Cottoned to Blackness

My father and I struggled to have conversations that didn’t involve silence and awkwardness. I held contempt for him abandoning me when I was a kid, for being absent most of my life. I don’t know my father very well. At fifty years old, I presume I never will. Immense pain was buried in my father way before he became a heroin addict in 1993. It had to do with his lack of knowing his Blackness, or more specifically his confusion as to who he was. Dad never knew whether his father, my Grandpa Price, was Black or white or an amalgam of them both. Grandpa Price was so light-skinned he passed for white. When Grandpa Price was drafted into World War II and had to fill out the form where it asked a person’s race, he wrote “Black.” The sergeant read it, and called Grandpa Price into the office.

“Why’d you put down Black?” Asked the sergeant to which Grandpa Price replied, “Because that’s what I am.”

After Grandpa left the room, the sergeant told the colonel to scratch out Black and write in white.

My father—in his heyday—was handsome. I know this not from memory, as I have absolutely no recollection of what he looked like when I was a kid, but from pictures and family members telling me I looked exactly like him. As he grew older, his skin discolored and weathered and became haggard, due to his heroin use. During my Dad’s drug days, which occurred throughout my twenties and thirties, he was enthusiastic and caring in public and self-centered, two-faced, and the only person who hurt me as much as he did in private. I felt the crushing darkness within him that slashed light like the earth were upheaved beneath him. He groped about helplessly for light—one ray of light. To wake from the suffocating gloom of going to the open grave he saw himself standing in front of because he didn’t know his father and grandfather’s race—he told me—but more specifically that he had not known his identity.

“I’m seventy years old and don’t know who I am,” he said.

He became a born-again Christian to stop using heroin, but the religion did little to stop his dislike of white folk nor his suspicion of them. Whites were unredeemable, he told me when we began talking in the summer of 2020, would never see us as human. But I refused to believe him when he said that they wanted Blacks only as slaves. He never called the occupant of the White House before Joe Biden, the president. “He’s the devil,” my father’d say, “that’s why he got orange skin.” My father saw Trump as the four horsemen all wrapped up in one riding, ushering in the apocalypse. Mind you, this’s a man who has more white blood flowing through his veins than Black, never got called a racist slur in his life, never witnessed Blacks in his school or neighborhood be called racial epithets, and never experienced Jim Crow. My dad grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Providence, predominantly Black schools, and had all Black friends who questioned and taunted him for his light skin. He endured much hurt from his pitiless father who made it difficult for his children to identify with him and build a relationship. All these difficulties showed in my dad’s face when he tried, without success, to establish a relationship with me after he and my mother divorced when I was five.

For the first fifteen years of my life he popped in and out, appearing on Easter or Thanksgiving as if time hadn’t passed. He’d call and wish me a Happy Birthday or Merry Christmas and unabated tension paralyzed my tongue so that no malediction or impotent violence could escape from my lips and press out the life he was trying to renew. When I turned sixteen I told my mother to tell him he either stayed in or stayed out. He chose to stay out, which was fine with me. I’ll admit, I was glad to see him go.

He owned his Blackness, however, at a time when I was running from mine. He spoke Black vernacular, and wore Blackness with the armor of our ancestors. I didn’t talk about my father to my friends when I was a kid, always needing to impress them, though I know now that I never did. The first time we communicated, spring 2019, he had mailed me three letters apologizing for missing my life. Each one sounded like a greeting card. All of his “I’m sorry” and “forgive me,” were arranged before me like empty bottles waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. I suspected in those half-hearted lines a meaning which had never been there before, and that came as a moment of realization, of accepting my father’s shortcomings. My mother said I expected more from my father than what he was capable of providing. When I told her that he needed to say more in his letters, she snapped at me: “What do you want, Allen? He can’t give you what he doesn’t know how to give. That’s all he knows how to do. You take it or leave it.” So I accepted his apology, but I didn’t accept him back into my life.

