Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  “Save it?” Mohan laughed, not noticing how emotional I was becoming as he removed his Kangol to wipe his forehead and reveal the same receding hairline that I would later inherit. Mata saw my face and let the weight of the world pull her high cheekbones down into a frown. She disappeared into the kitchen for a brief moment, and when she returned, it was with a Styrofoam cup full of water in her gentle hands.

  “You can freeze some of it,” she said with a smile that seemed to mask the hurt she felt from hurting me, a hurt that had taken her by surprise. I think it was her own carceral dissonance revealing itself as she told her barely five-year-old son that it was time to be a man.

  We kept a cup full of ice with a tuft of my hair inside the freezer for months, until it mysteriously disappeared. For some reason, I never asked where it went.

  There will forever be distinctions between different stages of life, and there should be. I needed a different type of protection and guidance as a child than I do now, and often children need adults to make decisions for them. But those distinctions never have to mean what the state says they mean. Those distinctions don’t have to mean children have no say over their bodies, desires, wants, and needs. That only we, as adults, have the right answers. That they can’t make decisions differently than we might make them, that they can’t make mistakes and get into fights and have conflicts without something fundamentally wrong with them needing to be fixed. Or that they can’t be queer. Protecting children shouldn’t be conflated with controlling them and their perspectives along their journey into adulthood. Misafropedia ensures it always is.

  All Black children are subjected to the harm that comes with erasing the complexity of their childhood experiences as they are forced into the categories of “young men” or “young women.” This expression of misafropedia also comes for our girl children, in how we project designations like “fast” onto those like Tierra. And it comes for Black children who don’t conform to either of the state’s binary gender categories entirely, which is all of us before we are forced to conform. By joining in this process of denying Black children the space to exist freely, we have no recourse when the state does the same.

  In 2014, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by police while playing with a toy gun not too far from my old house on East 128th. Afterward, newspapers referred to him as a “young man.” They hardly mentioned his fourteen-year-old sister, who was handcuffed when she tried to reach her baby brother after she saw him murdered, nor how this trauma played a role in stealing her childhood, too. Rice’s murderer insisted he thought the child was no less than twenty years old in order to justify his actions, building on the groundwork already laid for our acceptance of such childhood-thieving narratives.

  Like many Black children, I was coaxed by the state, and by those who had adopted the state’s messages, out of my childhood, in order to try and fit a definition of manhood that was never compatible with me. That haircut was the early part of a sustained project of gender policing that my parents adopted to prevent me from growing freely into my queerness. This project would include shame and isolation, neglect, and the memory of at least one beating.

  It wasn’t just my hair. It was that, in an attempt to make us ready for the world and to shape me into their inflexible and supposedly objective idea of what it meant to be a man, my parents would now compromise their strongest beliefs about how important it was for their children to safeguard against inflexible perspectives and a false sense of objectivity. I, in turn, would come to compromise those beliefs, too.

  The summer we disinvited Roberto was the last summer we ever built a clubhouse. I soon began to make bigger fragile houses, and from them I only got better at throwing stones at the Black children whom I could most easily criminalize in my life (and the parts of me that, like them, I could not reconcile with white society).

  My family moved to Cleveland Heights when I was ten years old. The move marked a shift into some semblance of middle-class life, even though we were still surviving on my father’s poverty salary and food stamps. I didn’t really know what “middle-class” meant at the time, but I knew that our new home had not only a sunroom but a side porch and a basketball hoop on the garage. I still didn’t have my own room, and never would until I moved out from under my parents, but I knew that our new house was now considered “nice,” even though Kiss still really loves our old one with the dandelion lawn. I knew that we had to separate ourselves, with the “nice,” “respectable” neighbors, away from the “ghetto” ones—who were so much more like the dear friends who’d helped us build our clubhouse year after year.

  The state allows adults to tell only specific stories about growing up in a poor Black city. Stories about danger and gunshots and how no one cares for one another. Stories of how we were stripped of our agency but never of how free we felt when we still had it. Stories where it would only make sense to want to leave, to hate all the dandelions, even if you really didn’t.

  The compulsion to tell these stories is an extension of how the state frames the Black past in general. The state relies on progress narratives that insist Black people are constantly moving forward from horrible events and that we must keep running in the same direction. This is why, for instance, popular media propagates the idea that New York City’s Blackest neighborhoods were “bad” in the eighties, overrun with gangs and drugs, until the police state increased its presence, ensuring that those areas are now whiter and “better.”

  This story disregards the indisputable creativity and revolutionary spirit of that same time—and indeed of many of the gang members and drug dealers—a spirit that has survived in the people who lived through it and are still here. It is a story that disregards anything we might learn to make it through the difficulties of today by embracing their guidance. With the narratives of our pasts being so devastatingly flattened, it’s only fitting that “doing time” has become a reference to our literal imprisonment in the carceral state. To understand history as the state does, as a singular narrative of the past that it projects onto everyone, as if proximity to power has no bearing on how a story is told, is central to criminalizing Black children and adults in the present. When the state tells history, our singular past is always that of enslaved people “freed” into an anti-Black, carceral system.

