Virgil Tibbs isn’t arrested, exactly, but the white cop in
Sparta, Mississippi, tells him to spread his legs, boy, and
get into the back of the police car. Darren Wilson cannot
find a job, twelve months after the shooting, which left
his round cheeks pink with adrenaline. He lives a quiet
life. His blue eyes sparkle. He is a man who shot a boy.
No—a suspect. Boy. Rodney King became nationally
known after he was beaten. Journalists consider flimsy
words: ironic and alternative, fault and intention. Even
angels want L.A. fame. On the phone I ask Jericho how
the South is treating him. He says today he wasn’t shot
to death, and we laugh. There’s no way a black woman
killed herself, because everyone knows we can withstand
inhuman amounts of pain. (There’s no way she didn’t
hang herself, dumb brown martyr, not mentally sound
to begin with.) Immortal. Magical. Not like angels, but
like drinking water, like roads. Trick question: Is mercy
ever justified? Aren’t all masters benevolent? Now, please
use the space below to create a graph showing the price
of water. There’s no way we don’t deserve it. In 1992 in
California my white classmates are like, aren’t you glad
you’re free. Your people. What if you lived in the olden
days. I’ve seen pictures of slavery, crude charcoals in
watered-down history books, and that’s how I know I’m
not a slave. (A Sgt. testified that Rodney King exhibited
Hulk-like strength. His name was Koon, and repetition
is a literary device, and paranoia is a weakness of the
oppressed: we cannot be mentally sound.) What began
to leak, then, from the laceration was discipline, which
for the slave is a tic of survival, and for a nation is the
practice of denial. What did he have in his system? Was
it hunger, or money? Was it glass, plants, voice? Death is
the only cultural truth, because there are fake marriages
every day, and even rappers are cooked up in an office,
in somebody’s pink cheeks. Dylann Roof, Burger King,
Urban Outfitters. I know it’s just a movie, but I’m still
afraid of what I see when I fall asleep. I know the masses
ask me every day for a eulogy. I know I am supposed to
say shot and killed, say brutality, to call my life a life. This
is their language and not mine. This is not my mouth.
Multiple choice: In what year did a black man hang
from a tree? Who is a nigger? Which of the following
are Negroes free to do: marry, own property, vote, drive,
speak, bear arms, organize, revolt, be president, make
movies, laugh. Which is greater: the amount of minutes
it takes for requested backup to arrive at the scene of
a twelve-year-old in a park playing with toys, or the
varieties of insects that might make contact with a person
laid in a street over the course of four hours on a summer
evening in St. Louis? How patient must we be? Praise the
endurance. (Or is it suspicious, almost not human? Who
else is so great but the devil himself?) I worry sometimes
I will only be allowed a death story. No one will say in
the New Yorker how my mother made her money, who
I married, how my career began. Your people. The death
story is just a name folded into another name. My name
might be a list, or a hymn, or a body, an investigation,
a year, a lineage. I might become an autopsy, and
the reason won’t matter, only my understanding, my
swallowing of my rightful place, tectonic plates clicking
like a jaw, and—stubbornly, like history—my mouth
becoming their mouth speaking who I am.