Even Mr Thomas, who had never called my mother anything other than âthat nigger,â was, to her, just a confused old man. But walking around with my father, sheâd seen how American changed around big black men. She saw him try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months. Each time, they took him to a little room off the exit of the store. They leaned him against the wall and patted him down, their hands drifting up one pant leg and down the other. Homesick, humiliated, he stopped leaving the house.
Related Quotes
Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man Iâd ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with him. I knew that he had chafed against the schools, that he had almost been doomed by the streets. But even more I knew that he had found himself while studying in prison, and that when he emerged from the jails, he returned wielding some old power that made him speak as though his body were his own.
I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another humanâs body to confirm myself in a community. Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe. But my tribe was shattering and reforming around me. I saw these people often, because they were family to someone whom I loved. Their ordinary moments - answering the door, cooking in the kitchen, dancing to Adina Howard - assaulted me and expanded my notion of the human spectrum. I would sit in the living room of that house, observing their private jokes, one part of me judging them, the other reeling from the changes.
The space between the family in the photograph on my dresser and what became of it is gaping and largely unknowable. My parents rarely spoke of each other. They rarely acknowledged that the family in the photograph ever existed. My father died before I was old enough or brave enough to ask him all my questions about the end of our family. Once or twice, we stumbled onto the topic, but those conversations were terse and awkward. I worried that he would take my curiosity for ingratitude, that he would think the life he had given me was not enough. My mother, when we were still speaking, would reveal only scant details. I did not push her. Our relationship was too fragile. And, always, below us, vibrations moved through solid rock.
The girls who picked on me were neither persuaded nor deterred by my recitation of this history. But my father was right on one count: their words no longer pierced my skin. When they approached me, I stuck my nose in the air imperiously and walked in the opposite direction. To their insults, I did not respond. I acted as though they did not exist.
My father continued to teach me about Ghanaian history after discovering that the entire continent of Africa was excluded from my world history textbook, except for Egypt. And the illustrations of ancient Egyptians in the book made them look decidedly European. âNonsense,â my father said.
I donât think this place was everything my mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world. Though she didnât ford a river or hike across mountains, she still did what so many pioneers before her had done, travelled recklessly, curiously, into the unknown of hopes of finding something just a little bit better. And like them she suffered and she persevered, perhaps in equal measure. Whenever I looked at her, a castaway on the island of my queen-sized bed, it was hard for me to look past the suffering. It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost - her home country, her husband, her son. The losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered., but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she survived, even when she wasnât sure she wanted to. I used to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle, but then my brother died and my mother and I were left with so much more; it crushed us.
It took me many years to realize that itâs hard to live in this world. I donât mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, itâs harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding rows, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. Itâs natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, at the nature of âwhat we can handleâ changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, thatâs something of a miracle.