Somebody—and I know exactly who he is and where he lives—has dragged a dead deer more than a hundred yards from where it was discovered and deposited it behind my house, just into the woods but visible, nevertheless, from my backyard.
My son, Langston, is home from his third year at college, and he wants to confront the neighbor.
I ask him not to. I beg him not to. The man is white. We are black. This smells like trouble.
So we brace ourselves for the ghastly job of dragging the carcass to the street where the city will dispose of it. We have already called. They will pick it up soon—but not if it’s on someone’s property.
The neighbor probably knows this, but looking at the slope and distance to my yard versus the street, he chooses us. He is probably watching everything from his window and so he will see Langston and me dragging the carcass to the street. We will clean up his mess. We will not confront him. Who knows if he has a gun. Don’t all white men standing behind closed doors have guns?
I put on my gardening jeans and grab two pairs of gloves and tell my son I am ready. We walk toward the deer, unsure how much it has already stiffened and swollen with death, how much it smells.
It is a sunny day. The light illuminates the leaves of the ash trees and sumac underbrush. I suppose the deer was beautiful just a few days ago, but it is—as I suspected—now heavy with the signs of death and decay and, yes, a smear of blood across its fawn-colored pelt.
“Let’s get this over with,” I say, grabbing hold of one back leg.
I am putting a good face on and feeling strangely bonded with my son over this unwelcome chore. Over his concern for me. Over my concern for him. In recognition of our ability to get the job done.
“Cleaning up after white people,” I say to myself. He doesn’t need to hear my sarcasm. I imagine his thoughts are angrier, his body language says as much, but there is nothing I can do about that. We have a deer to dispose of.
Is it wrong to forbid him from confronting this irresponsible neighbor? “No!” I tell myself. Am I too paranoid? I don’t care! The voice in my head is like the sound of a door closing, fast and final.
I have a duty to protect him. He thinks my worries are overstated, but he is wrong: black men are being shot every day for less, and I am sure as hell not going to let him die because some fool white man has decided to dump a dead deer in my backyard.
Just after completing Song of Solomon, a novel about the dangers of being black in America, Toni Morrison talked about the importance of surviving whole in a world where we are all victims of a sort.
Still enraged by my ordeal with the dead deer, I turn to Morrison, but then I remember I need to call the city to tell them the deer is ready for pickup.
As I stare at it from my front window, I can see most of his carcass in the street with his head resting on the curb. It is not just the very image of death but a symbol of something dead inside me. How far do I go back in time to find that moment when I had faith in the world? To recover the girl who did not fear a white man behind a closed door ready to take the life of my loved ones or me?
Song of Solomon is a novel about the legacy of racial violence on four generations of Deads. Yes, this is the apt name of the family that survives racial violence only to break apart under its pressures.
We are introduced to the central figure, Milkman, who is the first black child born in the racially segregated Mercy Hospital, and we follow him throughout the novel in his unfulfilled quest for gold while he finds, instead, family.
Milkman’s great-grandfather is enslaved; his grandfather is shot because he owns property; his father, who becomes an orphan, must escape to the North; and Milkman—representative of the more privileged younger generation—has it much better and only encounters a few harassing police officers and some unfriendly white citizens.
Although the scenes of real abuse—murder, brutality, intimidation—occur mainly in the past, the novel explores how this history weighs on Milkman. Reminding us of the psychic weight of the violent past on all black people, Morrison includes a scene where the community responds to the murder of Emmett Till.
Morrison does not include much more than this singular reference to a real event, the savage murder of Till by white Southerners who accused him of whistling at one of their women. Although many of Morrison’s readers will know the story, she provides some of the key details and, more important, describes the community’s response.
Setting the scene in a black barbershop, Morrison emphasizes black communal space while also representing the intrusion of violence into it.
They were listening to the radio and muttering and shaking their heads. It was some time before Milkman discovered what they were so tense about. A young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Sunflower County, Mississippi. There were no questions about who stomped him—his murderers had boasted freely—and there were no questions about the motive. The boy had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till.
Morrison uses the words “stomped to death” as a shorthand for the mutilation that left Till not only unrecognizable as a fourteen-year-old boy but unrecognizable as a human in his open casket.
Emmett Till serves as one of the most famous examples of white-on-black terror, and the haunting photograph from his funeral, depicting a mourning mother standing over a disfigured corpse, has been called one of the hundred most influential images of all time. Morrison wrote a play called Dreaming Emmett and also includes this brief reference to Till as a shorthand for the very real dangers of being a black man in the twentieth century.
