I am no longer in the business of writing my journalism down via thousands of words; I'm a radio woman again, you see! But this last week, o, how I missed being a print journalist. The chance to write it all down with gay abandon and then write it all again, this time doing a steady job of subtracting until what is left is the most concentrated and effective version of a thought. It's the same principles in radio journalism, to be fair; the words just taste different in your brain. But at the same time, I was glad that it was no longer required of me. The requirement might have been a burden too far this week.
I have been able to read, though, and I am grateful for that. Poetry, naturally, is a balm that soothes, as well as a kite to hang sorrow on. W.H. Auden, whom I stubbornly like to think of as a dirty poet who sometimes wrote other poetry, still feeds me with his Funeral Blues. Sometimes I cannot believe a man whose given names are "Wystan Hugh" can move me so profoundly.
South African poet Koleka Putuma's Indulgence feels on-the-nose, since it opens thus:
mother teach your daughter
that a grief
that sets itself loose
in the middle of a busy highway
is not madness
From Terrance Hayes, there are words that feel like a hand on the small of your back, familiar but still heavy:
America, you just wanted change is all, a return
To the kind of awe experienced after beholding a reign
Of gold. A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection
Of your own.
From Bridget Minamore, and her poem But A Second Hand Emotion, a sort of playful pain:
You're an asthma attack
you make my lung tight
my chest contract
my airwaves are a mess
And I have been watching television, imagining a world where Molly and Issa on Insecure are still friends, and Felicia Leatherwood does my hair every single day, and where careful camera angles and melanin-friendly lighting assist a Lawrence or an Andrew in helping me forget all my trials and tribulations. ::eyes emoji::
And I do all sorts of things offline that are nobody's business but my own, but you should know they make me feel useful, and calm and good, and grateful. Sometimes the feelings lasts for hours, sometimes for minutes, sometimes less.
Almost every night, I think of the artist Alisha B. Wormsley's installation in Pittsburgh.
THERE
ARE
BLACK PEOPLE
IN THE
FUTURE
I wish I felt better.