by Hari Ziyad
El Yunque is more than twenty-eight thousand acres of tumbling green hills, and only after our cab dropped us at the entrance did we find out that the registration tent was much deeper inside. As we walked through the fog of insects, a small tan sedan passed us by, then quickly slowed to a stop in front of us. In the back seat, a Black woman with an asymmetrical afro and a voice that sounded as if it had known intimately its fair share of cigarettes rolled the window down.
“Y’all going zip-lining?” she shouted. She was seated beside a young girl, and there were two other Black women in the front. Based on their energy, it seemed as if the driver had stopped only because the woman with the fro in the back seat asked her to, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“Yes, do you know how to get there?” Timothy responded.
“Hop in!” the woman with the fro said, which wasn’t an answer, but somehow she knew how to listen for questions unasked.
Their car fit only five people, but she insisted.
“We lap up all the time, and it’s just down the road.”
She told us her name was Brenda, asked us where we were from, told us she’d lived in New York for a few years, too.
“But they are gentrifying the fuck out of it. Fuck gentrification,” she said. I agreed, mentioning how we had just learned about the constant threats developers, the gentrifier’s kin, made to the forest and how poetic it seemed that the clouds kept pouring nonetheless. I did not mention the part I might be playing in those threats.
I was searching for adequate words in a foreign town, but Brenda talked enough for all of us. She spoke at least two languages, the two official ones of the island that colonization had established to erase the Indigenous ones that came before. Three if you include Black—Black like “fuck gentrification.” Like how we didn’t know Brenda at all, but to her that didn’t mean we didn’t share a kinship, or that we existed only to exploit or be exploited. Like how our strangerness didn’t mean we couldn’t forge a relationship of accountability, one that challenges us to better meet our responsibilities to one another, too. Like how our foreignness to each other did not prevent her from caring for us, the way I had taken it to mean that I did not have to show care for some of her fellow people on the island.
“Y’all see that?” she asked Timothy and me in giddy excitement as we came upon our first zip line. “I’m so fucking scared!” She cheesed, staring straight into my eyes as if she knew me. As if knowing I was Black and that we were under the same kind of constant threat was knowing me enough.
After a few hours of gliding among the giant ferns, laughing with us and her friends, Brenda again insisted on driving us back to the edge of the park, the young girl back on Brenda’s lap to provide us room.
“Wait, how did y’all get here?” she asked when we made it back to the street, more concerned than curious.
“We took an Uber. We can order another one now that we’re here. Thank you so much!” I said.
She looked incredulous, relaxing her neck to allow the unbalanced weight of her crooked afro to tip her head to the side in disbelief.
“How much did that cost you coming here?!”
“Oh, only like fifty dollars,” I reassured her.
“We split it and it was fine,” Timothy followed up, noticing the concern blossoming across her face.
“Oh no,” she said. “No, no, no. We are headed toward San Juan—we’ll take you!”
We told her again it was fine, but this “we’ll take you” wasn’t really a question either.
As we drove back toward the city, Brenda asked how we knew each other. I told her Tim was my partner, and her eyes lit up like mine must have when my cousin Justus showed me her girlfriend.
“We’re gay too!” she said, explaining she was dating the driver. The woman in the passenger’s seat was the driver’s sister, and the girl in the back was the driver’s daughter. They didn’t speak English as well as Brenda, but that hadn’t stopped us from laughing together in the trees, and they seemed to immediately understand the excitement we shared and joined in with laughter now, too.
Brenda had said they could drive us only to the edge of town—“Al menos then you’ll be close enough for a more reasonably priced cab”—but the car kept rolling closer and closer to our hotel until we were within walking distance.
“Is this good enough?” Brenda asked when we were about a ten-minute walk from where we were staying. I still don’t know how far out of their way they had actually come in order to bring us there.
“This is more than perfect, thank you so much!” I said.
