Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

This book is not a Choose Your Own Adventure, much as I would have liked the option in real life. It’s the opposite of that, actually, if such a thing is possible. It might be a mystery, though. At the end I gather all the suspects in a room and there are some very bold accusations made. It involves a luxury ocean liner. There’s a caftan. Things escalate!

Everybody loves Elmo, right? Elmo is a closer. Elmo gets all the Glengarry leads. Elmo stares into the abyss and the abyss whispers, “Tickle me.” But in real life, I’m a Grover. I have always been black in a white environment, not black enough in a black environment, working-class in an upper-class environment, Christian in a secular environment, questioning in a devout environment, gay in a straight environment. Never quite right.

There’s a Nayyirah Waheed quote: “If someone does not want me, it is not the end of the world. But if I do not want me, the world is nothing but endings.”

Mrs. Obama is, rightfully I think, totally over the ugly presidential campaign and probably the presidency in general, but has been doing everything in her power to ensure that the next president is someone who will carry on her husband’s legacy of, at best, hope, and at worst, less terribleness. She has lip-synced for the country’s life and, hours later, I am still thinking about it. I will probably think about it forever. It feels, to me, consequential. Life-changing. Even though it is, ultimately, a campaign speech at a political pageant. It’s theater. The only way it could preach to the choir more is if there were an actual choir (suggestion for next time). And of course, it doesn’t end up winning her chosen candidate the election. So, what is the consequence, really? Or rather, who was she doing it for? I guess I believe she was doing it for me. For her. For the future.

We must all, even in some small way, be angling toward hope. And who am I to joke about that? Michelle Obama is trying to change the course of history and I’m making quips online. Who is this for? And what does it add?

I didn’t have as complex a read of Lady Elaine as a child. I just knew that this queen was extra as hell and I was living for every terse line reading. I would frequently turn from a television playing Mr. Rogers and say to an empty room, “I can’t wait until Patricia Clarkson and Sarah Paulson play her at different stages in her life in a biopic that I am currently writing.”

These days we tend to talk about bubbles like they’re bad things. A bubble connotes a lack of awareness of what’s really happening, a disconnect from the real world. But bubbles have transparent walls and gossamer skin that allows sound to permeate. Bubbles, like the kind you blow from a wand dipped in soapy liquid, don’t keep anyone out or anyone in. They’re just different environments.

Which is why it was such a surprise when one of my classmates called me a nigger in fifth grade. — It happened, as I suppose these things can, for no reason. The class was briefly unattended, working on a project and talking. One girl was needling a boy. Let’s call the girl Dora and let’s call the boy Prentice because those names are quaint and if we’re going to use pseudonyms, they ought to bring joy. So Dora says, “You know, another word for ‘Prentice’ is ‘nerd,’ ” or something equally toothless. I don’t really remember the quote so much as I remember thinking, This utopia is terrible at shade.

My first “nigger” was what I think of as a casual “nigger.” (Casual Nigger was the first title of this book but literally everyone started screaming the minute I said it, so I came up with some alternatives.)

There’s no response to being called a nigger. I’ve been called a nigger a fair number of times. (How many times is acceptable? That’s the question of our age. I think it varies by region of the country, but that may be my Mid-Atlantic prejudice showing. Also, does it count if it’s online versus in person? What are the rules?) Every time it happens, I’m like, “I’m not sure what you want me to do with this information.” We’re not engaged in a dialogue; we never have been. And we weren’t engaged in the room in fifth grade. So, the why of the “nigger” is on that guy. I’m not part of it. And the why of the moment is of less concern to me. It’s like Baldwin says, “What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why.” If it hadn’t been him calling me a nigger for the first time, it would have been someone else someplace else. But in the middle will always be me. I am the one I seek to understand.

The danger in a city is systemic and endemic; it’s built into the walls and the street corners and written in invisible ink on the mortgages and in the local newspaper headlines; it powers the public transportation and funds the political campaigns. The danger in the city is all around you, but has clearly delineated borders.

