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Something about him fills me with an immediate sense of love and hate. I want to hug him and push him away at the same time. And I know that all of this stems from the impossible color of his skin. I wonder what growing up with skin like that must have been like. Going to school looking like that? Must have been hell. Pure fucking hell.
As sleep finally gets its fishhooks into me, I offer up a heartfelt “Poor kid” for the pitch-black boy I met today. Living a life looking like that in a world that works the way this one does? . . . I wouldn’t hang that noose around anybody’s neck.
The other kids on the bus watched and listened. They too, willing or unwilling, were a part of the ceremony. Up front, they turned and leaned over the backs of their seats, watching. Some of them grinned. Others did not grin, but neither did they look away. Soot wondered about those kids the most. He wondered how they could watch and say nothing. But he also knew that he would do the same.
He wished that he could disappear again, become completely unseen like he had done that day. For years now, his mother and father had made him close his eyes and say, over and over again, “I am unseen and safe. I am unseen and safe.” But it never worked.
He wore hoodies and long pants all year round in the hopes that the kids would see less of his dark skin and find fewer reasons to pick on him. But none of it helped. He was the boy named Soot, and no one would ever let him forget it. Nothing he ever did would change that.
Tyrone had the perfect skin. High yellow. Light as butter. The holiest of blessings. Light skin got you girls. Light skin made teachers like you. Light skin made you a star in Hollywood. Light skin was everything. And almost all skin was lighter than his, so what did that say about what the future held for him?
“Why do I have to look like this?” Soot asked. His broken sobs became a steady stream. “One day, you’re going to have to learn to love who you are,” his father said, but Soot could not hear him over the sound of his grief.
I’m sorry. I haven’t introduced myself. I’m an author. My name is ———. Maybe you’ve heard of me and maybe you haven’t, but you’ve probably heard of my book. It seems to be selling pretty well. It’s called Hell of a Book. And, according to the reviews, it’s a hell of a book.
it wound up being the greatest gift I ever had. Entire worlds were mine and mine alone. People, creatures, and sights unimagined by most people were a place where I lived.
Whatever the reason, when pilots become customers, they show up on the other end of the phone line barking orders. You always know a pilot when they call in because they always tell you they’re pilots. “I’m a pilot!” they shout. And then they say: “If I make mistakes, people can die! Do you understand what that means?” Apparently, it means that they’re allowed to yell at you and call you a stupid buffoon, an idiot, a moron, a pussy, a bitch, a cunt, and whatever else comes to mind.
Eight hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year: we’re the people you blame. Try sitting through that for four years and not going off the deep end. Few people are built for it. Fewer and fewer each and every day. Half the people working at Major Cell Phone Company are on antianxiety pills or antidepressants. And a significant number of them are gun owners.
“Yeah,” Sean says. “That’s it. We can’t get through appetizers without talking about the Second Coming and the fate of my immoral soul.” “Immortal soul.” “That’s not what she calls it.” “Did you tell her you’re an atheist?” “I did.” “And what did she say?” “I forgive you.” “Gotta respect that.”
“But what kind of a train wreck?” “Vietnam.” “You know,” Sean says, “I read an article the other day about how fewer people actually get the Vietnam reference when you use it that way. When you use it that way, you’re dating yourself. It’s better to say Afghanistan.” “So if I say Afghanistan, I sound younger?” “Exactly.” “Hell of a world,” I say.
Reality as a whole—past or present—just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion. There are better ways and places to spend your time.
Maybe it’s residual mood enhancement left over from the special brownies I had the night before in whatever town that was, or maybe it just feels good sometimes to be hugged by a stranger. Whatever the reason, I don’t pull away from it. I realize right then, right there, in the arms of this strange old man, that I’m alone and have been for years and probably will be for the rest of my life and if he holds me for a second longer, I’m going to break down into tears right here in the middle of this airport and there isn’t anything anyone will be able to do to stop me.
Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that’s what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we’ve invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. So maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we best measure love.
“And what do you think about it, State College? You’re a writer. You’re supposed to say something about these things. And you’re Black!” “Am I?” I ask. I look down at my arm and, sure enough, it turns out that Renny is right. I’m Black! A startling discovery to make this far along! “Well now,” I say, staring at the black hand at the end of my black arm and the black fingers adorning it. “That’s very, very interesting. I wonder if my readers know that?” “So what do you think about it?” Renny asks. “What do you have to say about it all?” I really do want to answer Renny’s question, but I’m still
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“I mean, White writers don’t have to write about being White. They can just write whatever books they want. But because I’m Black . . .” I pause to look at my hands and reaffirm that, yes, I really am Black. The story checks out. “. . . does that mean that I can only ever write about Blackness? Am I allowed to write about other things? Am I allowed to be something other than simply the color of my skin? I mean, I can’t quote it word for word, but isn’t that what the whole ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was about?”
“But here I am, today, in this moment, finding out I’m Black. A Negro! A bona fide African American! Hell of a discovery. And if I’ve always been Black—which, as I’m thinking about my life, I think might be the case—then I wonder what it’s done to me. I wonder how it’s guided my life. Like, what decisions have I made that I wouldn’t have made if I wasn’t Black? And what about the rest of the world? What has everyone seen in me and thought about me because I’m Black that I didn’t see and think about myself?”