Timothy took out thirty dollars to give to Brenda as we got out. “For gas, at least,” he said.
She just laughed that smoker’s laugh, patted her fro, and slammed the door thunderously in our faces.
“Pay it forward,” she yelled out the window.
Brenda’s generosity was so ordinary, and yet I still find it booming over the language of the escape that I went to Borikén to find. It wasn’t necessarily what she said or did that struck me; it was how familiar she made her words and actions feel, even when I had spent so long keeping people like her at arm’s length in my futile search for comfort. This ordinary Black generosity, which has the power to hold across distance and time, was the language I was searching for, and it was one I’d always had access to, but I had turned away from where it could be found. It was the same language Mother Bhūmi used to ask me, in all my queerness that she would never know in this lifetime, to go on those long walks with her, despite my being stuck in fear and resentment of her. It was the same language I used, despite the very real horrors of our shared history, to respond with a yes. And it was the same language my Black Puerto Rican friends asked me to speak with when talking about their home, a language where no one’s home means “careless escape,” because everyone’s home is a place where care is given generously.
I spent so long trying to escape regular Black life and the struggles that come with it that the regular care that comes, too, felt almost spectacular. It had been years since I’d really sat in appreciation of the Black neighbors who would let my family borrow sugar when we had run out of it and my father’s paycheck hadn’t come yet, although they regularly helped save my life. It had been years since I understood why strangers in my community so often stopped police from harassing me even when I was doing something “wrong,” and I still find it hard sometimes to understand why they always felt so compelled to step in. Relationships of accountability remind me that I can be them—can replicate their generosity—for my own neighbors, both next door and across the diaspora, despite our differences and struggles and traumas, if I don’t use differences and struggles and traumas as a barrier necessary to escape. The extraordinary ordinary of Blackness is inaccessible when all you see in ordinary Black life is something to escape in pursuit of white acceptance. When all you see in the Black people who come from different backgrounds and places and families from you is distance, instead of an opportunity to build across it.
At the same time, if observing white people has taught me anything, it is that being too gracious can have terrible consequences. We invite Dylann Roof into our place of worship, and he guns us down. We invite Rachel Dolezal into our organizations working for liberation, and she steals our identity. We forgive them both, and still, justice does not follow. And so, on a certain level, you could interpret this individualistic way of life imposed by a capitalistic society—this push to separate your own life, and whatever enjoyment you can find in it, from the lives of others—as useful for Black people’s safety. Healthy boundaries are important when exploitation is as common as carbon. But when we only create boundaries between ourselves and those most vulnerable to state violence—the Blackest, the poorest, the ones the state can most easily other and exoticize—in attempts to access the power of those who control the levers, there is nothing healthy about the boundaries we are forced to draw. When our boundaries are inflexible, they are no better than the walls buil
t around the borders of the state. It’s clear now that I held on to these unhealthy boundaries, delineating care for myself and care for other Black people, during my trip to Borikén. And rectifying the harm I caused must be more than just claiming to have learned a lesson. It must include reckoning with how I create boundaries around myself within relationships of accountability into the future.
I have one white friend left.
Five years ago, after Cloud supported me through a difficult breakup with the partner I’d been living with, we moved into an apartment in Bed-Stuy. Before Cloud and I officially moved in together, they had let me stay in their previous apartment for a couple of months because I’d had to move out of mine so suddenly, and the roommate arrangement seemed to work well enough that we decided to continue it.
Cloud was also from the Midwest—Flint, Michigan—and had been born into a family that followed the Bahá’í faith. We bonded over the apparent commonalities of our upbringings and our shared affinity for drunken debauchery through a period neither of us recognized then as being one in which we were both plagued with depression. I met them at a party during my junior year of college, where they convinced me—with a fake accent, to which they impressively committed the entire night—that they were British.
“I studied abroad in London!” I responded excitedly when they told me the lie, apologizing for spilling my drink on their shoes. “Where did you live?”
