Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir

by Brian Broome

According to Anderson, Baldwin had lost his audience after 1964 because America had “moved forward.” Considering the Black Lives Matter movement, however, Baldwin’s skepticism of America’s racial progress seems more prescient.

Black boys have to be tough but, in doing so, we must also sacrifice our sensitivity, our humanity. I can feel his urgency and know that my body has done something wrong.

The differences between Black boys and white boys, he explained, are vast and it is entirely up to the Black boy to make those differences clear. White boys could just do whatever. But Black boys had to show through our behavior that we were undeniably, incontrovertibly the most male. The toughest.

Any Black boy who did not signify how manly he was at all times deserved to be punched back up to God to be remade, reshaped. Sometimes I would look up into his face after my ass-whuppin’ and I could feel the apology radiating off of him. But he would never apologize because he wanted to teach me that the world wouldn’t.

She still always looks at me like I’m about to cause trouble. I don’t think she likes Black people because Black kids give her a hard time. Black boys are always a disruption in class and the Black girls are too loud and bossy, so I try not to be like them and blend into the background. But she doesn’t treat me any better.

Black boys don’t get a long boyhood. It ends where white fear begins,

White children got sent to their bedrooms or were given a good and loving talking to—​punishments that shamed the knee-jerk ass-whuppin’s my siblings and I were subject to for a misspoken word or the slightest infraction. I didn’t even have a bedroom to get sent to. White children were given “allowances.” Allowances: money that was given to them just for being alive. White children became indignant when their television parents did not raise these allowances or withheld them as punishment for some adorable mistake they’d made. Their household chores seemed more of an option and not a command necessary to keep the very household functioning. Their clothes were never out of style, never dingy with wear. Their homes were beautifully decorated. They all had bicycles and their own bedrooms, and I was in thrall to the opulence and ease of it all. The parents of white children were loving toward each other and playful with their children. They acknowledged them and talked to them and always seemed to be in a good mood.

Our home was a shack, especially when compared to the two- and three-story palaces that lay just at the other end of town. Money was a constant discussion: lack of it, what to do with it, where it was going to come from. It was always a problem. The white parents on television were always canoodling, doting on their children, and smiling at one another with an air of playful romance, but my mother didn’t like my father at all and it was fairly evident.

There was no beauty in my life. It was all pea green, gray, boxed in, and all she could tell me, over and over again, was that we didn’t have the money. I hated her. Our whole lives were a Black embarrassment.

My parents didn’t even make me a “good” Black. Not honey colored or caramel. They made me the color of a turned-off TV screen and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

It’s a poster child for what America does with a town after it’s done with it. The sidewalks are virtually empty and the storefronts are boarded up. The town’s deadness is made more profound by the knowledge of how alive it used to be.

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.

didn’t dare shout. No one could hear me but me as I, just under my breath, announced my arrival on the scene.

Growing up, it didn’t take me long to learn that my gayness detracted from my Blackness. Black, gay men are punch lines to the Black community. An anomaly to be ridiculed. Relegated to the role of church choir directors. We are a nationwide family secret, courtesy of masculinity and religion.

People will tell you that times are different now, but I think we all know that only some love is granted public access. It’s not as though I want to display affection publicly. It’s just that I’d like to have the option.

wonder if my father ever really listened to my mother. I wonder if they ever actually had a conversation about anything other than money.

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 know because I have been that man myself too many times.

White folks got plenty time to tell they children how wonderful and special they is, but that’s not how I was raised. A Black child need to learn discipline in this world because if they don’t learn it, they end up dashed up on the rocks.

We, us homos from the nineties, are the ones who put in all the real work so these youngins can enjoy all this pellucidity. We are the ones who did all the heavy lifting.

My mother once told me that, when she was a child in the Jim Crow south, a Black parent showing affection toward their children was a sure-fire way to let white people know what your weakness was.

hated him in that way we sometimes learn early to hate ourselves when we’re different.

They are afraid, and fear often trumps judgment. It isn’t as if they don’t have reasons in America to be afraid for their Black children.

There have been moments of solitude and silence when I have literally taken my right hand, placed it over my left shoulder, and patted myself on the back for surviving small-town Ohio. And if you are a Black person from small-town Ohio, you deserve it too. Go ahead. Do it now. Pat yourself on the back and be proud that you are still standing upright. 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.

When I look around Pittsburgh—​the city in which I still live, the city I love—​I see a bigger version of what I’d thought I left back in Ohio.

But there is no substantive difference. And I have given up on the idea that there is any place in this country that would be any different.

even though I feel nothing for the man, I don’t want people to know that I feel nothing for him.

I have spent a lifetime giving up in one way or another. I have believed every person who told me all the things I couldn’t and shouldn’t

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.

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