In including this historical event, Morrison might have provided more details about the torture of Till, even shown the full-page spread in Jet, which included not just the gruesome image from the open-casket funeral but two close-ups of the head and an innocent enough photo of a piece of equipment, a two-hundred-pound iron gin mill fan, which was recovered from the scene of the crime, the heavy weight unfastened from around the child’s neck.
In the barbershop, the men debate whether the murder of another black person will be reported. Will it make the news?
“I got five says it’ll be in the morning paper.”
“On the sports page?” asked Hospital Tommy.
“Or the funny papers?” said Nero Brown.
“No, man. Front page. I bet five dollars on front page.”
It is Guitar who interrupts with anger, saying, “What the fuck is the difference?” He shouts at the men, saying, “A kid is stomped and you standin round fussin about whether some cracker put it in the paper. He stomped, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.”
Despite Guitar’s clarity, his laser focus on revenge, there is little to celebrate in this scene. This is not how to “survive whole” but how to become crippled by the weight of racial terrorism. And the novel does not ask us to identify with Guitar, and we discover, eventually, that his anger undoes him.
I find Cedric Herring’s notion of “racialized precarity” essential to understanding what Song of Solomon is revealing to us in this scene and indeed in much of the novel. Precarity refers to a living condition that is unpredictable, unstable, and insecure in terms of people’s material conditions, job security, and psychological well-being. Although the concept may apply to various peoples at various times, Herring tells us that “one can reasonably argue that precariousness is near synonymous with black life.”
The history of lynching in America vividly captures the condition of racialized precarity among African Americans. Lynching was an instrument of racial terror. These acts of racial terror created an environment of fear, unpredictability, and insecurity for African Americans, and sent a clear message that black lives did not matter.
This message is powerfully conveyed in the barbershop when Freddie reflects on Till’s crime as one that is committed by a Northerner “acting big down in Bilbo country.”
“Who the hell he think he is?”
“Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy.
“Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”
Again, it is Guitar’s clarity of purpose paired with his intense anger and strong sense of black pride that delivers a counter to Freddie’s claim (regardless of the irony) that there are no black men in the South.
“The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.
“Who?” asked Freddie.
“Till, that’s who.”
“He dead. A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse. That’s all. A corpse.”
Morrison is playing with the definitions of a man, but she is also deadly serious about the very real and dire consequences of these ambiguities on the lives of black men. The men in the barbershop know there will be no justice for Emmett Till and his family. When one of the men ventures that the murderers will be caught and brought to justice, he is quickly shouted down. Porter, in fact, laughs at the idea that these men will be caught.
“You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.”
“Yeah. The whole town planning a parade,” said Nero.
Again Morrison points to the ironies of a racist justice system that is far from “color blind.” This scene highlights the black community’s relationship to the state and its criminal justice system. The men know they cannot rely on the state to do right by them. Justice is not guaranteed in the U.S. racial regime.
If Morrison were setting the novel in today’s landscape of terror, the men in the barbershop would be talking about Trayvon Martin or Freddie Gray. She would include references to body cams and cell phones. She would depict riot police and protests.
If she were to turn to the everyday acts of state-sanctioned racism, she would not have to rewrite at all the scene of Milkman and Guitar being pulled over by the police for no cause. Racial profiling is in the novel. From racial terror and murder to “driving while black,” the novel reflects the past and our time as well.
When Milkman’s father tries to explain the white officer’s motivations in pulling Guitar and him over, Milkman counters his explanations powerfully and fully.
They didn’t see his eyes when they told us to pull over. They didn’t see nothing. They just sideswiped us, and told us to get out. Now, what was that for? What’d they stop us for? We wasn’t speeding. Just driving along.
Becoming furious over the memory of having to bend over his car as the police massaged his fingers all over his body—a humiliation that stays with him—Milkman continues, “What business they got stopping cars that ain’t speeding?”
But his father, who has succeeded in life by accepting the reality of racial profiling, white privilege, and Jim Crow, argues back: “They stop anybody they want to. They saw you was colored, that’s all. And they’re looking for that Negro that killed that boy.” He knows and accepts that black bodies are criminalized in the eyes of the law. Presumptions of “innocence before guilt” does not apply to black citizens regardless of their economic, educational, or social status.
As a young boy, he watched his father brutally murdered by whites so that they could take possession of his farm. Although Milkman has heard this story many times throughout his childhood, the full weight of the community’s complicity does not get explained to him until he asks what is considered a stupid question by his black elders.
“Did anybody catch the men who did it—who killed him?”
Reverend Cooper raised his eyebrows. “Catch?” he asked, his face full of wonder. Then he smiled again. “Didn’t have to catch ’em. They never went nowhere.”
