They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  I have been thinking a lot lately about how black people have to hold on to our stories, or tell them for ourselves. I have been thinking about how I learned to write, to tell the stories I have, largely at the feet of black women who then became ghosts—ghosts by death, or ghosts by erasure of their living contributions, and sometimes both. I think of Nina Simone’s legacy, and I see the legacy of so many black women I know, who have had their work reduced by all of the hands that are not their own. Today, movements are stolen and repackaged with faces America finds more palatable. Hashtags and viral memes are created by black girls and women who do not profit from their enduring popularity: Peaches Monroee, the originator of “on fleek,” and April Reign, who created #OscarsSoWhite, have had to fight for the minimal credit they’ve received. Meanwhile, the “Damn Daniel” kid ends up on Ellen after a week. I have always held the legacy of Nina Simone close, because I know how easily it could be taken from me and served back to America as something more pleasing.

  It is easy to be black and non-confrontational if nothing is on fire, and so it has never been easy to be black and non-confrontational. The silence may reward you briefly, but it always comes at the risk of something greater: your safety, your family, how the world sets its eyes upon you and everyone you love. When you look like Nina Simone looked in the 1960s—dark, with an Afro piled high on your head—the confrontation will find you. It will inform your existence and the way you move through the world. Nina Simone sang songs of protest even when she wasn’t singing songs of protest. Every song was a plea to be seen through that which was burning around her. I say “burning,” and mean that Nina Simone wrote songs while churches were being blown from their foundations. I mean that I listened to her sing her version of “Baltimore” in a summer when the internet argued about the value of property and the value of a man’s spine, the song arriving just in time for a new, burning generation. “Ain’t it hard just to live. Just to live.”

  Zoe Saldana is, in my opinion, a fine actress. The kind of actress who I will not rush out to see, but if I am at a movie and she is in it, I don’t feel as though her performance is distracting. When I saw the trailer for Nina, the Nina Simone biopic that was released in 2016 before, I shared a feeling of disappointment with many others. It was more jarring for some, myself included, because it seemed, for a time, that this idea had been scrapped. The initial announcement of the film’s concept, in 2012, was not well received, and Nina Simone’s family did not give the film their blessing. To have the trailer arrive at all seemed to be a small injustice, one that visibly upset the Simone estate. The trailer portrays Simone, of course, as a mess, during a period when her life was at its most out of control, needing to be pulled back from the brink of destruction by a man. This is how it goes for women on screens in America: a loss of control driven by anger, or “complication,” followed by a man to help them regain the control that they have lost. In the trailer, we see Saldana in very obvious makeup used to darken her skin. She has a nose that looks very different from her own, and a kinky Afro wig. This is the Nina Simone that is being presented to America now: clichéd and predictably polished.

  I came of age during a time when I was constantly reminded of the darkness of my skin, the width of my nose, the size of my lips. I am similar to Nina Simone in this way. When I chose to take up jazz at 13, driven in part by Nina’s influence, my white jazz teacher told me that my lips were “too big to play trumpet.” This led to my father marching into his office with record after record of large-lipped black trumpet players, spreading them all out on his desk while I sat in a corner and watched. Louis Armstrong, Freddie Hubbard, Mercer Ellington; my father, born in the era of Nina Simone’s most confrontational living, standing over the desk of a white man who tried to tell his son that he didn’t belong.

  America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people but not the black people themselves. Everything is a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, or a march where no one was beaten or killed. This is why the telling of our own stories has always been important. The idea of black folklore as community is still how we connect to our past, locking in on our heroes and making them larger than life. This is, in many ways, how we make our own films. I tell the story of my father walking into my jazz teacher’s office in a place other than here, perhaps on a hot porch at the end of a long summer. In that version, my father storms into the room and pulls out a Miles Davis record. He puts it on, pulls a trumpet from the sky, and plays along with every note. When the record dies down, he places the trumpet on the teacher’s desk, and walks out of the room with me on his shoulders. In any version of the story I tell, he is driven to do loud things, to be the type of black that has to be loud in order to not vanish.

  When I see people talk about diversity in film rooms and writing rooms, I often see numbers and percentages, but not often very plain talk about what the repercussions are when no black people are present. Of the core team that created and brought Nina to life, there is only one black person: the film’s co-star, David Oyelowo, is one of the executive producers. Nina Simone’s blackness—not just her politics rooted in it, but her aesthetic blackness—is not a footnote. The fact that no one in the room was able to point this out serves as this film’s undoing before it is even released.

  Because Nina Simone unlocked a part of my imagination that I have always returned to, I hoped the story of Nina Simone to be one that was larger than life, because that is what she has always been for me. I wanted to hear folklore, a story of a great black woman surviving violence through more violence, driven by her incredible gifts. Here is the story I hope we tell: Nina Simone’s blackness didn’t wash off at the end of a day. Nina Simone sang “Sinnerman” for ten minutes in 1965, and the whole earth trembled. Nina Simone played the piano like she was cocking a gun. Nina Simone was dark, and beautiful, and her hair piled high to heaven. Nina Simone survived what she could of the civil rights era, and then got the fuck out. Nina Simone rode away on the troubled ocean, standing on the deck of a black ship, looking back while a whole country burned, swallowing itself.

