The Crown Ain't Worth Much

by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

  “…and anyway, we ain’t all grow up the SAME kinda poor.

  I know them country boys out here wanna act like the blunt be

  some vice for the uncivilized but don’t we all feel better settin’ fire

  to some shit when we with the homies? ain’t that how so many

  white crosses made the fields dry and empty after the black

  families moved too close to town? God knows I be of a

  complexion responsible for so many empty harvests. so many

  hungry daughters, and we still don’t know what to do with all

  this violence but put one of them big gold frames around it and

  pray it might sell a million copies or somethin’ so our mothers

  can get up out them homes with the leaning bricks, that is if they

  still breathing. don’t nobody out here know what that is. fields

  out here might just need a good song, ‘least that’s what the end of

  a good whip used to whisper into the backs of my great-great-

  great ancestors. last week, heard your moms say the dairy queen

  off route 36 was “ghetto” and I figured that meant it been

  sandwiched between a juke that only played Sam Cooke and a

  grandmotherly sort who never stops swaying when the wind calls,

  just trynna stay alive since she don’t know what’s next cuz she

  stopped believing in heaven when all her children caught them

  bullets for wearing red or blue or the night on their skin, but it

  turns out the dairy queen was just out of vanilla soft serve. the

  men out in the fields here be letting the sun cook their skin bright

  pink, chewin’ on those big cigars like “why can’t they just get

  back to the good old days when a fistfight could solve it all?” but

  trayvon and jordan and ‘em still dead, and we still only know

  the way to fill something empty be with these songs or some other

  shit loud and covered in smoke”

  DISPATCHES FROM THE BLACK BARBERSHOP, TONY’S CHAIR. 2011.

  shit ain’t nobody out here gonna care bout you bein lonely out in them suburbs like your pops ain’t still right down the street nigga like you ain’t already home but the hood ain’t what it used to be you see they got a fancy ice cream shop where the corner store was they got a sports bar where the record store was and what we supposed to do for records where we supposed to go for that old school shit how we supposed to heal see that’s why these new lil niggas only listen to the radio that’s why ain’t no love songs played at the block party no more that’s why niggas fight all summer long swear every time a black boy throw a punch the city be puttin up another strip mall where we used to dance light-skinned jeff got knocked out on east main by a sucker punch that broke up the 4th of july cookout in front of brenda’s hair shop and when he woke up it was a whole foods see that’s why you sittin up here talkin bout you lonely while my rent goin up every month but I still got my name on the door I ain’t listenin to that new rap them boys bring in here shit sound too wild for me I gotta get behind your ear real quick yeah my son be driving around in my car listenin to that shit got the whole car shaking got the whole hood shaking got bricks falling right out of buildings and turning to dust got whole houses collapsing swear the church was still there three Sundays ago a nigga ain’t prayed to god in three weeks my girl says I got to get right says ain’t none of us too far off from heaven nigga god don’t care if you lonely ain’t nobody more lonely than god you know god ain’t got no friends all god got is questions all god got is one million hands lookin for grace ain’t nothing more lonely than watchin everything you built collapse ain’t nothing more lonely than watching a whole block swallowed by smoke nigga ain’t nothing more lonely than having the power to put out a fire and not making it rain

  AT THE HOUSE PARTY WHERE WE FOUND OUT WHITNEY HOUSTON WAS DEAD

  I am tucked in the corner,

  underneath a choir of arching floorboards

  wailing for sympathy from about four dozen relentless feet,

  and I am telling Jasmine that there is like,

  ONE song that everyone at this party knows all of the words to.

  I tell her that we were all born of the 80s.

  All born of parents who watched the revolution

  shove itself into a too small suit at the turn of a decade that

  left them in homes with welcome mats that read:

  “Your hearts are the lost luggage at the airport of the next generation.”

  I tell her because of this

  we have earned one song we all know the words to,

  in the same way we have earned this breeze,

  sitting on top of our skin tonight and staying,

  the way any good apology does

  while we scroll through our iPods shouting out 80s pop songs

  we both kind of love like a secret,

  and we keep scrolling right up until

  someone runs into this room that is over capacity

  by at least nine righteous, glowing bodies

  and tells us that Whitney Houston woke up dead

  in Los Angeles two hours ago.

  Our friend Amber is like five PBRs deep,

  and drunk enough to yell at her boyfriend

  for the Whitney Houston-less iPod he has been using

  to DJ this party.

  We, the war generation.