“I mean, did they have a trial; were they arrested?”
“Arrested for what? Killing a nigger? Where did you say you was from?”
This exchange between Milkman and Reverend Cooper echoes the exchange among the men in the barbershop about the murder of Emmett Till. Both communities—with a few exceptions—assume that there is no justice for black people.
Here in the first decades of the twenty-first century, I am witnessing the deaths of countless numbers of unarmed black men and women at the hands of the police and feeling very much part of Milkman’s community, sharing images on phones and computers rather than gathering around an old-fashioned radio. Making predictions about miscarriages of justice on Facebook instead of in the barbershop. This is a novel about the past and—I can hardly believe it—right now.
Is it only the technology that has changed? Is Milkman my son? Is Tamir Rice my son? How can I accept that America has advanced so little, continued so much of the racist past, tolerated racial terrorism for so long?
As a mother, I am in constant fear that one day Langston will walk out my door and, as a result of a random encounter with a police officer, never return.
Try to calm me down. Try to tell me my fear is irrational.
My fear is borne out of the experiences of other black mothers who have lost their sons and daughters to police violence. My fear is borne out of the unpredictability of those deaths. My inability to predict what factors may increase the chances of violent police encounters inhibits my ability to develop strategies to avoid them. It inhibits my ability to teach my son how to be safe.
And my fear, at times, turns to anger toward those mothers of white sons who do not have to live this way. These mothers do not have to teach their white sons how to protect themselves should they get pulled over by a police officer for a traffic violation:
(a) Turn down the radio and/or change the channel to NPR.
(b) Keep both hands on the steering wheel so that the officer can see them.
(c) Never raise your voice; speak very respectfully—“Yes Sir,” “No Sir.”
(d) Before reaching over to retrieve your license and registration, inform the officer of every move you are about to make—“I am going to reach into my pocket for my wallet.”
(e) Never talk back and do not agitate the officer.
(f) Do not move quickly, not even to swat a bee from your face, not even as a response to the sound of fireworks; your life may depend on your ability to remain immobile.
Generations of black parents have been keenly aware that black bodies are criminalized in the U.S. racial regime and, because of this, state surveillance of black men and women is heightened, making encounters with police officers almost inevitable.
For black parents, then, the issue is not if our sons are stopped by the police but when they are stopped by the police. This is the burden of black parenthood in America. No matter how much we teach them, these strategies do not guarantee protection for our children. They do not guarantee our children’s safe return.
I remain haunted by the words of Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old African American boy from Cleveland, Ohio, who on November 12, 2014, was gunned down by two police officers while playing in the park with a toy gun. In a commemoration speech at Kansas State University, Rice shared her story of the day of Tamir’s death. She recalled that her two children had asked to go to the park across the street to play that Saturday afternoon. She was cooking lasagna for dinner—an ordinary task on an ordinary day—when two neighbor children knocked on the door to tell her the police had just shot her son.
I was in denial. My sixteen-year-old zoomed by me and out of the house. When I got there, I saw my son lying on the ground. I tried to get to him. I was told to calm down or I would be placed in the back of a cruiser. My fourteen-year-old daughter was already in the back of a cruiser and my sixteen-year-old was surrounded by police. It was the most horrific day in my life, sending two children out to play that day and only one coming home. That’s a pain no mother or father should have to endure.
Rice’s crime that day was sending her children out to play. Tamir’s crime was simply playing in the park.
The killing of Tamir Rice shook many of us to the core not only because he was so young and innocent but also because of the swiftness by which his young, beautiful life was taken. He was killed in less than two seconds. The two white police officers did not see, or chose not to see, that Tamir was simply a child doing what children do—playing in a park.
The killing of Tamir Rice amplifies the condition of racialized precarity African Americans experience. Although Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun, like so many young children, the two police officers are supposed to be professionals trained to assess and diffuse a situation before they act. Had they done so, they might have discovered that Tamir was playing with an Airsoft pellet gun, the same toy that thousands of white boys have played with without being gunned down.
The swiftness and ease by which the police officers ended this child’s life, and their refusal to offer him first aid until four minutes later when another officer arrived on the scene, exposed the fact that they did not value Tamir’s life.
The police officers also did not value the pain of Tamir’s grieving mother and siblings who simply wanted to hold him in their arms as he lay dying. Instead, the officers threatened to detain Tamir’s mother and brother, and placed his sister in the back of their police car as if these family members were criminals.
What is even more painful is that a grand jury refused to indict these police officers, who drew on the criminalization of black men as part of their defense, claiming that they had felt threatened by this twelve-year-old. The actions of the police officers and the city of Cleveland clearly reinforced the message that black lives do not matter in the U.S. racial regime.
