Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

it’s every generation of Black children that get burdened with this particular American work—and

“Treat people as people. Be color-blind. Love openly. Love everyone.” And then, in the same breath, he would have to say to his son: “You will be treated differently because of your skin. The rules are different for you. This is how you act when you meet the police. This is how you act growing up in the South. This is the reality of your world.”

I don’t know what shooting I mean, but there’s always another shooting so it’s always a safe bet to just ask if the person heard about the other one. It makes you sound informed, and sympathetic, and all of those other things that good people are.

“Everything you’re saying is true and real, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible to care about everyone. So you pick your battles. You limit how much you invest into the world and into people. It’s a type of emotional triage.”

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.”

I try to explain to him that adulthood just isn’t built for believing in the existence of other people. If we all believe in everyone—really believe they existed—then we have to care about them. We have to change our lives. We have to admit that maybe some of us actually have it better than others and, in having it better, we have to admit that maybe we could get by with a little less so that others can have a little more and that means giving up some of the things that we have.

We’re all afraid of being at the bottom of life’s shit stack. We’re all afraid of being poor, being injured, helpless, handicapped, all of the things that make us look at other people and say, ‘How bad. Somebody should do something to help them.’

The thing we’re most afraid of is being the ‘them’ in that equation.”

And obsession is, by nature, a one-way street. Only love can ever answer back.

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

The modern author is only as important as their search results.

And now I remember the talk of the shooting. The talk of some kid somewhere who caught the wrong end of a bullet. The talk of the police. The talk of excessive force. The talk of Black lives mattering, and Blue Lives mattering, and All Lives mattering. Now I remember the pundits and politicians. The talk show hosts and celebrities. The presence of this always. Now I remember all the screaming, and crying, and rallying, and arguing, and the memes and the thoughts and prayers, and the talks of regulation and investigation, and the bumper stickers, and gun rights laws. Now I remember it all.

You never know what he’s up to now or what he’s going to be up to in a week’s time. It’s like he rebuilds the world in every movie, rebuilds his reputation, rebuilds his outlook on sunshine. And if that don’t speak to someone like me, I don’t know what the hell does.

Dead kids don’t linger on the brain like they used to.

The Kid loves telling jokes. And not just any jokes, but those bad kind of jokes that only the very young and only the very Dad are able to laugh about. Those jokes where the punch line is the thing that makes you grimace more than it’s the thing that makes you laugh but the bottom line is that you came here to grimace or laugh to begin with.

The sun’s bright and hard; an angry gold eyeball staring down to see what comes next. Because it knows what’s coming next.

“Because you have to believe you matter, whether someone else sees you or not. Especially for a kid like

You’ve got to come into this game knowing what the rules are and knowing that you can’t ever win it. All you can ever do is try to break even and survive for a little longer than the next person who looks like you. That’s all you can expect. But the thing to know and remember is that you can never be something other than what you are, no matter how much you might want to. You can’t be them. You can only be you. And they’re going to always treat you differently than they treat themselves. They won’t ever know about it—at least, most of them won’t. Most of them will think that everything is okay and that you’re being treated well enough and that everything is beautiful. Because, I guess for them, all they can imagine is a world in which things are fair and beautiful because, after all, they’ve always been treated fairly and beautifully. History has always been kind to them.”

You see, the thing those fablers don’t get is that certain kids don’t get a fair chance to chase the dream. The world murders them first. Murders them, but fails to kill them. So these kids, they die young and grow a little more mad every day from then on out.

Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene.

Horny, without a doubt. But happy? No. I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself.

But the talk of anger and frustration is careful to avoid the conversation having to do with sadness. 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.

“But how many books you read don’t make you a good or bad person. How many books you read is just how many books you read.

Guns are like pets. Even if you don’t own one, it’s only a matter of time before your neighbor, friendly or unfriendly, brings one into your life and you have to cross your fingers and hope it’s friendly.

it. I try not to question Divine Providence or major cell phone carriers when they team up and come knocking at my door.

But it’s only a fall if you think about the ending. Otherwise, it’s called flying.

I mean, wasn’t I somebody’s baby once? Wasn’t I a kid for at least eighteen years? So when did I change from being a victim of the world’s cruelty to being a part of it? When did I become the thing that furthers the cycle of horrible things that crawl over the world each and every day?

Love cures all. Loves takes away pain. Love makes us forget, and each of us is deserving of a little forgetting. My dad told me that once.

“I guess death isn’t supposed to happen, but it’s the only thing that we can ever really depend on. It makes time for each and every one of us.”

It . . . it just gets too big. All of it. Stacks up every fucking day and none of us can make a dent in it, so we just sorta move through it without ever letting it get its hooks in. It’s survival. It’s how you stay sane. It’s how you stay alive. And there ain’t no way to change that.”

Memory and death are countries that know no geography.

And I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do with what happened to you, with what happened to all the other kids like you, with what happened to me. To all the kids like you who got shot and maybe even lived through it and grew up to be people like me: Black and broken and trying to remember that they are beautiful.

Laugh all you want, but I think 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.