by Casey Gerald
Next, I am in a bar. A friend I know in real life is there. He orders a drink, though in real life he does not drink. I pull up a barstool next to him, order the same drink he ordered, listen to the bartender tell me about the drink. I feel eyes on me. I look in the far right corner of the bar and see a woman, I do not know her, watching me. All of a sudden, I’m back at the house. It is night.
Everything is fine at the house, quiet. Then a car crashes through the wall. I run.
Next, I am jogging in the middle of a neighborhood street on a cloudy afternoon. I am aware, in the dream, that I do not jog in real life. I am aware that the shoes I have on are not good for jogging. Another boy, a stranger, who does have good running shoes, jogs up beside me, passes me, continues to run in front of me, down the middle of the street. A woman—the woman from the bar, it seems—approaches him, upset. She’s asking him questions that sound something like Why are you so kind now? Who are you hanging with? He keeps jogging. The woman vanishes. Soon, he is gone, too.
I approach an intersection: a four-lane Main Street, with shops on each side, two lanes going each way, a median with grass and small flowering shrubs. Suddenly, it is dusk.
I jog across the two lanes nearest me, then across the median. It is night again. Just as I’m about to cross the other two lanes, a car makes a U-turn in front of me. The car that crashed through the house? I don’t know. I hear the engine vroom behind me. I feel the front of the car crash into my legs, launch me into the air, over the back of the car. I land in the middle of the street.
I can’t move one of my legs. I am not paralyzed, just stuck on my butt in the middle of the street, trying to drag myself to the sidewalk, trying to crawl away because I know the car is coming back. I cannot tell if I am crying or saying whoa or oooh.
A woman, a girl, rushes over from her car, trying to help me. Are you okay? she asks. Somebody’s trying to kill me. I’m dragging myself through the street, trying to get away from her, looking for the car, yelling at her—Somebody’s trying to kill me! She’s trying to grab my hand and get me out of the street. She keeps laughing, cooing Nobody’s trying to kill you. Come on.
Another car, a van, speeds past her, parks in the street behind her. A man is in front, smiling, looking at people in the back of the van. This is it. But they just sit there in the van. I feel a bit relieved, but I stand up and try to limp-run away from the van anyway, away from the girl, who is still following me, reaching for me, trying to help. Somebody’s trying to kill me, I keep telling her. Nobody’s trying to kill you, she laughs. You just got hit by a car. Nobody’s trying to kill you. You just got hit by a car. Come on. Laughing at me like I’m crazy, following after me as I limp away from her, away from the van, looking up and down the street for the car, for the person or people that are after me. Somebody’s trying to kill me! Nobody’s trying to kill you. Suddenly, a man appears from behind her—an older man, with no expression on his face—coming after me, not running, more like speed-walking around the girl, hands out for me, trying to kill me. No no! No no no no! No no no no no no. He keeps coming. I can’t get away. He’s reaching out for me, a knife in his hand, though at first it looks like a white card, like he would just put a white card in my breast pocket. But it’s a knife and he’s reaching out to put the knife in my chest and I’m yelling No! But he doesn’t care and the girl won’t stop him or is gone and nobody’s coming to help. No! No no no no no no no no! My no won’t work he won’t stop I feel the knife going into my chest I scream or I moan No no no! No no no no! No no no and then I wake up, in the dark, in my bed, screaming no.
I lie there in the dark. It takes a few seconds to realize that I am not dead. But I can still feel what it was like to be hit by that car and thrown in the air, what it was like to keep telling that girl somebody was trying to kill me, to be laughed at like I was crazy, to be ambushed by the man with the knife, to have the knife put into my chest, to die in the dream for a moment. I lie there and I can still feel what it was like to be hunted.
I lie there in silence and can still hear the echoes of no. I bet the neighbors heard me. That’s embarrassing. I feel exhausted, even though I’ve hardly moved. Feels like I’ve been electrocuted, or shook somebody real hard for a long time. My arms are tired. I catch my breath.
I lie there in the dark and a few thin streams of tears that seem calm and tired and disappointed run down to the pillow. I have had this dream since I was twenty-one and each time I hope it’s the last time. Though not as much as I hoped that first time—a few weeks after I left Lehman Brothers and returned to New Haven to prepare for football season and my future.
I was lying in the floor of a secret society tomb because somehow that was the only place I had to stay. I don’t remember what exactly happened in that first dream, besides what happens in all the dreams. I remember, more than anything, a friend shaking me out of my sleep. He seemed frightened, or disgusted.
Yo, Casey! Wake up. Get up, man. You aight??
He shook me awake right as I was about to be killed in the dream. I couldn’t tell him what happened, so just looked up from the floor and wiped my eyes.
You were rocking down there, screaming and shit. That was wild, man. Fuck. You sure you aight?
Yeah, I laughed, yeah I’m good. Just a bad dream or something.
