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

by Darnell L. Moore

Every word and every sentence that follows is an attempt to recover the parts of myself I stared at in the photos, the many smiles and moments of joy hiding behind the walls trauma left.

The long, collective hatred of blackness, the calculated policing of sexual difference, the intentional ghettoization of urban centers, and the lure of the American dollar are just a few of the strong forces that shaped my senses of self and the way I viewed others.

I couldn’t write a memoir full of life stories without animating all the invisible, and not-so-hidden, forces that rendered my blackness criminal, my black manhood vile, my black queerness sinful, and my black city hood.

In all the years of my white and heterosexual-oriented K-12 schooling, and during my five years as a struggling undergraduate student at a Catholic university, I went without reading books reflecting any part of the black life I had experienced.

it is important to understand how particular aspects of black urban life teach us that it takes unmatched agility to survive under conditions that make so many of our unnatural deaths possible.

South Camden smelled like a steamy concoction of about half a million residents’ shit and weeks-old rotten food shipped from the suburbs to the county trash incinerator in my neighborhood.

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. Camden was on fire in the summer of 1971. I was born into its aftermath five years later, in the winter, when it was still smoldering.

Had I read about Horacio Jimenez in the history books during my years in Camden Public Schools, or had my family told me about the muggy summer nights in 1971 when they placed solidarity flags outside their home, I might have understood why the streets I traveled were a phantom of a place once glorious or how our neighborhoods had become so blighted.

I would have understood that the city once erupted because Latino and black residents were no longer willing to be crushed into neighborhoods too densely populated, enrolled in under-resourced schools, stuck in low-paying jobs, and living under a majority white law enforcement organization who saw them as bodies fit for extrajudicial liquidation. And to not retell, reclaim, and rewrite that history here would perpetuate the lie that the city I was born into was a hood simply because of the black and Latino working poor who live there.

Black people had to be more than victims and sources of problems. I sensed as much growing up, but discovering the ways in which racial segregation, beyond redlining and housing discrimination, affected the lives of black residents in Camden was redemptive. Learning how the malicious unseen, but felt, forces of economic disinvestment, political deception, and cultural pathologization shaped my hometown helped to magnify the love I have for the city’s people. It was proof that black families like mine had made a way despite the strategic forms of harm impacting their lives.

As a child, I walked past many fire-struck dilapidated buildings I was led to believe were burned down because of residents’ inherent pathology and purposeful neglect, and not during a historical moment when a crushed people rebelled.

There are few geographies as fiercely desired and derided as the bodies of black girls and women.

The institutions supposedly designed to correct my father failed, almost expertly. He returned many times after the first.

My mother would dress my three younger sisters and me in our best clothes, prepare and bag lunches, and place toiletries and other treats that were to be given to my father in clear Ziploc bags. Everything was checked before boarding, including us. We would take a public transit bus to Camden City Hall, which doubled as the city’s short-term jail, where we would then wait with other families, all black and Latino, all working poor, to board a yellow or blue bus that would take us on our journey to places like the East Jersey State Prison in Rahway.

The visits were designed to teach us, black and Latino family members traveling along the ghetto-to-prison pathway, how to be proper citizens, different from the shady criminals we were granted free transportation to visit.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the correctional institutions we visited in mostly rural and suburban areas of the state bolstered the economies of predominantly white towns, thanks to the ever-increasing population of incarcerated black and Latino fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons.

She carried the double burden of mothering her kids and my father as if we were all her children. I could not see the invisible weights she carried because she did what she could to lessen our load as children growing up without the daily presence of a father. His absence only amplified her presence. And her presence brought me complete joy.

I never went a day without eating or worried about having a place to lay my head because I had been raised by black people who would sooner welcome another, whether family member or friend, they were angry with than leave them on the streets to suffer. No one person was left to struggle alone.

As a child, I assumed the world was full of people just like them who loved just as hard and sacrificed just as much. That is why I played more than I worried as a child. It’s why I smiled more than I frowned. It’s what made me remember the good nights before the bad mornings.

That was the first time my father had used his hands to hurt me. The hands that had only ever held me with tenderness, he used now to break my spirit and bruise my mother’s face. I gave up whatever love I had for him in that very moment.

Every celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth is another opportunity to highlight the type of college-educated, Christian, married, suit-wearing, and respectable black man society deems worthy of public praise. My father was born in 1961, on the same day as King but thirty years later. Two black men, one an American hero and the other its proverbial nightmare.