“Oh, you know,” they said, running their hand through their short brown hair, not even bothering to flick the thick droplets of tequila from their loafers, “I moved around a lot!”
I later found out that they were an actor, and they were using the night to practice their craft.
“Was that like, a class assignment or something?” I asked, still incredulous as we reminisced on a random Tuesday night in the living room of our new apartment.
“No!” Cloud admitted, smile as wide as a Cheshire cat’s, “I just wanted to see if I could convince people.”
“You’re so . . . interesting.”
“Better that than boring!”
“If I was sober, I would have known you were lying, though.”
“If we were sober, we would have done a lot of things differently!” they replied, a devilish twinkle in their eye as we each threw another Patrón shot back, Wednesday be damned.
Bed-Stuy is one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods that is most thoroughly gentrified today, and this process was clearly underway five years ago. Having already begun to radicalize in my politics, I was by then railing to anyone who would listen about the Black storefronts disappearing, the Black food and culture disappearing, the Black people disappearing. But I still moved in with Cloud as if this didn’t make me part of the same violence scourging the neighborhood.
When they were sober, Cloud usually said all the things a white “ally” is supposed to say about how and what whiteness takes from Black people, too, like we hadn’t both just become the replacements of the Black people who were being taken away. Poof. As if gentrification were just a thing that happens, without actual players to make it.
As was later the case with my touristic exploits in Borikén, my attempts to disengage from certain realities of anti-Blackness made it easy for me to recognize the problem of gentrification in theory but not to apply the theory to my own life. Cloud was my friend, a friend I’d gone through so much real and deep and dark shit with, and our friendship became an excuse to ignore the risks their presence presented to my community, risks that existed regardless of either of our “good” intentions.
If Cloud were to have had any type of conflict with any of our Black neighbors—who were an impediment in the eyes of a state waiting for any excuse to clear them away for the next wave of white people—there would have been no telling the consequences. Like Saheed Vassell, Akai Gurley, and Sergio Reyes, Black people had been killed by cops in gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods for less. Even though Cloud and I personally refused to engage the police, in any scenario where cops were present, they would always be more likely to read innocence onto Cloud’s white body and criminality onto the Black ones surrounding them.
Even without the physical presence of police, this type of deadly protection proliferates around white people. It was present in how quickly our landlord catered to Cloud’s concerns about noise levels and maintenance requests, even at the expense of the routines and needs of other Black tenants. It was in how the store down the block became a place Cloud could leave personal belongings to pick up later, even as Black customers who frequented these same places were regarded as rabid thieves to be put down.
By uncritically bringing Cloud into Black spaces, particularly at this precarious moment in our neighborhood, I was selfishly asking others to pay the costs I hadn’t even reflected on paying myself. And I was letting Cloud know that it was okay to be uncritical and careless when it comes to the safety of Black people, too. Sometimes they did exactly that. Sometimes they showed up at events for Black people, spoke on Black issues, and demanded things from Black people that we shouldn’t be required to give. And this harm was always exacerbated when we drank.
“I’ve had too much?! That was only my fifth tequila!” Cloud tried in an Israeli accent after we’d just been kicked out of another bar. “You had at least seven. Anyway, where should we go next? Therapy Lounge?”
“No.”
Cloud wasn’t lying. I was even drunker than they were, and I understood the desire to keep the party going; we were both running away from demons. But not long before that night, I’d been sexually assaulted—again—at a different gay club mostly frequented by white men, and I had decided to avoid these cesspools of anti-Blackness and fetishization as much as possible in the wake. That decision was as clear to me seven drinks in as it would have been sober. There is only so far Black people can run, even when we are committed to escape.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be around white gays right now.”
Cloud screwed up their face. “You can’t go just this one time?”
“No.”
“Oh my fucking god, you are so fucking unreasonable!”