He looked at me as if I were a freak, which was fair and how I felt myself . . . out of control, with no idea why this had happened or how to stop it from happening again. I began to dread sleep, the thought of sleep, knowing that the dream would be there waiting for me. So I tried my best to stay awake. I figured, or I hoped, that if I worked instead of slept, I could keep the dream away. And, you know, I got a lot of stuff done in those waking hours. But here I am, a decade later, still being hunted in my sleep. I still feel the same panic when I wake, the same exhaustion, the same thin stream running down to my pillow. Still hear the echoes of no. Still hope that this time is the last time, though now I do not worry that it may come again tonight, or always.
Now I know what I did not know when the dream first came: that my dreams are part of me, even the nightmares—and all the waking hours of work in the world cannot erase them. I had to learn the hard way, though.
chapter EIGHTEEN
I am not the best mathematician around but I would estimate that, at any given time, about a quarter of the students at Yale want to be president.
Another quarter hope to work for a president (or prime minister, or the like). A third quarter dream of being imprisoned or martyred or publicly persecuted for opposing a president. My best guess is that the remainder is a mix of boys and girls who enjoy things like playing music and writing poems and making money, or who feel that high politics—which they have possibly seen up close—is beneath them, or who simply want to have a good time and take life as it comes.
This is all unwritten and unspoken. In fact, one of the surest signs that a young person is not fit to be president is if they tell you they want to be president. But even if they do not admit it, the germ has to be there, in their minds and behavior, by the time they are twenty-one, so that the first three years at Yale are spent moving toward that moment when the field has thinned and their odds are, more or less, set.
There are some countries where, it seems, all you have to do is go to Yale or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge—the Ghanaians and Nigerians prefer Harvard; other former colonies, Oxford—and you have a good shot. It requires a bit more in this country (at least it did until very recently), but not much: a graduate degree from whichever school, Yale or Harvard, you did not attend for college; some time abroad or in the military; a dramatic childhood story that is true enough not to be totally false; and a seemingly idyllic personal life. That is why, I suppose, despite only ever wanting for sure to be a truck driver, to make $100,000, and to exact revenge on those who wronged me, the Hartford Courant, another fine newspaper, reported in the fall of 2008, No wonder his Yale tea
mmates voted Gerald the most likely to be elected president of the United States.
Another thing: it helped to be able to give a good speech.
Here’s one for you, the first I delivered in my last year at Yale, to prospective members of the Black Men’s Union, who sat before me on a mid-September evening in the same Ray Tompkins House trophy room where my journey had begun years before.
I opened with those famous lines from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which I held in my hands:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasm. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
I slowly closed the book. Placed it on a nearby table. Stared out at the audience, silent for an uncomfortably long string of seconds, then began to speak again, slowly, twisting Ellison’s words for my own purpose:
If Ralph Ellison were here tonight, after reading that he would urge you to understand that you are by no means invisible. He would look out into this crowd and be encouraged because each and every one of you is more powerful than you can imagine. No matter what people say or think about you, regardless of the doubt you may have about yourself, you can and will be seen.
Because of that fact, it is our duty and pledge to open your eyes to those who remain invisible—those who we see on the streets every day; those who we find in our schools and our homes and, sadly, those who we encounter on this campus. We aim to make ourselves aware of their invisibility, but even more we strive to gain the tools to make them visible again.
It is your responsibility, with the immense talents and opportunities that you have been afforded, to put flesh on their bones and present them to the world as individuals that are just as capable and promising as you and I. You must be the vanguard that expands the boundaries of what is expected of us, and of what we accept from one another. That is what the BMU is about. That is what we are inviting you to join. That is what we are asking you to add to.
So as president, I can promise you that we will do everything in our power to make ourselves better men; to harness the great potential that lies within us and forge a path for a new generation of leaders. Because tonight you have the opportunity to not only join a tradition that can be traced back almost two hundred years—to men like James Pennington and Edward Bouchet—but you also have the opportunity to create a legacy of your own by daring to be great. So with that, I encourage you to come on board, and I echo the words of twentieth-century British author Wyndham Lewis, who said: “We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a ‘great age’ that has not come.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is the BMU.
At least two handfuls of new converts signed the BMU pledge that evening. Even more had packed into this room a year earlier for the Union’s first informational meeting and my public debut—a debut that seemed to vindicate Daniel’s choice, for those gathered.
This one short speech goes to show why, since the days of Lucifer and Cicero and Christ and Lincoln and Hitler and right on up to today, the speaker, the sorcerer of language, has kept a dangerous hold on the people, always toeing the line between demagogue and liberator, between sophist and prophet. And this kind of rhetoric may also be why, aside from all the work so many members had done over the prior year, one man, Warren Kimbro, said when we met with him in the fall of 2008 that the Union was the most radical thing I’ve seen at Yale since the sixties.
He would know.
