The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

by Junauda Petrus

“Audre, you are a wild nurturing. You are a complicated specialness. You are ancestral perseverance and sacred erotic,” she says, like she praying, holding me close to her. I cry louder. “Gyal, you been in constant communication with Spirit your whole life and you been taught that Spirit speak loudest when we deep in the water, drowning in trouble and fear.” Queenie suddenly closes her eyes and is quiet and breathing, which I know means she is receiving messages. “And that is when you must let yourself get quiet and still. You must let yourself float above it until you are safe and levitating on the water and beneath the sky and just listen, Audre.” She opens her eyes and looks at me. “And, dahlin’, let me tell you something for truth: America have dey spirits too, believe me,” she say, and she puts out her spliff, rubs my back, and starts humming a song into my spine. It a quiet and low song, and I feel my heart inhale the love of it.

Incarceration is a sustained, lifetime lynching, meant to discard your soul and make a shell of you in plain life. Make you into your monster self, the beast that comes out when you are forced to survive in the absence of love and safety. Never mind that most of us come broken and traumatized, we still are no longer worth our own humanity. We are a criminal. We need punishment and to be rehabilitated. We need shame and exclusion. We are not worthy of control of our own lives; we are hopeless and evil. We are not individuals or of a womb or a family. We are not absent from anywhere else; because we are here, we simply non-exist. The world is better without us. In this society we are taught our crimes are the summations of our lives and define the limits of our possibility. Our only potential is to harm and destroy. But I was a boy once. And to be honest, I can’t help but hold and carry him inside of me. Most of us in here is holding and carrying a scared and lonely little child in us. How could we not? I write this story for the little Afua in me that needs to know he is okay and worthy of life, even if my whole existence is a reminder that my breath will one day be taken away at a predetermined time by an executioner, whose

As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. My mom, dad, brothers, and I used to go to the top of our apartment building on 143rd Street and look through a big telescope that my dad found at a pawnshop downtown. On a clear night, our family would take this telescope, our dinner, and a boom box up to the roof, and we would take turns looking at the stars and planets and moon while we listened to tapes by Smokey Robinson, Chaka Khan, Earth Wind & Fire, and John Coltrane and others. I used to love it so much, I never wanted to go back inside. I was so obsessed, my mom got me a book all about astronauts and space, planets and stars for my ninth birthday.

On death row, in some ways, I feel like I did become the astronaut of my childhood aspirations. I live suspended, distant and hyperaware of all existence. I’m alien, yet affiliated, living like a satellite, away from all that I have ever known. I know more about human life now that I have moved my research on planetary existence from the streets of Harlem and Philadelphia to my Spartan spaceship of four cement walls, steel commode, and a cot. The space travelers of my felonious legion are drafted from our streets, vulnerable and afraid, some innocent, some guilty, all trained and broken in this system. We are sensitive scientists of the soul who stumble into a laboratory of the self we can’t figure out how to escape. We spend our days rereading our star maps, trying to understand how we ended up at this unintended destination. The solitude of these walls allows us the time to explore the vastness inside of us in ways that our survival on planet Earth never could. I don’t glorify this irony.

In Junie’s love, I learned that loving on a Black girl wasn’t sinning, but something I lived to do, like painting or eating perfectly ripe plums.

Every woman I have loved has shown me Goddess and devastation and I thank them every day for the lessons and insights in their love. —Ena Amethyst-Miel, Black Girls Know How to Love, with Coconut Oil, Along the Cornrow