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He “play punched” me to toughen me up—blows to the side of my head or in the arm that were so hard that I knew somewhere deep down inside that he really didn’t like me at all.
I took his disguised ass-whuppin’s almost every day, believing that, one day, he would deliver the one punch that might change me.
This could not stand. And now I was being taken to go fuck “some girl” to prove that Corey had not been hanging out with a sissy. I was to prove that I was not an insult to my race and my gender.
She took me out in the hallway once to ask me who writes my English homework for me and when I told her that I write it myself, I couldn’t tell if she was looking into my eyes or over my head when she called me a liar. Sometimes, she makes me wonder myself if I am cheating.
It’s like they have a Black boy rule book that they won’t show me, and I always end up doing the wrong thing, so I mostly try not to do anything at all.
I know that it’s the eighties and everything, but I don’t think that white people should be dating Black people. It’s not what God wants. He made white people and Black people and meant for us to stick to our own kind.
Jodie Henderson is one of the white girls up here with me and this makes me nervous. She is the smartest person in our class. I am the only Black person on the stage. This makes things worse.
For him, his body is merely a vehicle to run from place to place and explore the world. He is wonderfully oblivious, as I must have been at one point.
I wondered if Blackness was responsible for inferiority or if God just made those who were inferior Black.
He was the exact opposite of the Black boys who gave me hell every day. He was sensitive. I wanted Alex and I wanted to be Alex.
“Boy, don’tchu ever trust white folks again.”
“White people didn’t care if you lived or died out there tonight, you understand? Anything cudda happened to you! You gonna get enough of trusting these white people, you hear me?”
When our eyes met, he seemed to be taking in the ruin and loss. He truly had nowhere to go now. I felt powerful. He disappeared into the crowd as it grew larger. The house folded in on itself like it had been punched in the stomach. I felt like a man.
I could picture everything where it once was. The front porch where my mother hot-combed my sister’s hair. The expansive backyard. The tree that held our swing, now chopped down. The land near the back of the yard where my father had built a grape arbor. The patch where my parents grew a garden so bountiful that it kept us fed all winter from the vegetables my mother took such pride in canning.
I had been so focused on everything I believed we didn’t have.
Then he turns to me but not with his whole body. Just his eyes. He narrows them hatefully. “AND FUCK YOU!” He storms down the steps of the bus and back onto the street.
Recently, I’ve seen Black boys on this same bus huddled up together, holding hands and whispering sweet nothings. They are unapologetic—stronger, prouder, and braver than I was. Than I am. Than I ever have been.
She came to my room in the middle of the night and sang “This Little Light of Mine,” in an effort to cheer me up. I repaid her by drinking bleach the next day, in an effort to put my light out forever.
Above all, we would be discreet about our relationship and live quiet lives. Because we would both know that, although we loved each other, there was absolutely no need to make a big spectacle of ourselves. We would never march in any Pride parade.
People marched with linked arms that day in Pittsburgh, to the beat of Annette’s bongos. I allowed myself to disappear into her noise and whisper the chant quietly to myself. we’re here. we’re queer. get used to it. I didn’t dare shout. No one could hear me but me as I, just under my breath, announced my arrival on the scene.
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.
I knew immediately that cocaine would be a mainstay in my life. It made me feel invincible. In an instant, I was the person that I always wanted to be.
But I was not afraid anymore. Something in his sad manner let me know that he meant me no harm. What I saw in his eyes was a gasping loneliness. Pure and simple. The kind of loneliness that begs for some—any—form of humanity to reach out and touch.
I can show you the exact geographical spot that sparked the end of my innocence and when the lights in my life slowly began to dim.
But I can’t help it. It’s what I like. It’s what everybody likes. It’s what we learn to like, and I don’t have any control over that. We learn that white boys are people and Asian boys are exotic and Hispanic boys are luxurious and Black boys are for sex.
I am standing in the rain wondering what seized my brain early on that made me believe white men to be the only ones worthy, of being the only ones who are fully human. I am wondering who wrote this script that I, for some reason, have been so determined to play out.
Who would I be if I unlearned all the things I’ve learned without my permission? All the things that the darkness of my skin is supposed to mean.