  I told these flattened stories of my own past for so long that sometimes I still get an involuntary chill when walking through the same type of “dangerous” neighborhoods where my little yellow house resided, neighborhoods where sisters like Sarah and Tierra and Marissa and Titi sometimes fight on the streets, but only because they want nothing more than to protect and be there for their siblings. I feel that chill even though far more harm has come to me in “safely” white neighborhoods, where cops and citizens and even white children with guns and fists remind Black people over and over again that we don’t belong.

  Black people have always carried multiple sets of memories, multiple perspectives of the past, living with the dissonance this country requires of us in order to survive. That we can carry them all at once, without punitive inflexibility defining our histories along one singular timeline, is important. The perspectives we attempt to grow away from must be acknowledged alongside all others because it takes acknowledgment to heal, to be held accountable. But we can hold all these perspectives together and grow from the failures of each only when we stop considering any single outlook as the only one, as above critique.

  There are the memories of Cleveland as a place of lack, of hating homeschooling, of my grandmother as a terrifying and tormenting presence, of difficult little Black boys and combative little Black girls . . . and then there are the memories of the freedom that I lost, of sitting between my mother’s legs and having her tenderly braid my hair, of Black boys and girls who were complex enough not to pathologize each other even in the midst of conflict.

  There are memories of me yearning for another life where I wouldn’t be so different from everyone else, of difficult tens
ions with people who had different needs and desires from mine; and then there are memories of that summer building a clubhouse with all my differentness on full display being one of the best times I’ve ever had, and of the kids who loved us despite it all. There are memories I don’t have full access to. And reconciling all these memories, repairing the fracture caused by carceral dissonance, is a type of time disruption that is just as magical as a palm full of Nowalaters. Because as sure as there are many different ways to tell stories of the past and the present that aren’t reducible to the only one the state tells us is possible, there can also be different stories of the future. There can be stories where we are free.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A PRAYER FOR REST

  Hari-Gaura,

  Another night of no sleep, and I feel it coming like a storm creeping just beyond the horizon before I even lie down. Or it comes because I feel it, like when you think about yawning and then you do. I excel at keeping myself awake with fears of keeping myself awake.

  I’ve found excellence in many such practices since I lost you.

  Not all of them leave me feeling like the loneliest person on the planet—at least not immediately. Most of them, in fact, serve to foster a kind of community, the kind that cheers on a person for acing tests that measure only how good they are at taking tests, not their intelligence; for having more of the skills others will celebrate than anyone else in the room, even if they don’t have more of the skills others will need; for mostly successfully assimilating into spaces filled with powerful people when they themselves are weak. And I think mastering these practices has historically been a way to replace the companionship you provided me, however inadequate.

  It took a lot of discipline to achieve this excellence, to graduate with the second-highest grade point average in my high school class; to attain multiple student leadership positions and honors programs while I was there; to manage, in my guidance counselor’s words, a “near-perfect college application.” Discipline like, “You idiot, you should have been first in class,” or, “Only losers follow,” or, “What am I doing wrong that my application isn’t perfect?”

  What I mean is, the idea of excellence that I learned, that I adopted, after you left, is one that travels hand in hand with harm. Capitalism is a system in which individuals are given value only through competing, often violently, to own the means of producing goods, exploiting those goods for personal profit. Under this system, how I came to value myself since high school, and even more so when I began to have some semblance of financial success in my career, meant that I had to beat someone down, even if that must be myself, to climb over them. And if I wasn’t climbing, life wasn’t worth it.

  I’ve been climbing for more and more top spots and accolades and money ever since. I thought that was what I would have to do to have a meaningful life. I didn’t know it was an option to find meaning in getting you back, in nurturing a love for myself. I had to be the best at not settling; otherwise, what I settled for would be all I would ever get, and I didn’t understand that to be able to reclaim my sense of wholeness would be enough.

  I just didn’t want to only ever get picked last, to only ever get locked out of power, to only ever not matter, and I saw that’s what happens when you do nothing more than be Black and live life. So I couldn’t just be Black and live; I had to become an example of Black Excellence, which I know now is just another expression of respectability. And that meant whenever I was or felt powerless or worthless, whenever I got complacent in my Black life, I had to punish myself for it, even if I wasn’t the one who had made myself feel that way.

