by Hari Ziyad
Hari-Gaura,
I’m beginning to feel incredibly lonely after weeks of social distancing, but I find some comfort thinking about you. I’ve been remembering how you would sometimes ask Daddy to accompany you to the bathroom because you were afraid of being alone for too long. According to him, you would talk his ear off for minutes on end while sitting on the toilet.
“My father would do the same thing when he was getting older,” Daddy says with nostalgic amusement. “The reddish tinge of your hair when you were young, calling me to talk to you like that while you were on the toilet—I said, you have just got to be my dad reincarnated.”
Our grandfather, Reuben Hubbard, passed before we were born, and this story is the closest thing we’ve ever had to knowing him. I think what Daddy is trying to say when he brings it up is that he wishes he had gotten to know his father more intimately and that, in a way, you offered an answer to his prayers.
Asking Daddy to accompany you to the bathroom went on until you were about five years old, longer than many would likely deem appropriate, and certainly longer than you physically needed him to help. But it was a tenderness. A love language passed from a Black father to his child. It’s probably clear that I don’t remember everything from that time. But I remember that these bathroom sessions ended the same year you first dreamed of losing Daddy and the same year Mata cut your long hair, which had become much darker than your grandfather’s reddish brown over the years.
I plan on raising children someday. As a queer person, I worry myself constantly about the boundaries between anything that could possibly be read as too intimate around kids, given how easy society makes it to project predation onto us. When I spent a summer babysitting my friend Nikkee’s toddler, Martin, this fear led me to become overly conscious of how queer I appeared in public, reinforcing those carceral logics around myself. I was afraid of the judgment that infiltrated the faces we passed together when I was more visibly myself.
I imagined the people who witnessed me with Martin immediately assumed me dangerous, and so I tried to silence my queerness whenever I was with him to avoid their judgment. It’s the same reason I suspected my mother imagined me some type of monster when I called her that one time and she heard Martin crying in the background. She asked about an essay I’d written on the sexual abuse I experienced as a child—out of the blue after never before asking about my writing without prompting—and immediately I assumed she was calling me a child-hazard. I know it was unfair, but I believed it anyway. “We will talk about it,” I told her. We still haven’t.
Daddy never seemed to worry about how spending time in the bathroom with you would appear, though. And for that brief moment in his own life, his father didn’t either. All three of you were free in a way I struggle to be. I wonder if Daddy would have had more intimate stories to share of his father if that had been the case for longer. I wonder if I would have more intimate stories to share of our father if that had been the case longer with him and us, too.
Daddy swears he would have never hit you. “Except for that one time . . . ,” he says, telling a story that I don’t recollect. Mata says she doesn’t remember anything like what I remember of that day you spent with your friend Mark either. But it makes sense that they wouldn’t. It happened to me . . . or to you?
Is what I remember my past or yours? Or no one’s?
Can a thing really have happened if no other living person says it did?
Tell me you remember sleeping over at Mark’s house, him catching you up on all the cartoons you hadn’t seen since you’d been away from his home and its cable. Doug canceled his birthday because he was tired of everything changing with age. Tommy, Chuckie, and the gang went on a vacation in Vegas, likely without considering the effects of tourism on the local people either. Helga created a new student newspaper to challenge Arnold’s. And the following morning, you and Mark took a shower together like you sometimes did when you were that age.
Tell me you remember how, fresh off a recap of the show, something struck Mark to begin singing the Rugrats theme song in the tub, doot-dooting in place of the xylophone melody. How you joined in and, in the excitement, got a little too into the music. It wasn’t grabbing a sponge and pretending it was a microphone while dramatically lathering your body with soap that I’m referring to. It was how, as you did those things, you pushed up onto Mark, grinding your naked body on his to the beat of the song.
Tell me you remember that, at the time, Mark only laughed and pushed you away, although he had every right to be uncomfortable. This was a prime opportunity to learn about the importance of respecting other people’s bodies. Instead, when Mark told his mother, and his mother told Daddy, our father whipped you harder than you’d ever been whipped before.
He swears he didn’t, but I remember it so clearly. I could never forget how Daddy kept repeating that this wasn’t what boys were supposed to do as he beat it into you. I could never forget how Daddy told you this whupping was “for your own good,” even as it seemed to last forever. Even as it scarred my relationship with our body and the bodies of others for just as long. Instead of teaching you that you should not deny people agency over their bodies, over who can claim their bodies, he beat you for the queerness he thought your body betrayed.
I find myself needing to believe in the certainty of my version of the past just as much as my father needs to believe in a history in which he would never have hit me—except for that one time. When I let him know I was including this story here, Daddy and I spent two hours arguing, with as much softness as we could muster, about whether he really hit me, instead of discussing how I still don’t always regard other people’s bodies with the respect they deserve, or how he still blames my queerness on something wrong with the food I eat.
“You can’t blame the person,” he says, his version of “hate the sin but not the sinner.” “You gotta blame the food, all the GMOs—that’s what’s making everyone gay today. It’s not your fault.” But something is always to blame.