He cries a drunk cry that rattles his breath. The kind of cry that only bursts through when you’ve got nothing left to hold on to and nothing strong enough to hold it in any longer. “Why ain’t you a man? Why cain’t you be a man? How can you be like this? How can you be like this?” he asks over and over. But, now, I know that he isn’t talking to me.
On the street, cool air blasts me in the face. I look up and take in what seems like the same streetlight that follows me around the city. It mocks whores like me in the late hours. It takes pleasure in knowing that, if it has to sit outside in the dark, used and meandering, so do I. I can’t take sitting at home on my own at night. Too many ghosts use silence as their time to attack. I convince myself that I am bored, when what I really want is noise to drown them out. I persuade myself that I am horny, when what I really am is lonely. So I allow the street to lead me from club to tavern to
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She drops her pants and steps out of them and toward me in one motion. We kiss and I wrap my arms around her. I am fascinated by her breasts against my chest. I am fascinated by how soft she is all over. I am fascinated by how small she is. But all I am is fascinated.
further and further until I arrive where she wants me, and I look at the space between her legs where I am once again . . . Fascinated. I am fascinated by nothing but the spectacle of absence between her legs. The sheer “not there” of it all.
“You want me to try again?” “No. Every time I look down you lookin’ at my pussy like it’s made outta math.”
Alone in the dark, I sat as close to the television as I could. I wanted to see him again. I needed to know why they all hated him so much. He look like a faggot. I knew what that word meant too. A boy who likes boys. It was the word that hounded me every day at school. And now I knew that my mother hated them. It confirmed what I had been slowly realizing: that I needed to hide myself. I was twelve.
I knew that, no matter how sweetly he sang, that he would never be a man and most definitely not a Black one.
I catch myself smiling and staring at the little boy now talking to his mother on the phone and I am cheering him on. “Talk to your mother,” I whisper to myself out loud like a crazy person. You will never know your own origin story as well as your mother does. She knows you better than you do. Talk to her. Because I found out so much when I finally stopped judging her long enough to let her speak.
The Holiday was uncomplicated. Wooden. An old-fashioned pickup joint. No need to get dressed up because nobody could really see what you were wearing anyway. It was a place for man’s men. It reeked of desperation and spilt beer and I loved it.
“Someday,” he says. “Someday you won’t look good. You’re not always going to be young. Someday everything you’re so proud of right now will be gone forever, and I wish that I could be there to see it.”
Look Left, Look Right
The drunk man looks down at Tuan, who looks up at the man dreamily and with sleepy eyes. I find that I am holding my breath. Not because I think the man is physically dangerous. I’m holding it because I’m scared the drunk man’s sorrow and pain will somehow infect the boy’s spirit. From my own experience, I know that there is something going on deeper than the whiskey. There is some pain he is trying to escape. I don’t want Tuan to see the way that some men—men like me—deal with their despair. Because despair is an insidious and dangerous thing. I know it well.
I remember something that she once said in rehab. “Maybe it’s childhood. Maybe if you don’t feel like you got no love in childhood, you spend the rest of yo life lookin’ for it in grimy places.”
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.
“Reach for it again and I will send you back up to God!” he said. “I will send you back up to God!”
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.
One of the reasons I took this trip is to prove to myself that I am allowed to take up space in the world. I used to believe that the space I occupied was conditional. That I had to please anyone and everyone around me in order to exist because I had made the horrible mistake of being different.
The other reason I came here is because, lately, I have been thinking about my own death. I used to wish myself dead all the time. I’ve even tried to bring it about. But I am not thinking about my death like that any longer. Now I worry that my death will come to pass and with my final breath, I will realize that I’ve allowed my one and only opportunity to live to go to waste. So I have come to France to try to ensure that the feeling of wanting to live fully and unapologetically, like Brother Baldwin did, endures.
I will look out upon the same waters that Baldwin did when he first came here as a young man so long ago. And where the water is deep, I will lie back and allow it to buoy me up, so that I might look into the vastness of Baldwin’s sky. A Black boy from a shitty town in northeastern Ohio floating in the immenseness of the sea. And, for the first time in my life, the possibilities will seem limitless.
