Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  A year ago, Cloud, who had been sober for a few months then, invited me to join them at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

  “Okay,” I said, intending this to be a polite little lie. By that time, I knew that their problem with avoidance was bigger than alcohol, and mine was bigger, too, and different from theirs. But I did not want to have a conversation trying to explain all this. I did not have the language then, and Cloud could not speak history into existence just by talking through it with me like other Black people could. Cloud did not share what I shared with the Black boy in the club who was trying to avoid their gaze. There is so much exhaustion in detailing what no one else is able to do while white people and their problems are attended to, and that exhaustion is taking a thing, too. But I guess that just comes with the territory of calling a white person my friend. I guess, for as long as I do call Cloud that, refusing to address all these things was just another feature of my problem with avoidance in the first place.

  “I’d really, really like you to come,” Cloud 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 on the shoulder.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t, not before I’d explained to them how difficult those years had been for me. How beautiful and terrible it was to see someone I cared for falling apart like I was, but in a way I could not understand or excuse. In a way that demanded my obliteration, too. How beautiful and terrible it was that they wanted the way I fell apart to be the same as the way they did. How beautiful and terrible and terrible and terrible.

  After the AA meeting, Cloud asked me to dinner to talk. When I arrived, I was surprised to see their eyes straining so much that the veins in each reddened from the effort of trying to stop them from filling with tears. They explained that the meeting had been to commemorate a significant step they’d completed in their sobriety and that they had wanted me there to celebrate with them. That it would have meant a lot to them. That sometimes it feels like I don’t support them enough, even as they try to support me. That sometimes it still seems to them like my anger at white people is so unreasonable that I can’t make exceptions for them.

  “Of course I support your sobriety,” I said. But I think perhaps, at least for a long time, Cloud wanted me to feel their anguish, to reflect it back, to understand on the deepest level how monumental this moment in their journey toward healing was for them, and I no longer wanted to do that. Feeling what Cloud felt would always mean feeling all of whiteness and the violence it has wrought upon me and so many others. I didn’t want to feel what they felt, even if I didn’t want them to feel it either. And their belief that this was unreasonable would not make it true, just like it hadn’t on that drunken night all those years before. The belief that it is unreasonable to honor the experiences we have that are unique from white people’s, and the sanctity of those experiences, can, in fact, only make more harm come true.

  I apologized, but I still didn’t confirm the reality that I won’t always understand how they feel. That we won’t always feel the same. I didn’t say that it wasn’t my anger getting in the way, that it was their whiteness and my continued avoidance of acknowledging the necessity of finding distance from it. And though I told them that I genuinely regretted things working out this way around the AA meeting, and I was being honest, I didn’t explain why I couldn’t find myself feeling sad about it the way they seemed to want me to. I knew that there were a lot of things Cloud didn’t support me in, sometimes through no fault of their own. There were a lot of things Cloud couldn’t support me in, because that is just an aspect of a relationship where one party has “something to save” and the other never had “anything to lose,” as Wilderson reminded me that James Baldwin wrote on his relationship with Norman Mailer. I didn’t tell Cloud that it’s okay if we experience the world differently, emotions differently, our relationships to substances differently, that we never should have tried to pretend otherwise, and I should have told them.

  Cloud cried some more. I apologized again and went home. It took a long time for our relationship to recover, in part because it has taken this long for me to be able to fully articulate that empathy and care not only can be two different things but sometimes have to be. In part because I wasn’t always sure it was worth articulating when the articulation of this takes so much out of a Black person. And it will take even longer for me to be able to figure out how to show this type of care to Cloud after choosing to continue a friendship with them in the face of my very real failure to empathize, a failure that I can now embrace.

  All our relationships shape and are shaped by anti-Black conditioning. For my friendship with Cloud to work, there must be space for my Blackness that I keep protected, part of my home that is not open for others to travel to without a fruitful connection. Things I say that they cannot say. Things I want for myself that they will not ever know to want for themselves, like to no longer feel the weight of this anti-Black world squeezing the air from my body with every step I make. For this to be a relationship of accountability, there must be responsibilities that they have, like to find a way to rid themselves of whiteness, that I don’t. Responsibilities I have, like to keep them from spilling white violence everywhere while holding them to finding a way to rid themselves of it. For this friendship to work, and we shouldn’t feel compelled by society or anyone other than ourselves to make it, we have to find care despite the distance between us—even if that care looks a lot different from what care between friends is “supposed” to look like.