A year later, June 19, 2020, which was Father’s Day and Juneteenth Day, I called him. The racist murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd left me ashamed of having denied my race. I felt a duty to reconnect with my Blackness, and learn my family history. My father was in his late sixties by then. After beating his drug addiction, followed by prostate cancer, he lived in such deep communion with God that his long recitations, punctuated by Bible verses, irritated me, but as our conversation turned to the current state of America I noticed his Bible rhetoric became almost nonexistent. Anger, melancholy, hopelessness filled his voice as he spoke about the country backsliding on Black rights, Black history, and criminalizing the teaching of slavery: the institution of racism. He believed the crumbling of America’s civilization began the day the Civil War ended. The warring had been and would forever be about whites wanting superiority, and putting Black folk back onto the plantations. “Free labor made them free money.” I hadn’t heard him speak in such an apocalyptic manner, and came to see how his feelings had become my own. I’d become my father after decades of doing everything I could to fit in with white folks. Our shining city on a hill wasn’t a melting pot, but rather Black folk were the pot and everyone else melting inside. My father made me aware of the damage I’d done to my Blackness when he read me something Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni, wrote in an email, “BLM is a bit of a dangerous Trojan Horse and they are catching well-meaning people into dangerous posturing that can invite mob rule and property looting. Let’s not be tricked into joining cause with radical extremists seeking to foment a cultural revolution because they hate America.”

“Ass kissin Uncle Tom,”  Dad said. “He hates being Black. He even said that the white kids at his school called him “ABC”—‘America’s Blackest Child’. He wishes he could change to white.”

My father is by no means political. He never had a desire to be wealthy or famous. He believes the whole the system is “bullshit,” and the only way Black folk could overcome racism was by staying unified against whites, be they liberal or conservative. The whole push to assimilate made no sense to him. Whites would never equalize us because it would mean relinquishing power to a race who they believed signaled a deficit of intellect, talent, skill, and morals. The country had shown that enacting laws did nothing to stop racism or white supremacists from killing Blacks. Anti-Blackness had caused dad to become sick, quite sick in fact—in the mind. The weight of racism had been a heavy burden for him.  Living with such heaviness had sickened my father’s mind and I discerned that it would do the same to me. I too had the melancholy air from the weight of white supremacists, and needed to figure out how to prevent this affliction from destroying my mind.

It took me a bit to process, and was difficult to accept, that because my father had battled racism for seventy years, he had suffered neurological and physical deterioration. It explained some of the cruelty he imposed on me. In 2016, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My mother told me, “I think you should call your father. He’s got prostate cancer and he’s going in the hospital tomorrow for surgery.” For some unknown reason, she stayed in communication with him after spending half my life berating the man. But I’ll never forget the feeling that possessed my body when she told me. He didn’t know that studies had been done showing Black men are 1.7 times more likely to be diagnosed with—and 2.1 times more likely to die from—prostate cancer than white men. He also didn’t know the role stress from racism plays in the development of prostate cancer. A study by Center for Health Disparities and Molecular Medicine associate director, Carlos A. Casiano, PhD, and his colleagues found that the stressor racism contributes to cumulative psychosocial stress, and influences quality of life and health status. Casiano, who’s been studying biological and clinical aspects of prostate cancer for over two decades, said, “When you take into account these life stressors that predominantly affect minority populations and combine them with biological factors, you begin to see an increased incidence and mortality of certain cancers in certain populations, like prostate cancer in African American men.”

The stress racism caused my enslaved ancestors and my parents could easily kill me if I continued to demonstrate intransigence. My dad went beyond needing simple surgery. He had to have his prostate removed, and had to choose either having a urine drainage bag attached to him for the rest of his life, or an artificial urinary sphincter put into him to control and release the urine by the press of a button underneath his scrotum. He opted for the latter. If you ask him today he’ll tell you he doesn’t know why he didn’t heed the warning signs his body had given him.

