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anodyne
And in adulthood, there’s fear of the memories and, very often, of the telling and how we might be judged. We are somehow expected to keep our hurts and shortcomings private, even as they threaten to suffocate us.
Gwendolyn Brooks praised Baldwin because he “dared to confront and examine himself, ourselves, and the enigmas between,” which is a skill of great artists and scholars.
But my Black, male body has betrayed its manhood on many occasions. My hips have swung too freely, and my heart has allowed itself to be broken far too easily.
I can only tell myself that it has already begun for this Black boy. I am witnessing it. I am watching the whole world ready itself to tell him about all the things that he cannot be.
I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t know this was going to happen. But I really love words. I love learning new ones. I love to write, and someday I will show my notebooks to someone. When I hear a word, it just appears in my head all lined up in order because I’ve seen it on pages before when I read. When I don’t know a word, I look it up and then I use the thesaurus my auntie gave me to find different words that mean the same thing. There’s nothing special about that.
Mr. Nye hates me even more than Miss Biviano does. He’s a skinny little pigeon-toed white man with a little bit of power, a balding head, and a pinched face. He wears short-sleeved polyester dress shirts, polyester ties, and polyester pants. He is practically made of polyester.
Reading is why I can spell words. Reading is the only reason why I am in this spelling bee. I won’t spell words wrong on purpose just so I can go sit down and be done with this. Something won’t let me. Even if I tried, I don’t think that I could do it because words are supposed to be the way they are and spelling a word wrong on purpose would feel like I was putting my shoes on the wrong feet.
Some kids in the crowd clap, but most of them yawn. Around me, the empty seats onstage are multiplying. They look like gravestones.
I didn’t even have a bedroom to get sent to.
The school colors were red and gray, like a gunshot wound through an old man’s head, and every wall in the high school hallways was painted pea-soup green.
I look past my reflection and take in the bleak sights of Duquesne. It’s a poster child for what America does with a town after it’s done with it.
I could never watch him raid our refrigerator. I couldn’t bring myself to take in the sight of him stealing food from the woman whose character he assassinated, in the home that she had been supporting by herself since he lost his job and become a hobo.
made up stories about my father and mother and how much they adored each other when the truth was that there was no mountain high enough, valley low enough, or river wide enough to compete with the lovelessness of their marriage.
The fire had come to save me from poverty. From mothers who were too busy at work. From fathers who dripped verbal poison. From secrets. The fire had come to deliver me to the life I was supposed to be living.
The house folded in on itself like it had been punched in the stomach. I felt like a man. Class dismissed.
I spat up a few more denials. They landed like dead birds falling from the sky. I tried my best to make my face look incredulous, outraged, and offended. But I could tell by their stony eyes that my face was betraying me, just as the rest of my body had throughout my life. I wanted it to be straight and it wouldn’t. I wanted it to be good at sports and it wouldn’t. No matter what I wanted in life, my body was always there to oppose me. And now here it was again, making a fool out of me.
I sat back down at my desk and removed the Gay and Lesbian Task Force flier from my pocket and cursed it. I ripped it just like my father did and then asked both halves what in the world I was supposed to do now.
I said goodbye to Grace Jones, whose Nightclubbing poster I’d only installed on the wall with Scotch tape a few days before. She stared at me as I stood there giving the room a final once-over. Her cigarette was tucked neatly into the corner of her full, gorgeous lips. Her stare laid my cowardice bare and her eyes followed me for the whole time I slowly closed the door. And when I did, when the latch clicked, I heard the Scotch tape give way from the wall, rendering her limp. I heard the poster tumble to the floor.
She gave me a Mountain Dew. “Mountain Dew is for white folks,” she said, “but I drink it when nobody here.” In that moment, she created within me the odd sensation of laughing through a deep ache. Like remembering something funny someone you loved once said while you’re sitting at their funeral. The feeling that confuses your body in an exhilarating way and you can’t differentiate between the tears born of mirth and the ones born of sorrow. Joy and pain get all mixed together in a yarn ball of emotions.
She talked endlessly about how much this march meant to her and how much we were going to shake things up. I was only listening to the voice in my head telling me to escape while I could. But I followed her because I was afraid not to. I followed her because I felt that, if I didn’t, I would be lost forever. I followed her because she was, up until that point, the bravest person that I had ever met, and I was ashamed to be as afraid as I was in front of her.
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?
He is smiling and laughing at whatever she is saying. The bus is sailing on a sea of Black love and not a drop for me to drink.
