Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  In the video, Kodi sits in the back seat beside his one-year-old sister. They are crying, clearly aware of the danger their mother is in, but Korryn just tells him to keep recording, to make sure we witness this. To make sure I do, though I can hardly pay attention over the rapid beating of my heart as Korryn’s rage bleeds out the screen over me.

  “You stop crying, okay? And you let them know that (the police) stole your mother.”

  Right before she began filming, Korryn had been pulled over for missing car tags, but she refused to give up her car.

  “They’re not going to steal my vehicle, and they’re not going to kidnap me the way they think that they are. They are going to have to kill me today,” she says to no one in particular, but it feels like she is talking to me.

  It felt the same way when I saw Sandra Bland say almost the same thing just a year earlier, while filming her own arrest, before dying in a jail cell under “mysterious” conditions following a minor traffic stop in Texas. It was hard for me to listen then, too.

  “You see these fucking rebels back here?” Korryn tells the officer, referencing the children behind her. That’s when she says the words I am trying to commit to memory this time: “I’ll live on forever, my nigga. Forever!”

  When I was five and woke up screaming after a nightmare that she and my father had died, Mata sat me down gently and wiped my tears.

  “We will all leave this material world someday,” she said, the same sad smile on her face she puts on now when she’s talking about her diagnosis, about COVID-19, about Aunt Cheryl and Mother Bhūmi and all the family we’ve already lost. The same twinkle in her eye when she begins telling a story she finds powerful.

  “The good news is, Kṛṣṇa tells us that we are not this body. The soul lives on forever.”

  But by the time I first saw the video of Korryn Gaines, I had long stopped believing in Kṛṣṇa. I couldn’t reconcile images of lost souls dancing happily in the heavens with our communities burning beneath them, with me burning beneath them, and so I gave up faith in what had started to feel like nothing more than the silly superstition that death could be sacred. And I replaced it with the ceaselessly futile avoidance of reality that fuels my anxiety today.

  But here was another mother telling her five-year-old about that faith again. She wasn’t telling him to forget that our communities are burning, to forget about what causes our deaths. She was telling him about how refusing the carceral logic of those who pour the gasoline is more important than living by that logic. She was telling him that death doesn’t have to be ceaselessly and futilely avoided, that it can also do something for the dead and the dying, if honored rightly. She was saying, as my friend Kevin Rigby Jr. put it once, that “we must find ways of reading and writing that register the ways Black people reorient their relationships to toxicity, in/sanity, death, and what it means to be alive.”

  “You fight them,” Korryn says, referencing the aggressing police.

  “Okay,” Kodi replies as his crying eases.

  “They are not for us. They want to kill us. And you never, ever back down from them.”

  At the end of the video, the officers drag Gaines from her car, stealing her daughter from her arms. They do not kill her that day. Sometimes the carceral state murders Black people more slowly. Years of neglecting a serious medical issue, which is one reason why uterine cancer is deadlier for Black women like my mother. A lifetime of exacerbating a person’s mental health crises, like with Mother Bhūmi. Different variations of Black loss caused by the same carceral state’s pillaging. For Gaines, her murder culminated a few weeks later while police served the warrant for the same traffic stop she recorded.

  When officers showed up then at her home with the warrant, Korryn refused again. Again, she tried to allow us to witness, tried to record what happened to her, but this time the police reached out to Facebook and asked them to cut off her streaming privileges. The social media company quickly did so, a powerful case for considering how surveillance might ultimately be no more than an anti-Black, carceral tool of the state, even when we try and repurpose it to save ourselves, and police sent in a SWAT team after five hours of “negotiating”—for an incident that began with missing car tags. Korryn didn’t open the door. Her boyfriend ran away with their one-year-old daughter, but she and Kodi stayed behind.

  “You see what they do to us, right?” she tells her son in the video of the earlier incident in the car. During the raid on her home, the police received the key to her apartment from a building super, who immediately complied with their request for it. The cops broke in. Korryn was armed. They shot her and her son. Kodi was lucky enough to survive, if you call this surviving. Asé, Asé, Asé.

  “I’se still climbin’ and life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

  When Mata ended the poem, it was my turn to go next. The anxiety overcame me, and I stumbled over the ending. I never completed it, though everyone clapped anyway.

  I think maybe it has been my turn ever since. I think maybe the poem still calls for completion, and I have just been drowning under the anxiety of trying to live in a world that would strip me of my childhood. What would it mean to honor death as sacred? How would we fight for our lives in the midst of generational trauma, in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of relentless state violence that is hell-bent on killing us?

  In 2012, George Zimmerman, a white Florida neighborhood watchman, shot and killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin as the Black teenager walked back to his father’s home after running to the store to buy a drink and a pack of Skittles. Zimmerman claimed he feared for his life, even though he followed the unarmed, much smaller boy with a gun, even after being advised not to by police.