II

In the case of my mother, it became clear to me that she had made a miscalculation. This has always been her tendency. Mom viewed my dad as “a useless, low down, good for nothin’ two-timer” whose clothes she filled with garbage bags and threw on the front porch of the house of the woman he was having an affair with when I was five years old. There were times, too many, so many my mind refuses to recall them all, when I hated my Blackness, equating it with the league of poverty we labored in. My mother didn’t like her Blackness because her father who was Blue-Black physically had sexually abused her. Blackness was equated with meanness, darkness, and she wore bright colors to ward off “bad juju.” If she had characteristics of the white world she’d be accepted with her copper-tone colored skin. When it came to people fawning over her prettiness my mother took it from every color, but she only got serious with whites. Whiteness was everything and everything was everything.

I have heard people ask, how does a child learn self-loathing? I learned it from my mother. Those memories refuse to lay dormant in the darkest  depths of my skull, remembering like notes of a thrush in the woodland: her sitting in a plush gold rocking chair in the living room in front of the bow window, staring at the framed pictures hanging on the paneling wall of a little Black girl, surrounded by a Black background, peering up, and the other of a Black woman’s face with a tear dripping down her right cheek. Every time I went up or came down the stairs from my bedroom, I had to walk past those pictures and my mother just sitting there in a daze. One day when I was older, what age I can’t remember, I asked her, afraid to ask her when I was young for fear she would yell at me, why out of all the pictures in the world those?

“The little girl’s looking for hope,” she explained. “And the other one…” she paused, and then said, “I feel her—”

“Sadness?” I interjected.

She nodded.

“Why didn’t you feel any hope? You were in your twenties and had a whole future ahead of you?”

“Because of you,” she responded.

“But plenty of women had children and had hope for their future. Just because you had me shouldn’t’ve stopped you from having hope for your future. Toni Morrison had two sons and worked as an editor in New York City and a professor at Yale in Connecticut.”

“I didn’t wanna go to school. I hated school. I didn’t have any dreams. Your father was the dreamer. Being Black was suffering enough.”

My recollection of this is sunlight clear because shortly after she said it to me, thirteen-year-old Craig Price, the youngest serial killer in American history, bludgeoned to death two white women along and two white teenage girls in my hometown of Warwick. Craig was Black, exactly my age, and we shared the same last name, but many white folk thought we were related. He lived in the Buttonwoods section and I lived in the Pilgrim Park area. I was a freshman at Pilgrim High School; he was at Vets, the only other high school in the town. It was also the same time the Central Park 5 were falsely accused of murdering a white woman jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump took out an ad in The New York Times demanding the Black men be lynched without a trial. Everywhere I went, white classmates, white neighbors, and white strangers asked me if Craig was my brother. They asked me if we were related. They asked me if I was related to the Central Park 5. They asked me if I knew any of the Central Park 5. They asked me if I knew anything about the murders. They asked me if I had anything to do with the murders. They refused to accept my answer: NO!  White folks’ stereotype that us Black folk are all related or know each other has continued for decades.

When Craig was asked why he murdered, he explained he’d experienced several instances of violent racism. He was nine or ten years old the first time he wished someone to die. It was August. He was about to race his new “Road Runner” bicycle against a Buttonwoods white kid with a new Huffy. Craig adored his bike from the moment he got it. It had deep Y-framed handlebars and blue finger grips sprouting sky-blue tassels. His favorite part of the bike was the sparkly blue chain guard, on which white letters spelled out The Road Runner. The chain guard he decorated with Pepsi stickers, and renamed his bike the Pepsi Road Runner. As the race was about to start, Craig heard someone yell, “Hey spearchucker!”

Craig said, “A cold fear gripped my stomach and a nervous lump began to grow in my throat. I consciously ignored whatever that idiot was calling me.”

Then a golf ball hit the pavement and bounced against his leg. He turned around. A white kid in his late teens with straggly hair was glaring at him from a driveway. The guy had two white friends with him.

“Did you steal that bike, you . . . nigger?”

“Paralyzed with raw fear now I just lowered my head and wished these idiots would get swallowed up by the earth.”

The three white kids threw more golf balls and racist slurs at Craig, and then headed to a beat-up Mustang.

Craig and the kids tried to get on with their bike race, but he heard the reviving of the engine, and then the Mustang pulled up alongside of him. The white guys yelled more racist slurs out the windows at him.