  And I don’t completely know what care between us does look like all the time. It will probably take more than either of us can fathom. But Cloud’s willingness to accept and apologize and make amends for the anti-Black harms they created, to interrogate their relationship to Black spaces and Black relationships even when it doesn’t seem they might ever discover the right answers, feels closer. Their willingness to understand and deal with the pain they felt from me avoiding these conversations without resorting to blame does, too. As does both of our refusals to use alcoholism as an excuse to run away from the harms they have caused and I have encouraged against other Black people, a refusal that is a recognizable component of their sobriety, and so does their encouraging me to see a Black, queer therapist so that I can better understand myself, even if they might not be able to understand me themself. Alongside me being clear about my needs and what I can offer, without us expecting to always be on the same page, our relationship consists more of those things now.

  And I think we are both much healthier than when we tried to ignore the question of how and when the distance between us is necessary. If I am to have white friends, I have to hold them to account for the harms they cause because of my own accountability to Black people. Our relationship can’t be limited to what I can do for Cloud personally, although everyone’s health, including Cloud’s, depends on refusing to limit the parameters of a relationship in this way in the first place.

  The way I express care for Cloud will never look like the way I express care for another Black person. Refusing to create unhealthy boundaries between my own and other Black people’s experiences demands that I have healthier boundaries in my relationships with white (and all non-Black) people, too. Similar to the way that a man’s relationship to women is always shaped by patriarchy and misogyny, Cloud’s relationship to me will be forever tangled up with their relationship to white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and it’s always my responsibility to keep that anti-Blackness from harming my communities—and from harming me, because I am a part of my communities. It’s always my responsibility to refuse to allow others who might carry anti-Blackness into Black spaces around me. It’s my responsibility to acknowledge when I carry it, like I carried it in Borikén, like I carried it during that time in Bed-Stuy, without making excuses. To find a way to relinquish it, even if that means discomfort, even if that means giving up the
parts of my relationships that this society has tried so hard to convince me are always to be desired.

  I have to give up the parts of my relationships that, when writing this, made me want to provide Cloud with more space to commit anti-Blackness, just because of their demons and their addictions. The parts that made me want to reduce the fact that they ignored consent and attacked me for saying no to just a misunderstanding, especially if I didn’t have the capacity to explicitly describe the full backstory of the sexual trauma that made me say it—as if any white person will ever have the full backstory of Black traumas. I have to give up the parts that provide space for always allowing white people the benefit of the doubt, even when they admit to hurting Black people, and the parts that provide space for the dangerous idea that requiring any other person to be accountable for their anti-Blackness is somehow ever unfair or one-sided or not enough to fulfill a relationship. Because dismantling anti-Blackness is always enough to fulfill a relationship.

  CANTO III

  Free

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A PRAYER FOR HEALING

  Hari-Gaura,

  No one really dies of old age, science says. It’s true that a body’s cells have finite life spans, but it’s ultimately diseases, which take advantage of a cell’s increasing ineffectiveness at protecting against them, that kill. Time is only death’s excuse. It isn’t actually how I lost Mother Bhūmi. It isn’t actually how I lost you, any more than it will be how I lose my mother. This country’s history is full of viruses and cancers both wrought and exacerbated by colonization, and they have been murdering Black people for a long time now.

  We are in the midst of a global health pandemic. As of today, COVID-19 has killed hundreds of thousands of people globally and more than one hundred thousand across this country, a greatly outsize proportion of them Black. Black people are more likely to be poor; to have inadequate access to hygiene and health care; to have underlying health issues; to have our concerns ignored by doctors; and to be locked in prisons, where all these realities are exponentially more present.36 For those of us who are not incarcerated, the state has instructed us to practice what they call “social distancing”—to stay inside our homes as much as possible, to wear a mask on our essential errands, and to stay six feet away from others and never gather in groups—so as to slow the spread of the disease. Most of these things are possible only for those who are not essential workers—people employed in food, delivery, and health-care industries primarily—or, of course, homeless, and a greatly outsize proportion of these groups are Black, too. And if we break social-distancing guidelines, we are threatened with being thrown into prisons. All this is because our carceral government ignored warnings, did not prepare our already overburdened, capitalistic health-care system, and refuses to make up the ground by properly investing in testing measures. It seems like this death and isolation will go on until the end of time.

  But what is time, really? What is death? What is isolation when you are here, too? I’ve been trying to figure out exactly when your story ended and mine began, exactly when this carceral dissonance became irreconcilable. Now I know that there were many beginnings. But there is one moment I keep returning to.

  I can’t recall your precise age. You may have been ten. A few years ago I confessed to murkiness around this memory in an essay I wrote about the incident. A more established writer advised me, unsolicited, that the story was difficult to believe because I couldn’t pin down how old you were when it happened.

