A Meeting

The producers turned down the lights.  The keynote speaker stood in the wings, amping himself to address the remaining crowd of Sunday conference attendees.  The diehards.  Those who'd availed themselves to this last stretch of indoctrination.  The African American educational unity conference had emphasized what binds us:  culture, purpose, commitment, experience, access and purpose. This was my second in two years and the number of participants had noticeably boomed from the year prior.  Some call it a zeitgeist, others, a moment.  We had flown in to commune with each other that we might return to our homes fueled by the idea of a collective agenda.  We intended to be free and to do all the work possible to allow our folks, our community the space and opportunity to live out its inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  We were students, instructors, counselors and organizers, gathered in one spacious soft lit room, awaiting closing instruction.

My knee bobbed from pride and anticipation as I sat to the left of a tall, brown young man who spoke to an older sister to his right.  His tone, sure.  His physiognomy, resigned.  I had not noticed him earlier.  But as he spoke, I had turned to measure him.

"I work now to restore my place in my community," he said.  "Because I committed the most egregious offense against humanity, I owe the greatest debt."  He continued, "I killed a man when I was 18.  And I served a long prison sentence but it's not enough."

I made myself sit still.  I had never heard anyone speak so candidly, and not in hushed tones, in such a public arena.  To qualify, I regularly sit in recovery rooms and listen to confessions of every possible human offense.  As well, I regularly walk out of such rooms without condemning the confessor.  Gut bucket confession and restitution are mainstays of such environments.  We practice recognizing our own faultiness and, in turn, reflect the same onto others.  But this was not any such room.  It hadn't been made safe or private or confidential.

Having forced myself to stay seated, I angrily wondered why the Universe continued to require so much from me.  I felt blindsided by another's experience.  My pulse responded, and a cold heat flooded my limbs.  Why?

Because in 1998 a 19-year-old boy in cornrows shot and killed my brother, Toure, in the back, in Oakland.  The boy was eventually caught because my brother was handsome and middle-class and a teacher and had two dogged parents and the Nation of Islam to pressure police and the community to give up this killer.  My brother's death caught us all completely off guard.  This was something that happened to street people.  Men and women risking their lives, passing dirty money between each other out of desperate meanness.  And my brother was the kindest, most consciously-living person you might ever meet.  He was poetic and sincere and learned.  He played Dungeons and Dragons and football and had a Marvel Comic collection dating back to Superman Vs. Batman in the 1970s.  By the mid 1990s, he had committed himself to the uplift of his people and had been killed in the street by a dope boy who saw the Nation of Islam as a threat to his trade.

So when the assured, reflective young man spoke beside me, I realized I had to reckon with, in that moment, the undeniable complexity of black life in today's America.  The moment the young man beside me spoke of himself as a reformed killer, I was forced to make a decision.  Little more than the terror of self-immolation forces many of my decisions.

Five seconds.  I waited for him to pause and then held out my hand.  "Excuse me, I'm sorry, what did you say your name was/I'm Tasha ... I couldn't help but hear your conversation."  I lowered my voice, leaned in and tried to study his his eyes.  "Would you mind me contacting you/ I'm very interested in what you have to say ... My brother was murdered in 1998 by a young man he didn't know ... I am interested in those stories/ the stories of black men and women affected by forces beyond them," I used my hands, "especially following the crack glut of the late 80s and 90s."

His head fell.  He said nothing.  He closed his eyes and I waited, saying nothing --

"Of course, you can.  I'm sorry about your brother."  His voice quivered as he reached into his blazer pocket and handed me his card.  We whispered between each other as the rest of the room tensely awaited the keynote speaker.  He told me some of what led him to what he described as his "crime against humanity."  I described my brother to him and shared that it really didn't seem to matter much, the degrees of separation.

"You were who you were and my brother who he was.  And I wonder how so many of the boys I'd grown up with and went to school with ended up affected by crack. So many died. So many went to jail.  Some killed other black men. Some did the unimaginable.  We all watched it happened.  The women were affected too; and that's a whole other huge story.  We were all affected whether we recognize/d it or not.  It took me the longest to see it.  Used to think of myself separated from it.  But we all knew somebody who got hooked on it too.  Then to find out how orchestrated crack's initial infusion into our communities was ... and we laughed at each other and were made to feel ashamed over it."

"Yeah," he said.  Still reeling, it seemed, from our introduction.  I could have continued to reel, but I had already placed the two of us in a larger context, inside the frame of American history.  I was able to do so then, more easily because so much time, therapy and feeling had preceded our meeting.  Time, therapy and feeling.

In 2013, I applied to an MFA writing program with one goal in mind:  write my story of black love and life in America. Document the complications.  Document it with honesty and conviction and with my own adornment.  Write it down to for my people, here and gone, who had long known what I came to know:  we decide the best we can on any given day and sometimes our hurt is as coarse and heavy as a hand-made brick;  but so is our love.  It is thick and late and on-time and gut wrenching--but always alive and always astonishing.  We see it in ourselves and in our brothers and sisters who share the same stories, the same blood and the same hope.  It is truth-spilliing and it is forgiving.  Confessional and accepting.  Inward and resurrecting.  It is recognition of ourselves as the killer and the killed and moreover, the open-hearted.

How else can we proceed?