Blackness & The Living
Nina Simone is dead. Dr. King is dead. Malcolm X is dead. And Roberta? Roberta Flack is dead.
As Nazis salute from columns slaves constructed, I wonder what chord might rise out of Nina, the imagination it might insight from Malcolm, the quiet Dr. King might arouse from an audience before addressing it. I wonder what they might think of immigrant eyes peeking out of U.S. concentration camps in Guantanamo Bay. Then again, I know the silence of a spirit you can no longer pick up the phone and call. I know the name murderers offer indigenous peoples who commune with spirits. Uncivilized. I talk to Mimi every day. So, hunt me. Call it witchcraft when I tell Dr. King that the landscape has changed.
They are dead, I remind myself. The stench of the world is an entirely different fragrance, and still, the wanting won’t dissipate. Not for more Black CEOs of some corrupt company, or for the first Black person to do XYZ, etc., but the want for freedom. A want for Simones’ and Hansberrys’. Not Democrat or Republican but Blackness. Not PhD or JD but person.
I was born into silence in a city where Fred Hampton once walked, and the Young Lords rose. I missed the Great Migration because I was already where my ancestors intended to go: north. I’m the moment the Civil Rights movement ran flat, and freedom got confounded with liberation – the back of my legs warming seats next to white students while Pan-Africanists dreamed an entirely different table.
I’m not a child of the ‘60s but a grandchild. African American. An anomaly crossing national borders. A reminder of who got captured when the Canadian African asks where I’m from. Cameroonian women covered in a boundless night sky looked at me longingly when my feet finally touched the ground. I looked up, and the angelic halo of a white face on a billboard smiled down. I knew then that continents weren’t enough when you could colonize corneas.
There are no more wooden floorboards or harsh stage lights to flood the senses. There are small cameras nestled onto bodies, small purses, a pocket, a hand. There are no more Black Panthers for the FBI to desecrate or ensure the victory of a dead movement – only people who sit waiting for a messiah. A voice to whisper the time has come. Someone to guarantee starving wasn’t just a few rows over. Or that refusing to type for corporations they no longer believed in wouldn’t render them unhoused like the people they passed on the walk to get there.
I ask Dr. King for forgiveness when I bow my head and admit to loving gospel and my relationship with God while knowing that the world becomes no less evil when I pray. Black folks sing, “Lord, when you coming?” I look at Elon and suspect he’s already on his way.
Three generations removed from the red dirt of the plantation, and yet I slip on the suit, button up the coat, bump Beyoncé, and board the train. Pretend my plight isn’t still with the ones at the bottom of the ocean. Even with my phone in my pocket and Uber Eats on the way, I am just as Black as she was.
Black faces who confound high places with liberation remind me Black is just a color. Today, $5,000 units of currency from the nation from which I was stolen is worth $1 in the country who stole. Today, serial looters back currencies while real gold reserves glisten below the copper dirt of Africa.
“Who is King?” I ask myself. I meditate to God every day because spirits hold food not from here. I don’t confuse it with my feet, which do the walking. I dream of home but know the stories: Marcus Garvey and Patrice Lumumba. I hold American history like fruit on a kitchen table, bite down, and taste the rotten. I trace 1850 chains to West Coast fires fought not by the paid and free but by the Black and post-incarcerated.
I drew pictures with chalky fingers at integrated tables the same day resistance died. I was granted permission to pursue law school while the stench of Sandra Bland suffocated. And when I went to work for the white male elite, I was reminded my grandmother never made it that far. I wonder what’s far when the world runs backward? What’s wild when you don’t know free? Time couldn’t have been linear, and neither were my great-great-grandmother’s wildest dreams.
I’m Mississippi Black. Translation: The small Black Baptist church where my Great Aunt Brenda was laid to rest was familiar to me. Gospel is how I know I don’t need to believe like you to love you. It’s why I ask, what’s liberation when they offer freedom?
I watch bubbles rise from the ocean and trace them to the sound of a woman down below. She tells me that I’m Malcolm and your Martin and that your mamma is Nina.
She chose the bottom of the ocean rather than land where she would never be free. She was uninterested in being oppressed so long she lived solely for the right to take a vacation. Or, lost for so long, she’d use “bad for business” to describe pieces of Palestinian girls falling to the earth like rain. Or, mentally mutilated till she couldn’t hear the sound of a dying earth or be granted the time to read.
Within my hands was no longer cotton but a keyboard, and I only knew two types of typing. There was the kind you did to convince those in power you were worthy of being fed and the kind you did when fear dissipated and spirits spoke. When hymns sounded like wind catching a woman untamable enough to jump. When Roberta winked and, Nina breathed in, pressed down on an unforgiving keyboard, released her breath, and let out a screech.
They are dead, I reminded myself. There was wilder, I whispered. I don’t know where people go when they die. I could only tell you how they lived.
The name I knew her by was Mimi.
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