Marital infidelity and imperfections aside, the respect reserved for King has much to do with America’s fascination with black men it regards as great, even when those same men have been demonized and killed before their deification. America’s relationship with King since his death has been a one-sided love story centered on a man made out to be less human and complex than he actually was.

In no way is this an excuse for his bad decisions, absence, and abuse. But it is a reckoning with the lived experiences of a black boy who had trouble loving his best friend and their children because he had no sense of the tenderness within him or not enough

I was no more gifted than they were. I was a resourceful and determined teen, but every student at Morgan Village deserved to read from books our parents’ names were not scribbled in. The failure of the state to make good on its constitutional commitment to provide a quality education to every child was the problem, but I didn’t fully realize then how the mechanics of purposeful disenfranchisement worked. At fourteen, I figured I had beaten the system. I had won.

When I left my house every morning, I knew I would have to employ the power within my grasp to survive potential danger. But sometimes there aren’t any spaces where we can be safe. In those instances, we learn to protect ourselves; we learn to build forts. Wands and incantations, ingenuity and prayers, however, were more useful than fists and insults at fourteen. I won the fight against annihilation, by my hands and those of others, by losing myself in my dreams.

powerful passage in Darnell's new book.

At forty-one, I still look back to the strong-willed person I was as a child. Whenever I feel as if I can’t leap over a hurdle, whenever I am scared to go after what I want, whenever I am paralyzed by fear and shame, I remember the young black boy who dreamt aspirations into existence. 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. I was a persistent and resilient black boy—despite the forces that attempted to stop me from pursuing my dreams and the forces that tried to end my life during the pursuit.

I was attracted to him—so much so I was willing to fight him to kill my attraction. We eventually fought in the middle of the street in front of everyone in our neighborhood. Someone else hit me in the head with brass knuckles as I punched the boy I hurt with words because I was too scared to let him know I really desired his friendship.

That day, I faced a probable ending. There could have been a fire, but there was no sacrifice to burn that day. And as a consequence, there were no ashes to be collected, no traces of a life to be discarded.

Looking back from my vantage point today, she was just a more honest white person—the type who said what she really thought rather than hiding the truth behind a smile. She was wrong for ridiculing me in front of my peers, but it’s possible she saw my potential.

I was already wary of white teachers. Unlike the trust I had for Ms. Harrison, my black sixth-grade teacher who used every subject hour as an opportunity to teach us black history, or Mrs. Dunham, the black music teacher who took me home some weekends so I could sing as she played the piano, I did not trust white teachers enough to think they would support me.

In the fall of 1990, the federal minimum wage was $3.80. The median income of black families led by a single woman in 1990 was $12,130, a tiny increase from $11,080, the median income for the same group in 1967.

All of this transpired around the same time OB and his friends doused me with gasoline. Little did they know their act of aggression would motivate me to chase my dreams and claim the future they tried to snuff. People who are always under siege often have no choice but to conjure their inner powers, to manipulate energies as they walk down streets where they were once beaten, to bend sound waves when invectives are close enough to the ear to cause pain, to suture broken hearts when the people they love refuse to love them back, and to appear again and again after death attempts to disappear them.

My survival depended on my ability to fight back. Later I would learn to use my fists, but this time I relied on my agility and ran in the direction of freedom. At some point, even the most fearless and cunning among us won’t be able to contort our bodies to escape a homo-hating person’s bullet or summon the courage to refuse a bottle of pills calling out to be swallowed. But throughout my life, especially during my childhood, I did all I could to survive.

Throughout my life, I had witnessed what aversions to difference can bring about. A black boy’s body soaked with gasoline as if it was prepared for sacrifice, a black boy’s jaw so sore and swollen because it had been hammered by two older black boys’ fists, a black boy’s eyes fixed on the water under the bridge he was nearly thrown over, and a black boy’s spirit invigorating itself after the body it dwells in was broken. I was that black boy and those are my memories.

Other kids, like my sisters and cousins, would run home out of breath just to make sure that anticipated phone call from a crush wasn’t missed. And after the call—while their eyes still sparkled and butterflies flitted in their stomachs—mom, dad, older cousin, little sister, aunt, or friend would ask about the youthful love, remembering for themselves how each minute away from a crush turns into long, agonizing hours.

The state’s refusal to name same-sex desire as acceptable and separate from the AIDS epidemic was piercing.

