In temperament, I am more of my father’s son than my mother’s. When I was 16, I was in a car being driven by two of my white friends when we were pulled over on I-270 in Columbus. We were speeding, tearing down the highway at least 15 miles over the speed limit. When the police officer arrived at the passenger window, where I was sitting, I was laughing loud, as my mother would, at a joke a friend in the backseat told to loosen the mood. None of us had ever been in a car that was pulled over before, and joking seemed like the right thing to calm us. The officer snapped at me. Asked, of course, if I thought anything was funny. Demanded to know what I was so excited about. This, before even addressing the white driver for his infraction. High school was the first time in my life that I had white friends I considered close to me. All of my black friends growing up were loud, sometimes quick to emotion. Among ourselves, among our neighborhoods, it all felt like it was the same volume. A low, and safe hum. Kept within, away from those who may wish to dull it.
Through high school and my playing time in college, my scouting reports for soccer all read the same. The highlights: speed, agility, instincts. The lowlights: balance, focus, work ethic. Toward the end, all of them that I recall had reads on my personality that felt odd. Words like “passionate” and “fired up” and “emotive” would hang in the closing sentences as compliments, I imagine, but uneven ones, given my play. I played sports as I imagine my father would have: all business, the occasional burst of outward emotion, but nothing startling. My freshman year of college, I played for my university as the first American-born player of color. I stepped onto the field for a preseason match, in a sea of white jerseys, white faces, white coaches, white fans. I got a yellow card for clapping in slight frustration, in the direction of the sky, after I allowed a ball to roll out of bounds.
What I am told most often now is that I am kind. I am told this more by white people than anyone else, but I am told it often by everyone. That my kindness is a blessing. People who don’t know me particularly well talk about how they can see a kindness in my eyes, or feel a kindness that I have deep within. I generally laugh, shrug uncomfortably, and give a small thanks. I know, particularly when it is by people who aren’t familiar with me, that what they are actually complimenting is an absence of that which they perceived, perhaps expected.
I often joke about how I don’t wear anger well. To a very real extent, this is true. I didn’t see anger translated well growing up, so it isn’t an emotion that I have worked through enough times to push outside of myself. Another element of that is rooted in the distance between my anger and the trouble it might cause me if taken in by the wrong audience. I read about a black man in the Columbus suburbs not far from where I went to college. His neighbor called the police on him because he heard the black man raising his voice to a level that the neighbor wasn’t used to hearing. He feared that something dangerous was happening in the house.
When the police arrived, it turned out the man was just singing. Practicing for his church choir. The stakes are high and the capacity for mercy is not. When I yell, I feel an immediate sense of guilt afterwards. Shame, sometimes fear. People aren’t used to my voice pushing above a joyful monotone. In the rare times I am confronted with anger spilling out, I wish to collect it quickly, before it grows all over everyone in the room. Before I become just angry and nothing else.
What I’m saying is that I’ve been thinking a lot about black anger lately, and what we do and don’t do with it. The relief that people have when a protest centering on black lives aligns with their ideas of peace. The relief that I have when there are no pictures of police pushing protesters to the ground. I am interested in what we afford each other, in terms of the emotions that can sit on our skin, depending on what that skin might look like. This makes me ask the question of who benefits from this, our eternal façade of kindness? Is the true work of kindness owed to ourselves, and our sanity?
This is not saying that I, personally, am waiting in a rage at all times. I’d like to think that people are largely correct: on any given day, I imagine myself a kind person. Or, at least, a person who is trying. One who reaches for the well of empathy before all others, even if I come up empty at the end. What possibilities would black people be allowed if their anger, and all of the ways it manifested itself, could be seen as a part of the human spectrum. The way we cut a wide lane for riots after sports games, for punk rock and metal bands fronted by white anarchists who wish to overthrow all unjust modes of government. Our fights aren’t going to be equal in the world, but if we are pushing our backs against the same barriers of injustice, I would like my anger to live in the world as your anger does. Reasonably, with expectations that it doesn’t make me who I am. It is a task, some days. To think about your consistent kindness as, instead, a product of restraint.
Black women, sitting at the intersection of race and gender, experience this more than I do, more than their male counterparts. Tabbed as angry, and only angry. I think, then, of my mother. How she always made sure to laugh louder than anyone in the room. How in every picture, she smiled with all of her teeth. How in the markets by our house, she would call everyone by their first names. Warmly touch them on their shoulders and ask about their families. How, even then, on a day where she was exhausted, I remember walking into the store with her. She was not smiling, but kind to the white man behind the register, offering short but polite responses to his questions. When handing her back change, he looked at my mother and said, “Everything okay? You just seem so mad today.”
And I can’t be sure, but I think I remember a smile, forcing its way along the edges of her mouth.
In The Summer Of 1997, Everyone Took To The Streets In Shiny Suits
This is the one where the mother dies.