“I just went into a panic and tried to literally out-run this car . . . I really thought these [expletives] wanted to kill me.”

Craig accidentally pedaled into a curb and crashed his bike, busting the chain guard, the seat, and bending the handlebars. He picked up his busted bike and went home. Craig wanted those white kids to die, and was unable to shed the hurt and anger he felt from the racism he suffered.

Psychologists, Alan B. Feinstein, at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections examined and interviewed Craig and wrote a thirteen page paper that “explores the possible role of exposure to racism as a factor in the murders,” and found that, “years of experiencing both overt and covert forms of racism appear to have had a significant impact on his psychological functioning and ultimate acts of aggression.”

“Throughout the interview process,” Feinstein said, “I was struck by C.P.’s numerous stories of racial mistreatment and the effect they had on him. These events were related in such detail it was as though they had occurred only yesterday, rather than in some cases, over twenty years ago.”

“Interviews conducted with C.P. indicate that his victims were not chosen at random or as a matter of convenience, but rather due to their being associated with some perceived racial slight directed toward him.”

Like Craig, I too knew no way to lance and spill out the toxin in the boil called racism. I perceived my Black self as a small, inadequate being in a big white world, and used white folks’ approval to remove the mental constraints which permeated within me. I knew exactly what  game white folks played and played it well. I was attracted to the high, the feeling of being important, of being somebody. To hear white folks say to me, “You’re so smart, so attractive, so accomplished,” was what that low self-esteemed Black kid needed to feed his insecurities. Hearing those words forced me to put aside all consideration of Blackness. I couldn’t see I was letting my Blackness be bullied. I grew comfortable with the pain and accepted the pain as the life for Black folks wanting to make it in white America. But nothing that is alien to our system can enter into us and stay there for long. The mind, the body, the soul will ultimately expel the offending object. I swallowed that belief for so long my brain started saying no more! and my psychological system went through a process of regurgitation to rid itself of this syndrome.

Racist rhetoric creates negative thoughts. Negative thoughts create neurological deterioration. Neurological deterioration destroys the brain. A broken brain creates broken emotions. But what if it breaks the brain and renders it unfixable? What must be understood, what white Americans must know is that once this venom we call racism is injected, one can never be carefree again. Racism’s poison can, without showing a symptom, flare up at any moment. This poison permanently damages the neurons and synapses in the brain and one’s ability, one’s desire to live peacefully and in community with white people. There’s not a Negro alive who doesn’t have this coursing through their veins— one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, the effects of this poison have flared up every week of my life, and will continue to do so until my death. I’m sure I turned off many Black folk with my self-loathing—most definitely my father.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, Allen,” my father said as we talked on the phone that Father’s Day.

I remember making some sardonic reply and laughed, trying to not go down that same dead-end road.

“I sometimes wonder what woulda been if you’d lived with me and your own people.”

When my father said that, something seized inside me with the hypnotic strength of a powerful barbiturate. Years of suppressed memories came crowding, agitating back like a swarm of ravens croaking and flapping their wings around me. I thought about the white gaze and how my brown eyes had averted it. If I didn’t look, if I avoided it, whites couldn’t see my disgusting, yucky self and I couldn’t see their disdain. I became small. Self-hatred is incredibly toxic. I had so much pent up disgust, was stuck in a void, and all I could see was that I was destined to be on this ever long road of misery. In that instant, I wanted to crush the white gaze for crushing me with its ideology. My oxygen had been overtaken by a carbon-monoxide-filled Black inferiority. The white performance I gave as a teenager had heightened to a level where I pathologised my Blackness as a young adult. I realized sitting there on the phone talking to my father that my Blackness had been stalking me, presenting me with these racist experiences to prompt deeper empathy and understanding, offering me necessary skills to interrogate and interpret the slippery abstract character of today’s racism.

“I did not birth you Black to ignore it,” a voice inside me said.