  The only way we know how to bury our dead

  is with blood, or sweat, or sex

  or anything pouring from wet skin

  to signify we were here, and the wooden floor

  of a basement belonging to an old house on Neil Avenue

  makes as good a burial ground as any,

  says the small boom box now playing DJ

  in the center of this room,

  and the Whitney CD inside,

  pouring out of the speakers just loudly enough

  to let everyone in this room

  get a small taste of Whitney alive and young,

  and telling us exactly how to squeeze exactly what we are owed

  out of this Saturday night

  when I don’t understand where love lives

  in the way I will understand where love lives in coming months,

  but I understand there is a saxophone solo

  at about 3 minutes and 30 seconds

  into the song “How Will I Know”,

  and I’m pretty sure love has a vacation home there,

  and we are all invited tonight when steam rises off of these bodies

  like a sacrifice and the first time I see Jasmine cry

  is when we are watching all of our friends

  convert grief into perspiration. I tell her that I see our reflection

  in the pools of sweat, and we look like two flowers

  that have never stopped opening, I say,

  We be bloomed so wide by the end of this night

  won’t nothing in this city be able to hold us

  later, we press our backs into the roof of a house that even at 4am

  sways with us like a metronome of well-timed memorial. The sky

  is unchained, and careless, and wrapped around us both

  like our long discarded childhoods.

  I look up and ask myself again why the stars have so long tolerated

  the audacity of clouds. I laugh loudly and tell Jasmine that

  it is

  impossible for a human being to wake up dead.

  She is already asleep.

  THE GHOST OF THE AUTHOR’S MOTHER HAS A CONVERSATION WITH HIS FIANCEE ABOUT HIGHWAYS

  …and down south, honey. When the side of the road began to swell with dead and dying things, that’s when us black children knew it was summer. Daddy didn’t keep clocks in the house. Ain’t no use when the sky round those parts always had some flames runnin’ to horizon, lookin’ like the sun was always out. back when I
was a little girl, I swear, them white folk down south would do anything to stop another dark thing from touching the land, even the nighttime. We ain’t have streetlights, or some grandmotherly voice riding through the fields on horseback tellin’ us when to come inside. What we had was the stomach of a deer, split open on route 59. What we had was flies resting on the exposed insides of animals with their tongues touching the pavement. What we had was the smell of gunpowder and the promise of more to come, and, child, that’ll get you home before the old folks would break out the moonshine and celebrate another day they didn’t have to pull the body of someone they loved from the river. I say “river” because I want you to always be able to look at the trees without crying. When we moved east, I learned how a night sky can cup a black girl in its hands and ask for forgiveness. My daddy sold the pistol he kept in the sock drawer and took me to the park. Those days, I used to ask him what he feared, and he always said “the bottom of a good glass.” And then he stopped answering. And then he stopped coming home altogether.

  Something about the first day of a season, honey. Something always gotta sacrifice its blood. Everything that has its time must be lifted from the earth. My boys don’t bother with seasons anymore. My sons went to sleep in the spring once and woke up to a motherless summer. All they know now is that it always be colder than it should be. I wish I could fix this for you. I’m sorry none of my children wear suits anymore. I wish ties didn’t remind my boys of shovels, and dirt, and an empty living room. They all used to look so nice in ties. I’m sorry that you may come home one day to the smell of rotting meat, every calendar you own torn off the walls, burning in a trashcan.

  And it will be the end of spring.

  And you will know.

  MY WIFE SAYS THAT IF YOU LIVE 20 YEARS

  Without having to go to a funeral, you are really lucky. The girl on TV is no older than I was when everyone in my quivering home learned to hustle one more ghost into our already overflowing pockets & even though it is not real, she is being swallowed by a carnivorous grief that is howling & escaping through the screen on all fours, pacing around at our feet & begging us to move. Pissing on the blanket sewed by a grandmother’s hands. Hands that were once a salve for every wound, hands that once clapped along with the good gospel in a church shack & once cupped a child’s crying face & once broke bread & then one day just broke. Outside, another sky undresses itself to its blood-red flesh & what kind of world is this to bring a child into anyway? The names we carry have been carved into so much stone clutching the ground in Ohio it is impossible to consider how many years it would take to lift them out and pass them on to anyone as small as the crumbs from a good meal. but who are we to deny our families the delivery of new blood? New hands to assist with the burial and becoming of the earth that chews at the edges of whatever years our elders have left & maybe even us in our youth even though we moved out the hood & gunshots don’t echo over the river out here & boys don’t leave the barren fields & go to war just so they can fall asleep with full stomachs. It is somehow easy to forget that there are so many ways to die while black & not all of them involve being made hollow while the world watches & isn’t that a funny thing? How there is all this danger I ignore & make plans for 2016 & beyond

  & beyond & our fathers still want grandchildren in spite of all this & I am afraid that if I do not raise children to carry the heft of me when I die, I will be only bones after my soul exits to spare all of you such heavy lifting & how awful would that be & who would speak of me around a drunk & buzzing table when the card game runs dry? on the elevator, when the woman eyes how I lock fingers with my wife, she leans in close & tells us she can tell we’re newlyweds & we smile & she asks how many children we’re going to have & I look past her face & into the metal wall where my fading reflection is whispering enough to carry endless caskets through the sinking mud.