  Blood Summer, In Three Parts.

  I. A Black Jesus On Stained Glass:

  16th Street And The Necessity Of The Black Church

  “It is only when we are within the walls of our churches that we are wholly ourselves, that we keep alive a sense of our personalities in relation to the total world in which we live.”

  —Richard Wright

  The black churches where I come from are still standing. Most of them around my old neighborhood are toying with the idea of collapse, worn down by the type of hard use that only a black church can endure. The foundations lean from years of the stomp, the clap, the holler. Paint is peeling back from the walls where a picture of black Jesus hangs, often crooked, but still smiling.

  I say this to point out that I don’t know what a church on fire looks like. I’ve never had to walk past what used to be a black church and see a pile of smoldering bricks, or smell the wood still burning from whatever is left of the old piano. I get to write about the black church without knowing a neighborhood afraid to go to one.

  Like most people, when I think of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, I think of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair. I think of the 22 injured, some who never fully recovered from their injuries. I think of Reverend John Cross Jr., who in 2001 recalled how the girls’ bodies were found, stacked on top of each other, clinging to each other for dear life.

  Though the church holds ceremonies for our dead, no one goes to church to die. I know that which makes the black church a sacred thing also makes it a thing that is feared. The African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) was founded by Rev. Richard Allen in 1816 Philadelphia, formed from black Methodist congregations along the Atlantic, eager for independence from white Methodists. Still, during America’s decades of slavery, nothing shook white slave owners more than black religious meetings. Prayer meetings and religious movements
of slaves were closely watched by slave owners; some slaves were whipped if they prayed to Jesus. After emancipation, black Americans in the South built sanctuaries of their own as a way to find refuge in a country that still didn’t feel like the Promised Land. The greatest mission of the black church, historically, has been to care for the spiritual needs of black people, with the understanding that since the inception of the American church, the spiritual needs of black people have been assigned a different tone, a different urgency. It is the difference in looking out on a land that you believe is yours, and a land that you were taken to, forced to build.

  During the civil rights era, black churches served as holy ground. A place where black organizers could meet, strategize, pray, and give thanks. The organization of black resistance has always sparked white fear, never greater than when violent bigots see a building where black people are praying to the same God that they do, and doing it with so much fire, so little worry. When a place like this also becomes a base of power for social and political movement, it becomes a target. Taylor Branch, a historian of the Civil Rights Movement, once estimated that from 1954 to 1968, there was a church bombed almost every week. During the freedom summer of 1964, it is estimated that a bombing happened every other day.

  The thing that we do on a day like this, where history arrives and reminds us of who it has buried, is that we look back and think about turning points. How a monumental day of violence changed everything that came after it. What hurts me the most is that we don’t get to do that here. We do get to mourn Addie Mae, Cynthia, Carole, and Denise in the best way that we can. We do get to reflect on what it means to live in a world where little girls can get dressed up to go to church and not make it out alive. But there isn’t the satisfaction of knowing that we live in a world where this could never happen again.

  In the mid-’90s, 59 black churches burned, mostly in the South, leading then-president Bill Clinton to sign the Church Arson Prevention Act. But churches still burned. The black church was still a target. In the summer of 2015, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and unloaded a handgun. In the days following, six black churches were damaged or destroyed. I imagine this to feel like the whip being taken to the back of any black community that dares pray to the same Jesus as its white counterparts. When the fear of death is omnipresent, when it has followed you into houses of worship for as long as you’ve known how to say a prayer, praying becomes an act of immense urgency. To be black and know how sacred this is, to see a whole history of your sanctuaries burned to the ground, or covered in the blood of your brothers and sisters, it demands you to give yourself over to a loud and eager prayer. One that echoes through an entire week, until you are called back again. The black church, where we can do this without apology, without the politeness of anxiety. Yes, be loud, and free, and rattle the walls with song. Yes, clap, and stomp, and sweat on whomever you must. Yes, leave baptized and clean. Yes, survive another week and pray for another.

  When the 16th Street Baptist Church was rebuilt and reopened in 1964, it did so with a new stained glass window. The Wales Window depicts a black Christ with his arms outstretched, his right arm pushing away injustice, his left arm extended in an offering of forgiveness. There is a replica of this window in a church near my old neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. It is said to be inspired by a verse from the gospel of Matthew: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” I think about the image often, though not of the black Christ. I think about that expectation, to hold off injustice with one arm while still consistently offering forgiveness with the other. I think about how often that is what blackness in America amounts to. Even when grandmothers are burying their children, and their children’s children. What forgiveness looks like when there are still churches being blown apart, still black bodies who arrived to pray, and ended up murdered.

  When the right arm is reaching into a fire to push away decades of injustice that still presents itself, how long before the whole body is engulfed in flames?

  I don’t know what a community does when it has no more forgiveness left, or when it knows what forgiveness in this age truly means. I don’t know how a country can forgive itself for the deaths of those four sweet girls in 1963, just as I don’t know how it can forgive itself for the consistent assault on black sanctuaries ever since. Still, as thankful as I am to come from hands that still reach out for forgiveness, I am even more thankful to come from a people who know the necessity of rebuilding. Who know what a church does, know how to drink all they can from it, and refuse to let it be torn from them.

