✦andrewjacksonslaststand010621: *8:46 lied about a lot, maybe almost all these cases! of police misconduct, brutality, and murder. When you do the research through the appropriate channels, you see that these “unarmed innocent black people” were thugs, killers, accomplices to killers, rapists, thieves, and the like. Let’s unseal all the records! down to the birth certificates.
*Unless you believe Pacific Islanders was some African boatmen who got lost on the ocean and washed up on the other side of the world, which is what my daddy, my momma, and everybody else thinks went down. Given that fact, blood would be 73.8 percent black, to be exact.
Jacqueline
There are so many pictures of you. I’ve seen them all because you’ve given them to me. They tell a story that words can’t. The first are those of you as an infant in your diapers. Your mother can hold you easily in the crook of her arm. You are as small as the day you were born, as small and consequently as beautiful as you ever will be. These are the pictures that she will preserve and curate most carefully, for they symbolize a passage in time when she was everything to you and you were perfect. I am only a year older than you, but I can see these photographs and imagine holding you in my arms. Every woman and many men can imagine themselves holding you and they can imagine themselves as you. It is this universal bond that will assure that those who love you will share these photographs first with the world now that something bad has befallen you. They connect you to what we all once were and what we all one day may hold: the helpless human form only just come from the womb. We were all perfect children once, whatever we’ve become.
In a few months, upon your first birthday, you will become a gang member, according to a database, according to an algorithm, according to the news.
Then there are the pictures from your preadolescence. Your body, in stages, begins to take its unique shape. You are not round as the world, no longer the soft ball of your babyhood. You will never again be universal. You are you, or what your mother, your father, your world, forms you as. You wear the hand-me-down children’s FUBU from your father’s older progeny, his first family. Your bushy Afro has been harshly coiled and laid like overlapping vines into cornrows that fall into braids down the back of your neck. You look like a very small, very young, very innocent Allen Iverson. Looking at you like this reminds people not just of how young and beautiful you were not so long ago, it reminds them of other black men who used to be young, hard, and slender, with bright eyes and powerful energy. You are five, six, seven years old, but you are black so you have already entered the liminal space where you hover between the humanity that we all share and an existence that only your people and others displaced into diasporized and dehumanized space will know. People who are not black already count your calendar quicker than they do their own children’s days, and because of that they may imagine that you are six when you are five, eight when you are six, ten when you are seven, or they may simply not notice if you die before you should. These images are unambiguous amongst black people, but they are up for interpretation in the haunted subconsciousness of the people who rule black people, none of whom are black. But this haunting is too deep, too bloodstained, too guilty to speak of, so these photos will never be published either unless we publish them and call you what you are: a child of God.
Ten is the age of darkness. By the time you reach it in reality, not in the imaginations of others, your body has thinned, your features have darkened, you look like your father except that he is bald and your hair is a simple tapered fade. You pose for your pictures now. You know how to hold your body in coolness, in seriousness, how to smile to approximate joy, how to be a schoolboy, a proper child, a momma’s boy, your father’s son, a feral thing amongst other wild boys and girls. Your photographers are your friends as often as they are your family members now. They curate you more coolly than your elders ever could, placing you inside the culture of the current moment rather than the memories of the past. You are, outside the space of their care, no longer anyone’s child. These are the first photographs that the media will share with the public because they are the first photographs that feature a version of you that is self-possessed and personally defined to be both target and threat. Grown men are targeting these pictures right now, having plastered blown-up photographs of you upon the silhouetted, concentrically encircled bodies at gun ranges across America, so that they can fill you with bullet holes as personally as possible. You are only ever a child to those who love you.
