My Vanishing Country

by Bakari Sellers

  * * *

  A week before the special ceremony in 2018 honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre, Bill Hine, a white history professor at South Carolina State and a family friend, asked me to give the keynote speech. First Lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama had been asked to do so, as well as Senator Cory Booker and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, but none of them was able to do it. I threw every name I could think of at Hine, because I knew it would be too draining for me. But in the end, I agreed and decided to talk about the wounds from the tragedy that have never healed—including my own.

  I paced back and forth before giving the speech. If I could get through the first part, I’d make it through the entire speech before breaking down.

  I walked to the microphone and began to speak. “I saw the scars and heard the story again and again,” I told the crowd. And as much as I tried to stop them, the tears flowed. The sorrow I felt was physical, like someone had ripped out my heart. I couldn’t stop the tears. “Shit,” I said, before taking a breath. “It’s physically painful to think about that night so ripe with potential and possibility erupting into violence and tragedy and loss, and I wasn’t even there. Still it hurts like nothing else I know—in my chest, behind my eyes, and all over my body—a living pain of a cultural memory and a realization that I live in a state where something like this could have happened. And they tell us to let it go. ‘Don’t tell that story again. We don’t want to hear it. Don’t go back to that place . . . don’t say their names.’ But we have to, not because we want to remember . . . but because we can’t forget.”

  I said I took pride knowing that if the tragedy happened today, not only would those officers have to answer for their actions, but they’d have to answer to someone who looked like me.

  And so, it remains the most important day of my life. My father’s path and my own are woven together over the same bloody ground.

  Dad made his mark on history that night in 1968 and stayed on the path with other leaders, from Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lewis to uncles Stokely and Jesse. He and my mother Gwen raised their three children to stand up and speak for social justice. As a lawyer, politician, and civil rights activist, I see my life as an extension of my father’s journey. In this new era of civil rights, in which politicized young activists have a direct impact on the nation’s laws and policies, I am a bridge between his work and the achievement of our common goal of racial equity.

  And yet, fifty years after Cleveland Sellers, my father—a professor, college president, and civil rights activist—was on the front lines of the civil rights struggle, I find myself in a country that looks too much the same. In my time, in our time, some of the most racist remarks come from the very top, where the president himself panders to the worst in us to score points with a particular political demographic.

  II

  Black and Forgotten

  When I say that Denmark is part of the forgotten South, I mean that the simple dignities we all expect as humans, such as clean water, a community hospital, and more than one grocery store, are ignored. This is a town where it’s not unusual to spot someone driving their lawnmower, the one they use to cut white residents’ lawns, to the Piggly Wiggly, the only major grocery store in town. It’s also not unusual to see adults, even the elderly, riding bikes—often children’s bikes—but not for exercise. Instead, they can’t afford a car—the taxes, the gas, the insurance, and the maintenance are all too much.

  Riding a bike can be tough if you’re isolated in rural South Carolina. If the tropical heat doesn’t get to you in the summer, our “no-see-um” gnats will. Imagine riding an old bicycle while clutching a bag or two of groceries in one hand, swatting invisible bugs with the other, and trying to balance the jiggling cycle, sometimes on dirt roads.

  My mother says Denmark’s poverty is akin to what you might observe in a developing country. The bike riding, she believes, is a form of resilience—“making do.”

  * * *

  It’s easy to be blind to the endurance of, or to completely ignore, the people whom others may think of as “backwoods,” hidden from the rest of the world. However, I see us as less “backwoods” and more “dirt road.” If you’re from rural South Carolina, you’ve ridden down a dirt road to get home. You’ll understand the difficulty of cleaning a pickup truck after you’ve driven down a muddy path. And if it’s raining, you know how to maneuver the holes.

  Dirt road living is who we are, allowing us to understand early on that life can be slippery, but we figure out how to navigate the unpredictable paths—paths that can go from gentle to muddy and treacherous in minutes. Those dusty roads have been leading us and connecting us from one place to another for generations. After the Great Migration, when five to six million black folk left the South and moved north and west to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, those who left called the ones who remained “country bamas.”

  Those same black folk who look down on us for staying have grandmothers and great-grandfathers who were reared on these same dirt roads. Maybe most importantly, every ounce of black cultural liberation, every bit of political ideology, first derived from the South. The spirit by which we have fought to gain those not-so-tangible ideals, such as freedom and justice, have all emerged from us country folk—and we’ll accept that.

  If you are black and country, you inherit a rich cultural legacy, one born out of that Black Belt soil that rises from the coast of Charleston, with all the rotten smells of pluff mud emitting from the marshlands and the taste of stone-ground grits stored in our memories.

  When you grow up in these left-behind communities where schools are falling apart and hospital doors are slammed shut, the only real thing that your families can give you is a sense of self and the notion of being unapologetically black. That pride allows some of us to maneuver out of the dirt roads to Wall Street. But our families also pass down something else—poverty.

