No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

by Darnell L. Moore

we come to be the people we are within the context of a larger world ruled by powerful, insidious forces.

To discover and name what shapes us is to engage in the work of history. I knew writing an honest memoir would require me to tell the truth about my life, which has been full of hostility and splendor. Discovering the difference between what’s true and all the lies one comes to believe requires a direct confrontation with the past.

Stereotyping black urban cities like Camden as “ghetto” and the people who live within them as leeches sucking the state dry of its capital are lies forged without a commitment to history. If Camden is a ghetto, it is because some force, comprised of many hands, made it so. That, too, must be named.

They constantly make me question whose stories are allowed to flourish in our collective memory and whose are blotted out.

We are James Baldwin, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Richard Bruce Nugent, Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray, June Jordan, and so many more. But in 2018, these are the names some still refuse to remember and celebrate.

If Camden smelled, it wasn’t the fault of city residents. The trash incinerator was built in Camden because it was a predominantly black and Latino city. It not only polluted the air with a nauseous smell but also contributed to asthma and other illnesses. It’s simply what we had to endure.

TO CLAIM LOVE FOR a city so denigrated by the US media is to contradict every idea Camden residents have been socialized to accept.

The negative portrayals of Camden and the black people who lived there, which pointed to the problems that seemed to undermine any potential for good in Camden, always upheld the black and Latino inhabitants as the source of the violence and poverty plaguing the city. But that is a misguided and ahistorical idea. We were never the problem. The entrenched, interlocking systems of antiblack racism, economic disinvestment, and political exploitation ravaging Camden and its black and Latino residents were the sparks always smoking, and they preempted the eventual flames that would drastically shift the state of our city.

Horacio’s unresponsive body was a consequence of a state instrument working as it should, in the way that most law enforcement bodies do—functioning always as a tool of white supremacists’ desires to protect white property and patrol nonwhite bodies.

It would have been clear I had been brought up in a city crafted into a black ghetto by unseen hands, characterized as a site of violence and impossibility by past political leaders

Camden has been shaped into the city it is today because of the various powers that were at work in stealth.

And, really, there is no secret to hide when the insidious consequences of state neglect and greed continue to materialize and destroy the well-being of the people who call Camden home today. Those forms of repression are the hands that do their best work unseen. The hands we do not name but always sense moving among us that shaped Camden then, and continue to do so now. When we fail to bear witness to their presence, we aid in our own destruction.

hope often surfaces as the result of radical love.

tenderness and violence, care and harm, are strange bedfellows. They can coexist in our complex webs of human connection, the bad always canceling out the good, until the good that we are able to express smudges away the traces of evil even the best of us are prone to mete out.

Care does not look like police patrolling blighted neighborhoods in search of people who fit the description of the assumed criminal, to fill up jail cells and meet quotas, both built on the false premise that black people are more prone to violence. Instead, care looks like neighbors passionately intervening to ensure the safety of people they know, and strangers they don’t, who have been assailed by police, many times for no reason other than the color of their skin.

Dreams die if they are consigned to the imagination only. They are the seeds we must be able to plant in the outside world; at least, that is what I now know, having remembered the ways I manifested dreams as a youth.

Dreams are the destinations we arrive at as we chase our wishes and our callings.

I learned to run, not away from bullies, but in pursuit of the passions that enflamed my heart.