The photographs of you at fourteen years of age are well known even to those who would never shoot a soul. This is the point: your image frightens otherwise God-fearing, reasonable people. They might want someone else to do something with you even if that something is only to arrest you. These images are evidence that you have been arrested before. At fourteen, your parents are out of the picture, photographically speaking. They might visit you in the Youth Control, but they do not live there. They cannot live there. You are out from under their protection. You are no longer anyone’s child, least of all those who see you now as you were then. These pictures are like class photos if every classmate of yours is an inmate and the mandated uniform that you all must wear is a jumpsuit. All your classmates are inmates, your mandated uniform is a jumpsuit. It is an ugly dark green jumpsuit. You could be in the military if you weren’t incarcerated, and by the looks of you—your sudden harsh crew cut, your broadening shoulders, your vascular biceps, the long, uncentered stare that looks through the viewer of the photograph and out to nowhere—you might one day. But in the timeless now of the photograph you are imprisoned, you are sullen, you are guarded. You are also worried about something no one understands: Did those days on that island suspended somewhere between freedom and incarceration contaminate and re-create your chemistry, your immunology? Nobody even knows that this is a thing except you and the others who were in limbo there, and me, because you told me. And none of us know whether this state of suspension, which is real, has really changed you in irrevocable, alchemical ways. What’s the window period for annihilation? What’s the half-life of genocide? Your whole life, every breath you’ve breathed, everything you’ve ingested, your environment itself in all its toxicity, has exposed you in ways that a photograph will never reveal. Lead exposure over a certain level is said to result in decreased impulse control, lowered IQ, and increased violence, and black communities in America experience lead levels seven times those of white neighborhoods. Our homicide rate is seven times higher than for white Americans. You can’t see lead in a glass of water, let alone in the bloodstream in a photograph. You can’t see what mold does to the lungs or the mind in a picture. You can’t see epigenetics, trans-generational trauma, DNA and its ghosts; you can’t see Greenwood burning. Some things simply go unseen. But at fourteen you call all these things you can’t see radiation and your community calls it the flu and maybe you are both right.
I can’t tell if you’re omni-visible or totally invisible or both. There are no pictures in the news of you in high school; I have these pictures on my phone, tucked away amongst my private, locked albums. I’m sure other people who went to school with you do, too. I don’t know if anyone has sent these images to journalists, but they should. I would if not for my fear of detection and investigation. Already, Soclear is dropping hints that they know that you are corresponding with someone. I don’t need to tie their noose tighter around me. But these images could make anyone fall in love with you: your smile is sunshine against midnight-black skin. Like every boy, your eyelashes are the envy of every girl. Your bone structure is leaving behind its awkwardness, and your eyes are not vacant depths but warm, kind, and close. You are looking at me as I stare back at you from this side of forever. Time is such a strange thing, Cope.
You are eighteen in your last image. It is a picture that is widely circulated on the newswire, with your name, height, estimated weight, eye and hair color, all denoted below the head shot. Your eyes in this picture are somehow different, neither inti
mate nor vacant. Your cheekbones are rounder, wider, vaguer, as is your nose, which should actually be startlingly aquiline for a black boy but is, instead, broad and flat, your nostrils flared as opened caves. Your complexion, like the rest of the image, is a computer-generated composite of Negro manhood based on ancient ideas about skulls and racial traits and an artist’s impression of the face of a black rioter in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2020. The artist remembers the emblem on the boy’s torn shirt, *8:46; he remembers the car burning in the background of the photograph and the way it lit the boy’s dark features in wild relief. He does not remember the child.
This image is not you, or it is the constructed, conglomerated you, the e pluribus unum you. Maybe it is the you that exists outside of time, that arrived here crowded out of all individuality, all names, all families, all tribes, all tongues, chained, massed at the shores of America four hundred years before your birth. Maybe this you has been here since the beginning. Whenever this image appears before me on one of my screens, in this fathomless news feed, I think how easy it is for black people to disappear.