What would it mean for both Daddy and me to spend less energy fighting to justify our perception of the past and more energy figuring out why we hold these perceptions? What would it mean for Daddy to have never hit me, in the face of his continued insistence that I am fundamentally fucked up? Regardless of whose fault it is, what does it mean that I cannot be fully myself in front of my own father? That I can hardly be myself, period, since you were here with me? What would it mean if this incident was never just about Daddy and me and our perceptions of the past at all?
You never should have danced on Mark without his approval. I know as much as anyone how a disregard for a child’s wants and needs can lead to monstrosities. I know as much as anyone the importance of addressing this tendency before it continues to harm more and more people.
Carceral thinking was never going to teach you this. Punishment cannot teach us what healthy interactions with one another look like. It never will lead to healing for those harmed. Punishment only ever taught me to adopt the same punitive gaze for myself that follows me on the streets when I am caring for Martin and to run away from accountability in my interactions like the one with Mark. It only ever taught me to turn that gaze outward at my father to avoid looking at myself.
Whether Daddy really hit you that day is important. But what is also important is his refusal to believe that he might have, and my inability to engage with that refusal because I only needed him to believe in my version of the past. The details of our sexual assault as a child are critical, but what is also critical is admitting my discomfort around my mother asking about those details when she did, and talking with her about it. It matters how my father came from sitting freely with you in the bathroom, from sitting freely with his dying father in the bathroom, to considering my queerness a problem. Retracing how he got there without a focus on blame and guilt and punitiveness is how he can find freedom again.
And if it’s true that we will all someday die just like my grandfather, then how I get there w
ithout a focus on blame and guilt and punitiveness matters for my freedom, too. It has always mattered for freeing you, Hari-Gaura. Knowing this truth is what’s most comforting in these lonely times.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IF WE MUST DIE
“If we must die, let it not be like hogs, hunted and . . . and . . .” and the next word disappeared into the air like smoke floating off a candle, although it had been right there not a moment before. I stifled a curse, returning my attention to the book of poetry lying on the dining room table in front of me.
“Penned! Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.”
I closed the book gently, keeping my index finger wedged between its lightly worn pages as a placeholder in case I lost track of what I was attempting to commit to memory again. Or rather, for when I lost track. I looked up at the ceiling and closed my eyes as if they were two holes in a chalice that the words would inevitably leak out from if left level and unplugged.
“If we must die . . .”
I don’t recall exactly when I stopped celebrating Kwanzaa, or why. Perhaps it had something to do with the dubious legacy left behind by Maulana Karenga, the holiday’s founder, and his abusive treatment of women. Or maybe the custom of celebrating pan-Africanism had been just another thing that would have to be discarded along with my childhood in my quest for belonging in a misafropedic world.
But during the years that I observed the weeklong holiday with my family, Mata would task her children with memorizing a poem that spoke to the principle of the final day—Imani, or faith—which was also when we invited outside guests to celebrate with us. This time, one of the last times, I had chosen “If We Must Die” by Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay.
“If we must die, oh let us nobly die . . .”
I’m not completely sure what drew me to the poem. It was short, and I could clearly use any such feature that functioned as an aid to memorizing that I could get. But I fell deeply in love with the piece on a more profound level quickly after I discovered it. McKay, who was born just twenty-four years after Paul Bogle had been hanged for leading a deadly revolt against Jamaica’s British colonizers, had written the poem as a response to the Red Summer of 1919, in which a string of white-supremacist mob attacks left hundreds of Black people slaughtered across the United States.
There was something about the way McKay framed the inevitability of death against an oppressive onslaught, not as a reality to ceaselessly and futilely attempt to avoid, but as something sacred. Death didn’t have to just be. It could also do something for the dead and the dying, if honored rightly. This felt like a god I could believe in again in the face of my steady trek toward losing my religion. It had been no more than a year since my first sexual assault, and I’d felt the air of death hovering around me ever since. I’d also just completed a history lesson on Emmett Till, and the image of his teenage face resting in the casket after being brutalized by white supremacists was still branded into my brain. If only these words could be branded there instead . . .
“Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave . . .”
Auntie Grace, a few other Black Hare Kṛṣṇa devotees, and some of my father’s fellow congregants from his mosque began arriving at our home just after sundown, dressed in kente cloth and greeting us with the traditional shout of “Habari Gani.” The greeting is Swahili for “What’s the news?” and the news was that I hadn’t yet finished memorizing my poem, but Mata was still cooking up the feast in the kitchen, and so at least there was time.
“Habari Gani,” I replied without looking up. But the rancorous noise that Black gatherings tend to breathe into life made it nearly impossible to concentrate. I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute.
“Hari, help your auntie with this here!” Auntie Grace requested as she burst onto the scene through the front door of our Heights home. I obediently went to grab an aluminum pan from her arms. Through its lid I could smell that it was brimming with macaroni and cheese with an aroma besting even my aunt’s sweet perfume, which stuck to me as she squeezed me tight in an embrace. I dropped the pan off in the kitchen with Mata, but before I could get back to the table and my book, my cousin Rachelle, Auntie Grace’s only daughter, barreled toward me.
