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

by Darnell L. Moore

To laugh and jeer during days punctuated by fear was a feat. What childlike magic did he use to make it through? And how did I get so far away from him, so distant from that smile?

To discover and name what shapes us is to engage in the work of history.

This work, then, both is and isn’t about me. It’s a book I wanted to read because too many books have yet to be written by and about the rich experiences of black people who are forced to survive on the edges of the margins because they choose to love differently, refuse standards of so-called respectability, make less money, talk more shit, or deny the state its power.

We are the unnamed black sisters, brothers, and nonbinary people who lived queer theory before it was popular among those in white academe.

I needed to know how a black woman who taught herself to read and write, who at some point in her life managed to work sixty hours per week, care for children, and save money to purchase a home, ended up in the newspaper as the subject of a legal notice and not a story centered on audacious endurance.

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.

His absence only amplified her presence.

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. I observed many interventions as a youth. Care—the kind of support that one gives to push another toward wholeness—is not a consequence of apathy.

Santa was a twenty-eight-year-old, minimum-wage-making, government-subsidy-supported black mother from Camden, and not a rotund, bearded white man from the North Pole.

Pleasure and survival, touch and attraction, are not so easily pulled apart. I met up with another man in a park, turned to his body, sought refuge in his arms and in his bedroom, fucked, and disappeared for days with him because I located unspoken desires where they could not be found elsewhere. Not in sex education classes, living rooms, church sanctuaries, workplaces, or state institutions. And I was willing to deal with the consequences because I believed, because I had been told, that I would be infected and deadened anyway.

Black same-sex love is revolutionary because we must first convince ourselves we are deserving of receiving and giving what has been denied us for so long.

Living, as a black youth without access to the collective empathy and safety granted to white kids, is a weighty struggle.

The belief that we have all we need within us, individually, to survive is a powerful, poetic idea, but the truth is, no one person can make it through life alone without the presence and support of others who are willing to draw upon their own strength to aid another at their lowest.

Staying alive when you’ve been counted dead is love.

It wasn’t that I was too weak to simply think differently or give a middle finger to hateful people. I wanted to die, which is to say not live, which is to say not have to be strong enough all the time to fight to exist, which is to say fight at all, which is to say, I really want to live without having to fight so damn hard to exist.

naming my wrongs is not the same as working hard to undo them.

I bent before a God who is the judge and the warden holding the keys to liberation, who seems to have always benefited the masters and never the enslaved.

The lesson we learn about American success is that it takes individual achievement to bring about collective uplift. But if I knew nothing else growing up in the hood, I knew collective work had always been the salve for individual triumph.

Faith in God can be a powerful tool on the route to self-discovery and healing, but people can’t be healed by God if they don’t fervently believe their bodies and souls are also worth loving.

All of my life I was taught to believe that single black mothers who have kids young, like my mama, were the cause of the problems in black families and the reason black boys like me made poor choices. We have been taught to believe black people, especially the economically strapped or urban or churched or southern, are backward and less progressive on issues of sexuality. I believed the lies for a good part of my life. But the day my mom, who had birthed me in a black city when she was a black girl, affirmed the full expression of my humanity was the day I decided to always put my faith in black people, even if my faith would be tested over and over again.

The Movement for Black Lives’ perpetual call for the value of all black lives requires critical self-reflection on the part of anyone who claims to be part of the work.