Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  When I was twelve, my brother Mohan discovered a new book series by Mercedes Lackey. The first book, Magic’s Pawn, featured an anguished young man and a beautiful white stallion on the cover, which, along with the word “magic” in the title, was more than enough to pique my interest. It looked like many of the other fantasy novels Mohan devoured, and the books he’d finished composed the bulk of my reading list at the time.

  But Magic’s Pawn was different from any of Mohan’s other hand-me-downs. In the first few chapters, the main character, the sad boy on the cover, was clearly beginning to develop feelings for another magical boy, and my heart pulsed faster with every new page that the story unfolded. I knew those feelings. They were mine, even though there was no other magical boy yet. I knew them, but I did not want to. Reading the book did nothing to lessen my fears of being queer, but it did everything to make me feel like maybe I wasn’t alone with them. Those fears grew so large that I began to sneak into the bathroom and read the book at night when I was supposed to be asleep, so that no one would catch me with it. One time, I got so tired reading late into the night that I accidentally left the novel in the bathroom. Mata found it, read from the bookmarked page with disgust, and gave a stern talk to my brother about influencing me with these sinful thoughts. He never brought any more Mercedes Lackey books into the house, and I never got any closure on my fears or feelings, or on what happens when two magical boys choose to love each other. Until Michael.

  I grew up hearing the Vaiṣṇava dictum that “we are not the body, but spirit souls” repeated over and over again, and many interpretations of Hinduism embrace queer and transgender people (which is not to say Hindu scripture regarding gender and sexuality is without its own gendered violence). But to my mother, my body—which my existence supposedly wasn’t limited to—still determined that I could never love other people who inhabited bodies like it. For my body to share specific attributes with my lover’s was such a horrible thought to her that when I finally confirmed I was queer two years after sneaking back into my house that night, she refused to sign off on the loans I needed to attend college, nearly forcing me to drop out as punishment, until an administrator in LGBTQ student services pulled some strings for me.

  “If this is what that school will teach you,” she said, “I won’t support it.” She spoke to me only in scripture verses condemning sexual sin for almost the entire next year. Our relationship has never quite been the same.

  Whenever I had asked for permission first to use the van to go out with Michael, Mata had always said no. She swears today that she didn’t know I felt this kind of love for him, but she didn’t need to consciously know it was true in order to fear the possibility, to punish me for it, and for me to internalize her fear and punishment. She didn’t need to consciously know it to always assume that when I sneaked out, it was to be with him, and to always be right. She didn’t need to know for her to constantly warn me of how he gave her “a bad vibe,” for her to tell me often that I should be wary of him “getting too close,” and for her to also make it known, in no uncertain terms, that I would never be accepted if I was anything like she rightly assumed he was.

  My mother didn’t need to know how I felt about Michael to look at me with the most distress I had ever seen in her eyes when I finally walked into the kitchen after my panic attack. She didn’t put me on punishment or take away my phone or yell; she just never looked at me the same way she used to after that. And when I couldn’t get her to see me as she used to see me, to show the love I know she still had for me, like she used to show love for me, I gave up.

  Michael had illuminated how painful it was to be trapped between the conflicting ideas of my mother’s faith, within the contradiction of praying for liberation to a god who wouldn’t allow me to be free enough to be queer, and I did not know how to reconcile that. I did not know that I could. So I ran away.

  I rebelled against my parents’ rules and the gods who had dictated them because I had gotten tired of tearing myself apart between mutually exclusive ideas of who I needed to be and who they said god wanted me to be. But running away made me into just another person who had hurt my mother, like so many had before me. And it wasn’t completely her fault, but when I walked up the stairs, clouded with shame, Mata was still apologizing to her god: “Rāma, Rāma!” And I knew it wasn’t my fault for wanting to be free to feel Michael’s love either, so I couldn’t work up the words to say I was sorry. And my inability to find faith in a world where both Michael and my mother could coexist helped spur a perfect storm of avoidance and substance abuse and self-destructive tendencies that were easily recognizable even to my ten-year-old brother, and that have plagued me ever since.

  “Naw, I get it,” Visnu said solemnly after getting bored of teasing at my sister’s friend’s house a decade later. “You were going through a lot . . .”

  “Yeah . . .”

  The silence that fell was abnormally long for a conversation with my little brother.

  “You okay?” I finally asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, taking another drink. He couldn’t be more my brother.

  My propensity to run away, to sneak out from under tense situations, and to avoid what needs confronting would later lead to my breakup with Michael only a year after that night we spent in his room together, after he became my first boyfriend. We’d both gotten comfortable avoiding too much, especially for a long-distance relationship, and I used too many lies and substances to fill the gaps between us.

  Embracing avoidance was the central mistake of our relationship, but it has nonetheless remained a consistent crutch for my anxiety. It is the easiest way to cop out of managing this ever-present guilt of internalizing a critical part of myself as a sin. And embracing avoidance has created problems in all my relationships that followed.

