Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

hate to tell you this, but nothing ever sounds right after a certain age, Kid. The older you get, the more you find out it’s all just falling apart and, even worse than that, it’s always been falling apart. The past, the present, the future. They’re interchangeable when it comes to bad news. Tragedy and trauma are the threads that weave generations together. Hell, being Black, we should know that better than anyone.” —

But only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something’ll kill you and being able to choose not to do it. Swing

You see, the thing about people is that we’re all creatures of habit. We like order, routine. We struggle to make a pattern out of our lives in order to mitigate the deep-down belief that there is no order to anything, that we’re all just marbles banging off of one another in a cold, infinite expanse.

It’s hard to stand there and tell your children that they’re always going to have to be afraid of the police. It’s hard to say to them: if a policeman stops you, you should trust them, but you should also keep your hands where they can see them and you should never ever talk back to them and you should never do anything that could be seen as a sudden move and even if you do all of that, there’s still no guarantee that you’ll come out of it alive. The cop could shoot you right then and there and you’ll die without ever knowing what you did wrong.”

The humidity hits me in the face as I step out onto the jet bridge and I know for sure that I’m back in North Carolina. I know all the smells: humidity, pine trees, thinly veiled racism. It’s what home feels like for me.

Down in this part of the world, we got it all: fifty-foot Confederate flags planted along the interstate, statues put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy, plantations where you can have wedding pictures taken of the way things used to be; we got lynchings, riots, bombings, shrimp and grits, and even muscadine grapes. Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. But the thing is, if you’re born into a meat grinder, you grow up around the gears, so eventually you don’t even see them anymore. You just see the beauty of the sausage.

Bolton Town Hall also doubles as a church because there is no separation of church and state in southern Black towns. God is everywhere, especially in the law. At least, He’s supposed to be. But I can tell by the tone and timbre of the people inside the walls of this small, ruined church that they’re beginning to believe less and less in the ability of God to come along and do the right thing in their lives.

Because, ultimately, it’s sadness that sits at the bedrock of all of the anger these people feel every day. Sadness at being left behind and left out of so much of what everyone else seems to have in this country, in this world.

learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it—learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle. —