I turned in time to catch him push my cousin out of the pond and climb out and begin to press her stomach and breathe into her mouth. In what seemed like an age, but could only have been a half minute or so, as he alternated between pumping her chest and breathing into her mouth. At last, she sputtered, issued a volley of coughs, and rolled onto her left side, coughed some more, tried to sit up and fell back, and the uncle who saved her and performed CPR caught her and gathered her up in his arms, and carried her into the house as she cried inconsolably.
For days afterward we looked down from the balcony at the ground below, and at the paling fence, and the land between the fence and the pond. We walked it and measured it by placing one foot directly in front of the next. We guessed how high a body had to propel itself to make it from the balcony to a safe distance into the pond. We threw stones to reconstruct the likely trajectory of the grown-up. We came up with all kinds of numbers and no one, not even the adult who made the jump, ever repeated it again.
People heard the story and came to see the place and upon seeing it for themselves asked several times if we were certain this was the place, and when we said that it most certainly was the spot, they asked to see the child and questioned her about it, and shook their heads continuously, and said aloud, in wonder, and to no one in particular, that no human could perform such a feat. And they left shaking their heads and they spread the story all over the village and beyond.
In my fight with cancer I want that grown-up by my side. I want his diamond certainty and shining conviction in a state of emergency. His sacrifice of himself, I mean with zero regard for his safety, in service of a good deed. I am willing to dive in and tackle my cancer head-on if I know that adult is there to lend a hand in case I find myself in deep water, and unable to reach safe ground.
* * *
Four a.m. catches me with my eyes open and in the middle of my itinerary for the day. I launch myself before the rooster and its Cape Canaveral of sound. I suit up to make ready for it: to ride that cock-a-doodle-doo free of the reins of earth and into outer space. There is something to be said for absolutes—absolute quiet, absolute stillness, absolute absence of relativity, absolute isolation, absolute dark, absolute time, absolute primacy of thought.
Just me, and my cancer for company, and the memory of my propulsion away from it all on the trajectory of sound provided by a cockerel. There is not much that I would change about the things I left behind. I look forward to an ideal in which I belong to no one and history has nothing over me.
Out in space, my skin does not have a negative, high premium attached to it. My skin denotes nothing unusual beyond its capacity to sweat and smell comfortable or not. I keep it undecorated by tattoos, though I have had Maori dreams of going wild on the canvas of my body for the sake of my biography. That day I arrived in Auckland stays with me. A line of warriors greeted a group of us artists. I was told to stand still and no matter what happened, not to move off that spot, and smile, no matter what. One of the warriors approached me. His body was covered in tattoos—a green and blue and black ink swirl and calligraphic canvas—he wore a short skirt and underpants that resembled woven tree bark. His feet were bare. He brandished a short sword or a cross between a sword and a spear. As he stepped toward me he poked out his tongue and shook it like a rattler. His mouth was very wide and his teeth shone brilliant white. He made the sounds of someone encouraging a horse to gallop, and someone who had just won at poker, and someone feeling a long injection in the rear.
As he met me and I almost fell as I rocked back on my heels, his rapid movements slowed to a crawl. He edged his head toward mine and I squinted, ready for a headbutt or worse. He drew so close I could smell pawpaw or jackfruit on his breath. He smiled. I smiled back. He leaned in more and more as I fought an impulse to recoil and run away. I widened my eyes in time to catch his nose as it touched my nose and he moved his head from side to side and rubbed his nose ever so gently against mine.
He stepped back with a broad smile, which matched my surprise. A woman stepped forward wearing a grasslike skirt and the mere hint of a bra, with bangles and beaded necklaces and earrings galore. She placed a garland over my head, which I ducked a little to receive. She smelled like apricots. She said, “Welcome to New Zealand.” And she called it something else as well.
Space is the great equalizer. I float without gravity, the equal of every human who ever lived and every human as yet unborn. I am equal to my cancer. As I revolve, it revolves. We maintain the same undefined distance from each other, though cancer is inside me. My cancer is not equal to me. Not up to the task of ruling me. Not up here in space, where the coordinates of domination are scrambled for the coordinates of the sun.
Time loses dimension. There is no proper measure for it. I eat when I feel hungry and drink in answer to the call of my thirst. There is no sense that I have grown older or leaner or less able as a result of spending this currency called time. If anything, I may be getting younger with all the weight off my feet and distributed equally throughout my body. This lack of time robs cancer of its principle tool of incremental spread over measurable time.
The David Bowie song sounds a rising sense of alarm and panic coupled with isolation as horror—the farther from earth, the worse the feeling. Major Tom is lost to us and to himself thanks to alienating outer space, where none of us would want to be stranded. The chords are plaintive, there is longing in them, which is a condition of being earthbound. And the chords amplify their relationship to each other by introducing some delay between each as if space had opened up among them and each finally can stretch its limbs. Absent from the song is the exhilaration of discovery of something new. The listener is left with a sense of life on earth in need of some spiritual injection to cure it of its malaise.
