Cassiopeia Strawberry John

                                                   Cassiopeia Strawberry John

       
I must a been about two.  I figure I was two because I could remember things and Mama said little folks don't remember too right until they can talk and put words to people and things around them.  Mama knows a lot which would make you think she wasn't right for Daddy—dim as he is—but Mama said Daddy got good sense about patterns.  He can't figure the pattern or sound of letters on a page, but he can sure look at this and that and see how they's connected.  He can fix a lawnmower, a transmission, a clock, a door, a television, anything.  He can and I know he can because I seen him do it.  Anything ever go kaput, Daddy just smile at it and shake his head and go wrestle up his tool belt.  He don't say nothing neither, just take that broken thing into that shed with him, bang metal against wood all day and night with that bright light peeking under the door, and come out with whatever it was broke buzzing and singing like brand new.  He can't read no instructions, but everybody in Midland come to him for fixing things.  He keep money in his pocket--which is just fine by me and Mama.  She say a man gotta have something to make him not try too hard to be a man; thinking about being a man make a man no good. I don't know what that means, but my daddy is good and got plenty of something besides dim wits.
Mama say Daddy is a tree and I'm his cutting.  Me and Daddy stay in each other's shadow now, but it ain't always been that way.  I didn't see him til I was five.  That War had him in a fit, Mama said.  He couldn't come back around until he could shake it off right.  She said he woulda killed somebody here stateside if'n he hadn't stayed away to get his head back right.  While Daddy was gone, me and Mama stayed at Grandma and Granddaddy's with all the rest of the Castleberry clan, all five of my uncles and aunties spread out in that big ole house—Granddaddy built it. Shaped like an L, light blue and white and made of wood and a touch of Granddaddy’s hands.

Standing in the Castleberry yard, before I became a John through and through, I got a taste of confusion that big Time would straighten out for me way down the road. That taste didn't subside til I got sense enough to know that everybody don't tell the truth.  And a lie seem sometime like the most right thing.

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Grandma always whistle when she walks through the house.  I don't know what song, but it starts with one long, clear note that trails off and vibrates like the end of her favorite Louis Armstrong song. … “What a wonderful worlllllddd…” And she keep it cool.  She don't never get too riled up about things.  My grandma is cool as they come.  Between her and Granddaddy, I don't know which more icy.  Nothing rattle them too much.  Like to keep things slow and bubbling low, like that pot of brown beans Grandma cook all day and serve up with a skillet of crisco-right white buttermilk cornbread. You know she coming because that slow whining whistle come down the hall ahead of her and that yapping noise behind her, Skip.
Skip is a tiny little black and white half dog.  Little wiggly black tail and little doggy toenails.  He prances around the house like he's everybody's best friend and you might owe him twenty dollars.  He get that way from Grandma.  He know won't nobody fringe on his day because he got Grandma for his best tight friend.
From the time I start walking and moving on my own, I play with Skip and start to call him Skippy because I want him to be my friend, even though I know me and him won't be like him and Grandma.  But me and Skip get to be friendly.  I tap my fat baby thigh like I can't control my hand quite right and say, “Tum 'ere, Tippy. Tum 'ere.”  Then I walk around and grab some of his little doggy biscuits from under the cabinet and say it again, “Tum 'ere, Tippy.”  I let him eat from my hand, then wipe my fingers in the rug in front of the sink. I ain't never like slobber of any sort.
Me and Tippy start to be friends.  I wake up in the morning looking for my bottle and Tippy.  I sit on the stoop in the den, drink my bottle and pour the milk inside onto my bowl of Frosty Flakes-- Tippy sits beside me chewing on a hard doggy biscuit, Grandma on the couch, cussing at the man on the TV.  So many of them named Bastard, I get confused.  When Mama wakes up to give me my bath, Skippy follows us and comes to sit in the floor and watches Mama soap me up and rinse me clean.  I'm in my towel, she drying me off and she tells Skippy, “gone dog, shew.”  Skippy trot back to Grandma in the den.
My whole day I go on about my business looking at stuff and touching stuff and shaking my head and listening to my uncles and aunties and Grandma talking about draft and War and lemon cookies and mosquitoes.  I fall asleep under Mama when the sun in the sky go down and that city light in the street starts to blinking.  I fall asleep ready to wake up with Skippy and my milk bottle and my morning Frosty Flakes.
That old man across the yard got roosters who wake you up.  “Err-er-errr-er-h errrrrrrr!”  They do like that and I wake up every day before Mama roll over reaching for me. I see Grandma on her couch, talking to the TV already and am 'bout to say, “Ma, I 'wonta eat,” but can't because this long eeerrrrrrrrrhhhhhh rips in front of the house right before a BANg!
Everybody jump and I don't know what. My aunties and uncles pull on they pajama strings, Grandma ties up her robe and everybody peek scared outside.  Auntie Dutch says, “Oh Lord,” and opens the door so the whole house can spill out behind her.  I'm forgetting about asking for my cereal and my milk bottle and following them.  I walk up behind my Auntie Dutch and peek through her locked yellow legs. Standing in front of a big black tire, a oatmeal-faced man holding his hat to his titties.  I almost missed Skippy that morning, but he in the grass, wobbling his head up and back like he was wanting for something.
“Here I am Skip,” blood on his ear and his eyes didn't look like his.  I start slapping my fat baby thigh, “Here, Tippy.  Here, Tippy.”  Aunt Dutch glance at my other auntie and Grandma, then tell me, “That ain't Skip, baby.  That dog's from down the road.” I look down the road and see nothing but more road.
Mama come up behind me and lift me into the house.  I don't remember no bath no breakfast no talking and no sleeping from that day.  But I know my next morning start with me on the stoop with my milk bottle and Frosty Flakes, Grandma on her couch not fussing at the TV, and a empty space between the two of  us.

