Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir

by Brian Broome

We don’t talk to one another and it’s like five different people are living five completely separate lives under the same roof.

God do I know this feeling.

I sat day after day allowing that television to teach me that the most important thing in life was to be liked. By everybody. Between its teachings at home and social life at school, I learned that the whiter you acted, the better liked you were. So I changed the way that I spoke to mimic the characters on television.

Ok, I was a neon white little redneck farm boy with a thick southern drawl, not a poor black child. But the television played exactly the same role.

I had found acceptance. That’s all I ever wanted.

I felt a bit stronger in the knowledge that I wasn’t completely alone. But I knew I still didn’t belong.

I know now that their actions are not simply from ego. 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.

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. A shinier, busier version. A version that has a Civic Light Opera and all-night diners and beautiful museums. 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.

I know he loved me. I can feel the power of it taking over the room. He didn’t know how to say it or show it, and now his mouth and body don’t work. He sacrificed so much of himself to be what he thought a Black man is supposed to be.

I wanted to give up. I wanted someone, anyone, to save me. 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 do.

living on the outside of “normal” provides the perfect view for spotting insecure and flimsy principles camouflaging themselves as leadership or righteousness.

Others will try to teach you that strength is little more than constantly setting yourself to the task of proving that everyone else is weaker than you. I say that strength is far more than that. It is proving to yourself day after day that you are capable of more than you were yesterday.