“Let me show you something,” Rachelle said as she ran up without even taking off her coat. Since I’d grown apart from Mark, Rachelle had become the main conduit to my understanding of popular culture during my homeschooling and years without cable, and I’m certain she had some hilarious jokes to relay from the latest Bernie Mac comedy special. She embraced this role much more proudly than Mark had, relishing the little taste of glory she could elicit through embodying the famed figures she introduced to me.
“I can’t. I have to finish this.”
“What’s that?”
“Memorizing a poem.”
Rachelle frowned, stretching out the scar I had left on the right cheek of her doll-like face from clawing at it in a catfight when we were both toddlers. She had left a nearly identical one on my opposite cheek in the same skirmish. A few more inches, and both scratches would have threatened our eyesight, but our parents only ever laughed about it.
“Hari, you was fighting like a little girl,” Auntie Grace would say with a chuckle, nudging me in the ribs. So Rachelle and I both learned to laugh about it, too. That’s what makes fighting among people you love different.
“Auntie Kṛṣṇanandini is making y’all do that?” Rachelle asked, wrinkling up her nose.
I made an annoyed face back at her, and Rachelle shrugged before leaving me to the poem.
By the time Mata began laying the traditional straw mat on the table, surrounding the kinara candleholder with an ear of dried corn for each child in the house, a bowl of fruits, and a giant wooden cup representing unity—or Umoja—I felt more confident that I’d retained McKay’s words. The confidence stuck to me even in the midst of the circus our house had become, as more and more revelers trickled in. But before I could catch up with Rachelle and join the excitement, my mother caught me by the arm.
“Place these in the kinara.”
She handed me a bundle of three red and three green candles to be set in the candleholder on either side of a black one, representing the African blood, land, and people that made us who we were. As soon as I had finished, I made a play back to the staircase to meet my cousin again, but Mata stuck a grill lighter out in my path before I could make it up the steps. She had never let me light the candles before. She gave that weighty look parents sometimes give when you’ve crossed some unofficial boundary into a new stage of life, which I now understood to also mean one step closer to death, but if we must die . . .
Once I lit the Mishumaa Saba candles, everyone encircled the table, and my father led a short prayer.
“Today, we are gathered here to celebrate the things that make us who we are,” Mata said. “We wouldn’t be here without Kṛṣṇa, first and foremost, but also without the ancestors who came before us. I invite everyone to shout out the name of someone who has left this plane behind for us to recognize collectively.”
“Aunt Leen,” Auntie Grace submitted.
“Asé!” everyone chanted in response as Mata poured a libation from the unity cup into a potted plant near the table, an offering to my great aunt.
“Helen Hubbard.”
“Asé!”
“Andy Cunningham.”
“Reuben Hubbard.”
“Topsy Cunningham.”
“Asé! Asé! Asé!”
“We are also here to celebrate the final principle of Kwanzaa: Imani, or faith,” Mata continued when all the ancestors had received their offerings. “It’s our faith that has brought our people through history, and it’s our faith that will keep us going. So the children have memorized some poems that they chose for the way they help us understand what that means. But I will go first.”
It was the first time Mata had joined us in this tradition. She placed the unity cup do
wn and stood by the table, a shine in her rose-petal eyes that found itself there whenever she began to tell a story she thought to be powerful. She had chosen the poem “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes.
“Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” Mata began. She went on describing the steps she knew too well: rough, without comforts, in disrepair.
Everyone seemed to be enraptured by my mother’s full commitment to this surprise performance, even Rachelle. But I could hardly pay attention over the accelerating beating of my heart as the anxiety about my upcoming turn blossomed. I bounced back and forth on the balls of my feet while I replayed the poem back again in my head, letting Mata’s voice wash over me as she practically sang of places on her stairs “where there ain’t been no light . . .”
I feel myself standing and shaking under the stress, as if watching my mother at Kwanzaa again, while browsing YouTube to find the video I’m looking for. I see it and click “Play,” and twenty-three-year-old Korryn Gaines is suddenly yelling into the camera, my fingers smashing imprecisely at the keyboard for the volume button as her voice blares through my earphones. When I finally get the sound at a manageable level, I notice that her face looks as old as it does young, like you can tell it has gone through tacks and splinters and upturned boards but has somehow still come out unscathed. Black doesn’t always show its cracks, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Korryn is light skinned with bright hazel eyes that kind of remind me of my sister Ganga’s. That kind of remind me that the blood in my own light-skinned body isn’t all mine, isn’t represented fully by the Black candles, is evidence of the systematic rape of Black mothers on plantations.
Korryn is small, but her voice isn’t.
“You will have to murder me,” Korryn tells an off-camera police officer, the first of many prophecies that would prove her a seer.
In the video, Korryn is parked on the side of a quiet street with her two young children in the back. Halfway through the recording, Korryn hands the camera to her then five-year-old son, Kodi. He looks a little like I did when I was his age. Today, he has a jagged scar from a wound on his cheek, too, this one left behind by an officer’s bullet some weeks later while his mother held him in her arms during her murder, but I don’t imagine he ever laughs about it.