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One day I stopped looking for Skip, I guess, but wondered for a long time how the people down  the road had the exact same dog as my grandma.  About my baby's business I went.  And every once in a while a thought about Skippy would come to me, especially when I caught a glimpse of Grandma's tipped up sparkly genie slippers.  Soft slippers, like my grandma's hand.  Opposite of my shoes.  Mama believed big white bucks best for training a baby's feet straight and strong; so I kept a pair on my feet 'til I turned three. I ain't never had no problem walking.  Especially away from things.
It started then, after I searched down North Spruce street and didn't see Skip no more.  I stood at the edge of the Castleberry yard with all that sharp grass scratching my ankle bones and started to wonder what else I might need to figure out for myself.  A lie might make you know not to listen to nobody.  And I didn't.  Might not have been the best way to come up, but I did figure a lot out one thing at a time:  like that sometime you can't tell a dream from what was real. I still, even today, got dreams that's mixed up with real life.

America is Mine: Claiming the Black Soil

A part of me is always at war. I accept it. There's no way to escape fact. My American life, black, woman, queer, and unbowed wakes each morning sure that while the sun shines into my eyes, I will have to assert verbally or bodily, my right to walk this land freely, without encumbrance, without imposition, and without permission.

This is new, accepting the war's physicality. Since second grade, when I worked myself into a headache in Mrs. Wilson's Pine Bluff Arkansas classroom, wondering how I had already formed the opinion that the wealthy and nameless white girl's spit was more pure than Katrina Ramsey's broke-ass black spit, I understood the psychological attack against my identity (no lie).  I sat analyzing that cognitive dissonance at seven.  I sat and thought back to first grade and to the red-haired farm worker girl with freckles who smelled of wind and lettuce.  She'd arrived late in the school year and spoke no English.  She stayed a few weeks, then left.  We never learned her name and she never learned ours, yet I had in the depths of my understanding, at six, in the mist-soaked valleys of Oxnard California, ranked her below the long-haired white girl with the perfumed Avon broaches:  the girl the boys, black, white and brown chased around the black top during boys chase girls.  I accepted a vanquishing, at seven.  I hadn't known how it happened.  I knew only that it was there, somewhere inside me and that Mama had us coloring the white kids in the library books black (not brown) didn't matter one bit.  This psychic onslaught against my blackness would forever require resistance.  Fine. Forward. Battle on.

Mama and Tatum, two semi-cowed revolutionaries, who'd bought into the promise of civil rights integrationism, walked away, their bodies in tact, from the guns and bank bombings and police shoot outs and communist affiliations.  They ushered us into the suburbs and a hope for us in this land. They had left their dusty homeland in Arkansas and bought a piece of an American future in California.  

They worked double-time to infuse us with a sense of psychic wholeness.  At five, we I sat at the kitchen table staring at a map, "This is Ethiopia. Their king, Menelik, fought the Italians out of his country.  This is who we are." They taught us that who America said we were, we were not.  America saw us as former slaves, clowning and begging and sexing and buck-dancing our way in and through the sooty margins of its mainstream/white society.  Yet, we knew ourselves not as marginal people, but round and whole and complicated and pretty and lacking and prideful and gentle and generous and low-down. That we knew.  The psychic battle, we accepted and fought on--though I know my brothers acquiesced at a point, decided it best to be an American nigger than to be alone.  I chose to be alone, save my junior year of high school (God forgive me).  I bounced back, refusing to bow to the American nigger consciousness.  I resisted the psychosis, or so I thought.  I had determined to be free of the thing that I, at seven, had thought most threatening.  I rejected the idea I could somehow rank lower than anybody on Earth, especially white folk.  My mind was sure enough to reject the washing of my common sense.  America, for all it knew of itself, would not have my mind.

