After a long day of work, James Byrd Jr., a black man, accepted a ride home from three white men. Three white supremacists, he realized a moment too late. They beat him, chained him to the back of their truck, and dragged him for more than a mile down a desolate country road. Jasper, where Byrd lived and died, is just a four-hour drive from the living room where my mother and I sat that evening.
Separated by a heavy silence, we watched the local news reporter’s mouth twist and morph to find the right shape for the word “dismembered.” I don’t remember if we turned to each other then, after Mom picked up the remote and hit the power button. I wish I could. I hope we did. I’d like to think that together we were able to name the fear that burrowed into the both of us that humid evening.
I was the kind of boy who collected rocks. A red book of Greek mythology “for children” was always just an arm’s reach from my bed, next to a notebook of, well, not poems exactly, just stray phrases I’d jot down when I was tired of repeating them to myself. When I went to bed that night, instead of going to my notebook, I dug through my rock collection until I found my piece of jasper. The polished stone was smooth to the touch and rust red. I saw the image of three boys with three branches in their hands, stomping into the woods. For a moment, I was less than innocent—not terrified, but the possibility of terror itself. For a moment, I was the wolf outside the door. But then I was a black boy in America again, curled fetal in his twin bed, a bloody stone in hand, ears ringing with the rattle of chains. Silent, troubled, and helplessly myself.
Just as some cultures have a hundred words for “snow,” there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night.