I feel drawn to apology, though I imagine you must have known it was coming. Here, perhaps I should tell you that she died in summer. If I say that I was at least outside rather than cocooned by cold, pressing my grief-slick face to a window, perhaps the image is more bearable. The thing about dying unexpectedly is that it certainly saves you the heartbreak of watching your loved ones fuss over you. I kissed my mother on a June night in 1997, and when I woke up, she was gone. That was it. I think sometimes it was better that way, to have our last moment be a routine farewell. Her throat simply closed in the middle of the night, a reaction to medication she was taking to fight against her bipolar disorder. Sometimes it isn’t what we’re battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself. Days before she died, she got to watch my brother, her oldest son, graduate from college. It seemed fitting, to go out on the heels of a celebration.
A few months before we buried my mother, a casket was carried through Brooklyn, the Notorious B.I.G.’s body inside, and here is a myth I like to imagine about that day: a line of rappers watching his funeral with their hands out, trading in their street-honed rhymes and still-cocked guns for a shiny jumpsuit, perhaps a pile of chains. A stack of money with the promise of more to come. And no rapper was ever killed again, and every hood danced in the streets for two whole decades, every song dipped in a sweet samples that our mothers learned from their mothers. It’s a lie, of course. But 1997 was, for me, a year of far-off myths that I wanted to come to life. I dreamed myself into an emotional survival that I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to live in my waking hours.
To have lost a beloved rapper first was a sad but gentle blessing. I was 13 years old and familiar enough with death to have felt its impact, but the loss of Biggie felt different, even more than the loss of Tupac just a few months earlier. If you happened to be alive in the Midwest in the mid-’90s, equidistant from each coast, you got to enjoy mainstream rap at its sharpest and most complete rise, without the biases that engulfed the coasts at the time. After the Notorious B.I.G. was murdered in March of 1997, it felt like the ride was over. It briefly felt like perhaps the peak had been reached, and then came the blood and the funerals, and now the whole genre was on timeout, tearing itself apart at the seams. I r
emember a brief moment where my brothers and I had to become secretive about our rap intake, our parents growing concerned about the violence of it all. It felt a little heavier to rap along to songs about guns and death. My mother began to eavesdrop on the music I was taking in, cutting eyes at anything with a black and white striped “PARENTAL ADVISORY” sticker on it. I was her youngest child and it was still the spring. She did not yet know that she would be gone.
“Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,” the Diana Ross-sampled hit from the Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous album Life After Death, was released as a single two days after my mother’s funeral. It was my first time hearing it on the radio. Not just a single radio, but every radio. It spilled out of cars, onto basketball courts, people danced to it in parking lots after the sun set. The song sampled “I’m Coming Out,” an anthemic 1980s disco-soul hit that arrived before I was born but existed in familiar homes in the years after, playing in the hood, or at the cookout, or anywhere you could find space for black people to dance. “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” was the first time I considered the true work of the sample: to call us all back to something familiar, in hopes that we might ignore all that is falling apart outside. The music video for the song came out shortly after the single. I watched it premiere on BET one day on a break from summer revelry. The visuals are a celebration. Ma$e and Puff Daddy dancing, cloaked in shiny suits, and even with the ghost of Biggie hovering thick over the song, they laughed, swayed arm in arm, levitated underneath the face of their dead friend.
With that, a new gate opened. The so-called “shiny suit era.” The commercialization of hip-hop, taken to an extreme. The party that never stopped. Puff Daddy on every single, blinding jewelry in every video, songs drowning and shameless soul and pop samples covering the top of the charts, gold albums for any MC who stepped in the booth. It began with Puff Daddy and Bad Boy Records, of course, but like all successful trends, it spread. It would be a lie to say that all of the music that was produced during this period was good. The results weren’t always ideal; MCs like Mic Geronimo and Nas, who weren’t organically in the shiny suit lane, attempted to venture in and found themselves clumsy and out of place. Still, rap was at its most commercially accessible after a brief and dark holding period, and I remember being thankful. Drinking in every bit of excess from a small TV screen in Ohio, feeling like both rap and my life hadn’t managed to change much at all, despite the hole left in the genre, despite the hole left in my childhood home.
At its inception, what made punk rock great in the face of incredible odds was the general idea that anyone could do it. It wasn’t about making great music, it was about getting free. This isn’t just something that Puff Daddy understood. Big Pun understood it while dancing in the “Still Not A Player” video. Missy Elliott understood it while spending the late ’90s giving us new ways to see, hear, and feel. Big Tymers understood it when they realized that they had no business rapping, but did it anyway. Nelly understood it while becoming a Midwest success story, an MC who still sounds exactly like where he’s from and doesn’t apologize for it. Cam’ron understood it in 2003 while freestyling on Rap City, counting hundreds of dollars.
This, too, is a response to grief. Covering yourself in the spoils of your survival and making music that sent people dancing in the streets again. What I took away from 1997 wasn’t how much I’d lost, though that burden was mighty. I remembered the songs my mother loved once, repurposed for my own pleasures, and this made it feel like she had never left. The shiny suit era, for all of its detractors, was a gift in that summer and beyond. A small light out of the loneliness that had found its way to me.