And forty-two years later, a new thing has emerged: America belongs to me too. This land -- its rocks and water and air and trees -- is mine. For forty-eight years, I have planted my feet in places more solidly than in others.  I have brushed against the leaves of trees more heartily in Arkansas and Georgia than in Yosemite and Monterey.  I have adopted a segregated notion of my physical belonging that has, in essence, denied me the full gift of my birthright.  I belong everywhere.

I write the natural world into all my works because it my heritage.  Writing of the African diaspora reflects the cosmological notion that the trees and soil and water and air and stars have as much to say as any character in any story.  When my parents, children of a southern agrarian culture, migrated to California, they brought with them an adoration for the natural world.  They gave it to us:  we camped in Yosemite every summer.  We wound our green sleeper van around the curves and crashing waves at Big Sur. We fished. We hiked. We swam. We planted. We noticed.

Wherever we ventured, Mama remarked on how the whitefolx stared at us, as if we didn't belong.  "Why they everywhere?"  she asked.  "Can't we go somewhere where they not?"  Mama, defensively racist, wanted to feel the same freedom at Yosemite that she felt on Black Lake, behind her family home in Arkansas.  She spoke a resistance to their presumptive glares.  Their eyes shot at us messages, messages that made her uncomfortable.  Their eyes said the land belonged to them and not us.  The lie.

Over the last seven years I have visited Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Monterey, Point Lobos and hiked trails through the redwoods and along the California coast.  Something has changed.  My last trip to Tahoe I watched the Latino folx walking the sidewalks along King's Beach and thought what a trick of history that these beautiful brown people have been made to feel like visitors on this land that once belonged to them.  They do not own the cabins along the water's edge.  The cabins belong to the people who believe the history of this land began once they killed enough people to claim it as theirs. I will forever resist that untruth.

My friends and I rent a cabin from a wealthy white woman when we visit and we stretch our necks to connect eyes with other black and brown folx wading in the lake's gentle waves.  Each year, more of us appear.  My last two trips to Yosemite, I noticed the population shift:  busloads of East Indian tourists disembark beside the mademoiselles and frauleins.  Latino families cookout beside Merced Creek.  Black families snap photos of El Capitan.  I now feel more at home under the same trees I had stood under in 1980.  The stares matter little now because we are more and we are over here and over there.  We have begun, I have begun to walk here, in this America as if it belongs to me because I know it does.  

A Primer for Bay Negroes: Chronicle One

It's Sunday.  The fatigued 30-year-old black mother sits in the underground train station, dank and wet with midnight San Francisco air.  She leans into her bike, regrets riding it down the hill to work.  After work, the uphill dig looms in her mind, in her muscles, she recalls the ache from that last mile.

Behind her, an Asian boy, in big jeans and Raiders cap is wrapped around his girl.  She plays with his knee.

-- Why you was looking at that nigga so hard?  he says.
She, -- You trippin nigga.

The black mother's hands turn cold.  Her mind speeds into making sense here.  Who is their nigga subject? Is he black?  Is he their friend?  Is he a schoolmate?  Is he Asian?  Is this alright?  She wants the warmth of her limbs to circle back.

She crosses into where she can make it alright. Correct the chill.
To herself, -- they're from Oakland where Asians are niggas too.  Everybody wants to be a nigga in Oakland.  They are as much out of town as I am, here in San Francisco.  Their family is new to the country.  They don't know nothing about niggas feet smoldering at the foot of dogwood trees.  Their nigga is not your nigga.  Don't be hurt. They are wandering, here, and Oakland generates its niggas in the first generation.  Sense.

She holds her bike erect and stands to move.  Her lips force a smile.  She spots a bench, two white bears in lumberjacks and work boots lean into each other.

Fading military tattoos show beneath the tight creases at their elbows. They are hairy and their skin rough.  The taller one's hand steadies the back of the other.  They are drunk.

She is tired, so she sits. She nods hello and waits for her train.  Two minutes flashes over the marquee.  Fremont train, two minutes.  The train will carry her under the Bay, back to Oakland, the city a friend said was --wall-to-wall niggas.  Oakland is soft to her.  She can walk through all of Oakland those street niggas don't ever bother her or her daughters.  Those street niggas know the story of black mothers and children alone.  They watch out for her.

A breeze rises and the train's horn signals to her, you will be home soon.  She's better.

Behind her the bigger bear asks his lover, "You liked that nigger, didn't you?"

She cannot believe her fortune.  She is cold again.  These these two muscled men will have to pay for it all.  The cold fires from her mouth.

--You two bitches,  who you calling nigger?
Their slow drunken sorry-s do nothing.

She is cold again, struggling to grip her bike's handlebars onto the train.

"Fremont train to West Oakland Bart."