Cope
Free finally, I was out and tight as a wasp with a memory. I touched turf, caught a ride back to Rockwood, and just as I was making my way to the gates, a Lexus coupe pulled up right in front of me. The female driver blew a kiss goodbye to the girl who opened the passenger-side door. You climbed out and appeared in the street. Had on that beautiful Pied-montay bomber, rose gold and gleaming, flashy as fuck and fuckin’ flawless. Where I had went away with this still photograph of you in my mind, skinny and scared, your hair a mess, your face masked, your multistriped socks and highwater jeans a joke, twelve months later here I was returning to the birth of your cool. You was still skinny enough to slip thru a shut door, but now you had a confidence to your walk that was its own honey-dipped dance. Without the mask, I could see your high cheekbones and the rest of your pretty face. A professional had did your hair into tight cornrows with a long braid falling down each shoulder: one cold crown. And of course I loved the clothes.
You glided past the gates, across the courtyard, and into the apartment I had seen you appear from a year before. The Lexus pulled away only when you was safely inside. I took mental note, cuz everything had changed and ain’t nothin’ change. Funny how the world works.
I watched the Lexus peel past me, throwing up a gust of wind in its wake fit to give me chills. I walked up and seen somethin’ else at the gate. The flyer read:
RENT INCREASE NOTICE
TENANCY AT: ROCKWOOD HOMES
THIS NOTICE SERVES AS A NOTICE OF PLANNED RENT INCREASE WITHIN THE NEXT 365 DAYS.
MONTHLY RENTAL FEES WILL ESCALATE BY 100%–200% BASED ON THE SIZE OF APARTMENT AND LENGTH OF TENANCY. THE LAW REQUIRES NOT LESS THAN 60 DAYS’ NOTICE OF A RENT INCREASE. IF THERE ARE ANY QUESTIONS, FEEL FREE TO CONTACT …
Just so we’re clear, that’s an eviction note, not no rent increase. I thought how you walked past it like it wadn’t but a thing. Maybe that had somethin’ to do with y’all’s Lexus budget, but even still you mighta noticed it and taken a second to study it if it was news. Obviously it was not. The flyer had been there for a minute. My ass was just late to the eviction.
When I got home, the first thing out my mouth, ’fore anyone could even hug on me, was “What up with the rent note on the gate?” On cue, a cherry bomb shook the windows and rumbled the ground beneath our feet. Welcome back to the bomb shelter. Daddy waited for it to pass. He dropped his head and swayed a little, like an old church woman singing praises. “Gentrification,” he muttered beneath his breath.
Gentrification. It was a word I had heard shouted like a curse from protest rally platforms downtown and seen headlining Oakland’s many radical newspapers but never knew what it meant. Now I had a definition in Daddy’s refusal to explain. Many moments like this would pass between us in the coming months, when word of Rockwood’s demise would arise and Daddy would mutter somethin’ to do with gentrification, and then he’d get quiet as a church rat and drift away into his inventions, not to be seen again for several hours. Momma had more to say: “Who knows, Cope. Maybe we’ll have to do like everyone else is doin’, move to Antioch, somewhere far away like that.”
I only knew about Antioch—the Ock, folks called it—because it was one of them towns that the bus drove by as it took me to the Youth Control. I knew it for a dusty-ass little place where East Oaklanders went when they couldn’t afford East Oakland no more.
“I am not moving to no Antioch,” I told her that first day home. I made sure to enunciate each word of my denial fully, with conviction and confidence I ain’t even know I had.
She was dicing limes in the kitchen for purposes unknown to me. Dinner was nobody’s specialty in our home. I sure as hell couldn’t cook. Momma liked to proclaim that she wadn’t nobody’s maid or slave, while Daddy, a tall, thin, knife-shaped Negro like myself, only ate as much as he needed to keep upright. Once in a blue, Momma would break down and cook an actual meal for everybody, four food groups and everything, but that was seldom.
“Juvie got yo’ back up, I see,” she said, a smile creasing the corners of her mouth. She patted me on my shoulder. I flinched. She startled. “What’s wrong, Cope?”