In New Orleans, the people dance on caskets. They cut the body loose while the funeral rolls slow down a street. Onlookers join in and celebrate the life of the deceased, whether they know them or not. The band plays loud and long into the hot night, and the line of dancing people grows and grows. I watched this once when I was young, in 2002, a few years after my mother’s passing, when I’d learned to move on. People, covered in sweat, both crying and yelling out in joy. Strangers hugging each other, and singing along to whatever tune the band saw fit to carry us home with. It made me reconsider the true purpose of a funeral. To see it, instead, as something that makes death memorable for those still living, something less fearful to sit in. A way to show the dead that we’ll be all right, that we can go on without them just fine.
After Katrina, when I came back to the city for the first time in a couple of years, there were bodies floating on the water. People were searching for their loved ones. After a couple more days, caskets, unearthed by the flood’s ferocity, began floating through the streets. It was haunting, the unburied floating next to the once-buried, both home and far from home, all at once. On my last day there, a man on some higher ground took out his horn and began to play while a few caskets, some turned sideways and empty, floated below us. A few people, weary and sad, started to clap slowly along, on beat. We make our own music to celebrate our dead where we must.
I’m saying that I wish I knew what joys could be unlocked by tragedy before my mother died, but I’m thankful to have learned it shortly after she was gone. No brass band played for her as she was taken into the cemetery, no dance spilled out in her name. But in the summer of 1997, I learned what it is to feel someone everywhere. On the radio, every time I heard “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,” I would think of how it might just have been the one rap song that my mother would have given allowance to. How she might have smiled and swayed at the familiarity of Diana Ross for long enough to ignore the lyrics. The gloss and shine of the era wasn’t just for the suits and the sound. It was all a distraction. A small and delightful manipulation. The only way that rap could have survived after being declared dead under a hail of bullets. It was all a trick to pull our eyes away, and it did, for me. And, look, I am not saying that the mass commercialization of rap music saved the genre or saved lives. It had vast drawbacks, some of them still being felt today. Shifts in production and marketing that started to water down the genre then haven’t really stopped, leading to a current-day market where there are, quite literally, too many rappers. But I wouldn’t take it back. It was what I needed in the moment, and still what I need now. The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over. I will take healing in whatever form I can, and I heard my mother’s voice singing underneath that music. I heard her slowly making her way back home.
The thing that I can’t promise is that heaven exists. I like to hope that it does, despite growing less and less connected to an idea of a higher power with each year. My mother died without knowing that death was coming for her, and I like to imagine her somewhere comfortable, a place where she can make peace with that. Selfishly, and more than anything else, I’d like to see her again, whatever seeing in the afterlife might look like. I’d love to sit across from her and hear her laugh at something, anything. I’d like to tell her about the summer of 1997 while someone sits behind us and plays a horn, slow and beautiful. I’d like to tell her about how I went outside for the first time two days after we covered her casket in dirt and heard the notes to a song she could sing along to. I’d like to tell her that I played basketball late into the night that summer, with the words to that song fresh on my tongue. That the radio played rap again, even in the suburbs that I hated. I’d like to tell her that I did not cry at the funeral, but I didn’t dance either. Not until weeks later, when I finally let go and flailed my limbs to the radio behind a closed bedroom door, crying and singing, feeling myself get closer and closer to freedom with every unhinged movement. You should’ve seen me, I’d tell her in our new and clean heaven. You should’ve seen me.
I did, she’d say. I always did.
Nina Simone Was Very Black
In the song “Pirate Jenny,” originally from 1928’s The Threepenny Opera, a maid named Jenny, who works at a cheap hotel in London, plays out a fantasy in which she gets
revenge on the townspeople who have treated her so poorly. A pirate ship—with 50 cannons, eight black sails, and a skull on its masthead—rolls into the harbor and fires on the city, destroying every building except the hotel. The pirates walk ashore, into the ruins of the city, and put all of the townspeople in chains. Upon presenting all of the chained townspeople to Jenny, she orders the pirates to kill them, before sailing away with the pirates to new land.
I first heard “Pirate Jenny” sung by Nina Simone when I was 12 years old. The record, from 1964’s Nina Simone in Concert, spun in the living room of my childhood home while I played on the floor. In Nina’s version, Jenny works at a flophouse in South Carolina. She watches the pirate ship grow closer, larger, out of her window. For years, this was the only version I knew. In the world Nina Simone builds around the song, the already harrowing tale takes on a new, more terrifying life. In hearing it for the first time, with the active imagination that comes with childhood, I could see the black ship through the walls. I could hear the chains locked around the arms and legs of the townspeople. I could hear their cries for mercy before death. I could see Jenny, standing tall on the black ship as it drifted away, sails raised high.
I can only imagine that I still find Simone’s version of the song to be so jarring because Nina Simone knew well that black people have a different relationship with boats, with chains, with the South, with freedom and the haunting that comes with not having it. “Pirate Jenny” was my introduction to Nina Simone, and it has informed how I have chased after her work ever since. Nina Simone opens her mouth and an entire history is built before us, where there is nowhere for anyone to hide from the truth as she has lived it. I view her now much like I did as a child, when I picked up the record cover to see the woman behind the voice. Nina Simone, of dark skin and a nose much like my own, never afraid.
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us Page 16