The woods, as I’m sure you’re aware, are where roughly 65 percent of all terrible things happen in horror movies. The other 35 percent happen in beautiful suburban houses where no one (except me, apparently) would ever imagine such a thing taking place. This rule isn’t even restricted to horror movies, actually. I love a good Dateline investigation or British mystery novel or Gone Girl, and all of them are basically infomercials about the inherent danger of living anywhere with a lawn.

Have you ever slept in a house that was so quiet you could hear a clock ticking in another room? WHY? If I wanted a soundtrack for my existential dread, I’d download a bunch of Ben Folds songs on iTunes like a normal person.

took it downstairs and set myself up on a couch. The family I was babysitting for had one of those houses out of a Nancy Meyers film: the gleaming kitchen with a marble-top kitchen island next to a plush TV room and breakfast nook with three walls of windows; the doorbell that played a full concerto; the rooms that weren’t decorated, but curated. I understand the allure of this kind of space. Everything was new in this place, even the things that weren’t new. The antiques were polished to a shine; the books in the library were like set decorations from a box labeled “Intelligent, Wealthy Person.”

“When I started building the collection nobody was writing about blacks in history. You couldn’t find any books.” As her collection grew, it became apparent that Dewey reified the same sort of structural inequities that kept black history out of books and black books off of shelves. In Dewey, she said, “they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had another number—325, as I recall it—that mean colonization.” The result, she explained, was that many libraries were reaffirming a Eurocentric mindset by filing any- and everything about black life under these two categories. Porter’s system, like the Dewey, classified work by genre and subject but included black authors and black history in every area. When I first learned about the Dewey decimal system, I assumed it was an impartial way of defining and filing the breadth of knowable information. I came to understand that the intention of the filer and the perspective that they carry play a huge role in how Dewey, and any other system, is employed.

I brought her an enormous wrist corsage that I’d gotten from the market my father managed. It was truly gargantuan. My father had told the florist that his oldest son was going to prom and he needed the best corsage they’d ever made. The florist delivered a creation that was essentially a bouquet attached to an elastic band.

Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.

(Have you ever been to the birthday party of someone who has a really mixed group of friends and the white people start singing the “regular” version of “Happy Birthday,” which, honestly, rivals “Streets of Philadelphia” for atonal glumness, and the black people launch into Stevie’s version and then everyone gets really confused because the white people have no idea what just happened? That’s my FAVORITE thing, because I like to imagine that for a brief second the white people think that they’ve slid into an alternate reality and they have to question everything they know to be true and, honestly, that’s reparations. A split second of reparations.)

What I know now but couldn’t have articulated then was that I was searching for an understanding of Otherness outside of the context in which I existed, which I found in postcolonial studies. Surprisingly, I also found literature and histories that centered on people who had been othered inside their own narratives, despite what a Eurocentric perspective might suggest. I drank it up.

specifically hierarchical about my experience of a black barbershop. The space exists for the cutting of black men’s hair, of course, but also to host overtly heterosexual camaraderie and community, which I’ve found most often expresses itself through machismo. The more macho one was, the blacker one was. This showed up in topics of discussion, in grooming, in the unspoken rules of who could and could not be there (rarely any women, besides moms, and even they would sometimes drop their sons off and come back). The rule, as I understood it, was that a successful man devoted time and attention to his hair to attract women and to be presentable in a largely white society that had a limited capacity for accepting new hairstyles. But you also wanted your pride and your preening to be rooted in masculinity. There wasn’t, and isn’t, a wide spectrum of ways a black man could express himself—his beauty, his pride, his love for his own being—in the spaces I passed through. This came from centuries-old external pressures on him, namely the presumption that he was a savage and therefore not actually a man at all. Having a strict understanding of how a black man operated in the world kept us safe. As someone whose deviations from that model were always clocked by others, I understood that.