  Despite the lack of space, in each home she has had, Mata has dedicated one room to her deities and the worship of them. Her deity room is filled with elaborate altars and garlands and the incurable smell of incense. When her children were young and we would get in trouble with Mata, we would run into the room and bow down in front of the bronze statuettes of Kṛṣṇa and his consort, Radha. We knew that Mata would never punish us in this spiritual sanctuary, and she didn’t try to hide the fact that she wouldn’t even discipline us after we exited.

  “You took shelter of god,” she would say, “so I will let him take care of it.” She hoped that this would teach us to always take shelter of god when we were in trouble.

  If my father is right, and we should pay the most attention to what god does rather than the traits we project onto them, then god is defined by what liberates a person. If that’s the case, then god for me is in fully embracing myself, my joys, and my freedom, without excuses or avoidance or shame. This god may look different from my mother’s, but I was raised to hold space for other spiritual practices. God for me is in fostering a true connection with myself, which means reclaiming my childhood—reclaiming who I was before I was taught to fear the parts of me that don’t fit neatly into the world—and repairing the fracture caused by my carceral dissonance.

  God is in challenging misafropedia wherever it rears its ugly head. The prayers I discover can be offered to only a god who doesn’t force me into choosing between one necessary love and another. A god who doesn’t push Black children into irreconcilable binaries at the expense of their wholeness. My ancestors modeled these prayers for me. I hope that I can model these prayers for Visnu, too. It only makes sense that in order to refrain from punishing myself the way I was taught by our mother and she was taught by the state, I would have to learn to see myself the way I want her to see me again. That might be the only god who can provide me shelter once more.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A PRAYER FOR ANOTHER WORLD

  Hari-Gaura,

  I wonder why so often the mind tries to manifest what it cannot have. Right now, I’m stuck within the recollection of a birthday party held last year for the mother
of one of my best friends, Ahmad. And all the old heads stand one right after another like a swelling current, but the wave stops at my shore.

  It’s the kind of tide that makes onlookers sit straighter, on high alert—what happened? Then I hear, “You can’t seeeee it, it’s electric!” and I have to believe these lyrics. Nothing less than lightning animates the elders’ bodies as they Electric Slide. Each of them is moving like that pain in her hip was just a bit of joy caught in the joint, a bit of joy that can be let out only when she sways in sync with everyone else. Every line dancer outdoes the next—flipping a wig, kicking up a leg as they spin—and yet they are all in perfect harmony. Every person puts the next to shame, and yet no one is ashamed, because Blackness is a meritocracy that doesn’t require suppression.

  The birthday party was in Newark, New Jersey, but for a brief moment I was home. For a brief moment, I was sharing this body with you again, and Auntie Grace was stepping away from the grill to join the dance floor her driveway had turned into.

  Our cousin Eric was out of prison and dancing like he ain’t never been accused of killing nobody, because in this universe he hadn’t. Even Mata, who has long forsaken secular dance, gingerly boogie-woogie-woogied into the crowd, tepidly relearning the steps she looked embarrassed to have forgotten, but that brought her more joy than anything. For a brief moment. Then this world appeared before me again.

  Eric has been in prison for as long as I can remember. Our cousin D has been locked up for a stretch, too, for allegedly stealing shit. He’s only twenty-three. I used to babysit for that kid, man. I used to wash his face when it was dirty, put his toys away after he fell asleep, back when he would stay with us for spells while his parents were going through some things. I remember thinking he should have had more of them, that he never had enough things to play with for a child.

  D’s younger sister, Justus, says some boys in Lorain are looking for our cousin Ali. He’s in his early twenties now, too, and he’s still a smart-ass. When he was younger, he would stay laughing about things that I could never understand and rib me for not being able to grasp them. The boys told Justus that if they ever saw him on the street, they would kill him for some shady shit they say he did to them. I don’t know if Ali is scared or not, or if fear just doesn’t really matter to him, because he keeps doing the same shit anyway.

  I’ve been reaching out to him more recently. Each time I don’t know if it will be the last that he responds, at least with his freedom. I miss him. Even talking to him more regularly doesn’t really fix that. I understand too much now, and there is too little of his laughter left for me.

  Justus and D’s brother Tay, the middle child between them, has been in and out, too. He lost his baby while he was behind bars, and then someone stole her ashes, which he’d kept in a locket. Justus told me that she thinks his baby was the only thing he was really still living for. Now he keeps getting into fights and being thrown into the hole only to be tortured with more loneliness. I never got a chance to meet his daughter.

  I miss all our fucking family, and I don’t feel like I have anyone to talk to about it without eliciting fake empathy or judgment, because people don’t understand how, as a group, we could be so affected by criminalization. So I don’t. Or I didn’t. I don’t think my therapist really gets it either, but he tells me that maybe you might. That you would know the indescribable hatred I have stewing because of how many people have been taken away from me, one after another. That I might share with you the rage I have on behalf of the many people I’ve loved whom I’ll never see again, and the many others I’ll never see the way we used to see each other, and together we can make space for each other to feel it.

