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.   

Brief Portrait of a Woman: Tell My Story

ESE NE TEKREMA

"the teeth and the tongue"

symbol of friendship and interdependence

I met Carol when I returned to college, in Atlanta, August of 1990.  By then I was convinced that Bob Marley was a prophet, and that Bab-y-lon would soon fall.  When it did fall, I would be safe because I'd seen it coming and had covertly stacked up walls of protection:  nights of headachy arguments, a righteously restrictive diet, cot-ton fabrics and a head full of positive vibe-ray-shun! I-ah.

Along with two committed comrades, I rented a two-bedroom house.  Comrade number one, my promised fiance'; and comrade number two, one of his angelically agreeable female friends, a new sister.  She and I shared a first name, so he figured he could talk to us both at the same time.  Either that, or we should change one of our names.

This new sister and I had spoken over the phone all summer.  She arranged our housing and my pickup from Hartsfield International Airport:  an older, slacks wearing man named Louis.  Louis rolled up to the airport with his nephew and his cousin smiling alongside him. No problem.  We could all fit into his plush white Lincoln.   Smelling of wet cigarettes floating in beer, Louis swayed unsteadily toward the car, opening the door for us while I wondered if the ride would cost me the rest of my days.  We drifted down the two freeways leading to the West End.  We asked Louis questions about his ex-wives, hoping to keep him focused on the white lines that guarded against him sideswiping other cars.  Twice along the drive we asked the old man if he was ok to drive before he eventually pulled off the freeway, swerved onto Raymond Street, and killed the engine in front of our new house.  The brown one, second from the corner.   I pulled my stowed California burrito from my bag and sat on the untreated wooden floors of the first house I'd ever rented.  Over the next few days and weeks our thickly painted front stoop emerged as a gathering place for more comrades.

As a group, all of our encounters began with "Greetings," and ended with "Peace," or "Jah guide."  With each other, we plunged deeply into further enchanting notions about freedom and race and money.  We concluded the logic of history made it clear that we should cleave ourselves from what we saw as the traps of eating too much, buying too much, lying too much to ourselves, despising ourselves too much.  We decided to live as freely as we possibly could.

Any given night our house filled with laughter, slow-cooked one-pot food, highly competitive games of Spades, concentrated games of chess, a rock-steady ichieck of a rootical reggae beat, and a lingering coat of frankincense and myrrh.

We wore our hair long and natural.  We ate unsalted, vegan food.  We wore cotton and hemp fabrics.  Threw out our processed soaps and cleaning products.  We bargained rides out to Little Five Points or the DeKalb International Farmer's Market to buy up cheap and interesting whole foods.  We blasted outward, into the street roots reggae, straight up jazz, and any style of hip hop we could find.  Enthused, we dusted off and listened again to the music of our childhoods:  Gil Scott Heron, Richie Havens, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Joan Baez, and Marvin Gaye.  And we read everything.    I had just finished a biography on George Jackson, still shaking my head at how the California penal system justified his murder by San Quentin prison guards (Jackson supposedly had a pistol embedded in his afro).  My roommates enjoyed the Old Testament and the Metu Neter.  We opened a little library in the corner under the window of our front room.

We occupied the thick, green, sweaty neighborhoods around the Atlanta University Center.  We met there because we all went to school there:  Spelman, Morehouse, Clark Atlanta, Morris Brown, or ITC.  We moved with our few brown suitcases (tags reading LAX, OAK, SFO, and JFK) and no furniture into that roomy, echoic house on Raymond Street--just down the street from all five schools, yet a miles away from our gated experiences on campus.

At least two distinct worlds existed in the University Center.  We walked through the outside world onto the campuses of our college world with its sculpted trees, mix-matched tulips, and buildings with names like Rockefeller and Woodruff.  Outside the gates was the outside world, John Hope Homes and The Bottom, located at the pit of the slope of James P. Brawley Drive.  The Bottom sat smack in the dead center of the projects we dared through on Friday nights, looking for cheap liquor and new adventures.  The outside world spoke a language different from ours:  staccato, the words clipped at the end.  Carol was part of this outside world.

Many evenings we sat on our stoop as folks came by to play chess or just talk about the latest.  We had food--sometimes from Busy Bee, or Paschal's, a nice vegetable plate--or we had cooked up a big pot of brown beans and basmati rice.  Music played out into the street and a local would stroll by and ask if they could join us for a beer.  "Have some?" we would say.  And that would be it.  Some friendships come to us so quietly we don't even know from where.  They begin with an acknowledgement, however, an invitation:  we need each other.
  
