The Search for Better: Pressure on Black Life in America

Helen grew up down the street from my mother in Pine Bluff Arkansas.  She was dispatched by her family to check in on us after my brother, Toure, was killed in 1998.  She lived only blocks away from Mama's duplex off 35th, in Oakland and she and her husband drove us over to her house for dinner one late fall evening.  It was just me and Mama and Helen, ultimately who ended up on her floral print sofa chatting and sipping wine.  Toure had been gone for thirty days at most; so the pressure that ascends into the body after heavy trauma was not yet below any surface.  It was vivid and tangible, in our voices and waiting for our skin to open and let it into our blood.  And it would, over the years, slip deeper and deeper into our blood.

I noticed Helen's teeth first.  They made her whistle when she spoke.  I wondered why she had never had them fixed to fit more neatly in her mouth.  Mama would have explained that cosmetic tooth care is a luxury for most folks.  And Helen wasn't living luxurious.  She lived, in fact, in a house that was sliding down a hill.  A fact that did not relieve her of a mortgage payment, but that instead also cost her more each month, as she paid for the exorbitant price for water that leaked out of a pipe that sat between her sliding home and the street to which it should have stayed attached.  Helen was kind and fed us well.  She also offered Mama and me some comfort:  she had attended Toure's memorial, she said.  She had sat among the thousand or so who'd shown up to Allen Temple for this young brother who'd been slain while espousing his religious principles, working to speak peace between two bickering factions of black men.  She told us, "At least you can be proud of Toure.  My son died doing dirt."  She had been estranged from her boy.  She said she thought of him during the memorial service because he favored that handsome minister from San Francisco.  Same hair and height.  Her boy was handsome.  But he had fallen, she reported, to the lure of the street.  And in order to save herself from constant worry, from bonding him out of jail, from inserting her in his street conflicts, from feeding and sheltering his grown body, she'd had to let him go.  "I'd been through enough," she said.

He'd moved to Brooklyn and only because a stranger had phoned in the middle of one otherwise muted evening, did Helen know something had happened to him, "I think your son is dead, Ma'am.  In New York."  That was all the stranger said.  

Helen packed a small bag; set it by her door.  For three more days she retrieved files and input data down at the Alameda County Court House waiting for a Friday paycheck in order to purchase a $700 open-ended ticket to New York to find her son.  She flew out Saturday morning and hit the streets of Brooklyn.  She used what she knew of files and court houses and street commerce to search for her son.

She met with success on day four after sucking it up and heading first into the hospitals and finally downstairs into the morgues.  She found him.

In the morgue:  a technician walked her down as he finished chewing the last of his pastrami sandwich.  He flung open the drawer, she said, and grabbed her son's body.  "This here one is yours ma'am."  He said it as he chuckled and grabbed the boy's head.  "He's got your forehead!"

Helen said she couldn't believe he had spoken to her in that tone.  As if she was nothing and her son was nothing.  As if this scene could possibly register as ordinary and not devastating and not horrifying.

Helen withdrew the last of her real savings and flew her son back to Arkansas to have him buried in ground she knew.  Just like Mama, she sought some comfort in returning her boy to the deepest sanctuary she knew.  Buried him among people that'd long known his name.  Buried him among the pines where she'd have rather watched him grow and prosper and start a family.  But Helen had had to abandon the people and the pines, in the search of something that had been promised as better.  She had to leave.  Her son was made to wander from one street corner to the next in search of better.  But better never came, except for one brief period in the 70s:  before crack, before AIDS, before the guns and Reagan ... before the chaos.

"Least you had something to be proud of," she said it to me and Mama again as if to assuage the sense of our own dangling off a hillside.  We were told it would get better, eventually.  But before another decade was done, we'd bury another brother, two first cousins, a father, aunt, countless friends and our dear Grandmother.  We'd step up like Helen and Mama did, in tribute and obligation to the family and the dead, put them away nice.  And each time, the task would fall upon another one (who is able this time?) in the family to handle the searching, the detailed arrangements, the endless answering questions.  All an ageless exercise in purging and catharsis that is promised to be followed by relief.  That's the mythology.  But in this age, whereby ruthless capitalism is inextricably bound to racism, sexism and violence, the mythology doesn't exist.   There's no clean resolution.  No rest.  No better.  There's a back and forth.  A frenetic attempt at mending.  A reaching for better from sources safe and not safe.  Unending pressure.

A wealthy little black girl I nannied years ago in Marin County came home one day and said one of her wealthy white friends asked her why black people were so "irritable".   She told the white girl she didn't know.  But had she been honest, she would have told her because we live precariously in this country.  Though the little black girl was wealthy and lived in extreme physical comfort, she had lost her father before she was born.  Her uncle lived in the projects across town and had just been nearly missed by a drive-by shooting in Richmond.  Her next point might have been that her own seeming "irritability" may stem from her John Henry-like efforts to never have to live in the neighborhood where she would have to dodge bullets. We understand who and where we are and have never relinquished our desire for better.