I just looked at her. I didn’t know how to answer. So much was wrong. You gotta understand, nobody touches you when you’re locked up, or not often, at least, and not outta love. I couldn’t explain that, though, without tellin’ the woman who gave birth to me to keep her distance. “I’m sorry,” I said, and hugged her quick and awkward. Then I confused not taking well to touch with voicing my feelings about leaving Oakland. I was outta practice carrying on regular conversations with regular people about regular things, like emotions. “I’d be a fish outta water,” I said about the Ock.
She let go of my hold. “You’re a fish outta water everywhere right now, baby.”
“I’m just not feelin’ the Ock too tough,” I said, hanging on to that particular piece of outsider identity, which at least made me an insider in Oakland. “It’s just, idn’t much goin’ on out there.”
“It’s lower rent is what’s goin’ on. You can get twice as much square footage for half the price is what’s goin’ on. Cain’t survive out here unless you make at least $60K these days. See, this is where me and your daddy is different and where you and your daddy is so similar: I work for the hospitals. They’s hospitals aye’where you go in this world. I could pick up and make a living in Timbuktu tomorrow. Shit, over there they probably hire more blacks’n they do here. If you ain’t some kinda immigrated Asian—let me not go there. It’s harder for him. The old man is in business for hisself. He don’t have no institution payin’ him twice a month. He gets what he gets from his community. Aye’thing he made, he did it in Rockwood and for Rockwood. That Negro can talk all the shit he want to about how he gonna make so much damn money and move on up, but this is his home. Born and raised on the Rock. He lived in L.A. for a few years, had them kids. It wadn’t his life to live, though, and it nearly killed him. It’d be hard for that man to have to leave the Rock now. Y’all the same that way.” She hustled the diced limes off the cutting board into a clear plastic container, which she then set on the dining table.
“Am I eating limes for lunch?”
“You got jokes now. Anyway, enough with this. We here for now, in Oakland, on the Rock. And we breathin’, thank the Lord. And that’s enough, thank the Lord. Now sit yo’ free ass down and celebrate what we do have: you home, safe and sound and halfway sane.”
Daddy came strolling in, a big store-bought pe-can pie cradled in his bony hands. My favorite. He was smiling like he was ’bout to get his picture took. It was one of the last times I’d see him smile bright and full like that. A moment later, I learnt that the limes was part of a Mexican, Yucatán-style dish Momma had learnt to make in a marketplace where not a single word was ever spoke in English. She could go into any market empty-handed and come out that bitch with the Queen of England’s china and
a recipe from every continent, that woman. She served me on her finest plates that afternoon. “Figured you’d like it,” she said, as she blessed the plantains, ceviche, fish, and collards with lime juice.
She was right: I did like it—loved it actually—complected, conglomerated Californian that I am.
*
With Daddy’s skills on deck most of my life and then being locked up for a year, I hadn’t had to pay for a haircut in Lord knows how long. Back home now my hair was a natural mess. I couldn’t let the old man go to work on my head, though, like wadn’t nothin’ changed. Everything was changed. I felt like I might break open if the dreamer set me down on the porch and memories of how things used to be came back to me. I might break if he touched me. I couldn’t be in the apartment that close to him, his hands on my head, his love for me as close as his touch. He loved me too much. I couldn’t deal with nobody’s oh-so-careful attention all on top of me, holding me too close. I just wanted my space, my freedom.
I lit out for the new barbershop down the way. It was a cool outfit: clean, spacious. Good music. A food truck right outside. Portraits of the Obamas and LeBron and Jay and Beyoncé on the walls. Barbers who dressed professional. That was when I first realized that the masks was never given to us in the Youth Control cuz things had changed, not just cuz they didn’t care about us, even though they didn’t. Nobody in the barbershop, no matter how clean-cut and professional the brother happened to be, was rockin’ a mask. Yet it was the most professional barbershop I had seen since the Muslims.
I stopped worrying about the masks and got free up in there, the barber cutting away the Mason-Dixon that divided my scalp, emancipating them slaves one nap at a time. I was cleaner-cut than an Ebony magazine model as I rode the BART train to a meeting in Berkeley, at the Shattuck station train platform.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 12