"To be Black in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all the time."
–James Baldwin
Dearest Michael,
Do I open with the threat that had anyone within arm’s reach said anything disparaging about you in the days and weeks after your death, my nigga, I would’ve put a foot so far up their asses they'd feel it right up to the moment diggers of graves shoveled dirt onto their coffins? Would you believe me if I told you that I would’ve welcomed the subsequent police officers and the handcuffs and the nightsticks, and yet still I would’ve shouted to wide-eyed onlookers, blood spilling from my battered jowls, “He was my friend!” But of course I am no killer. So perhaps I should open this note as fiction writers do, with a simple and direct testimony devoted to character and conflict and voice: "He had run for so long through my veins that I now know I never would've made it out of my shitty sliver of the Bronx without his ballads and badass moon-walking."
And then there was the sparkling glove. The glistening gerri-curl. The high-water jeans and white socks. Altogether you were like a hybrid of silk and sandpaper, and your presence to me, and to the world, rang of streams of hot elegant rain poured upon us all from a thunderous sky. To say nothing of your precious voice, which announced to so many of us soft spoken and artistic and nerdy outcast brothers from my hood that we, too, were meaningful entities within the glorious web of inner-city Black Men. But later, as I grew, this: black beauty was murderously disputed by evening news and Hollywood blockbusters; and then I’d learned, for the first time, the word castration; and I’d seen, for the first time, video of black bodies burning and hanging from thick oak trees, and beneath their smoldering feet, little white children with mutilated souls giggling at the charred flesh—I was even more grateful, then, for the presence of your rough pop-hit-lilts in my life, Michael.
Despite the horrible truth of the above sentiment, I exited the inner-city a product of that gargantuan metropolis of eight million beating hearts, and entered a predominantly white and rich private school in upstate New York, armed with an impenetrable motto: never take shit from no one. It was a mantra I had to wield in order to withstand—though I failed so many times—the absolutely stunning and dizzying acts of deliberate and unconscious racism I experienced for three years at that educational institution. I shielded myself as best I could so that I could also, then, harness an energy to properly love myself in order to properly love another human being. All the while trying to make sense of the centuries old excavation into the deep earth of what it meant to be Black while in plain sight of a few thousand white people. Well, I never finished a degree at that school, and some seventeen years later I found myself at a bar chatting with one of those white cats who had, you know, strangled himself with an addiction for underground Hip-Hop. When I admitted that I had no fucking clue of the rap artists he’d named who were keeping it real by staving off commercial record company vultures, he said to me, “Man, what kind of black person is you?!”
Make no mistake, Michael, I prayed, at the time, to be the best teacher I could. I prayed for continued publication and winning awards as a writer. I also prayed for a good golf swing and the good treatment of animals; I prayed the Yankees would win another pennant; I prayed the woman I loved would forever love me. But it was all I could do not to take this white cat by the scruff and slam his face repeatedly into the iron mesh table between us, all the while chanting—in the same fervor of giggle as those white children might have while ruined bodies swung in the air above them—we are a diverse people, we are a diverse people! Instead, I kept my cool and said, “Do you know anything about The Blues or R&B? Do you know Erykah Badu or Tracy Chapman or Cassandra Wilson or Muddy Waters or Teddy Pendergrass?” (If being black means anything at this exact moment, it means having to correct white people—of whatever ilk—about the kinds of music they think we ought to be listening to based on the color of our skins).
He fell silent and sipped on a tall can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, wholly dissatisfied with my rebuttal, and staring at me as though everything he thought he knew about black people had been reinforced because I was just some Uncle Tom, sell-out, little white-boy-faking-it-black—just for shits and giggles. I wonder now, Michael, if you had been more forceful, more successful in setting straight a number of these kinds of cultural fools—if you had been able to put those lost cats properly in their place—would you have resisted the bleaching cream and the surgeon’s knife raised to your face?
Maybe that’s an unjust question to pose, brother. Especially now that you are no longer here—but you are very much still here—to speak on behalf of your human agony. Which, at this point in our American history means, quite frankly, racial agony. It killed me how so many white people arrived at your guilt for, as was alleged, messing with little boys as easily as slipping on slippers or uttering nigger or swallowing chicken nuggets. So many rushed to chant, he must've done it because he's a fuck up racial freak. As though they didn’t already know imageries of whiteness have dominated the planet for centuries, and long before you ad-libbed, just look over your shoulders, honey! or spun around on penny loafers. As though their guilt-filled nightmares about the color of their own skins hadn’t already revealed the ruthless, vicious, and often fatal dance between being simultaneously Black and Human. Had they been stripped down to their swinging cocks or shaved pussies by the lawmen who came after you, I wonder how easily would there be an admission that they are the sole beneficiaries—they are the children!—of the mother of all mantras so many black and brown folk on this continent have forever been scorched by: white rules all.
Michael, I still search for what it is that rules me, and I question the merits of such an exploration every day of my life, brother. So, who am I to say anything about the relationship between you and this northern America where your spirit lingers like the genetic dominance of melanin and the birth of interracial babies? I apologize for sounding bitter; I suppose it’s because you’re dead and I will only ever know you in song, never as a man. I wish we could’ve been friends so I’d know what sad love songs you threw on after the first time had your heart broken. So I’d know what kind of movies you watched on rainy Sunday afternoons when it was far too depressing to go outside. So I’d know how tall you were or if you liked sports or if you kept a journal or wrote poems for no one’s eyes but your own. So I could know what kind of middle-of-the-night-food you craved after a night out boozing—did you booze?—with those who were actually your friends.
I sometimes permit myself to imagine that we were as close as white on rice, thick as thieves, and I picture myself dropping by your place unexpectedly (as friends sometimes do), carrying a plate of my famous chicken cacciatore and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. Let's get fucked up, dude, it's Friday, I say, and for the next several hours we eat and drink and listen to music and talk about the power of white supremacy and old times, and every fifteen minutes or so you playfully admonish me for stepping outside to smoke a cigarette. Once the bottle is finished and the music playlist begins to repeat itself, I crash on the couch like an old friend and you head upstairs but warn me that you won’t be able to sleep. And I say, Man, just turn the light off and close your eyes.
Sometime in the night, though, I bolt upright, stricken with a swollen fear
like when I was a boy and thrown from sleep by winds that forced snapping
tree limbs to sing like gunfire. So now I cross the living room and climb
the stairs, and at the top I call out to you—once, twice—before turning
down the corridor to your bedroom. When I push through the door,
I see you sprawled out on the floor next to the bed, and I know
that, while I’d slept, you might have stared at your reflection
in the bathroom mirror while brushing your teeth and deplored
the effect of our country’s history carved in your face. I fall
to your side, then, and shake you—once, twice, and then
a third time for good measure, for I am your friend—
before realizing the irrevocable truth of the moment.
Crying, then, I embrace you, praying the psychic
power within my beating heart will perform
a miracle, and like a fellow victim
and warrior in this current
pathological racial war, I sing
to you, Michael, as I have
done so many times since
your passing, you are not
alone, you are not
alone, you are not
alone, my nigga.
Sincerely Yours,
Professor Afro
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