by Hari Ziyad
Kodi called his mother’s death “the end.” But she left with him the wondrous possibility that this could also be the beginning of the story—the same story my mother has always told of how this material world, with its devastating health crises and its unwillingness to answer them, is “filled with suffering,” even when she didn’t quite know how to escape it. A repeating pastime that shows us over and over again that this world has been built upon the premise that Black people must endlessly grow up to be punished, until we refuse this world entirely, like Korryn did.
In refusing state policing under carceral logics, Korryn presented a parable about how liberating it could be to abolish all cycles of policing Black children and the adults they should be allowed to grow into: how we speak, love, and live until we are broken. Until we are in prison. Until we are dead. Until we kill the children inside us. And in the story of Kodi, the baby boy to whom she gifted this lesson, I might finally find myself, if I can mind the message she left him, too.
Mother Bhūmi told me that she was tired and ready to head home much earlier than I expected. She looked physically fine to walk a little bit longer, but I don’t believe she was talking about the fatigue of moving her legs. Her body was still relaxed, but something inside her seemed to be swaying, barely holding up in the wind. “I’m tired,” she repeated, this just another type of chanting.
Immediately after the hysterectomy she underwent to treat the cancer, Mata looked just like her mother did in that moment. Like an ailing tree. If they were both dying trees, then abolishing the oppressive cycles of separation that this carceral world forces Black people into—separation from oneself, from one’s childhood, and from each other—was always Mata’s and Mother Bhūmi’s roots, my roots, the roots, the answer, the full story, the reason to be tired of living and to live on forever, my nigga at the same time.
If Mother Bhūmi was a tree, autumn had only just broken. The end of a season, the beginning of another, tangled up like a bundle of twigs. Most streets in Cleveland Heights, including Beechwood Avenue, where we lived, are not only lined with trees but named after them, and my grandmother was finally not out of place. And as we headed back in the direction we came, the leaves were just beginning to fall.
CANTO I
Black
CHAPTER ONE
CARCERAL DISSONANCE
“Everything seems normal,” the doctor said, shuffling the papers inked with my results in front of her as if they were cards in a game of spades and she had no interest in learning the rules.
“Are you sure?” I asked, barely registering the pain of the hairs on my finger as they got caught in the engagement ring I anxiously twisted in circles. For the longest time, I didn’t know if I loved the odd tresses sprouting from every area of my body other than my head, which has been balding since I was twenty, or if they made me look animal. In this moment, I felt profoundly beast-like.
The doctor plastered on a preprogrammed smile as she looked out from under her purple ombré pixie cut, which perfectly encapsulated the young! hip! edgy! demographic targeted by the health insurance company running this medical center. I’d learned recently that Josh Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s brother-in-law, was a part owner of the company. This did make me question why I was still paying for its services, but not enough to go through the hassle of trying to find an alternative in New York State’s utterly confusing health-care marketplace, which was supposed to be the solution to the country’s underinsured problem. It was not.
“Well, let’s wait for the blood tests, but the EKG results are fine,” the doctor said, crossing her ripped-jeaned legs.
“Okay . . .”
This was the second time in the past three years I’d found myself in front of a doctor with concerns about my heart. The last time, I’d wound up in an ambulance after having palpitations that wouldn’t stop in the office of my former job.
“You need to go!” the office manager had advised.
“Are you sure?” I asked then, too, once again requiring someone else’s validation of my well-being. The palpitations seemed urgent, given that nothing like that had happened to me before, but going to the doctor had never been my first option for solving problems with my body. Not until I’d at least tried what I now understand to be largely untested home remedies with which my mother had met all sorts of maladies I’d sustained as a child—like swallowing a dollop of Vicks or applying shea butter topically, which Mata insists improves even internal bodily functions when rubbed in thoroughly. Untested or not, you can’t tell me that shit didn’t work at least sometimes.
“Go!” the office manager urged again. She was an older Black woman who reminded me of my mother, which meant I mythologized her to know more about my body than I did. Plus, I had health insurance for the first time since college, so I assumed that would prevent any financial burden. I thought money had been the primary reason the doctor was a last resort—reserved for after we’d plodded through my mother’s list of deviceful, quick fixes—when I was growing up. That assumption is, of course, belied by the fact that Mata is currently undergoing a traditional Ayurvedic medicine treatment in India after passing on trying chemo, immunotherapy, and hormone therapy to fight the cancer. My siblings and I would have eagerly paid whatever her insurance didn’t for the standard treatments, but we have collectively agreed to be as supportive of this untested remedy she has decided on as we can. It doesn’t seem like we have any other option.
“You’re fine,” the nurse had announced after running that first EKG.
A $2,000 bill for a ten-block emergency vehicle ride and three years later, here I was again. But I had learned my lesson. I walked to the medical center this time.
“What was it that you started mentioning earlier?” the purple-haired doctor said, setting aside the papers that told her I was fine and giving me that smile white people give when they are sure they’re helping you. You don’t get it, I wanted to say instead of answering her question. I wake up every day feeling like Kano has pulled my heart from my chest in a Mortal Kombat fatality.