Cancer must be confused up here. Cancer must wonder what it means to grip tighter onto a body part and spread around that body when everything weighs nothing and to grip feels the same as to release one’s grip. To contract and disappear conceptually registers as no different from spreading and growing. I figure if cancer reverses its activity in me, then it should put itself out of commission. But only up here, where I shall remain until there is peace on earth and my body is free of every last droplet, particle, speck of cancer.
Aotearoa. Listen. That touch from the warrior who greeted me relocated all my senses to the tip of my nose. The woman who presented the garland to me said, “Welcome to Aotearoa.”
16.
Juneteenth
To help me to get past the shock of so many killings, I turn to the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. I place myself in his mother’s shoes so that I may deepen my understanding for the history of Black suffering in our time.
“This is a photograph of my son, Emmett Till. My son. Emmett Till. I have to keep saying it to believe it. Don’t avert your eyes. Keep looking at him. I want you to see him the way I must from this day to my last. Is that the face of a fourteen-year-old boy? Is that my son’s face? I do not recognize him. Or I should not, but I do. That’s him. I was the one who sent him to the place where this was done to him. I sent him there for him to have the time of his life with my relatives. I thought that if I gave him a break from the city, he would come back to me stronger and brighter and refreshed by his time in the country. But look what happened to him. Look what they did to my child.
“When he left me in Chicago for his summer holiday in the South he was beautiful to look at, warm to touch, strong. His face had a shine to it and his mouth and eyes smiled at you. I want you to keep looking at this photograph of the child I collected off that train, because your eyes added to mine will give me strength, and help me to look a little longer, as I must do to serve my son’s memory. I still see traces of Emmett in there, there among the cuts and swelling. I can’t help seeing his clean features—the face I told him to wash and dry, and the face I examined and touched, many mornings, before I sent him off to school. I see both pictures of him at the same tim
e: this photo of him, broken like this, and the many others of my healthy child that I have in my mind. I want you to look with me and see both pictures of him.
“The day he left I waited with him on the platform for the long train. We stood close together and made small talk. Mostly my dos and don’ts, which he was quick to reply to, with a slight and growing trace of frustration in his tone, a tone I had to put a stop to, regardless of the fact that he was about to leave me for a long spell.
You must remember to be polite to my relatives.
Yes, ma’am.
Remember, whatever you do—good, bad, or indifferent—will reflect back on you, and on me, in just the same way you did it.
Yes, ma’am.
Don’t lose your one good belt. You need it to hold up your church suit.
Yes ma’am.
You know “Please, sir” and “Thank you, ma’am” go a long way in Mississippi, much farther than in rude Chicago.
You worry too much, Mama.
And try to whistle less, and keep your hands out of your pockets.
Yes, ma’am.
Don’t you “yes ma’am” me in that tone, Emmett. I’m not one of your friends.
Yes, Mother.
I just want you to be safe and enjoy yourself.
I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.
“I straightened his jacket one last time, though I did not know it at the time. I hugged him and kissed him, and by the way he pulled away from me, I guess he must have thought his mother was holding him a little too tight, and a little too long for comfort. I can hear him! After all, he wasn’t a baby any longer. He was big. He was fourteen. I want to say to him, Emmett, you may be big but I am your mother and you are my baby and shall remain so always.
“Of course, none of that exchange was possible in that little embrace and quick kiss. It seemed to last a long time now that I look back at it, and as I stare at this photograph. Who would do this to a fourteen-year-old? You tell me. Look at this picture of my son with me, and help me to understand something about the men who would do this to my son.
“I watched Emmett board the train with his suitcase full of the things that I pressed and packed for him for what was to be a summer of fun with my relatives.
“He left me in the city for the countryside of the South, where time stands still for the body to throw off its cares, and renew, for another bout with the demands of the city. A child can play there. See more than concrete encasing trees. That was the idea.
“They said he whistled at a White woman who walked past him as he played cards with friends outside a shop. When does whistling become such a crime that it can cost you your life? Is it only in America in August 1955?
“Emmett liked to whistle. He whistled around the house as he did his chores. I made him help me around the house so that he would grow up to be independent, and make some woman proud to be with him, just as he made me proud. Who cares if he whistled as he worked? I didn’t. But in the South adults think it’s a precocious child who rinses his teeth with the air and hides his idle hands in his pockets while in the company of big people. I knew that, from my time growing up there, before I left for a better life in Chicago.
“Did I remind him not to whistle so much? I said so many things to him at the station that I may have missed the one important thing that could have saved his life. I should have saved him. I should have kept him safe here with me.
Don’t whistle around, or at, White people. In fact, don’t whistle, end of story.
Yes, ma’am.
Don’t you, “yes ma’am” me, unless you hear what I say to you.
Yes, ma’am.