Bay Air

                                                               

Dinner was done.  All the dishes cleared from the tiny kitchen table.  The open patio windows invited a waft of cold bay air to wend through the house, through the slatted furnace grates in the floorboards.  The cold sat down in the living room on the couch, in front of the muted oversized flat screen television that they’d bought together; unknowingly, at that moment, consigning themselves to defeat before they’d ever committed to this last of last foolish romances.  Some loves linger far past years of usefulness and fire and trying.  This love did not linger.

The day it ended, Shawna woke with a scratchy throat and knew who to blame.  She looked at the rolls that laziness and disinterest had folded into her sleeping lover’s back and imagined herself hunched over a well-lawyered desk, punctilious in signing all necessary-- and some extra--contracts allowing for a silent, pain-free dissolution of her dead dead and done marriage to this woman who used to be able to stop her breath, merely walking through the room and picking up a pencil.  Now they were pals who touched each other only out of habit and politeness.  She couldn’t remember the last time they’d kissed –well, besides the times they both needed to come--it didn’t happen.  The Saturday afternoon shows for the neighbors, with the windows wide open onto the street--Oh sweet Jesus!  Or even counting through Redwood Park, predicting the averages of leaves on the ferns growing beneath the shade of their unknowing, aged caretakers.  The splendid years gone and rolling toward regret, Shawna would have to tell her by noon.  Keep regret at bay.

She asked her future former lover to meet her at home for lunch.  She had a plan.  She’d made roasted chicken sandwiches, home fries with thin sliced garlic and strawberry lemonade, the pulp drawn out and set on a folded napkin.  She sat by the window, gazing out at the huge oak tree at the front of her surly cross-the-street neighbor’s yard.  She imagined how the tree felt knowing it would never leave that spot; it would always be beholden to the soil that held its roots, the sky that greened and sooted its leaves.  The light would change between seasons leaving the tree, at its root feeling a deep down greediness.

But the tree had learned these patterns and braced against what had become predictable let downs, expecting more from longer sweeter daylight and less of short tepid nights.  Winter drove it bare.  It cried for warmth and refuge.  It cried in cycles aligned to the change of light.  Then one day it noticed itself as a sliver of light reached under a cloud and shined upon a pool reflecting the tree back at the tree.

Shawna heard the car engine settle, the car door slammed, and footsteps climbed upward.  She noticed a shift in her breath.

Bill Maher's Wackness Illuminates America's Lingering Race Problem

I wanted to start with an examination of language and language acquisition and how we cannot contain what's in the unconscious; but, I re-examined my premise that Bill Maher's words were not purposeful.  But I watched the pitiful scene repeatedly to try to assess his intent.  I decided he was purposeful.  Following is how I followed that line of interrogation, starting with the permission he granted himself as well as the idea that language is alive and informing on multiple levels.  A revisiting of our beloved James Baldwin, as well as my own grounding drove this turn:


Malcolm X opens his Message To the Grassroots speech in a heterogenous room in Detroit, 1964.  A year before his assassination in Harlem's Audubon Ballroom:

We all agree tonight, all of the speakers have agreed, that America has a serious problem.
Not only does America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious
problem.  ... America's problem is us. ... She (my emphasis) doesn't want us here.

A live cut of that speech opens the 1989 hip-hop classic, "Self -Destruction".  The song, including bars from MC Lyte, Chuck D, Doug E. Fresh, Heavy D (d. 2011), Miss Melodie (d. 2014), Kool Moe Dee, Flava Flav (living-dead) was a product of KRS-One's Stop the Violence Movement.  The song represented a powerful coming together, agreement over the presence of a problem.  Something was amiss, we were watching our brothers and sisters suffer, and we wanted solution.



The video is perfection, reflecting the time: herring bones, asymmetrical ash blond perms, leather LV sweatsuits, African medallions, and a seemingly appropriate response to what appeared to be a devolving condition in black communities throughout the nation.  All of us did the best we could with the information we had. We knew something had changed and we wanted it to stop, we wanted the jobless dope dealers and growing crack addicted population to "Just Say No" --echoing the sentiment coming out of the White House and the mural on the wall behind Heavy D as Crack and high powered weapons had entered our communities.  The video's tone is reflective yet, condemnatory.  It is moralizing.  It is also historically asymmetrical.  An extension of the inaccuracies fed us by a white supremacist media, informed by white supremacist academics and policy makers who had convinced us that our problems were rooted in our inability to mimic the lie of American spiritual uprightness.  American spiritual uprightness is a lie.  That is clear.  And the jobless dope dealer was just as American as those gunslinging fur, oil and slave traders who not only plundered and raped this land from under the Native peoples here, but raped, murdered and plotted their way through their relationships with indigenous people across the globe.  White men, working their very black magic, initiated crack into our communities and blamed us for what it did to us.