Carol and I first spoke when she came by and I was alone.  I hadn't worked that day, nor had I gone to school.  I was not extremely friendly at that time, but was always willing to talk and to listen.  We ate together as I listened to her talk about her life.  I heard a subtle desperation in her raspy tone.  She looked at me with something I'd then mistaken as fear and confusion.  We talked about general stuff: where we came from;  what we liked to eat and listen to;  what we thought about the coming change in time.  I hated it.  Short days, less light.  She liked it, the day a dismal waste of time.

The next time we met to talk Carol brought her bottle.  Tucked in the back pocket of her loosely hanging jeans, it read, "Gin." I would stick to sipping my beer, hanging over me a fear of liquor as ominous as the fear I maintained of the worst parts of myself, the two always cavorting together.  Plus generic alcohol crossed my danger threshold.  I tipped my last swig of stock and noticed Carol's eyes, the color of root beer and soft like warm water.  She asked me about the flag in the window.  I told her we flew the Ethiopian flag because we all come from Ethiopia.

"That's in Africa?"

"Uhm huh."  Both of us talking slowly now.

"That's my daughter's name, Africa." She says proudly.

"Oh, yeah?"  I said, inescapably intrigued.

"Huh whole name, Africa Zaire."

"Wow!  That's beautiful, Carol.  What made you think of that?  I mean, Zaire?"

"When I was pregnant with her, my daughter Africa, I got real sick.  I didn't have no where to go, but some missionaries, I met.  They had a little church downtown.  Took me in.  Wanted to make sure I had my baby safe and right.  They told me to stayed wit them all the way through.  Had my baby in Grady, them two missionaries waiting right theay.  Told em I would neva forget them.  They was from Zaire, Africa.  So I named my baby Africa, Zaire.  It sound betta like dat."
"I think you might be right about that, Carol.  I like that.  Africa, Zaire."

That night Carol passed out on the floor of our living room and left a little puddle in the unfinished floorboard-- to remind us of her visit.   I went to school and to work the following days and would meet Carol's daughter, Africa, one day as I walked up Jeptha.  I knew she was Carol's daughter because she looked just like Carol, but with skin like fine black ink in a bottle.  I said hello as she passed, explaining that I knew she had to be Carol's because she had Carol jumping all off of her.  She was an older teenager.  She was also pregnant.  The next time I saw Carol, I would have to congratulate her on becoming a grandmother.
                                            .                             .                              .

Carol came by the house one evening as I sat on the stoop, the sun ducking behind a cloud in a western corner of the gold and blue sky.  The neon light from Paschal's Hotel beamed through our window.  On the wall it reflected a red, gold and green intimation, much more impressive than the flag we'd hung in the window.  Holy smokes we'd said staring at the back wall, now sure we were in good stead.  Carol plopped down on our stoop, partially drunk and not too steady.  She was completely different during the day when she hadn't had a drink.  But it was nearing nighttime, she was full of liquor, and in the mood for singing.  She sang to me, "I'ma tell you something, but you got-TA tell my story!  Only if you tell my story!"

Ok, I nodded my head yes, laughing a little.

"You promise to tell my story?"

Again, I nodded yes.  She then broke into a ballad about a man who took her down to Savannah/and tried to make money off of her/because he knew she liked to smoke crack.

"You like to smoke crack!?"

She smiled, "Yesssss!  I lovvvvee to smoke crack."
She said this as her hand waved through the air in an operatic moment.  I sat amazed. Carole didn't hit one note, but sang with passion.  I smiled and nodded my head with a beat, encouraging her to continue.  "He tried to sell me to other men/ He thought I didn't care nothingggg about myself.  I told him I wasn't raised to work on no street corner/ My momma taught me better than that/He passed out afterwhile/And I slipped away out a teeny tiny bathroom window/ Walked through the rain to get to a phone to call my uncle/ And he took the bus down to Savannah and found meeeeee/You gotta tell my stooryy!  Somebody tell it, please."

"Ok, Carol," I said, still tickled and stumped about the liking to smoke crack part.

That was October, 1990 and the last time I saw Carol.  Africa soon had her baby.  I would soon be expecting my own (testing the bounds of my commitment to communal living), and Carol would be dead by winter.  From the neighborhood I heard she'd had a stroke that killed her where she fell.  That urgency in her voice, that desperation and fear that I then had not understood, I see now as I see her eyes, the color of root beer and soft warm water.  

Cool slanting light marks another change in time.   I am thanking the night, then the day, and alas, I sit here still, at this desk--having fulfilled a promise to a friend:  to tell the story of a woman named Carol.