“I forget,” I replied honestly, looking forward to getting home and impulse buying a video game I would play only on one quiet afternoon to manage my stress. When the doctor first had walked into the room, I’d tried to tell her that I had a medical concern, and she cut me off before I even got all the words out. “We have a set amount of time, so we need to jump right into the physical you scheduled. If there’s extra time at the end, you can ask any other questions,” she’d said, offering up that robotic smile again.
The truth was I already knew what was wrong with my heart. I had diagnosed myself with social anxiety a long time ago. I fit all the symptoms, and my anxiety had spiked in recent months with a decline in Mata’s health and an uptick in public engagements. I’d had two panic attacks over the previous year. I feel the anxiety most in my chest. For the past several months, there had been a constant tightening there, as though my heart were cratering in on itself more and more for every wall I didn’t punch but wanted to—my body recognizing that something must be smashed even as I policed it into pacifism.
I knew what was wrong, but I had refused to start psychotherapy or obtain an official diagnosis. Sure, this refusal might have been pathological, but not in the sense that Black people all have some disabling stigma around getting help for our mental health issues. Some of us do stigmatize therapy, thinking that it indicates a person is weak. This stigma seems less pervasive in recent generations, but I’m certain that it has infested my own thinking at times. I’m also sure there was more to my initial reluctance than an irrational disdain for therapy. After five hundred years of the atrocities of colonialism and no repair, there must be more to Black folks’ struggles than our own failures. How could talking with one person heal the wound of systemic and generational oppression that affects almost everyone I love?
There’s the very real history of medical malpractice. There’s a legacy full of Tuskegee experiments and forced sterilizat
ion of Black women by doctors who lied to them. This was what North Carolina’s state-run eugenics program did to fourteen-year-old Elaine Riddick in 1968, after she gave birth to a child conceived when a neighbor raped her. Riddick has spoken publicly about how she didn’t find out she couldn’t have any more children until five years later, after she was married.11 When the state isn’t mining Black wombs for labor, it is policing them with the same brute force it uses against the Black children they birth.
There are also the $2,000 ambulance bills and doctors who are hip enough to dress like young Black folks but not hip enough to make time for our questions. There’s growing up never having seen a doctor because of a lack of access and no one to bring you gently into familiarity. There are doctors who disregard what we know about our bodies because they have anti-Black biases about what these bodies can do, deduce, and withstand. All of this is real—most of it I’ve experienced firsthand—and it leads to a logical aversion to medical professionals, particularly those whose effectiveness relies on how much they get to know you . . . which means it also relies on how vulnerable you allow yourself to be.
My reticence toward therapy extended beyond the far-too-often-overlooked fact that medical professionals have not been safe for us historically, however. I don’t think I’m much more averse to therapists than I am to other medical doctors, and I made my way to Purple Pixie Cut’s office just fine (albeit after first attempting some of my mother’s inventive home remedies). I went to therapy willingly in college, and it was helpful. I encouraged it for other people all the time. But I had come to embrace the reality that much of the fuel that fed the fire of my anxiety was inexhaustible, or at least it was something I did not want to exhaust. I am still afraid of anyone policing my emotions and my body in the name of looking out for me, because doing the same thing to myself was what made it so difficult to recognize and deal with my anxiety in the first place.
I am a Black person who has seen Black friends die, Black family members stuffed in cages, my Black grandmother beaten, and my Black body raped. I am a Black person who has seen these atrocities replay themselves over and over again on the news, on the internet when I turn off the TV, and on the walk home through my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood when I shut off my phone.
I am a Black person from a lineage of Black people who, for centuries, have never stopped seeing these cruelties. And in the dreams that I often could not access because my anxiety kept me awake, I couldn’t stop seeing these cruelties either. This anxiety was just my mind being colonized in the same ways that my external world has been. I was forced to see atrocities against my people everywhere, and even if I could screen them from my view, how then could I ever know where to move to get out of the way of them devouring me?
This society has conditioned me to believe that healing is just the muting of one’s rage. I have been taught that healing looks like celebrating the forgiveness offered by the relatives of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church members to the white supremacist who killed their loved ones during a prayer meeting, without demanding he or the state that emboldened him take any accountability. But I couldn’t survive muting my rage much longer. I couldn’t survive uncritically forgiving a world that would not stop harming me, and so I had accepted that I just would not heal. At least not in that way, and I didn’t yet know any other.
I left the doctor’s office with the lump still clogged in my chest like a clump of nappy hair in a drain, and only then, after a ragged breath through an oddly inflamed throat, did I finally remember that I’d meant to ask her about a suspected allergy that had been making getting through my days miserable. I scuttled down into the train station feeling defeated and Blacker than I’d ever been. There, I was immediately confronted with a teenager being held by two cops, each twice his size, for questioning on the platform, just to the other side of the turnstile. The boy was Black, too.
I heard the words “fare evasion” and “I just needed to get home to my mom.” The city was ramping up police presence in the subway to crack down on turnstile hopping, claiming that everyone needs to be punished for not paying for services to make sure “our trains run smoothly.” Watching the scene unfold, I thought about who was included in this “our”: Who owns these trains. Who profits most from them.