  It seemed a heartless response to one of my most vulnerable pieces of writing, but I know he was only repeating this world’s greatest truth: An inability to define a person’s age makes it impossible to believe in the validity of their suffering. Which is to say, Black people can never truly be victims in a society that doesn’t afford us the freedoms of childhood or the agency of being adults. And for as long as I abided by this world’s rules, the validity of my suffering was so difficult for even me to consider that I often mistook it for only a figment of my imagination.

  Sometimes I want to believe that the only real part of this memory is the beginning, when you were sent to the room of the youngest son of one of Mata’s friends for the night. We would frequently stay in Mata’s friends’ homes while traveling to different states for Hare Kṛṣṇa festivals and holidays, though I can’t remember which holiday this one was. The girls were sent to another room and Mata’s friend’s oldest son, who would have been around fifteen at the time, to his own.

  I remember clearly how, late one night, when we were all supposed to be asleep, the teenager came into the younger boys’ room on the pretense of sharing some urgently hilarious joke. You must have been the only one awake. The older boy had always been a prankster, insatiable for laughter that seemed never to be enough to replace the sadness in his eyes, and one joke was insufficient. He kept joking and joking, then paused to see whether you would continue snickering when he asked if you wanted to come back to his room. But you didn’t laugh.

  Instead, you followed him down a pitch-black corridor into his bedroom. There he had erected a tent made of white sheets, as if he knew you were destined to find shelter among ghosts. When you entered, he proposed a game of Dare, and you agreed. It started off simple.

  “I dare you to eat that old cracker off the ground.”

  “I dare you to hold your hand to the surface of that scalding heater for three seconds.”

  “I dare you to pull down your pants.”

  After both of you had your clothes off, he graduated to challenging you to touch parts of his body, but I don’t remember the specifics. When I dream about it, I always wake up before that part, sometimes shamefully wetted in my body’s desperate bid to desiccate this memory before I drown in the pool it has made as thick as raw honey.

  My body has perfected how to make pleasure from pain. In order to find legibility in a world where you must be the villain, it needs me to forget about how you have been victimized.

  I used to blame you for what happened. For your selflessness. For agreeing to relinquish yourself so that you might replace this other boy’s sadness the way laughter was never able to. For being so trusting. For foolishly believing any Black child could fulfill their most frightening desires in this world and still claim safety. For why I can’t escape these dangerously queer desires even now. And there was no resolving your existence with my commitment to punishing you for what, to this world submerged in misafropedia, are irreparable crimes.

  You could say that this was the first moment I allowed a boy inside this body, but it would be more accurate to call it the first excavation of a boy—of you—from it. Underneath that tent, the touch of the oldest son of my mother’s friend felt right to want but not right to receive, and my lack of faith in the sanctity of this contradiction would kill whatever innocence I still granted myself, just as Mata had always warned me a lack of faith would do.

  You had been the only sacred thing I knew for sure, and so I believed your naive longing for illicit intimacies had created me queer in your image. I hated this body you bequeathed to me, and so I came up with countless ways to have no body at all as long as my knees still refused to be scrubbed clean of the dirt and crumbs from that boy’s unswept floor thousands of showers later.

  Creation stories have always confused me. No one ever really talks about who created the Creator. His advent just sort of happens, while the rest of us are made of clay and ribs and rape. But there must be a genesis before the Genesis. I know that you were queer before the tent. You were queer enough for this older boy to know, and for him to exploit the fact that you didn’t know how to name it. Not all Black children who participate in their own harm in this way are queer. But if queerness is defined by questions about the kind of intimacy that lies outside of this world’s scripts, questions that Black children like you—gendered or otherwise—are brave enough to ask, then all of them are queer enough. All of them experience a time before censoring their stainless desires
for freedom and intimacy, which this misafropedic world will always abuse. And instead of exalting your desire for freedom, your trust, your vulnerability, I took to blaming you, yet another act of abuse in itself.

  There was another sexual encounter later on with that same boy, I think. Or it was with the other family friend around his age who asked me to suck his dick behind our garage at the yellow house with chipping paint—in that always trash-riddled area between it and the fence blocking off the next house—around the same time. I can’t remember clearly. But I know that each of these foggy memories would end with you saying yes, if I let them.

  I know that I can only conceive of my existence without you after a time when you had been drowned in a pool of pleasure that another boy’s body had created from pain inside our mouth. I know that I punished you out of existence for this, even though you would have never been given the chance to finish off the sexual encounter yourself. You weren’t even able to yet, not that these older boys asked or would have waited.