III

In the confinement of the Covid-19 plague, I continued communicating in great haste with my father; especially throughout that summer of George Floyd’s murder, fearful he’d too die soon. I saw his death as a certainty. My dad’s timing has always been less than stellar. I don’t believe he’s ever arrived anywhere on time, though he never dawdled the way I did. Whether or not death was ready for my father I knew not, but both of us were bent on getting justice for Floyd’s long, drown-out murder, and to prevent another from happening. I hadn’t seen my country so violently calm or peaceful marching in the streets. I hadn’t seen so many shades of colors, a mosaic of people, joined together in every state determined to snuff out racism. Nor had I seen my democracy try to stifle its citizens’ rights, not since the Civil Rights Movement. The most amazing part of the protest was white police officers dressed in full uniform taking a knee in front of Black protesters. I saw this unity as a higher plane of consciousness.

Each person’s ancestors are inside of them, for each of us is a continuation. When a protester walked, their kin walked too. I saw we are a continuation of each other. Whatever we do to our individual selves we do to one another. I saw this moment, this summer, as America’s chance to transform its racist inheritance into reconciliation. The same way I cannot remove my father from my life, America cannot remove my ancestors’ hand from it. We are present in all of its energy, organisms, rivers, and gestures. I may occupy a particular American river, but that river flows in the same way a current of the spirit flows. We have no reality as solitary beings. Everything in the universe relies on everything else in order to manifest—be it a flower, a tree, a bird, or you and me. Earth’s one giant living, breathing being with all its working parts interconnected. Impermanence moves in a deep broad channel through the vista of life and mingles its waters with the seas of eternity. It has breadth and depth and consciousness. Tempests may agitate it and the bark that rides upon it may leave a temporary furrow, but it disturbs not its lower currents. All remains calm and tranquil in the spirit that hasn’t one iota of racial identity. I don’t consider myself to be African American. I’ve never been to the African continent. Culturally speaking, I don’t have a racial identity. Ethnically speaking, there’s no such race as the Black race, or any race. Just as the trees are made of non-tree cells, so am I made of non-human cells that haven’t anything to do with race or ethnicity. This insight helped me. It gave me the strength to go and see my father for the first time since Grandma Price’s funeral back in 2010.

As I drove to my father’s, I let go of the anchor that, in the most buoyant waters imaginable, was sinking me to the bottom of the ocean. The day was a typical humid New England summer day. I was hot, sweaty, and cranky. I was cranky because I hadn’t a clue as how to communicate with my father. But the instant I pulled up in front of his place, I was struck with the reason why I stopped talking to him. We were strangers. When we talked it felt hollow. I was too nervous, and too afraid to reveal who I was, to tell him I despised him, didn’t trust him, but longed to know him. He had walked out on me, cheated me out of his life, spent decades refusing to pay the forty dollars a week in child support, and chose to go to jail to avoid it. My anger and bitterness wasn’t for him so much as it was a result of the illegitimacy he’d imposed upon me. It was disturbing to hear a judge ask my mother, do you wanna put your son’s father behind bars for a night? I doubted that he even recalled my being at the courthouse that day. But I needed to focus on what mattered: his being at the end of his life, our time left together, Blackness, and to lose that focus was to acquiesce in my own suffering.

The pride and sorrow on my dad’s face when he opened the door was painful. In ten years he had aged like scullion in scouring: his skin was orange-stained. His brown eyes were vacant. His belly stuck out from behind two bright red suspenders he wore to keep his sweatpants up. His speech was pathologically slow, and filled with paraphasic errors. I sat across from him in his sparsely furnished apartment with beer cans strewn around, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. He could no longer produce the uneasiness that gnawed on the pit of my stomach when in his company. I felt a peculiar kind of bold dignity, like the scariest part of a scary movie had passed and that now, even if another terrifying scene should come, it would come without fear. He sat on the couch and I sat next to him in a wooden chair. The little box television had on CNN. As he showed me pictures and explained to me who was who of the family, I began to fall into a heavy reverie, to feel there was another me trapped inside as his words echoed all the way to my childhood. I saw that dad wasn’t trying to hurt me. He genuinely wanted to know me and have a relationship with his son. Cheap thrill or not, I wanted a relationship, a functional one, with him. That man was not sitting in that room with me though. He probably never was and likely would never be.