“His suitcase looked heavy but he said it wasn’t. I made him pack too much. He had to have his best suit for church on Sundays, his good belt to hold up his long pants, and several summer cotton short-sleeve shirts and short-pants and a toothbrush and comb and polish for his church shoes. I sewed buttons onto two shirts and strengthened others that seemed to be coming loose. I didn’t want anyone saying that my son was not well turned out. I put things into the suitcase and he took things out, and I put them back in again. To close the case he had to sit on it while I secured the clasps. He said he wouldn’t be able to open it without help, or repack it on his own. As he carried it to the station, he worried that the lid might spring open and all his clothes burst out, and scatter, for all the public to see his private things. He complained about it but I said,
If that happens everyone will see what good care your mother takes of you.
“In the end we laughed about it.
“I worried about letting him go and imagined all sorts of trouble that a fourteen-year-old might get himself into. Maybe meet a boy who wanted to test his strength in some wrestling or boxing. Maybe meet a girl who took a shine to him and he to her. But I never imagined this. That’s why I have to look long and hard at him, and why I need you to look with me, and help me to keep looking. They said that after he whistled at the white woman two cars full of armed men came to the house and demanded my boy. His cousins tried to plead with them to forgive the child. But the men were armed and they threatened the entire household with retribution. Emmett stepped forward, off the front porch, and said that he was the one who had whistled and that he was sorry for it, but no one else in the house had anything to do with it. He said he was the one they wanted. They must have seen from the way he was dressed and heard from the way he talked that he was not from Mississippi. He was from up north. They would teach an uppity Black northerner how to behave in the South. His age didn’t matter. That he was a boy. They called all Black men boys. They grabbed him roughly and drove away with him. And that was the last time he was seen alive.
“This photograph is what they did to him. I need you to help me look at it. His face is swollen to twice its usual size. He is missing one eye and many of his teeth. His whole head is swelled up and covered in bruises. His skin looks stretched, and underneath, just below his skin, it looks pooled with blood. I cannot help seeing those men hitting him again and again, grown men, hitting a young teenager, over and over again. They had to repeat this beating of my boy for a long time for him to look like this. I want to take his place. Have them beat me instead.
“Why didn’t they just teach him a lesson? I wouldn’t mind if they hit him for it. I would have given him a second beating for his rudeness. They could have used his belt and lashed him a few times around the legs and backside. They could have made him perform some community chore for breaking a code of the South. He whistled at a white woman. For your transgression, boy, you cut this grass and pick up the trash along this street. You hear! And get out of town before nightfall! And I would have made him do another set of chores for a long time. But not this . . . Those three men beat him and they wrapped him in barbed wire with a cotton gin fan to weigh him down and they threw him into the river. He was pulled from it a day later, and I ordered the undertaker to leave the casket open for my son’s last ride home, and leave it open for the world to see what trouble a little whistle can get you into, in a place that needs to look at this photo with me, and with the whole world, and make sure my child is the last one to end up this way.
“Many mothers have told me that I should be grieving. They’ve asked me, How can I show him to the world in his condition? I tell them that before I saw him, saw what they did to him, that I cried when I heard, and I bawled, and pulled my hair, like any mother would who lost her son. But seeing him changed me. If they can do this to a child, they must never be able to do it in secret, without the world seeing what they do to children in the name of one race ruling over another. I thought, for you my son, who I keep locked in my heart, for you I’ll do this last thing, and let the world know that I put my healthy child on a train, and this is what came back to me, and that is the condition between the races in this country at this time, and that must change for all our sakes.
“But some days, Jesus, I just want my son to come back on that train, with his suitcase stuffed wi
th all the things I sent him away with, his one good belt, the clothes I sewed and ironed and folded neatly and packed tightly for him, come back to me, and with his skin darkened by his time in the open summer sun, and with him full and brimming with the stories of his time in the country. Not this. So help me to look a little longer. Help me to see how this might save other mothers from what I’m going through.”
* * *
A Sermon by DJ Cancer
Assume that I am everywhere and always. Among the killers of Emmett Till back then and George Floyd and so many others in recent times. Assume that I circulate in the air and take the form of ingredients in your food, drink, injections, tablets, and serums. Assume that I drive time as seen on clocks and as felt at wrist, neck, and groin. You store me under your fingernails and toenails, in the corners of your eyes, behind your ears, under your tongue, between your thighs.
If I show my face in one place, take that appearance in public by me as a sure sign that I am present in many other places in discreet ways. If you engage with my face, I mean turn your attention to the place where you see me, that would be your first big mistake. I want you to look at me and listen and reply to what you see in front of you.
My real work takes place behind your back, while you grapple with my appearance in front of you. You blast and lambast me. Pour scorn and invective on what you see of me. And though that may be as it should be, given the shock of my appearance in your body and the way your body registers me on all its senses, those responses are the exact ones that I need from you for me to thrive as an indispensable part of you.
How? Well, think about it. Who breathes and gives me life? Who puts food in your mouth and feeds me as well? Who sleeps and leaves a portion of your dreams for me to star in them? You are my main benefactor and beneficiary, the two rolled into one. I am mixed up with you to the point of being indistinguishable from you. The pieces of me that you cut from you are parts of yourself.
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