If only Rice’s story were unique, an anomaly, it would not be as haunting. Indeed, the ease and swiftness with which police officers take the lives of black and brown men, women, and children, and the painful fact that most of these officers are never brought to justice in the U.S. courts, illuminate how race and the criminalization of black bodies heighten the condition of precarity for people of color.
Every day, in the face of contrary evidence, black people are asked to take a leap of faith that the state and its agents will do right by its black and brown citizens. We are asked to take a leap of faith that body cameras on police officers will help reduce police violence and ensure justice for victims and their families. We are asked to take a leap of faith in the American creed that all persons are created equal and will be treated as such by the state.
I am reminded of the words philosopher Cornel West delivered in a 1993 commencement speech at Wesleyan University.
I’m in no way an optimist. I’ve been black in America for thirty-nine years. No ground for optimism here, given the progress and regress and three steps forward and four steps backward. Optimism is a notion that there’s sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we’re doing, things will get better. I don’t believe that. I’m a prisoner of hope, that’s something else. Cutting against the grain, against the evidence.
The black residents in Song of Solomon exercised hope as they grappled with the precarious condition of living in the U.S. racial regime. Their hope is evidenced in the various forms of resistance black residents engaged in their daily struggle to live whole in such a world.
In Song of Solomon Morrison provides models of resistance from which we can learn and can apply today. One form of resistance, embodied by Guitar, is cathartic but destructive. Another, exercised by the townspeople, is an example of hope.
Deeply angered by racial injustice, Guitar chooses a form of resistance by retaliation: an eye for an eye. He understands that black citizens cannot rely on the state to administer justice. They had to rely on themselves.
He joins the Seven Days, a secret society that avenges the murders of African Americans by killing innocent whites. Guitar insists that his form of justice was not done out of hate but, rather, out of love.
“What I am doing ain’t about hating white people. It’s about loving us. About loving you. My whole life is love.”
Out of love for his black community, Guitar chooses a strategy of vengeance that aims to balance the ratio between blacks and whites since “every death is the death of five to seven generations.” In his view, “It’s about how you live and why. It’s about whether your children can make other children. It’s about trying to make a world where one day white people will think before they lynch.”
Guitar experiences neither optimism nor hope in America or in white citizens. “White people are unnatural,” he states with boldness. “As a race they are unnatural.” Guitar presumes that whites are born with intrinsic characteristics that make them behave in hostile ways toward blacks: “The disease they have is in their blood, in the structure of their chromosomes.” Guitar tells Milkman that the sickness is deep, historic, and may only be addressed through retaliation: “The earth is soggy with black people’s blood. And before us Indian blood. Nothing can cure them, and if it keeps on there won’t be any of us left and there won’t be any land for those who are left. So the numbers have to remain static.” Morrison, however, reveals Guitar’s tactic as ultimately toxic. Vengeance in the name of black love consumes him and toward the end of the novel it destroys his friendship with Milkman and, eventually, himself.
Contrary to popular beliefs (or wishes) among white Americans that we live in a postracial era, the Black Lives Matter movement reminds America that it has yet to recover from its racist past. Indeed, the phrase “black lives matter” reminds us of the constant state of racialized precarity experienced by black and brown citizens in the U.S. racial regime.
According to the BLM website, “When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.”
In a letter to our son, my husband expressed his fears of living in this moment when it feels as if black and brown men are under siege by the police. This letter was triggered, in part, by the deaths of two more unarmed black men: Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 5, 2016, and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, the following day, on July 6. The letter was also written after viewing Alton Sterling’s son interviewed by reporters, witnessing his uncontrollable weeping.
My husband could not get the image of Sterling’s son out of his mind. Sterling’s son reminded him of Langston. He decided to write a letter sharing his fears with Langston, and wishing he were a young child again living at home with us so that we could protect him from such a cruel world. Langston responded:
Funny, I too find myself wishing that I were a kid again. The world seemed so much simpler back then. But then I remember Tamir Rice. I remember Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Aiyana Jones. I look at the faces of countless black bodies piling up in our streets. And I remember my own experiences with police officers as a kid. The struggle must continue, for our future’s sake. I love you, Dad.
In his wisdom, Langston reminded us that we cannot hide from the reality of the precariousness that comes with living in this U.S. racial regime. He also reminded us that we must continue to resist in spite of it. Indeed, like the Southside residents in Song of Solomon, Langston chooses to continue the struggle for all our sakes.
Langston chooses hope.