“She ain’t gonna change shit!” My father blurted out. His eyes were painting the television screen red. CNN had announced that Kamala Harris accepted Joe Biden’s nomination to be his Vice President. The commentators were speaking on how her nomination would help Blacks.

“Whites always tryna control our image in the news. They been defining what Black is and we in turn doin it ta ourselves. All skin folk ain’t kin folk. Just cuz one of us’s in there ain’t gonna matter. They don’t bring us wid em. Look at dat ass-kissin Clarence Thomas. He been on that Court longer than any white man because he got more hate for us Blacks than a white supremacist. I ain’t talkin bout color on da skin. Whiteness’s da center. They say, ‘We’re gonna National-Geographic-look at all ya all other people.’ Whites won’t let us do nothin bout racism. The Republican Party let that orange devil say they were “very fine people” about a bunch white supremacists because they’re part of their base. They’re their people. David Duke endorsed that orange devil da head of da Ku Klux Klan. Not one of those republicans said a damn thing.

“Since when do you follow politics?”

“Since the orange devil said there were very fine people on both sides. A neo-Nazis drives his car into a crowd of people, and da President of da United States calls that ‘very fine people.’ It was like he was channeling Jesse Helms with a megaphone from the grave.”

“The Republicans have been spewing racist rhetoric longer than I’ve been alive,” I said pulling out my iPhone, looking for a quote. “They’ve been abstract about it. One of Reagan’s advisers Lee Atwater’s said, “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…. “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

“Wow! I didn’t know that,” dad said.

“Reagan had a rally in Mississippi where the three civil rights activists were killed and he knew that and declared his allegiance to “states’ rights.” It was a dog whistle whites in the audience knew. During his 1966 governor race, he said it was Martin Luther King’s own fault for his assassination, saying he disobeyed segregationist laws. Reagan invented the term “welfare queen” during his 1976 presidential campaign.”

“Wow!” He said. “Howya know that?”

“Something this big couldn’t be done without obsequiousness, without many knowing. Trump knew all that. Trump gave them a platform they haven’t had since segregation. When he was asked by a reporter why Blacks are still dying at the hands of law enforcement. He said, ‘And so are White people. So are White people. What a terrible question to ask. So are white people. More white people, by the way. More white people.’ During the protests, he tweeted ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ referencing Bull Connor who used dogs and fire hoses against Black protesters in Alabama.”

“I was seventeen when Conner did that shit. That orange devil did da same thing, Allen, same thing. Armed soldiers in military gear as he paraded around like a dictator where BLM protesters were. 1968 all over again. Only instead of dogs and fire hoses he let out tear gas, rubber bullets, flash bangs, and helicopters. You see them in Portland jump outta unmarked cars and snatch people off da streets. They did that in da back streets of Alabama and Georgia. Not tell dem why they’re arrested and when released, chase dem inta da woods and murder dem. Fifty years and nuttin’s changed.”

“We’ve become a third world nation.”

“We ain’t never stopped, Allen,” dad said. “We ain’t never stopped. Fancy cars and houses don’t make us better than others when we behaving worse than vultures. Da way that orange devil waved da Bible around for a photo. Not praying, not opening da Canon. Just desecrating God. Like da KKK burning a cross on da front lawn of Black churches. I used ta believe we’re making progress. I don’t anymore. Look at yar favorite author there James Baldwin. He believed we were until Martin, Malcolm and Medgar gots murdered by our government. Whites believe we’re a threat. That orange devil told da military ta “crack skulls” and “beat the fuck out of them.” John Lewis got his skull cracked open crossing da Edmund Pettus Bridge. To give us rights means taking sumthin from whites. That’s how they see it. Doing anything that is anti-racist is now considered racist against whites. They’re trying ta erase us by banning our history in school. It’s segregation 2.0. Whites’re too fragile ta hear bout da history of slavery and racism but we Blacks are strong enough ta have suffered and died from it?”

“Their feelings about talking about racism are more important than our experiences with racism is what you’re saying.”