  In a time where our communities were organizing in new ways given the rise of social media, the case became a bona fide spectacle. More than 10 million people tuned in to watch, many with bated breath as, just after 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday in July, jurors returned with their verdict. I was one of those millions of people watching anxiously, having not yet fully given up hope in this justice system; having deluded myself into thinking that justice can, at least sometimes, still come from it; having clung to the belief that putting our trauma on TV on such a scale, making it visible and impossible to turn away from, would somehow bring restitution. I was wrong once again.

  At “not guilty,” I said nothing. I looked at my partner, surprised to see that many tears were able to make it down his face so quickly. Surprised to feel my cheeks wet, too, without even having the time to feel the sadness erupt from my body. Surprised to hear the words, even though I shouldn’t have been. Even though I’d heard them in cases like these so many times before.

  I don’t remember walking outside, but a few minutes later my partner and I were on the street, drunk and angry and directionless. We uprooted plants from in front of the stores in our Crown Heights neighborhood and overturned trash cans. We screamed and prayed and even laughed maniacally. Maybe it was pointless, and our actions may have even harmed people who shouldn’t have been harmed, but we didn’t know what else to do. Those storefronts, which brought so much white money into our gentrifying neighborhood—the same gentrifying neighborhood where police stayed prowling for children like Trayvon who threatened capital with their mere presence—felt complicit, too. We didn’t know what else could be done, because the only answer we were given had, once again, not been an answer at all.

  This sociopolitical era can’t be discussed without reckoning with Black Lives Matter, a movement formed out of the ashes of George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Organizations led primarily by Black women channeled some of the grassroots energy that had long been simmering in response to lynchings like this under a hashtag that took off following the police killing of eighteen-year-old Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, two years later. Today, that energy has been transformed into numerous demonstrations, activist organizations, and policy proposals across the globe.

  The deaths of Trayvon
Martin and Mike Brown are understandably cited by many Black writers and organizers of this era as moments that define their politicization. These moments certainly had a huge impact on my activism as well—I attended my first political rally after Zimmerman was acquitted, and was arrested for the first time protesting after Brown’s death. But as undeniably important as these stories and the stories of other Black cisgender heterosexual men killed by the state and its agents for no apparent reason are, they draw a sharp contrast with the relative silence in activism around Korryn’s death.

  This particular YouTube video of Korryn’s traffic stop was taken from her Instagram account and uploaded by a Black man who uses it as proof Korryn was delusional and deserved her punishment of murder.

  “I’m giving you all these chances,” the officer says in the video, his voice dripping with condescension and the carceral state’s idea of reason. And the Black man who uploaded it seems to find it reasonable. If she gets out of the car, the cop tells Korryn, she can walk home with her kids right now. The carceral state is always so sensible. She should have wanted to live above all else. All she had to do was not resist. Comply. Put her hands up, and she would have.

  It makes sense that the man who uploaded this video didn’t understand Korryn. The stories of Black liberation movements that the state permits are almost always filled with the blood and faces of men. Are almost always filled with us dying with our hands up, begging them not to shoot. That’s the way the carceral world works. To refuse this narrative for one of violent resistance—or any resistance that can be modeled by the revolutionary ways Black women and queer folks fight back against the state—is insanity.

  Revolution is easy to speak, but when someone like Gaines comes along and commits to it, when it comes time to actually put McKay’s words into action, to sacrifice, to consistently choose to hold ourselves accountable to our beliefs, we often run away. When Assata Shakur and Joy James and Mariame Kaba and the numerous Black women and gender-nonconforming people who have never experienced or wanted popular recognition remind us that this carceral state cannot be reformed, only abolished, the popular stories that systematically exclude their perspectives beckon us away. And in so turning away, we leave our future, our children, our childhoods behind. We give them none of the honor they deserve, just like we do for all the other ancestors who made us who we are.

  Black life under the carceral state may be taken at any time by “reasonable” police error, or by lead contamination consolidating specifically in Black neighborhoods, or by doctors who don’t acknowledge Black patients’ claims as legitimate, or by food deserts sprouting in Black communities, or by a callously managed global health crisis that primarily affects the poorest and those structurally denied health care, or by innumerable other ways Black people’s health outcomes are specifically diminished. And the gaps between these outcomes and white people’s have never closed in any significant way, despite liberal progress narratives that often celebrate the increased visibility of our traumas.43

  But when Korryn spoke of “living on forever,” she offered another way to do Black life. It would force us to acknowledge all the ways we are already constantly dying when we’d rather lean on avoidance. It might even actually spur the most material versions of these deaths. But the only life where Black people can ever be truly whole must be found in refusing carceral thinking, behaviors, and institutions. I never want to lose that understanding again. I never want to lose who I was before I subscribed to an abolitionist framework again. I never want to lose, again, the words that struck me during that celebration of our ancestors:

  What though before us lies the open grave?

  Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack

  Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A PRAYER FOR COURAGE

  Hari-Gaura,

  I think what’s at the core of my anxiety is that I’m afraid of the suddenness of death. I left you behind in a selfish attempt to survive the state’s rampage, but the threat never ceases for too long. Cancer here. A trigger-happy cop there. A deadly contagion. I know that death is inevitable, but that’s no more than a small hurdle in the face of my urge to run from it. I keep running further and further away from you, but the fear of meeting your same fate only subsides briefly—if that. And when it comes back, it comes roaring with a vengeance. Carceral dissonance is nothing more than a cycle of panic, centered upon attempts to minimize the terror of death’s constant specter in a carceral state.

  Today is one of those days when the anxiety blankets everything and the idea of death won’t stop haunting me. I’m FaceTiming one of my closest friends, Jahvaris, while trying to walk my dog, who still doesn’t want to be walked. I still hate FaceTime, but since it isn’t healthy to meet in person now, it’s the only way we can see each other. I think he notices my morbid preoccupations. I wish he’d notice you, too—maybe that would make it easier for me to do the same—but he just looks on through the screen in concern as I take another pull of the cigarette I bummed a moment ago. I chuckle as his scruffy, worried face becomes what happens when you push in the nose of a teddy bear.

  “You have to imagine—all substances were completely off the table growing up,” I tell him, a plume of smoke and burning tar masking my face, “so even just seeing my sister smoking a cigarette felt like the world had been turned upside down.”

  I’m telling Jahvaris the story of that moment during the summer when you were about ten and stayed with our sister Bhakti for a few weeks. It’s the only way I can think to explain my ambivalent relationship with smoking after Jahvaris encouraged me to give it up. It’s a story about why I always bum and never buy. Why I always quit and come back. Why I keep repeating patterns of avoidance that do nothing to stave off mortality and in fact invite death to return with a vengeance—in this particular instance by destroying my lungs.

  Bhakti had just gotten married to her second husband, and I haven’t seen her so giddy since—although I don’t see her as much as I’d like, her being a police officer in Chicago and all. Or was that perceived giddiness just an expression of her own anxieties about another marriage that would prove not to last? Funny how easily only grasping the edges of a memory can transform it into something other than what it originally was.

  I remember the scene as more Hitchcockian than you probably experienced it. Bhakti had again without question taken you with her to pick up something you’d asked for from the convenience store. She’s still one of the most openhanded people I know, comparable only to our oldest sister, Rani, despite our profound disagreements over what her job allows her to give, over how much space policing provides the fingers to bloom as any hand unfurls. It was pitch black, pouring rain. In my memory, the night was filled with dark figures with long trench coats and top hats, a frighteningly gritty crime occurring right around every corner.

  I explain to Jahvaris how you stayed in the car as Bhakti walked inside the store, and after a few minutes, she stepped back out with someone it seemed like she knew. How you couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but you saw our second-eldest sister’s friend offer her a cigarette, and you saw her take it. How your heart stopped. I don’t think you judged her at all, but Mata had never missed a chance to warn about how deadly cigarettes were, and so it would make sense if you were sure Bhakti would someday pay with her life. It would make sense if that was why you began to cry.

  “That sounds ridiculous now,” I tell Jahvaris, still laughing and taking another drag of the Newport. I consider tossing it into a puddle of sandy water on the side of the road but don’t. I briefly wonder how sand made it this far away from the beach and into the middle of Brooklyn. Since Mata’s diagnosis, I had been drinking more, smoking more, and pulling away from Timothy more because I didn’t want to face his concern over my increasing turn to substances, only to find myself now facing Jahvaris, and the coronavirus pandemic had exacerbated it all.

  “I mean, it was
only a cigarette, but I was sobbing. I don’t even think she smoked regularly or anything,” I say with a hollow laugh. “As I got older I realized, it’s only a cigarette,” I continue, taking another drag. “We’re all going to die anyway.”

  A few weeks after I found out about Mata’s cancer, Timothy was invited to do a poetry reading at the Brooklyn Museum. There were a few hours between the end of the workday and the show, so I asked Jahvaris to get a drink with me to kill the time. A few drinks, if I’m being honest. I’m not always. Once Jahvaris and I arrived at the museum, I tried to hide my tipsiness from Timothy because he was starting to believe I had a drinking problem, and I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire. He greeted me with a kiss, and I held my gasoline breath for fear of exploding.

  After Mata’s diagnosis, everything already felt like a hand about to strike a match in a gaseous place, and COVID-19 was the flame. Every second feels like it could be the one in which I lose everything, and drinking and smoking my worries away often seems more plausible than preparing. Embracing the slow death often seems more realistic than facing any other, so I hide behind numbing drugs and nicotine words that offered relief in the moment, without concerning myself with when the dying comes roaring back.

  Jahvaris has always wanted the best for his friends. “I just want you to be happy,” he repeats so often that the phrase has become a running joke in our circle. Right now, the drinking and smoking are making me happy. If there is anyone who would understand my need to escape, I thought, it would be Jahvaris. His brother Trayvon Martin’s murder at the hands of a neighborhood watchman in 2012 had become a rallying cry for an entire Black liberation movement, so he must have been struggling to avoid the imminent shadow of death now, too.