I love celebrity news, so we watched Entertainment Tonight for six more minutes together in silence. When the timer went off, she put me back in the sink, washed and shampooed my hair, and then dried it. She removed the towel, and for the first time in my life, my hair fell into my face and I felt an unfamiliar thrill. It was bone straight. White straight. It was like a limb had appeared in a space where there was previously just phantom feeling. It was a surrogate solution to all the conflicted racial feelings I had. And it was a lie. But I had never felt lovelier, and beauty beats truth any day. At least that’s what I took from my half-remembered viewing of She’s All That.

He’d long been a member of the City of Brotherly Love Softball League. A gay softball league. Indeed, each team is allowed a maximum of two players who identify as heterosexual. Any more and the team loses league funding. This was extremely gay. Corporately gay.

But in and of itself it doesn’t make much sense. It’s an absurdly un-insulting insult. “Gay!” they shout, always out of context and dangling dangerously without the anchor of a pronoun. “Gay!” It’s like, duh. Are you trying to tell me something I don’t know? How kind a gesture that would be! Some person with really extreme gaydar just tumbling through the world alerting people to their own sexual orientations. Like a blessing.

“Gay!” people shout. For whose benefit? I always wonder afterward, as they are walking away, or in the case of one strange man in South Philadelphia, continuing to sit at a red light while I stood on a street corner and stared at him. He had pulled up in a truck, immediately rolled down the window, and started yelling at me about how I was a faggot. And also a nigger. This was an intersectional moment. I just sort of looked at him, mostly out of surprise. And then out of confusion; I was wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt. This guy must have been a professional faggot-spotter. It was almost impressive. After letting me know who and what I was, he then rolled his window back up and stared straight ahead, waiting for the light to change.

When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.

For years, I thought that the way to keep from getting burned was to set myself on fire first or to snuff out my light. I didn’t know that I was a phoenix, growing more powerful with every unsuccessful attempt at the drag of presentability, every hurled insult, every strike, and every split. The flame is not my liability but my strength. It was inside me all along.

Kanye was, to my mind, the ultimate example of society’s Good Black Man and Bad Black Man, and he didn’t seem to wrestle with any of the duality of these harmful figments so much as delight in it. I had been good once but I wasn’t so sure I was good anymore. I didn’t think I was bad, but I wasn’t sure. Kanye lived life in stereo and I coveted that.

I would announce it on Facebook by changing my profile picture to Whitney Houston in The Preacher’s Wife. I saw the future clearly and, apparently, that future was on Facebook. You’ve got to be always thinking of how you’ll turn life events into #content, and it’s a known fact that engagements, the first baby, some new jobs, winning Big Brother, and photos with celebrities are the gold standards of social media reaction-getters.

I surveyed the ruin of the parlor, the empty plastic bags, the basket of surplus eggs, and the pile of mini chocolate candies. I unwrapped a Krackel and ate it as I tried to figure out how to go about righting this wrong and also what a Krackel is and why there are no full-size versions of it. This is an entire candy brand that exclusively exists in miniature; what’s the business plan here? Deal with this later, I scolded myself. We have a holiday to save.

Does Easter have a villain? Is it Pontius Pilate? Is it Barabbas? Is it Death? What’s the deal with Krackel? Seriously. Please email me about this. Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?

And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

“Hear me out,” she says, waving her hands in the face of my disgust. You think you know some people. She continues: “I’ve been trying to figure out ways I can go back and warn Hillary.” Okay, I am on board the train now. I’ll bring my smelling salts. Kristen says, “I keep thinking if I go back to the beginning of the campaign and I say, ‘You need to just release all of your emails right now,’ it’ll be fine. But then I think I should go back further, so I go back to when she’s secretary of state and tell her, ‘Oh, girl, a private server, no.’ But then I remember, LOL, misogyny is the reason we’re here, so I need to go back to whenever that didn’t exist and I keep going back further and further until I’m all the way back before the Big Bang, and when I get there I whisper to the cloud of dust, ‘It’s not worth it.’ And then I fade away like I’m Marty McFly’s siblings.”