We bought the gaslight in the 1980s and 90s.  Malcolm X, a religious convert, bought it before then. Booker T Washington and hundreds of others of us, as well as our leadership bought it before then.  Now, I do not disagree that America has/had a serious problem; but, I do disagree that America doesn't want us here.  Without us, America has no idea who she is.  White America needs a nightmare shadow to reflect its dream of whiteness back unto itself.  That nightmare is the nigger.  And the nigger of the American imagination is the most profound lie in history.  Innocuous whiteness is a profound lie times two.  As long as America refuses to face itself, apologize, remit owed dues and repent, that nigger lie will surface, resurface like water beneath oil, through slips of the mind and tongue.  But Bill Maher didn't really slip.  He slipped up.


Maher's not easy to figure:

Twin Towers fell and he lost his late night show because he questioned American foreign policy.  He's an atheist.  He's anti-Christian but more anti-Muslim.  He's white. He loves Nas and has described hip hop artists as Shakespearean poets.  He advocates for pot and once argued that referring to Obama as "Kenyan" was white code "nigger".  (That didn't make big news.)

A white man with a thing for black women dressed as porn stars (including rap world's infamous, Superheat).  A white man with a fetish.



A white man focused on the dimly lit areas of everyone else's psyches while avoiding, yet speaking his own his own.  Time, hubris and opportunity have their way with us all.

And Bill Maher is a complicated product of the country that raised him.

He's spoke as a white man who believes in his own righteousness and the freedom to express that as he pleases.  His jokingly referring to himself as a "house nigga" is an expression of his wealthy white male arrogance coupled with a lingering American fetishizing of blackness.  It says so much. The black man, he wishes to be.  The black woman he wishes to own, in all sorts of white ways.

Black folks know it.  White folks tell and act out every lie they can to avoid it.  Every unexamined truth contained in one's unconscious extends itself into the wider world harming anyone threatening the illumination of that truth.  To paraphrase James Baldwin, until America faces it's own carnality, it will never be free.  America projects its own shadow self upon the so-called nigger.  And black folk are not that.  We now have no confusion about that.

The Split: Grieving Bill Cosby, then Heathcliff Huxtable

I turned my whole bedroom over.  "I found you, you old African!" I shouted like James Earle Jones as Alex Haley in Roots, the Next Generations.  Alex Haley had found his Kunta Kinte after listening bent, for over a day, to a griot chronicle the history of his tribe in Jufure.  A teenaged Kunta Kinte had wandered off from his village to hustle up material for a drum and was never seen or heard from again, except in the stories handed to Haley by his deliberate black ancestors.  Roots, both the book and the miniseries, were derived from Haley's genealogical dig into his past.

I had found my old iPhone cord.  And while my discovery weighs little against Haley's epiphany, that interjection flies out of my mouth at moments of jubilant uncovering.  This one made me dance inside; that cord connected me to my old music list--the one I'd accumulated over the last seven years.  I had grown sick of the repeating handful of songs on this better buy android.  Like the building of my book collection, the music on the phone grew over the years.  It shows I cared enough to stop and pay attention, maybe fall in love with another human being's art.  Eight times out of ten I can't remember when I stopped.  But I hold on to the art and nod to its creator.  

Unlike books, songs transport me right back there because they backdropped and recorded much of what I forget or eventually will have forgotten.  They document the thickness of a particular moment.  The songs open themselves randomly and I am surprised over and over, by what each reveals.  So good-bye to the deadening android reboot of Aaliyah's songbook--I was juiced.

The phone charged quick and I hit 580 happy, bumping in my head and my seat to songs I had forgotten but thirsted for over the last two months. I rolled down the window at the break and waited.  Thum, thathumpthumthumthunnuhnuhmmmm ....  I caught a feeling.  That Staples Singer eicheck kicked out and I nearly lost my mind, scrunched my face up like something funky had let loose in the car.

Sometimes the rain ... let's do it again.  Let's do it in the morning ...

Them Africans had me grooving.  Grooving and weaving.  Snapping my fingers ... then remembering, associative flashes:  bell bottoms, turtle necks, Watts festivals, red black and green window stickers, raised fists, red-tinted afros, homecoming parades, buttery laughter, ... and relax ...

Then came a marked and sudden grief.

My eyes began to well up, over something gone.

I couldn't return to where I'd been; Pops Staples' bass line had eased out of my body, what I had not known was there.

So, westward I rode, seven miles into East Oakland.  It was time to let that grief have its way with me.



The past came alive and the unconscious senses of a gone time nursed the hungers of the present.

The song, "Let Do It Again", led the soundtrack to the movie, Let's Do it Again (1975), starring Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier.  Aunt Butch had dropped my brother, Toure, my cousin Keesha and me in downtown Pine Bluff to watch the movie.  And though the theatre's gone, I've since lost my brother and don't see my cousin often, this surprising grief, I discovered by the end of my ride, can be traced directly to the Bill Cosby in that movie.