  XII

  No one

  wants to be the person

  who drives slow past a flower shop

  on valentine’s day

  while their lover sleeps

  even if I know the flower petals

  will fold in on themselves

  and turn to rust

  before they expand

  into the sun

  beautiful things die

  every day and we

  still stare while they

  are living or set them

  in the middle of a

  wooden table passed

  down from a wilting

  grandmother who only

  remembers your face

  on tuesdays

  it makes sense to

  declare love with

  something that makes no promises

  about how long it will stay living

  something that we know

  will be dead in a week

  I tell myself that

  while gently pressing my

  fingers into the dark

  leather of another pair of sneakers

  while all of the other men

  scramble for chocolate

  I try on another beautiful thing that

  may live to see me

  forgiven for walking

  through the door

  holding it close to

  my chest

  nothing else in my hands

  I understand that I should

  always come

  bearing flowers

  it is good to hold

  a slow funeral

  in your palms

  it is good to know

  when something

  will leave

  MY WIFE SAYS THAT EVERYONE OUR AGE RIGHT NOW IS LISTENING

  To NPR & I suspect this is why we had to spend so much money

  on alcohol for the wedding

  I mean don’t get me wrong

  on a depleted highway in Ohio licked clean

  of light we all do what we have to do to survive but I don’t

  think anyone has ever unzipped a Saturday night in a

  buzzing city by getting low to

  A Prairie Home Companion

  then again it’s not like I know how to party really

  I told myself I could never drink alcohol when I was 18 after

  we dared Chris to drink seven beers in an alley &

  he tumbled his limbs into a tameless dance on College Avenue

  before stumbling into an oncoming #2 bus & ever since

  that afternoon he only listens to talk radio &

  so the least I can do is buy you this beer &

  by “you” I mean anyone who can still feel things below their

  waist in a bar with an endless jukebox

  it is so easy to leap into someone else’s skin

  & wear it when the bass floods a room & so

  why is everyone I love so immovable

  maybe we should try and invent new dances because

  I can’t do any of the ones I see on TV anymore I think

  my dance will be mostly arms

  & the rest of me will look like it is sinking or

  fighting against some other violent thing

  that will inevitably swallow me whole

  another burning city or

  another sleepless night in America

  & maybe this dance will catch on & then

  no one will even notice how all of this joyous screaming bends

  itself into tears.

  THE GHOST OF THE AUTHOR’S MOTHER TEACHES HIS WIFE HOW TO COOK FRIED CHICKEN

  …And child, when you take skin swollen and damp from the river and the blood, and you throw it in the heat, everything pops. You gotta cover your eyes, baby. Hold them children close. My mama’s mama said that’s how God made the south. Said there was nothing but grass and then, one day, all this wet black skin. Said it popped so loud when they set them down in the blazing stomach of the new world, them plantation fields split clean open and then there was cotton. And then idle hands for the picking, and then war, and after th
at, we all woke up with our skin covered in hot grease, birds following us everywhere and so at least we was eating good.

  Wasn’t nothing to do back then but tear into the flesh of something you own. Swallow something you raised before the rest of the world took hold of it. Now, child, it don’t matter how dark the body is. That ain’t how you tell when something is done. When it’s limp and floating, you gotta take something sharp to the heart of it. It’s ready to be taken if it ain’t got no more blood to give. That’s how them white boys from Birmingham knew they done got granddaddy good. Left him in the dirt road we walked to school, flesh burned from the cross and bloated from the drowning.

  That’s when mama moved us to where the black men ain’t know the first thing ‘bout cooking. ‘bout giving themselves over for a meal. I been in kitchens my whole life, girl. You drop enough things into a burning place, you learn all kinda new prayers. Learn just how to cover them eyes. When to get them babies away from the heat.

  My youngest boy don’t know no better. He ain’t never seen the broken remains of a man melting into the asphalt so he be reaching his hands too far into the flames. Used to bring me food still dripping in oil. Soaked through the plate. Got buried with the scent of it still dancing on my fingertips. Thought if I just swallowed enough of my child’s food, the world would keep him safe. If I could take this full belly into heaven might hold me over ‘til I could touch his face again. ‘Til he loved another woman enough to cook for her. ‘Til another woman loved him enough to rip every stove out of the wall.

  MY WIFE SAYS THAT THERE ARE SO MANY SONGS

  That aren’t about what we thought they were when we were kids. There hasn’t been anything romantic written since the 70s. All songs are about how much of someone we can take into ourselves until we both become dust. It is evening once more. By the time we go to sleep there will be another city to call our own. Another home to fold us into its cracked hands. I pick branches off of my mother’s grave again. I don’t know what will stretch itself over the stone after I have left it to its own growing. Everyone tells me that the Third Eye Blind song isn’t about what I thought it was about in 1997 when we covered the head of the cold body. When the men carried the coffin and buried it here. I walked the streets of a borrowed city with headphones and stopped speaking. Only allowed my mouth to shape itself around the words of this dirge that spilled out of pop radio, out of college house parties. And tonight, as the state where we fell in love becomes another ghost between us, playing a mixtape I made, it leaps out the speakers. I sing along to the line I’m smiling, she’s living; she’s golden and then rewind it.