Expectations are useless when you’re surrounded on all sides by human nature.
Who would I be if I unlearned all the things I’ve learned without my permission?
It often feels like there is no place among humanity that I can call home. I have spent a long time searching.
I used to believe, with the help of drinking and drugs, that I was a people person. Now, absent those crutches, I find people laid bare for what they really are. They are desperate for something, anything to cling to. I find that I am better off on my own, where there is no one to disappoint me but me. I want no more of the pain that people cause.
The interior of Pressley’s punishes me for having such grand fantasies.
I order watery Jim Beam after watery Jim Beam because I am afraid to leave. I don’t want to walk across the room to the door, which feels farther and farther away. I stay because I know, without a doubt, that once I walk out and the door slams behind me, they will all laugh. Their laughter would confirm for me, finally, that there is no place in the world for me to go.
He seems sad and deep in a way that teases my rescue and victim instincts all at once.
Summer was taking its last breaths and the sky was the color of erased pencil on white paper.
My father kept handing me these balls, hoping to conjure a miracle. But they were just air pushing back against a leathery prison. Air doing its best impression of a Black boy in America.
My father’s normally stocky, grimy, and clunky frame was lithe as liquid and refined as teatime.
“I get caught up in the action of it,” I continue. “All I can think about is getting the ball to the hoop. It just becomes, like . . . necessary for some reason, you know? I really can’t explain it and if you don’t play the game it’s hard to understand, you know? I just feel, like, electric when I play ball.
The only thing I learned in Phys Ed was that my body would never do the things that it was supposed to do. My body was the worst bully that I’d ever had.
He hated me. Black boys hated me. All of them. From my father to my brother to Glenn Banks. They were all a source of pain and, much like my Judas of a body, the basketball, and the key, I wished I could be free of their demands.
When Denise thought something was funny, the music in her laugh would comfort me in the late hours when we worked together. She wouldn’t let up until she left you in a pool of giggles too. And she was beautiful. Dark brown skin like the woman standing before me now and a smile that could drive away dark clouds.
Her anger was dismissed as hysterics. Whatever she did had to be completely focused on shoring up his confidence and alleviating his insecurities. There is nothing sadder than an insecure man foisting his insecurities off on everyone else because he is unable to process them, to be an adult about them, and ultimately to deal with them.
I saw Black women all around me who were disappointed by their men, who felt dominated by them yet unprotected at the same time.
was sitting just at her knee looking up, and she was holding a potato chip midair as if she’d forgotten how potato chips work.
Maybe the wages ain’t exactly death like dying. The wages of sin can be a spiritual death, a prison, a life derailed and unrealized. I know about the wages of sin, pastor. Preach on.
Seem to me that men only happy with the female sex when we just girls. They want us to stay girls because they don’t like grown women. They don’t like us at all.
I know that I never want to go back to the endless, desperate ache of begging someone to love me. I have been there. I know it like the sound of my own breathing. I know how deceptive a crumb of it can be when I feel starved for it. I want to learn to love myself, as they say. I’m not entirely sure what that even means, but I hear other people say it and it sounds good.
You saw me through the window and your face was contorted in a mask of goodbye forevers.
I should have done something. But I don’t know what I should have done.
I didn’t know it back then, but my mother was a straight up con woman at the now extinct department store practice of deferment known as “layaway,” a system where one would basically placate the Layaway Lady by sliding her just a jingle of money at a time, with a promise to pay the full amount, and then reneging on the whole deal at the last minute when the items you wanted went on sale on the main floor. It’s a lost art, hustling the Layaway Lady. But a woman gotta do what a woman gotta do, and my mother somehow slowly chipped away at the Layaway Lady’s sanity until she got those prices
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This antechamber of Hills Department Store smelled like the emotions of a child. Preadolescent bacchanalia. It was dizzying. It was a roasted peanut, soft pretzel factory wrapped inside a chocolate-covered everything. It was the aroma of popcorn; cold, red Slushee; hot dog jamboree with dusty corners; and waxy yellow buildup on the floors at a time when two dollars could buy you the world.
The crabby, old, white concession lady with the hot pink eye shadow and a face like a catcher’s mitt was my Goddess of Giving as I handed her my two dollars reverentially, head bowed, and accepted her synthetic foodthings with a gratitude matched only by those who have received a donated kidney.
The inside of Hills Department Store was my first barstool and, when I was finished, sticky hands and all, it was time to wander the aisles while my mother worked the Layaway Lady.