The scruffy beard Bill Cosby.  The Bill Cosby wearing ill-fitting orange three-pieced-suits and beanies with bouncy balls on top -- like my dad used to wear.  Fat Albert Bill Cosby.  The half cool brother walking in the room, slapping everybody five, talking jazzy and with his fingers.  The same Cosby who had also starred with Sidney Poitier, Denise Nicols, Flip Wilson, Harry Belafonte, Richard Pryor and a long long list of other 1970s black film stars, in one of my all-time favorites, Uptown Saturday Night.  Even as a child, I knew Uptown Saturday Night was the better film of the two. Major clue:  Jimmy "JJ" Walker played a key role in Let's Do It Again.  But in Uptown Saturday Night, characters like Silky Slim and Geechie Dan Beaufort stood between everyday working cat, Poitier, and his winning ticket.  He'd hit the number big!  Cosby came in as the faux shady sidekick to encourage straight-man Poitier to hit the streets and get his money.  No spoilers, the drama kicks off at Madame Zenobia's.

To be continued ...

Part II

Madame Zenobia's is, for lack of a better correlative, a speakeasy.  It's a mysterious club, set on the outskirts of town; and, one needs a pass to enter the back door, the seat of the real action.  Poitier and Cosby are not traditional patrons to the club and gain entrance only after some trickery, including not telling their wives about their intended night out.  It is cave of sorts.  An adventure into the darker --and no less fun -- recesses of the black experience. 

In the cave, Poitier and Cosby are entranced by flesh-bearing women, open gambling tables and shadowy strongmen, whose power they no doubt envy.  In the midst of their cave play, both men are robbed along with all Zenobia's other patrons who are made to strip down to their underwear by a masked, debonair thief.  The grace of this film lies in its depiction of a range of human identities.  Uninhibited storytelling. 

It layers morality and interrogates reality in a way that black folk can identify as authentic to their experience.  Characters spring from the working classes, the street-hustling classes, the political classes.  More importantly, all the classes interact with each other.  Genuine decent guy Poitier is morally challenged by his fall:  his betrayal of his wife, his titillation in the cave.  This is the story of us that we recognize.  What do we do after we fall?  What do we do when confronted with our need for economic relief?  What do we do when victimized by our own?  This is a story written by and about a free black people.  Free, in the sense that they are not writing back to Empire.  Empire is subordinate.  Oh it's present, but it is quiet enough to signify a black wholeness.    

Agency in the face of oppression is power.  In this case, that power aligns with the sense that we are not the problem.  We are not pathological.  We are not a problem people who inherently need to be fixed.  Although America has since its inception cast black folks in the role of shadow, we know better.  America denies reality and projects its shadow self upon us:  its thievery,  its violence, its deceit, its entitlement -- its rapes.  

Instead of stepping into the cave and confronting its own unholy self, America projects its un-holiness upon black folk.  And we consistently get caught up in answering the projection.  But there are moments in history, moments in our story where an untainted voice arises and sings our song without imposition of self-doubting restraint.  A song so sure of its holy imperfection, it is completely free and resonates with an audience recognizing itself.   

It says, "We are complete and imperfect and look at this story."  

The Bill Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night represented that voice.  Hat to the side --  

But then, the split.  

That scruffy-bearded Bill Cosby, endearing to me, my brother, and my cousin, would later morph to inscrutability as he transitioned from a 1970s familiar into a 1980s popular culture icon.  

I realized in the car that day that I needed to grieve both of Cosby's personae.  The earlier one hurt.  The latter felt ceremonial, like attending the funeral of somebody I never really knew.  No heart in that. I said goodbye to this Heathcliff Huxtable character -- a man I wanted not to see as inauthentic, over-compensating, class conscious, and elitist.  Although I, like so much of America, enjoyed my Thursday nights with the Cosbys, I also felt a tinge of something shaming beneath the show's surface.    A shaming that disallowed the characters to speak in their real voices.  Claire and Theo Huxtable's forced enunciations and obviously corrective micro-managing of every aspect of that show felt light and not white -- but like an answer to the American battle between black and white.  I could not have said so during that time, however, because I believed then, as a naive student at Spelman College (during the time of Reagan) that most of black and poor peoples' problems resulted from poor decision making.  As I learned more, lived more and questioned more, I began to develop a distaste for Heathcliff Huxtable.  Especially, as I saw how much we were not allowed to speak out of concern for what others might think.  After Cosby publicly chastised Lisa Bonet over her role in Angel Heart, the sense of something not right increased.   And the shaming escalated the last two seasons of the show when Cousin Pam, the blacker cousin, moved in with the Cosbys (1990-1992).  

Cousin Pam and her crew fulfilled every stereotype of working class and poor black folk imaginable:  they spoke in broken English and lacked focus or goals or restraint.  They knew nothing about anything and no wonder they couldn't succeed.  