  I didn’t call Mata this week, and I am now so excellent at being a good child, at being the young man she always wanted me to be, that I will not rest tonight. I am so excellent at being that person that I won’t even consider why I cannot be it for her all the time, through no fault of my own. I won’t even consider that I might get too tired and too sad and too overwhelmed and too resentful, even if I feel all these things for valid reasons; it feels like this capitalist economy is collapsing, but I am still somehow being overworked, and I do not remember how it feels to be rested.

  You can become so good at punishing yourself this way that it almost feels like a superpower. No, really—I can hear everything outside for what must be miles, blaring louder every time that my body approaches relaxation, all because I can’t stop thinking about missing a phone call.

  Someone is dribbling a basketball a few streets over, but she might as well be dribbling on my head for how adept my body is at amplifying the sound to penalize me. A car alarm keeps going off blocks and blocks away, but the car may as well be floating right outside my fourth-story window. My fiancé is grinding his teeth so loudly that I fear that they will fall out any second and chew me to pieces.

  My superpowered body can even metamorphize in mere seconds through extreme temperatures, ranging from raging hellfire to the center of an iceberg, prompting a never-ending cycle of sticking my limbs out from underneath the covers and then wrapping the covers around myself so tightly I can hardly move. My body can make time meaningless. In two seconds, the sun will rise, even though it was only just midnight, and with it will come a light so blinding no pillow held across my face can keep it at bay. Though that won’t stop me from trying and nearly suffocating myself in the process.

  If my anxiety is just my mind being colonized in the ways that my external world has always been, then this burning heart and cratering chest and famine of rest are the final frontier. In this search for excellence that I’ve undertaken ever since you were gone, my body is doing only what my colonized mind trained it to do, better than it ever did before. In a warped way, I feel proud of what it has accomplished. It has gotten so good at trying to be good that it won’t allow me anything else, even when it has no choice. Even when everything around it is so conspicuously bad. I wish that my body knew good outside of punishment, like you did. I know there was a time you wanted to be good at being free.

  But knowing that you could be in this unsettled mind with me means that filling it with the constant punishment of myself and others in search of excellence isn’t the only solution. I don’t have to wander through this emptiness without a guide to show me a way out. I can ask you to lead. I can ask you, what is your purpose? What do you need to fulfill it? How can I help? Trying for another type of purpose that doesn’t turn on harming Black people who refuse to climb endlessly is possible, if you are. There must be some other way to live life outside of the constant attempts to build a feeble sense of self atop the bodies of the people whom I have harmed and discarded.

  And strangely, as I talk to you about all this, I find it a little bit easier to relax. In the calm, I can feel my body cautiously begin to lose its superhuman abilities, but if that means waking up tomorrow without feeling like shit, I guess I have to start being okay with that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  D*MB SMART

  “It was all Kṛṣṇa’s mercy,” Mata responded when I asked how we afforded the move to Cleveland Heights, a question that for some reason I’d never thought to ask before. We were sitting in the bedroom she shared with my father, a converted attic that had gone unfinished for more than a decade, filled with neatly stacked piles of books and magazines that smelled faintly of sawdust. The room was mostly off limits to her children before I moved to New York for college. She said she was talking to me inside it now only because she had work to do there, but I could tell it was really because she was tired. She had on her head wrap but had otherwise put little effort into getting dressed—wearing only a robe—which was markedly unfamiliar. I didn’t know it yet, but she wouldn’t leave the room for the whole time I was in town.

  “We needed to get you out of that house,” my father followed up, taking the baton of storyteller. He does this sometimes, forcing her unwillingly into a conversational relay race. I used to think she was okay with it in that same mystically charitable way I’d always mythologized her to act bec
ause she never stopped him. This time I think I caught her rolling her eyes before giving the more customary warm smile and placing an encouraging hand on his shoulder.

  “Once you passed out, we realized we couldn’t live there anymore,” my father continued.

  He asked if I remembered. I told him of course, but he still recounted the tale of how, at the yellow house, I developed terrible breathing problems that nearly killed me.

  “Just walking down that old carpet-lined staircase took all the breath out of you.” He’d probably spit at the word “carpet” if he were outside and had less couth, his anti–floor covering crusade kicking into high gear.

  “I try to warn everybody about them carpets. Death traps.”

  Like with his excessive hatred of microwaves and GMOs, I might otherwise have dismissed my father’s incessant war on carpeting as irrational, but I could almost feel the air siphoning out of my lungs again as if it were helium in a just-punctured balloon, the foul coughing fit hitting me like a tornado the air escaped to create, and I found myself sympathetic to this cause. I can only imagine the horror Mata must have felt when she saw me start sprinting in desperate circles around the landing area at the bottom of the steps as I tried and tried to outrun death, before everything went black.

  An acute case of chronic bronchitis, the doctor said when I woke up in the hospital. My lungs have never been the strongest, and my breathing issues had been greatly exacerbated by the dust collecting in our carpet. After the diagnosis, I had to wear a breathing machine every night for days on end.