  II. Another Rope, A Newer City:

  The Legacy Of Ida B. Wells And The Death Of Sandra Bland

  “Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.”

  —Ida B. Wells

  What makes the dead body worthwhile is that it was once living. It is true that in every instance of black death, we adorn the dead body with its accomplishments. We name the people who loved the person who was once alive. We look for the pictures where they once smiled into the sun, their camera turned on their own face. And we do this, consistently and loudly, because we have to. Because we have seen enough death to know what untruths feed on a body at rest. I say this to illustrate the point that I do not want to talk about Sandra Bland getting her dream job, or the joy that seemed to fill her life before she lost it. I want to speak plainly about the hanging of black bodies from anything in this country strong enough to hold them. It took three men to remove Ida B. Wells from a train car in 1884, and for his trouble, one of them got her teeth marks in his arm. She should have never been asked to move from her seat to the smoking car of the train and she knew this. She measured the fight and took it on.

  This is my favorite story about Ida B. Wells’ life. It’s the one that will show up first when you click on a Google doodle, and I tell it to someone every year on the day of her birth. It makes sense to tell the story every July 16th. I like to think that Ida B. Wells always knew what we see so clearly now. When black men die, they live on, almost forever. When black women vanish, they often simply vanish. When enough outlets tell you that your life is an exercise in rehearsing invisibility, when you become invisible, it just seems like you’re performing the grand closing act. I admire the work of Ida B. Wells, of course. But more than that, I admire her consistent refusal of silence. It is present in all of us, I believe. But I become most inspired when I see it in black women. I come from a long line of black women who spoke, who moved with authority—direct descendants of The School of Wells.

  It took two men to arrest Sandra Bland on the side of a road last week. One was holding her firm to the ground while she cried out in pain and, perhaps, fear. We are to believe that she assaulted one of the men, though we do not see it. We so rarely do. We are to believe that Sandra Bland was hanged three days later, though we are not clear on how her body was fixed to a metal bar, or what was used to hang it. But we are to believe that it hanged, nonetheless. We are to believe that this was due to a traffic stop. We are to believe that she was planning a bright future. We are to know that it will not exist.

  It is impossible to even mention America’s history of lynching without mentioning the woman who fought most fervently to dismantle it at a time when men were being dragged from their homes and hanged for not paying debts or being too drunk in public places. Or, in other cases, for displeasing law enforcement. There is sacrifice in that. In being a black woman who fights and is alive at any time in this country’s history is a sacrifice. It can still get you a death sentence, though the knife is fashioned differently. When Ida B. Wells couldn’t go home to Philadelphia, she fought in Chicago. When the mobs came for her in Chicago, she went to England. And like so many black women, she fought and lived and loved a family and built a home and wrote and pushed to the front when th
e front did not want her there. And she did not want to stop the fight until more black women had room of their own, until black men stopped being hanged from trees.

  But Ida B. Wells died an unceremonious death in 1931 and we are to believe that Sandra Bland hanged from a jail cell on a summer day in 2015. It was the failure of kidneys that took Wells at age 68, not any of the violent mobs, their whetted teeth shining against the moon. I write about Wells today, how much she hated the rope, the black bodies left hanging in the south. And I write about Sandra Bland today, the all-too-familiar death, the dead body that this country has come to know, the one that we write about even when we are not writing about it. And my hands can’t help but shake. I don’t know anything more about Sandra Bland than anyone else, other than the fact that I want her life to be one that is not forgotten. I want us to honor the living black women who fight and I want us to fight for the black women who no longer have the honor of living. I want us to respect the legacies that were remarkable by virtue of boundarypushing and I want us to respect the legacies that were remarkable by virtue of being alive and loved. I want these statements to not be “brave,” or “unique.” I want them to be expected.

  III. On Black Grandmothers And The Art Of Dying On Your Own Terms

  During the time in my life when my grandmother was still living and wholly present, I rarely recall her smelling of anything other than smoke. She smoked More cigarettes, a brand that currently can only be purchased online (and, I’m told, at a few corner stores in the Florida Panhandle). More cigarettes were mostly notable because they used brown paper to wrap the tobacco instead of the traditional white paper that most cigarettes use. My grandmother seemed to always have her thin brown fingers wrapped around a stick of thin brown paper, so often that on some days it seemed like the smoke was rising from her hands all on its own. If she needed to get into her purse for any reason, she often had to sift through a graveyard of emptied red and green packs of cigarettes, cursing under her breath the whole time. The smell of them, though, was distinct. I had no language for it as a child, sitting outside of her room and breathing it in while watching her watch Supermarket Sweep in the evening, or watching her watch some soap opera during the summer days when school was out. I found myself not even having language for it as it lingered on my clothing after a good hug. It wasn’t until years later, while taking a road trip through the South in my early 20s, that I could name it. In South Carolina, after a hard rain, I walked through an old plantation. And it was the smell descending from the trees after they made room for the storm. A humble attempt at forgiveness.