This is the only way that we can survive whole. But there are challenges that appear at moments that should be celebratory, the racist world intruding on weddings or everyday outings to the park. Some of the intrusions end in death but many simply reinforce the racial profiling, the state surveillance, the intimidation—all contributing to this feeling of racial precarity, this sense of an imminent threat.
How long after sending Langston off into the world would it take for him to get his own reminder?
It seems like we had just dropped him off at his freshman dorm. It seems like he had just called to describe his first assignments. It seems like we should have been given a longer grace period before the hammer of racism disrupted his precious college years before going out into the workforce.
I was in the kitchen washing dishes when my husband burst through the door, holding his anger in his shoulders and hands, conveying exactly whose life commanded our attention as parents first and foremost. “I knew it would happen. No place is safe. This is no country to be black in.” His fists were clenched and my right hand dropped a handful of forks. There was something in his voice, a fierce hesitation in each word, that made me know instantly that something had happened to Langston.
In his urban studies course, Langston’s professor had assigned a research project that required students to go into an unfamiliar neighborhood to observe and assess the economic status of the area. Langston was assigned a wealthy white neighborhood to conduct his observation. Shit. Sounds safe enough, right? Safe if you are white!
How much time had the professor worried about sending wealthy white kids into black urban neighborhoods while forgetting (or never knowing) what every black person in America knows: wealthy and white does not equal safety for us.
After spending some time walking around and observing the neighborhood, Langston and his classmate, a Latina woman, stopped at a local park to sit under a shady tree and write notes—a suspicious activity to the local on-duty policemen.
And how did my husband, as he listened to this account, console our only child? This was our precious Langston describing a scene every black parent is terrorized by—the approach of two white police officers, their hands poised above their guns in a tableau of cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, white authority and presumed black guilt.
“What are you doing here?” one asked.
In a beautiful park on a beautiful day with notebooks in hand and a first semester of earnestness quickly evaporating and seeming foolish, there are a million sarcastic answers to such a question, but sarcasm is a luxury afforded to others. It is not an indulgence a black teen can afford to risk in today’s world.
“Officer,” my son responded respectfully, “we are students from Brown University.”
My son is the child of two academics. His clothes come from Abercrombie and Fitch. His beautiful smile is the result of quality orthodontics. Before leaving for college, he spent his summer in Japan. His life might be described as privileged.
But he is black.
“Officer, we are here doing a project for our urban studies course. May I show you my student ID?”
As Langston engaged this officer, the second police officer began searching bushes that were nearby. The first officer examined Langston’s student ID, looked at him, and declared, “The park closes at eight o’clock.”
Langston looked at his watch.
“Yes, sir, but it’s only six o’clock.”
The officer leaned in, glaring into Langston’s eyes, and then repeated in a voice edged with threat, “I said, the park closes at eight o’clock.”
My son immediately raised his hands in the air, said, “OK, officer, we are leaving,” and then he stood up from the bench, his classmate quietly studying her watch with confusion but then also getting to her feet as if this made sense more than the logic of her watch.
Once Langston safely removed himself and his classmate from the neighborhood, he called his father, giving all the necessary facts to this rock of our family.
When do I stop getting angry, an emotion that does no good? But there it was. Anger at these police officers who inserted themselves into my child’s first year away from home. Anger at the professor, who did not think that this assignment would put my child at risk. He did not think—nor thought he had to think—about how race could have impacted the experience. What if Langston had taken out his cell phone and the police had thought he was reaching for a gun? Wasn’t Amadou Diallo killed by police because he was trying to show his ID?
I cried. It is hard enough to send a child out into the world. It is impossible to send a young black man into the world without questioning the insanity of what you have done. But I also do not want to be crippled by my fears. I don’t want to let what has happened to others dictate my celebration of my only child’s entrance into manhood. I don’t want to just survive but I want to wish and hope—with the help of Morrison—to survive whole.
In the same interview where Morrison talks about surviving whole, she writes that “we have a lot of rage, a lot of violence; it comes too easily to us. The amazing thing to me is that there is so much love also.”
Does Song of Solomon’s depiction of the psychic weight of racial violence—much of it absorbed into the family—keep us from surviving whole?
I don’t think so.
Milkman learns about his family’s violent past and the contemporary tragedy of Emmett Till but also learns to shed the burden of these horrors. At the end, he seems to be quite literally flying free of his burdens. It is an ending that I read as ultimately hopeful.
As I sit in my office writing this, I know that the dead deer has been removed from its outpost in front of my house. And Langston is starting his last year at college. I am writing as an act of surviving whole. I am writing to make sense of what has happened. And I am repeating Langston’s words a second and third time to keep his youthful spirit and strength in my mind: “The struggle must continue, for our future’s sake.”