The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

by Jesmyn Ward

Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.

First, it confirmed how inextricably interwoven the past is in the present, how heavily that past bears on the future; we cannot talk about black lives mattering or police brutality without reckoning with the very foundation of this country. We must acknowledge the plantation, must unfold white sheets, must recall the black diaspora to understand what is happening now.

I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words. That sharing our stories confirms our humanity.

people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. . . . Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

that to become free from disappointment one must acknowledge the obvious, then learn to live with it.

Slavery is violent, grotesque, vulgar, and we are all implicated in how it denigrates humanity.

But empathy, these days, is hard to come by. Maybe this is because everyone is having such a hard time being understood themselves. Or because empathy requires us to dig way down into the murk, deeper than our own feelings go, to a place where the boundaries between our experience and everyone else’s no longer exist.

We seem to be in a continuing feedback loop of repeating a past that our country has yet to address. Our history is one of spectacular achievement (as in black senators of the Reconstruction era or the advances that culminated in the election of Barack Obama) followed by a violent backlash that threatens to erase the gains and then a long, slow climb to the next mountain, where the cycle begins again.

There was a lynching every four days in the early decades of the twentieth century. It’s been estimated that an African American is now killed by police every two to three days.

We must love ourselves even if—and perhaps especially if—others do not. We must keep our faith even as we work to make our country live up to its creed. And we must know deep in our bones and in our hearts that if the ancestors could survive the Middle Passage, we can survive anything.

Wheatley is much more than that. She proved something to white people about us: that we could read and think and write—and damn it, we could feel, no matter what the racists believed. We already knew those things about ourselves.

white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.

A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws, and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger. It’s

Maybe I was meant to understand that darkness magnifies the sight of joy.

Maybe there’s a place where everyone is both in love with and running from their own skin. Maybe that place is here.

Blackness isn’t a bunch of facts to memorize, or a set of stock behaviors; nor darker skin color neither.

Walking had returned to me a greater set of possibilities. And why walk, if not to create a new set of possibilities? Following serendipity, I added new routes to the mental maps I had made from constant walking in that city from childhood to young adulthood, traced variations on the old pathways. Serendipity, a mentor once told me, is a secular way of speaking of grace; it’s unearned favor. Seen theologically, then, walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling. We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won’t be our last, but will lead us into a richer understanding of the self and the world.

“I have walked myself into my best thoughts.”

Much of my walking is as my friend Rebecca once described it: A pantomime undertaken to avoid the choreography of criminality.

So I walk caught between memory and forgetting, between memory and forgiveness.

“black skin is not a weapon”

Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.

“White silence is violence,”

From the time your children begin walking, they are moving away from you. This is as it should be, even when you can’t protect them from harm with anything but the inadequate outerwear of your love.

Trust Your Struggle

“Troubled water or not, you best learn to swim.

Who I am now is who I must be: a flawed human striving to live in a state of becoming. Along the way I’ve discovered a thing or more about myself: that who and how I love is not dictated by law or blood, that being a constant presence is as much a part of being a man as almost anything else, that what I want must be earned, that I can win and win I will, that there’s hustle in my genes, that either I swim or drown and there is no one more important to that outcome than me.

Words mean things, we say again and again, but overuse and abuse can wear those meanings down, render them pale parodies of what they once were. And revolution, it seemed, had long since lost its meaning.

You can’t tiptoe toward justice. You can’t walk up to the door all polite and knock once or twice, hoping someone’s home. Justice is a door that, when closed, must be kicked in.

Every journey is a crisis, a turning point, a shedding of myths,

And in a way, this journey never ends, but in another sense, it ends where all great roads lead: to the discovery of voice.

Tell them how their mother landed on hope amidst all the despair