On the night of 19 May 1969, Warren Kimbro was thirty-five years old. He was a member of the New Haven chapter of the Black Panthers, whose national chairman, Bobby Seale, was in town to speak. Mr. Kimbro was not in the crowd but in a basement elsewhere with three other Black Panthers: Lonnie McLucas, George Sams, Jr. (the national Panther field marshal), and nineteen-year-old Alex Rackley, who was tied up.
Mr. Kimbro, Mr. McLucas, and Mr. Sams had kidnapped Mr. Rackley on May 18. They suspected him of being an FBI informant. They interrogated and tortured him for two nights. And in the early hours of 20 May 1969, they drove young Mr. Rackley to the town of Middlefield, Connecticut. Mr. Kimbro shot Mr. Rackley in the head. Mr. McLucas shot him in the chest. They dumped his body in the Coginchaug River, where it was discovered the next day. Perhaps it was around this time that Mr. Kimbro learned that there are no excuses for committing a crime, but there are reasons.
Mr. Kimbro, Mr. McLucas, and Mr. Sams were arrested along with six others—they’d be christened the New Haven Nine—including Bobby Seale, who Mr. Sams accused of ordering the killing, and who became, when he went to trial in May 1970, the most polarizing American negro defendant since Nat Turner. Too bad Nat didn’t have someone like David Hilliard, the Panthers’ chief of staff, on his team. In March 1970, Hilliard had ordered the nation’s college students to help free Chairman Bobby—not in the courts, but in the streets:
If you want to break windows, if you want to kill a pig, if you want to burn the courthouse, you will be moving against the symbols of oppression.
The students killed no pigs. They burned no courthouses. But they did break windows. They threw cherry bombs. Gave speeches, made demands, gathered on the New Haven Green—over ten thousand of them—not just students, but Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden and Allen Ginsberg, who wrote and read a poem.
They drew the support of Yale president Kingman Brewster, Jr.:
In spite of my insistence on the limits of my official capacity, I personally want to say that I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.
And the scorn of American president Richard Nixon:
My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. . . . Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.
In the end, the students did not destroy the universities. They did not free Chairman Bobby; a judge did that in 1971 when the case was dismissed. They did not free Warren Kimbro; he confessed and served four years in prison. But the students had moved against the symbols of oppression, even if the symbols—or the oppression itself—did not budge. And after the May Day demonstrations at Yale, the symbols of oppression moved against the students, killing four at Kent State on 4 May 1970.
This was not all Mr. Kimbro remembered of the time.
The month after Warren Kimbro shot Alex Rackley, a twenty-three-year-old black drag queen named Marsha P. Johnson shattered a police car windshield outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, helping to spark riots that launched the gay liberation movement. Later that fall, three black Yale students completed their siege on the university when they opened the Afro-American Cultural Center, to complement the Black Student Alliance—which one of them, Glenn de Chabert, presided over like (in the words of Henry Louis Gates, then an underclassman) our black and shining prince—and the Black Studies program they had designed, the first such department in the country.
It was a strange time to be young and black, in 1969. It was also a strange time to be young and black, though for different reasons, in 2008. I suppose it is always a strange time to be young and black, anywhere in the world.
And while it may seem that Marsha P. Johnson and Glenn de Chabert were very different young black people with different aims and different means, they unite across time in two ways. For one, Ms. Johnson and Mr. de Chabert are both long dead, both mysteriously, both before fifty. I won’t say before their time, because Nobody ever died too early or too late; you always die right on time. Be that as it may, my point is that the movements they gave their lives to could not (or did not) save them.
There was another link that spoke through Mr. Kimbro as we sat with him, even if it was not clear to me
then.
Ms. Johnson and Mr. de Chabert, if I’ve interpreted their lives correctly, wanted to change, or at least subvert, the terms of life for what some folks who think they’re being considerate call marginalized communities. And all those ass-kickings they got and gave had evolved, in the forty years between their youth and our meeting with Mr. Kimbro, into political agendas shaped by homosexuals trying to convince themselves and others that they were not faggots, and black people trying to convince themselves and others that they were not niggers. What was birthed as a push to declare We can be free had grown into a program to insist We can die for our country like you, and marry one person like you, and even bring a child into this world like you; we can be corporate executives, we can be your good neighbor, we can be president if you let us. All these possibilities might amount to a lot more than a hill of beans. But compared to liberation, they strike me as sad, provincial concerns.
Yet these were the concerns of the time. So when Warren Kimbro said that the Union was the most radical thing he’d seen at Yale since the 1960s, it did not mean that we were akin to Bobby Seale or Glenn de Chabert. It meant that the bar was low. Incredibly low.
But it was 2008, a year of wonders and wanton language, so meeting this bar was called a revolution—especially after November 4.
We cannot quite proceed with business as usual. We have all just ordained a new American Revolution.
Those were the words of Akhil Reed Amar, spoken—shouted, really—from the dais of the Yale Law School auditorium on the morning of 5 November 2008, to us, his Constitutional Law students, many of whom had not slept much the night before; most of whom had just cast their first ballots in a presidential election, for Barack Obama.