  228 Years of Catching Up

  There’s enough research out there to show that people born into poverty often become an heir to it, which means poverty is passed down from one generation to another. African Americans are less likely to rise from this intergenerational transmission of poverty compared with other groups. There are many reasons for this, including unusually high incarceration rates, education inequalities, drugs, segregation, workplace discrimination, and lack of male role models.

  For example, when my friend Pop was a little boy, he looked at his surroundings and the people therein and decided he wanted something different, but how could he break the cycle? Three years before I met Pop, he’d endured a heavy loss. His father was killed in a car crash, right behind Voorhees College. He was driving drunk and hit a large oak tree.

  The car was totaled, and as Pop would say decades later in his heavy southern twang, “He busted his brains out.” Pop, who was nine when it happened, went to the scene because “I had to see it for myself.”

  It was Christmastime and all Pop had wanted that year was a computer. As he stared into the twisted metal that was once his father’s green Plymouth, Pop could see the remains of an Apple computer inside the car. From that moment on, Pop developed a severe distaste for computers. “I type only with two fingers,” he says. “I had no interest to learn to do it right.”

  His mother, who worked odd jobs, running nightclubs and working at restaurants, tried her best to raise six children by herself.

  There’s a question I’m often asked. It’s a question I dislike, and I am sure many African Americans also dislike it, because the very heart of the question dismisses so much important history. The query usually goes like this: “You know, all of these immigrant groups come to this country and thrive. Why haven’t African Americans been able to break through?”

  The question discounts hundreds of years of slavery, and then years of degradation brought upon us by the oppression of Jim Crow. It dismisses generations of white advantage and pretends we all came here and rema
in here on the same level, as if white privilege is based on merit. For instance, many European immigrants, who arrived long after African Americans, acquired government land for nearly free in order to accelerate the settlement of the West. They were given every opportunity to have their material needs met. Black people, on the other hand, built a nation and broke free from bondage, and yet legal segregation in Denmark ended only in 1972.

  The question dismisses how the nation’s lengthy past of racial inequality has added to an enormous gulf in accumulated fortunes, and with it a disproportionate gap of opportunity: If economic trends continue, black families in the United States will have to wait two centuries to accumulate the same amount of wealth white Americans enjoy today. The average household wealth of white families has grown 85 percent, to $656,000, in the past thirty years, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development and the Institute for Policy Studies, while that of blacks has risen only 27 percent, to $85,000. White families have almost ten times the net worth of black families. Educated white Americans make three times more than their equally educated black counterparts. Now think about Denmark, where nearly everyone is struggling to survive. If the estimates are true, it will take much longer than two centuries for us to catch up.

  * * *

  What a person like Pop survived in Denmark is being forgotten. The media equate rural America to white America; and that’s not only an untrue portrait, but it influences how the public perceives the nation’s crossroads. People of color make up one-fifth of rural America, and their poverty and high school dropout rates are much higher than those of white rural Americans. Half of Denmark’s residents live below the poverty line; and most of the children in Denmark’s schools are on the free lunch program, which is a true measure of just how poor a rural community is. The railroads and corporations that used to provide jobs during my father’s day are all gone, which is why many young, fatherless men like Pop found themselves selling drugs—crack cocaine and Molly (which in other places is called Ecstasy).

  After Pop’s father’s death, the boy put all his attention on two things: football and soccer. If you ask my family how we met Pop, most of us will have a different story; however, there’s a consistent narrative thread. After moving to Denmark, my father took over the city’s recreational center, which his mother had previously run. My daddy wanted to add a soccer component to the summer program. A teacher told him about a boy named Jamil, whom everyone called Pop. The adults believed Pop would benefit from keeping busy at the recreational center, and Pop wanted that, too.

  In Denmark, we don’t have gangs, but we have families you don’t mess with, and we have neighborhoods. Pop’s neighborhood is called “the Hookz.” I lived on one side of the tracks, in the Sato community, and he lived on the other, which could be why Pop and I see Denmark very differently. I see just one Denmark—desolate, sometimes bleak, but at the same time safe, peaceful, and heartbreakingly beautiful. We were all struggling, but he saw one side of the struggle and two Denmarks: the good side and the “bad side.”

  That’s why, he says, he decided to unofficially come stay with us, “to get away from the bad side.” In the tough section of town, as he puts it, “you always see fellas sitting around drinking, smoking weed, selling drugs, toting pistols, or they want to fight. On Bakari’s side you didn’t have none of that, it was really quiet, and everybody stayed to themselves.”

  Pop saw no beauty—just boys downtown drinking gin and rolling dice. He would say, “there’s a lot of unsolved crimes,” meaning the crimes are unsolved because those who commit them are often from somewhere other than Denmark, where everyone knows everyone else.

  He is right about one thing. Although there were times we struggled financially, my family was not poor. My mother, who was a television anchor at a small station when we lived in Greensboro, began teaching business communication at South Carolina State, which was only twenty-five miles away from Denmark. I ended up going to primary school on the campus, the same campus where the Orangeburg Massacre happened. My father’s opportunities were limited because of his prison record, but after he was pardoned, the world opened up to him, too. Jarrod Loadholt, my college roommate, who grew up in Orangeburg, often said, “Back home, children grew up reading about Cleveland Sellers in the history books. He’s our Martin Luther King Jr.”