In 2019, the city announced that it planned to spend $249 million over the next four years on increased transit police presence, partially financed by the mere $200 million it expects these measures to save on fare evasion.12 Those expectations are dubious on their own, but it’s also important to note that despite increased policing that year, subway fare evasion actually rose from 3.9 percent of riders in June to 4.7 percent in August. (Bus fare evasion dropped from 24 percent to 22 percent during the same time.13) The MTA also announced plans to spend $5.1 billion to install elevators in subway stations citywide, at a cost of about $81 million per station. Almost no comparable country has spent more than $25 million to add elevators to a transit station.14 (For the sake of comparison, Lyon, France, added one elevator for $4 million.) These scandalous price tags fall in a long history of MTA backroom dealing and wasteful spending that a 2017 New York Times investigation blamed on “excessive staffing, little competition, [and] generous contracts.”15 Who was benefiting from making sure “our trains run smoothly” in this way?
Certainly not twenty-two-year-old Malaysia Goodson, a Black mother who, in January 2019, fell while trying to carry her stroller and baby down the subway stairs because there was no working elevator at her station and died (her official cause of death listed cardiac hypertrophy, which can lead to sudden death after physical stress, and hyperthyroidism as factors16). She might still be alive if such misguided spending hadn’t prevented cheaper, quicker elevator installation. Certainly not the disabled community, who have been rallying for more transit accessibility for years, and who still struggle to find consistently working elevators that might exist in abundance if the government spent $4 million instead of $80 million on them (and if this government weren’t committed to oppressing the disabled). Not the many homeless people who are harassed by police for sleeping in the subways, nor the shelters and other public services they rely on that could desperately use the funding from these hypothetical savings.
As I watched the Black boy being detained, the cop watcher in me awakened. I decided to stay and observe the situation a little longer to make sure shit didn’t go left. Or any more left, rather. My chest tightened further as I pondered how, if this teenager didn’t pay this ticket, he could go to jail, and it was reasonable to think he may have been unable to pay. Obscene costs are relative, which New York City had to know if it was waging a war on fare evasion that looked to cost more than it returned. It took me two years to pay off that $2,000 ambulance bill. I thought back to having those heart palpitations, and how all I could consider then was that I just needed to get home to my mom, too. All I could consider now was how my mother just needed to make it through treatment, and the teenager had the same expression I did when I wanted to punch a wall. And right when the cop asked for his ID, the boy booked it. Ran. Fled to freedom. I never did that anymore.
My chest loosened for just a moment. I couldn’t help flashing a smile at the kid’s audacity and courage, and my dilemma gained some clarity, a mirror in a steamy room when the door suddenly swings open and it begins to defog. In just a split second, my understanding of healing and rage began to feel incredibly unconsidered. There must have been a way to heal without surrendering to policing myself, but somewhere along the line, I’d lost the necessary bravery to go that path. I gave up on resisting the confines of this world and the state that keeps them in place.
I looked down at the hair on my fingers and wondered why I cared so much about looking like an animal. When had I stopped using these hands to punch walls that need breaking down?
A few weeks prior, my friend Cloud had sent me the contact information for their therapist.
“Thanks, I’ll look into
it,” I said, intending this to be a polite little lie.
“You should,” they insisted, flashing that bright smile of theirs and struggling commendably to walk the line between nagging and stern encouragement.
“I said I will!” I repeated, punching them playfully—but dismissively—on the shoulder.
“I know you feel ambivalent about it, though,” they persisted, rubbing their shoulder, “and I just want to make sure you know that I hear you. But he’s really good. He’s Black. He’s queer. It’s not about fixing you; it’s about managing how you deal with the issues, and that’s how he approaches it.”
I still didn’t think much of it. Cloud is white. They didn’t get it. Even now, I don’t think they do, or ever will. But in that moment on the platform, looking at the cops stumbling over themselves in pursuit of this boy in the subway, I was forced to consider a different perspective of how I was dealing with this anxiety that I had come to proudly own. I knew I wanted to deal more like this boy who had escaped from unjust captors, and I knew it was possible because he had accomplished it.
But I still didn’t know how.
I still didn’t know how to manage the anxiety of being Black in America without policing everything that comes with it. I had set up an altar and had begun to chant again, which felt like a start, but I was afraid of fully committing to even these proven spiritual models for fear of being overwhelmed by religiosity again. I wanted more than anything to gain a better understanding of ways to embrace the fire and not be subsumed by it, and so I decided to at least give therapy a try as I continued these other practices, and sent an email to the therapist Cloud had suggested when I got home.
I understand that talk therapy isn’t viable for everyone. Even if it were, those who need it most don’t always have the means to fund what can be painfully expensive sessions. Just today, I found out I can’t even book an appointment with my primary care doctor until two months down the road, and securing an appointment with a specialist or therapist can take even longer. Only telling folks to “go to therapy” often isn’t a realistic solution to the reality of their lives; nor is it an answer to the systemic issues they face.