I was a black gay boy from a working-poor family growing up in the age of AIDS, in an impoverished black American city, within a society antagonistic to LGBT people, in a country that had yet to value black love and bodies. Certainly, black queer love would be dismissed as an impossibility.

Black boys and men are read as hypersexual: strong enough to deal with anything that comes our way, possessed of a brutish masculinity that prevents us from feeling, enabling us to terrorize others’ bodies. Our dicks are caricatured as weapons or photographed as objects of desire poking out from our clothes, the only part of our bodies that’s coveted. Our eyes as lacking tears. Our hands as tools for violence or pleasure, but little in between. Our lives as worthy of quick conclusions.

To ask those questions would mean black boys and men would have to be seen, first, as bleeding, crying, vulnerable, and sometimes resilient human persons. We are breakable.

We did not orchestrate our dress and expressions to prove we were tough simply because we were poor young people growing up in an American hood. We only needed to look around at what was happening closest to us to see that our survival would come by our own hands, not at the behest of the state, which we thought aided most in our demise.

The larger world made it clear that same-sex attraction was the type of evil that turns innocent boys into child molesters or freaks, and girls into man-hating dykes and aberrations. And a few of my gay friends seemed to believe maintaining a fluid attraction to whoever ignited my body at a given moment was akin to living as a fraud and sellout. My juvenile fascinations with sex and attraction were expansive, but the rest of society preferred desires to be either black or white, “gay” or “straight.”

Newark is a black city like Camden, but its spirit is animated, improvisational, and alive like jazz. The familiar tunes of Biggie Smalls and Craig Mack weren’t as dominant as the house music blazing from the speakers on vendors’ tables on Broad and Market Streets, where mix tapes with strange house beats like the “Percolator” and “Witch Doctor” were sold. Newark was a different world, a different hood, where people talked with a different tongue. The sound of the “r” was stronger, harder, as it rolled out of the mouths of the bold, hopeful, and aware black people from Brick City who seemed no less overcome by the looming presence of police and state neglect than those of us who grew up in Camden.

Such is the illusion that shapes great escapes from home. The places I’ve run to seemed to always figure as mythical havens of possibility even if they were gripped by the same conditions that zapped hope out of the people and city I tried to abandon. Newark was no different.

All of my life I had identified as black even if I sometimes, with or without awareness, distanced myself from black people I deemed too hood and poor even as others distanced themselves from me for the same reason. A world away from Camden, with little less than a year in the belly of a predominantly white campus, I had begun the process of a new becoming. I was becoming politically black: aware, awake, in love with my people, and enraged by racial injustice.

I didn’t pick up a gun with the hopes of lodging a bullet in the chest of another kid. I didn’t douse any of my neighbors with gasoline in order to kill them. I wasn’t that father punching the mother of his children in the stomach or face. And I wasn’t better than those who committed those actions. But I was black in a city wracked with poverty and political malfeasance, a person whose life was counted as a zero, who believed during certain moments that he didn’t deserve to live.

Difference, queerness, deviance is so terrifying it demands disposability and death. But it was also my magic.

I wasn’t an exceptional victim of life’s common circumstances. But so often those who try to manage and survive problems on their own end up caving in. 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.

There are no perfect words to describe what happens when the spirit is so depleted it no longer feels any sting, when the mind is so overcome by thoughts the person can no longer distinguish reality from fiction, when all words of encouragement offered to lift you go unheard when spoken. It’s dangerous to step back into the desperation that festers and lurks and overwhelms and destroys. Psychic pain escapes words.

The home is likened to a kingdom black boys are expected to provide for, fight to protect, and lord over. Outside the home, the streets black boys navigate are controlled by the state and the wealthy, and black boys’ freedoms are restricted and policed. White boys are raised to rule the home, the streets, the banks, the courts, the legislative halls, the church, the academy, the medical industry, the military, and the country. They are granted permission to travel through the world never questioning their need to control others’ bodies and properties, never reflecting on their incessant demand for respect and entitlement, never removing themselves from the center of the public imagination.

I treated her like a body without a soul. I wanted physical pleasure, emotional coddling, and the benefits that came with our connection—the sex, clothes, sneakers, presence, and food when I needed them. I didn’t have any desire to do the emotional work necessary to be anything other than a polite but still manipulative user. I regret hurting the girls and women who loved me then and love me now.