They screamed and stormed off, leaving me to deal with their whiteness, to deal with their belief that I had unreasonable anger toward it for wanting to protect myself. And I don’t think Cloud would have said that my anger at whiteness was unreasonable this explicitly or yelled it like this if they were sober, but without healthy boundaries between us I would have always been left to deal with their whiteness. White people can run away from things that we can’t. They can run away from facing the violence they enact upon us, even when they claim to love us, just to try and escape their demons. And if their demons frighten them enough, they will always choose to run, always choose their own violent protection over what is required to save us, and that is saying enough.
As someone who has struggled with substances myself, who has seen and loved so many family members and friends while they struggled and lost valiant battles to addiction all my life, I know that no one chooses alcoholism. But some of us do choose an escape from reality that an addiction to substances might help facilitate. I knew that Cloud’s reality was difficult in ways that are theirs to detail, and so I understood deeply why they might want to leave it behind. The problem was, as a white person in a white-supremacist world, the reality they wanted to escape also included their responsibilities to me and my safety as a Black person. That reality also included a responsibility to respect my saying no, even if the reason I offered or refused it seemed unreasonable to them. And the very real difficulties Cloud experienced that drinking helped them forget—and forgetting was paramount, even if it meant attacking me for when I offered and refused to give consent—do not take away from the anti-Black abuses I experienced as a result. Do not take away from the fact that there were choices. Cloud’s very real difficulties do not take away from how they would force me to compromise my safety for their own destructive desires throughout our relat
ionship and do not take away from the fact that my community’s safety was sacrificed, too. They abused alcohol in ways that harmed me as a Black person, that forced Black people in general into traumatizing situations for the sake of their escape, because of their anti-Blackness, not the other way around.
We didn’t talk about this incident again, but we began going to more Black venues after that, even though we did not lessen our drinking—either of us. Cloud did not stop running away from the anti-Black violence they enacted. And I did not stop running away from my responsibility to distance myself and other Black people from it.
“I don’t know what their problem is,” Cloud said, asking for a cigarette after a security guard at the mostly Black nightclub we’d turned into our watering hole against its will told them to go outside and get some air. “I don’t like this place anyway.”
I loved it, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I could say, Cloud, you have to drink less, but that wouldn’t make them listen to the things and the places I loved. And neither would drinking less, really. And without enough distance between us to honor our unique experiences as a beneficiary of anti-Black violence and a victim of it, they could always just point to the fact of me drinking the same amount to explain that they were just as okay as I was. We were friends who did the same things, and so either we both had the same drinking problem or neither of us did. That is what happens when you don’t draw healthy boundaries between people with whom you share a relationship.
Another friend of mine—Black—came to check on us outside the club and asked for a cigarette, too. He inhaled it with something about god being good. Cloud was an atheist, and in my experience, drunk white atheists have lots of questions when you talk about Black gods. So Cloud asked their questions. And Cloud didn’t listen to the answers.
“I just think it’s so stupid to believe in some all-powerful being in the sky,” Cloud said finally, voicing the thing they’d already decided to say, even before launching any of these invasive questions at this unsuspecting Black man, who told me, with his eyes, to come get my drunk white atheist friend. Told me to remember that Cloud would never understand the gods we find to liberate us. So Cloud and I left, but we came back, and back, and back, always to this same space where I needed to get my drunk white friend and stop them from enacting anti-Blackness, because I was still trying to use alcohol myself to escape responsibility for our relationship rather than putting the necessary distance between us. Cloud is locked in the bathroom at this Black lounge, and no one else can use it, but I just shrug and keep on dancing. Cloud is cussing out the bartender at this Black bar, and no one else can place an order, but at least I sneaked in my own flask. Cloud is ogling some Black boy who is just trying not to be fetishized by white gays, exactly like I was the night Cloud cussed me out for saying no. Until finally, a few years later, Cloud accepted that they had a drinking problem. Which, like I said, meant that I had one, too. Which, like I said, was never the problem to begin with.