  I’m tired of looking at faces behind bars and in coffins. I feel like the next thing I lose will be the last thing I’m really living for, too, if I don’t figure out another way to live. That I’ll also be constantly tortured with loneliness, if in a different kind of way than Tay, if I don’t figure out how to hold on to the flashes of other possible universes that moments like dancing to the Electric Slide at a Black family party can create. Maybe that’s why my mind keeps bringing me back there now in this time when I feel so isolated.

  I would have joined the elders on the dance floor, but my friend Sevonna had brought her three-month-old baby, Tiger, and he’s just the cutest thing, soaking up all our attention. Our mutual friend Henry was playing peekaboo with him. When Henry’s face reappeared from behind his hands, Tiger brightened, lightning animating his body like it did the elders’.

  “He doesn’t have object permanence yet,” Henry, a sage who rarely meets knowledge he is selfish enough to keep to himself, explained. “When I put my hands in front of my face, he thinks my face just disappears. He won’t learn that things continue to exist outside of his field of vision until he’s a little older.”

  I’d heard of this concept before, almost always with a soot-thickened air of “awww, silly little babies” suffocating the discussion. But Tiger’s face looked to have caught all the joy spilling from the old folks’ hips, and it was not silly at all. His face looked like maybe he knew something Sevonna, Henry, Ahmad, and I didn’t, not the other way around. Like he understood that the things adults now believe are too established to disappear still can, and that those things can still make their way back even if we don’t yet understand how. Like he believed in other worlds we can escape to and return from and that nothing is limited to this carceral one. Like he still believed in a god who can save us from carceral dissonance, from losing ourselves and each other to this world’s systematic ways of breaking us and our families apart with its prisons. Like he still saw your reflection in my eyes.

  Growing up with eighteen siblings, it must have been impossible for you not to feel invisible sometimes. It was impossible not to “disappear,” your whereabouts or emotional states going unseen by a mother and father who had their hands full with their gods and their homeschooling and all the kids they’d built this life for. But you found a magic in this where I would later discover only bitterness, imagining yourself as one of the X-Men with invisibility as a superpower.

  I don’t know where the heroism of stealthily making your way into spaces you would otherwise be forbidden from entering went—the feeling of accomplishment that came with sneaking a spoonful of strawberry jam from the refrigerator when you were supposed to be done with sweets for the day, with no one ever being any the wiser—I know only that it did go. I know only that I resented our parents for having so many children that I couldn’t soak up all their attention no matter how hard I tried to be just the cutest thing, and the magic of disappearing was lost with time. I embraced becoming an object that could be commodified by others, because I wanted to be permanent, too.

  I almost forgot the names of your imaginary friends, but I still remember how they were there to keep you company during those moments of feeling invisible. I still remember how our older sister Ganga would ask you the same questions about them, and you always had the same answers because they truly weren’t made up. You told her how Kula really grew up, and real stories about her family. How Saia really did her hair, and what type of food she liked. How India really came to be named after a country, and what she felt about it.

  “But you know they’re imaginary?” Ganga probed, just to confirm your level of awareness. You were four years old.

  “Yes,” you replied. But that didn’t mean they weren’t real. You loved them, sight unseen.

  We were all invisible together, so it wasn’t like I stopped seeing them and then that made me stop engaging with them as you had engaged with them. At some point, I was just too old for imaginary friends. I was just too old for “real” to mean that Kula and Saia and India were really there for us whenever we needed them, even though they were. I was too old for “real” to mean that imagining them drying our tears when we cried was really a comfort. I was too old for “real” to mean that they really supported us through all our most difficult decisions, and tha
t they never made us feel ashamed for being wrong. So I told them goodbye. They respected my decision, like lovers are supposed to but hardly any have since, and I never saw them again. But, oh, how I miss them, too.

  Hari-Gaura, writing to you has me drowning in nostalgia, rediscovering so many of the other things I’ve pined to reclaim since losing you. The other day I came across the earliest home video that you created and I still possess. It’s a recording of you dressed in faded denim overalls just before you turned five, head still full of hair. You stand in front of the camera for a few seconds before—poof—you are gone. There are countless clips of you disappearing and reappearing somewhere else, beaming a smile. One is modeled after a Toys“R”Us commercial, with you singing the jingle: I don’t want to grow up, ’cause, baby, if I did, I couldn’t be a Toys“R”Us kid!

  It looks like the trick was the most fun you’d ever had.

  By four years old, a child should have well-developed object permanence, but this video was evidence that finding joy in disappearing doesn’t have to end as soon as a person learns that things continue to exist outside of their vision. Daddy had recently bought a new camcorder that allowed you to splice video of yourself standing in front of a static background with an image of just the background to create this trick.

  I imagine Mata was frustrated with him for the purchase, thinking it just another gadget for his dusty collection of endless tools and books and electronics we couldn’t afford and didn’t use much. But you managed what I have too hard a time doing nowadays. You found something loving beneath the infuriating surface of our father’s hoarding habits: a search to fill a void he did not create but I think he feels responsible for. And sometimes, the love that is buried underneath behaviors informed by the trauma of being Black in this world can be recovered, when you haven’t given up hope in what you can’t see under the rubble.