Like so many of us, reared by the shadow-avoidant America, Cosby had blamed the poor and working classes on their apparent lack of social mobility. The more time passed, the more virulent his attacks. I would argue, the more his own personal predatory shadow dogged him, the more he pointed his finger at America's scapegoat -- black folk, especially poor black folk.    

By 2016, the man we'd earlier loved and later at least admired as a proud race man, would enrage us twice:  first, over his moralizing harangue of poor black folk in his NAACP Pound Cake speech; and second, over his admitted penchant for drugging women with the intention of raping them.  Over forty women have claimed that Bill Cosby drugged and raped them.  He has not admitted to any of the charges.  

Admittedly, when Hannibal Buress finally spilled that man-sanctioned tea, I was not surprised.  I had long suspected something false in Cosby.  I had long ago lost favor for Cosby because within his later work, I saw an underlying, consistent response to Empire.  While we can acknowledge his admirable efforts at exposing America to the black bourgeois, Cosby's work also expressed an unstated belief in an Empire that lies and steals and murders and rapes and was at the moment he hit his peak, doing its best to destroy us.  And more egregiously, I saw no struggle against its systems.  I instead, I saw a denial of black folks' value outside the mimicking of Empire's mores. A canned and didactic presentation dis-reflective of the reality black folks were confronting as we witness the ravaging of our institutions and an escalation in the numbers of us killed, drug addicted, incarcerated and abandoned by our countryfolk.  I saw an acceptance.  I saw a flat analysis and an elevation of respectability politics.  And respectability politics perpetuates a schizophrenic battle between shadow and light.  If you folks would just behave ...  Hold yourselves up in dignity and be treated respectfully.  Denial. Denial. Denial.  

In The Archetypes and Collective Unconscious, Carl Jung suggests that "the shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself." Jung adds that as long as these projections remain unexamined, ... the shadow expresses itself by exerting power over others.  The shadow behavior is rationalized by the ego made drunk by its own finger-pointing. I do not know why Bill Cosby would want to drug women.  I don't know why he'd want to rape women; but in the story of him and all the women he's reportedly hurt so deviously, we might, dare look at the ugliness to find a hint of instruction.  

The action in Uptown Saturday Night climaxes in a church.  Flip Wilson plays a shady preacher, repeating the lines, "Loose lips, sink ships."  Silky Slim and the entire gang squirm in the pews as if confronted by their own prior misdeeds.  The plot is framed by images of Evil and Good, neither clean nor clear--but muddled and unresolved and fascinating.  There are no good black people or bad black people.  Right or wrong.  Just people living as best and reasonably as they deem necessary.

If we are to ever live free, individually, collectively, creatively, we must walk into the cave and reconcile ourselves with whatever we find. And there's so much to find when we're not responding to Empire.

The beauty of the film Moonlight lies not only in its cinematography, but in its subtlety, in its honesty.  A young black boy, confused and abused over his homosexuality, finds comfort and assurance through his relationship with a drug dealer--who admits he sells drugs--and his wife.  A flawed black man, responds to the child with attention and acceptance.  The Empire is on all their backs, yet their humanity prevails because they deny nothing.  

  

Let Me Help You With That: a Love Story

 One 

God bless that Sunday:  no more than two minutes after I’d slopped the last cake of mud from my rubber garden slippers and dumped them into the washer, my husband announced he had an 8 pm date with a promising new lover.  The sound hammered at the lining in my chest.  A similar swish/thud, swish/thud pulsed from my ears, which had turned red, I know, though by this time in our marriage, I had trained myself never to allow him to observe the slightest flinch in me.

He said it and slid past me, the scent of wet tobacco coughed from the tattered pockets of his silly professor’s blazer and turned my stomach upon itself.  His words cut into my skin, like a razor’s slip:  the actual depth became more clear in the seconds after his odor left the room.

Earlier in our story, I’d been discoverable to him.  That had cost me.  He used that part of me he knew he owned to twist me whichever way he chose.  Nine years of my life I’d lost to that vulnerability.  Shifting at his critiques.  Responding to what he said I lacked:  energy, autonomy, vivaciousness.  He added that I had no depth of femininity.  The kind of femininity that engenders dedication.  He’d said something similar, earlier and I had fought it.  I worked.

The returned spring sunlight made it easy.  Committed and bright, I had stumbled through a few capoeira classes to build my stamina (though it was always he who collapsed after six minutes of mediocre love-making that hadn’t felt lovely for at least nine years now).  I paid forty dollars for the new Capoeira whites that that limber and muscled, Danilo, had insisted I buy.  “Anything for you, Danilo.”

Under Danilo’s command, I tumbled and sweat like an air conditioner for three weeks, 6:30 to 8:00 pm, pepping up each time Danilo announced my progress to the class.  I doubtless favored a grandmother sloth, following the circle’s Portuguese chants … and to what end?  Our love-making progressed to nine minutes, then within a week, back to six.