  I don’t believe Pop knew anything about my father’s infamous history when they first met in 1990. As the story goes, Pop was hungry one day at the recreation center. He asked my sister, who was home from college for the summer and acting as an unofficial counselor, if he could get something to eat. Either he didn’t like what the center was having for lunch that day or had missed lunch, but my sister, who Pop called “my girlfriend,” walked him to our house and gave him a peanut butter sandwich and soup. If you ask everyone in my family how old Pop was at the time, they’d say he was my age, but he was actually twelve—double my age.

  “Pop was just this cute little boy, like Bakari. I saw them as babies,” my sister says.

  In her mind, Pop was just six years old, like me; though probably it was more like I acted like I was twelve years old, like him. An old man in a six-year-old boy’s body, I was still a sheltered child in a new town. I immediately took to Pop as we played video games and watched sports on television. I asked my parents to allow Pop to play with me from then on and encouraged them to drive us to his home to ask his mother if that was okay.

  My father saw Pop as a good comrade for me, but he also believed he could be a father figure to the boy. After that first visit, Pop was always at our home. “I came and never left,” he jokes. My mother, who could be described as uppity (or “bougie” if you’re African American), didn’t know what to think of Pop, who was a little rough around the edges. Eventually, he became her “fourth child” and another brother who joined me and my father as we traveled to Lumumba’s basketball games or visited him at Morehouse College.

  During one Easter Sunday church service, fifteen-year-old Pop was officially accepted as my parents’ godchild. From then on, Pop called my father “Dad” and me “Bruh.” And like most parents, my mother and dad were always having long talks with him about “messing up.” My mother, not the person to hold back, “gave him shit,” Pop often jokes.

  If you ask Pop about messing up, he’ll say, “I was always in trouble. I used to fight a lot. I got charged with selling drugs. Then later on in life I got charged with a lewd act—a girl lied about her age. We never had intercourse, but it messed up my life.”

  My father, in particular, was often trying to make sure Pop stayed out of trouble. Once, Pop took a knife to high school to prevent a fight from breaking out on the school bus. He was arrested, and Pop told the authorities to get ahold of Mr. Sellers. My father begged, cried, and pleaded with the authorities to not kick him out of school or send him to jail. Pop was expelled, but he didn’t go to prison.

  Can He Survive This?

  The night Pop got shot in 2008, I was at a club watching the NCAA championship in Columbia. I received a text saying he was being airlifted to Richland Memorial Hospital, and since I was nearby, I went there immediately. I called my sister, who was a doctor-in-training at Richland, so she’d be waiting for him. I should have been worried, but I wasn’t because Pop is one of the most resilient people I know. Somehow, he has always managed to survive. Several years before being shot, he’d been stabbed; he’d also been arrested for selling drugs and spent more than a year in prison. In an isolated town with no job prospects, Pop’s life was typical.

  He was playing cards on the night he got shot. Everyone was outside, drinking and having a good time. Pop saw a young man he knew hitting a woman, and so he told him to stop. He was always doing stuff like that because he saw himself as a protector. The young man left but returned with a gun.

  Pop paid him no mind, even when the young man shot in the air and told Pop that if he walked toward him, he would shoot. Pop, always the person who wanted to stand up for the
underdog, told the young man to put down the gun and approached him. The bullet clipped a piece of Pop’s lung and came out in his right armpit. He was rushed to Bamberg County Hospital, which at the time was still Denmark’s functioning local hospital, and then was airlifted to Richland in Columbia. He woke up screaming, proclaiming he was going to beat down the man who shot him, which prompted the physicians to give him morphine.

  When his mother saw all the blood, she collapsed. Pop woke up and spotted his mother in a wheelchair, and then he lost it again, yelling and screaming. After that, he was either on life support or in a morphine-infused daze.

  After we realized Pop would pull through, we felt a sting of anger. This might seem like a strange reaction, but seeing Pop’s mother in so much torment frustrated my father and my mother to no end. My parents had driven her to the hospital; we all observed her heartbreak. Pop had put himself at death’s door again, and that was a lot to bear. Being a doctor, my sister had seen everything, including the nasty, bloody, behind-the-scenes events. “I was so pissed at Pop,” she recalled years later, though I think she was more afraid we’d lose our “brother” and how that would crush all of us.

  I don’t remember feeling fearful, and my father doesn’t remember going to Pop’s room, but my sister recalls we were both visibly upset. That night after everyone had left the room, my six-foot-two-inch sister looked down on the sleeping Pop and said, “If you ever have my brother and my daddy crying at your bedside again for some foolishness, it’s going to be you and me. If you went to hell or heaven, I’m still going to get you.”

  Pop doesn’t doubt my sister made that promise. He admired her spunk, brilliance, and beauty ever since he was a hungry boy at the recreation center. He even named one of his daughters after her. He knows our anger was linked to the love we all felt for him.