Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir

by Brian Broome

The expression of feelings was discouraged. Dismissed as sentimental foolishness. It was part of our unspoken code.

When I was a kid, I thought that the key to being a Black man was to learn how to properly lean on things to look cool. What I didn’t know at the time is that what Black men lean on the most, whether we want to admit it or not, is Black women.

What do you do when your own people don’t want you? How do you become anything?

The streetlamp. My spotlight of judgment. I am its star.

Because, I may be biased, but I am fully confident that the entire state of Ohio is nothing but a racist cesspool. It wears on the Black psyche until you either leave it forever or get damn good at football. I chose the former.

Your body goes clammy all over when you’re confronted by an outright racist. Your skin feels heavy and numb at the same time. You shut down, but you can feel the rage you’re trying to suppress, boiling like a hot cauldron deep inside. Your stomach becomes a black hole that you wish you could disappear into. The sweat bursts out of every pore on your body. But something told me not to run. Something in my Black DNA told me that running would only make things worse.

Even though there was noise all around, I could hear the distinctive sound of tires slowing down behind me. I knew that sound better than I know the taste of the inside of my mouth.

They look confused by the driver’s behavior, but they’d soon learn what he was trying to teach them.

There are moments in life when your situation becomes clear. I imagine there’s a moment of realization for people who are drowning, just before they start to kick, flail, and panic. There’s a calm inside that is disrupted when your entire system begins to realize that everything is not going to be alright. There are moments like this when something real and consequential happens and awakens something real and consequential within you.

When Tom and Melinda finally noticed what was happening, they did nothing. They said nothing. I imagine this kind of thing had never happened to them before. But Annette and I unloaded on the driver for every time we’d been followed around in a store, for every time we had been falsely accused, for every time we’d been dehumanized.

There is no thing on earth more dangerous than a man who refuses to accept that he is carrying all of these loads, because it then becomes up to everyone else to carry them for him in one way or another.

But they never really die. They just find other ways to escape.

The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.

My biggest failing in this life has been my gasping need to be loved at the expense of so many other things. I have allowed others to tell me who and what I am supposed to be and, when I failed to meet their expectations, I blamed myself.

I have only recently begun to factor my mental health into the act of living. Black life in America doesn’t seem to allow for it. As a race, we are often admired for how “strong” we are and for how much we have endured. The truth is that we are no stronger than anyone else. We have endured, but we are only human. It is the expectation of strength, and the constant requirement to summon it, fake it, or die, that is erosive and leads to our emotional undoing.

It is only through your own lived experience that you will learn that living on the outside of “normal” provides the perfect view for spotting insecure and flimsy principles camouflaging themselves as leadership or righteousness.

Far too many of them seem to prefer being “white” to being human.