“You gots it, son. Take the one-drop rule. It was an attempt ta save whites so-called purity. I learned that after my father died. I understood then why he said we were Black. All ya need is one person five generations back who’s Black and that’s enough ta make ya Black. One Black person in generations, generations of white people, hundreds of years, makes ya Black. Yar mother wanted ya ta go ta a white school ta get a better education. She believes that whiteness is better, whites gots da better system. So I said okay ta it. But now I know I was wrong. That was white supremacy and I didn’t think of it that way back then. Back then I wanted us to be a family. We Blacks want ta be free, want ta have access ta things defined as freedom in America. Your mother calls me ghetto because of it. Capital B Black is what I call it. Ain’t a damn thing wrong with it either. Because ya went to those white schools ya don’t know yar Blackness. I thought I could teach ya it at home and on da weekends as a compromise.”

“Supplement my Blackness.”

“Yes! So I sold out ta keep yar mother happy ta take advantage of da so-called best opportunities. So ya could ‘act in a uniformed way.’ Improperly influence ya. Those were her words. If we respect Blackness as a culture we need ta see it as a culture. We can’t be ‘get Blacks to dress like whites,’ cuz what ya saying is we gotta act like dem. That don’t change nuttin. Ya think whites look at what ya wearing before they shoot ya? Living in a fancy neighborhood, attending a fancy school is assimilation. You know what the first three letters of that word is, right?”

My father leaned back on the couch and took a sip of his beer. I lowered my head to the floor processing it all. He made sense in a way he hadn’t in my life. I could feel his mind and body drained by anti- Blackness. Racial battle fatigue had exhausted his ability to  feel? hope, creating a powerful negative force that felt insurmountable. My refusal to sink into sheer hopelessness at his words was taxing. I put together the pieces of who I am, took a breath, steadied my voice that had been shaky and on the verge of tears for the hour I had been there, and summoned the last bit of energy in my discoursed Black body, and said, “Is it irreparable?”

“Whites’re still asking me if Craig is my son,” dad said, his eyes filled with a sullen fire—his brow bent—his mealy face stained with red blots—his chin bristled with a fortnight’s beard—and his lips moving with suppressed rage. He rocked his chair, and growled, “You believe that? Forty years later and whites asking me that question.”

My head somersaulted in a chaos of bilious colors. My anxiety drained me. My heart palpitated. My eyes blurred. The piling of fear on top of fear led me to feel a new fear. I had come to see the forces that created the systemic and institutional network that produces and reproduces the pathology of racism as the same pathogen that was unleashed throughout the entire body politic of America. And I didn’t know what to do about that. This intimation made me wish that my father had been there during my childhood so that I could’ve not cottoned these injustices as commonplace but instead cottoned to Blackness and fought against them with all my Blackness.

“As do I,” I said. “When I was in journalism grad school at Emerson College in Boston my thesis advisor asked me if I was related to Craig. And he was Black.”

“One summer afternoon, my father and I were driving down Broad Street in South Providence. Black men were hanging in the streets and on da porches because it was hot. I can still see dem staring at us as we drove by. Just staring at us. When we gots ta a red light, da staring got worse, and yar grandpa said to me, ‘You haven’t any idea what it’s like to be looked at as a racist. For a Black man to look at me and think me a racist because I’s look white. Hate ain’t sumthin ya born wit. It gets taught. My papa read to me that segregation was in the Bible—Genesis 9, Verse 27. At six years old you get told that enough times, you believe it. My old man was so full of hatred, he once said to me, ‘If you ain’t better than a nigger, son, who ya better than?’ He couldn’t see that it was not knowing who his race was that was killin him, not any Black man.”

My father’s words brought a lightness to my spirit, stopping me from eulogizing the nation. In that moment, I realized that the death of my old America was a controlled burn, a regenerative fire, in the tradition of my native ancestors who were this land’s first people. They understood that for change, new growth, you have to raze the existing growth to the ground and let the new take root. And oh, yes, those flames are searing. I can hear the crackling and sizzling here beneath the New England skies telling me that my past life might be dead but I am not. I’m very much alive and kicking no matter how many racists may wish otherwise.

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