My author photo hangs from the rafters, sits on the walls, looks back at me from the cover of my own book. I have no idea who that person in the photo is. Whoever the person is, he’s Black. Around the age of forty. Average-looking enough to walk through an airport and not get noticed, but also Black enough in skin tone to have a cop tell him that he “fits the description.”
“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.”
“You didn’t tell me he was Black,” Jack says to Sharon. “I wanted to see if you could tell from his writing.” “I couldn’t.” “Good.” “Good indeed,” Jack says enthusiastically.
CNN and Fox News aren’t out there killing people in the streets. But they do add to the overall air of dread that we all feel. It’s the soundtrack of America right now. The jam we all bump and grind to. People being shot is the way we mark the passage of time now. Like, where were you when Sandy Hook happened? And do you remember who you were dating around the time when those people shot up that office building? But it happens so much that you then have to ask: ‘What office building?’”
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.”
“I 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.”
More than anything, it felt good to be out here, lost in the darkness of the world, away from everyone. He felt at home within himself, at home in his skin. He could believe, just then, that the whole world was gone away and all of the eyes that had been watching him were finally gone. He wasn’t being watched anymore. He didn’t stand out. Every moment of his life, he felt that he stood out. Too tall. Too skinny. Too Black. All of it swallowed him up some days. There were eyes everywhere, watching him, staring at him.
He was no one. He was unwatched. He was unseen. He was safe.
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 sit for a while and I watch as the onyx peacock walks back and forth beside the pond. Its inky plumage scintillates in the afternoon sun, refracting the light through the lens of darkness and shooting out something more beautiful than I’ve ever seen before. It looks the way jazz might if it had a form that you could see that wasn’t that Miles Davis.
But only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something’ll kill you and being able to choose not to do it.
Skinny as a bank account after Christmas.
Women wipe the corners of their eyes and grown men turn away, maybe even wiping a few tears of their own. Whatever Hell of a Book is about, it must be something powerful. I wish I knew what it was.
three months of my editor telling me why the books I wanted to write were “not quite the type of book we publish.” Whenever I told them I thought the whole point of publishing was simply “to publish good books,” both Sharon and my editor laughed.
Sometimes, you tell people you’re an author and they’ll pull out their phone and Google you, right there in front of your face. They’ll type in your name and, depending on the search results, decide for themselves whether or not you’re truly what you say you are. The modern author is only as important as their search results.
Like you just woke up in a sea of blackness and there ain’t a white face in sight and you didn’t know that feeling existed until that very moment and it’s so foreign, and yet so beautiful, that you don’t know what to do with it and while a part of you loves it, another part of you wants to know where the White people at just in case these niggas get out of line because that’s what you’ve been taught that niggas do when left to their own devices.
The thing that he loved the most about being unseen was not seeing his own skin anymore. He had escaped his dark flesh. He had escaped Soot and, because of that, when he closed his eyes and thought about himself, he finally got a chance to see the boy who had been living behind his eyes for the very first time. The boy was small and vibrant-looking. He smiled. He laughed. He seemed happy with himself and the world. He was not a boy who was afraid.
But the bigger problem is that now I’ve been on tour for so long that I’m beginning to hear my own voice in interviews. I can hear someone that sounds exactly like me saying that my book is about death. I can hear someone that sounds exactly like me saying that my book is “an attempt to cope.”
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.”
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.”
They had ignored the fact that from the moment I came out with all of this black skin, the world was already turning its blades against me. The traps had already been set. The walls had already been built. The schools. The prisons. The self-hatred. It had all been done before I ever showed up and my parents had the audacity to think that they stood a chance against any of it. They dared to believe that they could change anything.
Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
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.
I’ve got a condition. I won’t go into the details of it, but the bottom line is simply that I have an overactive imagination and it makes it difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not.” “You’re a schizo?” I laugh. “No. Nothing like that. I’m just imaginative.”
I’ve always found that the best time to wax poetic about some dame that you’ve fallen head over heels for is to say it so that it can never be heard. That keeps you safe. Keeps your world rolling along on familiar tracks. I’ve found that to be the best thing to do with any upsetting information.
I’m real, the next message from her says. You’re real. This is real. Is she? Am I? Is any of it?
My responsibility is to sell books. My responsibility is to keep myself out of the poorhouse. My responsibility is to keep on doing what I’m doing without taking on any more than I have now. My mother and father would have wanted that. I’m a good person with pain all of my own. Why do I have to try to fix the world?
“I don’t understand why I have to keep telling this story again and again,” I say. My breaths come fast and staggered. “I don’t understand any of this whole process. The interviews, the hotels, the readings. Why can’t I just write and go away? That’s all I want to do. Why can’t I just give one interview and be done with it? Why do I have to keep reliving this same day over and over again?”
This was when Soot found writing. It was a way to capture his father’s love, a way to keep the man alive, page after page, story after story. It was the means by which he could see his father and not get caught up in it so much that the doctor realized he was off of his medicine.
He sits there with that apology of his hanging in the air between us, promising that maybe somebody in this world really does care about me and all of the things that I’ve been through. I know he’s just a figment of my imagination, but maybe that’s the best way that the mind can take care of itself.
I hate myself for ignoring everything that has to do with people in pain, for spending all this time running. But what can I do? It’s the only way that I know to live.
