A history read about in textbooks, literature, poetry, and newspapers, seen in movies and on television, heard in stories, heard in song, becomes mine. I begin.
To feel one with my ancestor, the slave. To know of slavery’s systemic dismemberment of Black agency, debasement of Black men, rape of Black women, destruction of the Black family. Know of the wringing of energy and life out of my forebears, and of how they were then thrown out like trash to litter the ground.
To know of the efforts of resistance, rebellion, and escape. To know that those with light skin who passed into the white world left behind community, family, solidarity, and self in joining the white world. To understand that most could not pass and endured wearing the skin God gave them. To know that the promise of God and heaven was at times the only balm.
To know emancipation meant freed from ownership by another human then consigned to a life where skin color equals less than, equals bad, equals thug, equals criminal, equals presumed guilty, equals justifiably frightens whites. Equals death.
To know we’ve fought and died for America since its inception, on this soil and on foreign soil, have liberated others in the name of America’s ideals only to return home and still be called Nigger.
To know of the brief sunlight of Reconstruction. Like Greenwood in Tulsa. To know of the Black leaders including my own ancestors who began to shape a new way forward for us. To know of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, of Jim Crow, of the uniquely American practice of hanging adults and children from trees, of the economic, social, and psychological re-enslavement of Black people. Of the new enslavement that is mass incarceration.
To know why a rational, educated, hardworking Black man living in the twentieth century hated that false marker of independence, that tribute to a time when our people were chained like dogs and cattle—the Fourth of July.
To see the face of Emmett Till, the child murdered because he may have winked his eye at a white woman, found bloated like a dead frog in a Mississippi stream in 1955. To see Emmett’s fourteen-year-old face and see my own. To see my son.
To hear South Carolina’s Susan Smith claim in 1994 that a Black man carjacked her vehicle with her two small boys in their car seats in the backseat and see this set off a nationwide manhunt for Black men, and to learn that Susan Smith herself had strapped her boys into their car seats, put her car in neutral, and let it roll into a lake, where her two small boys slowly drowned. To see white people not comprehend the psychological toll this takes on all Black people. This Brutal Imagination, as Cornelius Eady calls it.
To see the face of James Byrd Jr., chained to the back of a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas, in 1998 and dragged along an asphalt road for three miles, still conscious until his head was severed from his body.
To find a home in Black America.
Though later, when Trayvon Martin is murdered, and he looks to me just like my son, to know an even deeper we. A searing pain. A surer Blackness.