I next volunteered to suffer the social lash: sipped black coffee half of three whip-cold nights in a Berkeley chat group for research widows.  The coffee burned every sweet and salty sensor from my tongue -- me nodding through petty Berkeley gossip— bobble heading, startled to more droll topics – (imagine an exhausted airline pilot’s eyes opened at two thousand feet and just before the crash, screaming, “You lackaluster bitches are killing me!”)

I had wanted this marriage.

I indulged him.  I held on.  We both did, ostensibly.  And now he, unsatisfied, whiffed past me and announced his desire to openly stray from our marriage bed; he had a date.  He wanted a reaction from me.

I felt that familiar sensation: the nerves in my stomach began to dance heavy into my lower bowels and I imagined that bum dog of his shitting all over the burnt ceramic of the mud room floor, standing upright, then spackling it all about the cracks in his sinister face.  But the dog didn’t shit the one time I needed him to.

My outward resistance to my husband’s abuse:  my calm, my disregard, my stoic replies—I had once judged as pitifully reactive, cowardly and survivalist—would in fact, soon emerge as my greatest strength.  I would always win with him.  My victory, alas, would be him admitting my superiority.  I would prove it.

First, I summoned my angels, whom I had yet to properly name.  (I’m chewing on Cordelia and Eddie).  Friends really.  Dears to me.  They would watch over me. Direct my action.  Keep me from running into the street or from grabbing a blade from the wood block in the kitchen.

 … Drop your shoulders, Cordelia said.  Eddie, her half-brother, insisted I turn my chin.  Lean to the right.  Nod inward slowly.  Up down drop, once.  Part lips slightly, flatten eyes, speak without excitement.  Drop a bomb:  “Let me know if it works out.  I might be able to help you find someone.”

My stoicism hit its apex.  Give him nothing.  Make him wonder over you.  Make him puzzle his decisions, his waistline, his speech.

He wouldn’t believe me.  But, I meant it.  I would help him.  After the initial chill, I realized I no longer minded.  I had thought about it increasingly as I knew he had no way of finding a decent woman on his own.

I had recently come to know that I had been his last best effort.  It took a regrettable amount of time for me to awaken.  He was old now.  And the charm of wit and an agile mind – which compensated for the knot atop his bald red dome –would no longer work as it had on me.

First, his mind was more placid now, lazy.  No pop to it.  And he repeated himself:  Whitman ruined America.  He fell into himself and stayed there … Tell me more Professor Nothing New.

And over the years, I had met two of the others.  I immediately sensed who they were.  At two separate department panels, like automatons, they both handed me drinks and cheese, (as if in homage to him, they stared in my eyes with wonder).  I recoiled from both, sickened by their gullibility.  Idiots. This is his game.  Corduroy blazers and wine and obscure implausible assertions to the unwitting dilettante.  I had been that TA, but stations above these two.  He is old now.  He can no longer corner the taut-figured, engaging TA I had been.  I, at least, married him before his big run.  When his ideas were fresh.  My discernment abilities were growing.

I didn’t know who he’d set aside for this night’s date but Cordelia and Eddie had prompted me to toss it across the mud room portal, “Let me know how you succeed."  Had he not heard me?  "I am committed to your happiness.”

“Wonderful.  Wonderful,” he said.

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?

The Least of Us

 [T] he war is in the kitchen. ~ Elmaz Abinader

A child is dragged from collapsed rebar and rubble.  Bloody, and his mother screams, her hand shakes her face blown open by disbelief.  The translation, an echo:  God, God, God.  The barehanded men dig and dig and scramble toward the moans, filling reused white buckets with rocks.  The men shuttle from one scream to the next.  The camera, the reporter and the interpreted ticker at the foot of the screen follow the commander, the target of the bomb.  He's survived, miraculously.  The interview.

My eyes want the camera to turn back to the child, to his mother too. Where have they run?

This impulse, to turn from the forced subject, the man in charge, the commander who participates (heroically, righteously, no doubt) in extending the carnage, says he fights for the child and the mother and the land.  Yet all three will have to grieve forever, the sloppy aim of this particular bomb.

Men can forget.  Wipe away what they've seen with another blast, another penetration. What they've done.  They'll smoke cigarettes and drink tea and congratulate each other over the victory and make more decisions about bombs and sacrifice.

The women, the children and the land, who've never ruminated much on metal and projectiles, will carry it forward.

The attraction to this story, the story of the child and the mother crushed by the collapsed concrete, I finally understand as well-earned, my own.

Like a tiny shard of glass in my finger, it remained half-pronounced, yet insistent, this question.  For years, I tried to work through the similar strands I heard from friends or from people I'd just met or from a new book.

And then it all came to make sense after several stuttering attempts at speaking it out when repeatedly confronted with the commander and his men with their cigarettes and tea and plans for their next right offensive.