Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

He has created a world in which his father has died of cancer. The boy has created all of those worlds because they are easier than the world in which his father was shot and killed in front of him by the long arms of a system that he is powerless to overcome.

Travel, the boy always dreams of travel. And why wouldn’t he? Somewhere else in this world, there has to be a better place than the one in which he finds himself. Somewhere else in this world, he cannot be afraid. Somewhere else in this world, he cannot be sad. Somewhere else in this world, he is accepted and loved and his father is not dead. It is only a matter of finding that place.

If he could disappear, he could be free from fear. If he could disappear, he would not have to worry about bullies. He would not have to worry about cops. He would not have to worry about legislation aimed at his skin. He would not have to worry about the history of slavery that led him to here. He would not have to worry about feeling inferior. He would not have to worry about being angry, and afraid, and never sure which was better to feel because they both hurt in different ways but they seemed to be all that he had left. He would not have to worry about not knowing what to feel when he watched video footage of people that looked like him being sprayed with fire hoses.

He would not have to worry about his skin being too dark or too light. He would not have to worry about his hair being the wrong texture. He would not have to worry about his lips being too big. He would not have to worry about all of the things his mother and father had both been afraid of.

And the anger and depression will cycle back through again and again and the only way to escape them is to pretend that you don’t see how broken the world is. It’ll be that way every single day of your life. And then, you’ll have kids one day, and you’ll want desperately to protect them from all of that.

She wanted a child that could be free from it. A child that could never get shot. A child that didn’t have to be afraid. A child that she didn’t have to be afraid for because, at any moment, they could just disappear. They could hide from the gun. From the cops. From the judges. From the mirror. That’s all she wanted for you.

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.

“Are we gonna be okay?” The Kid asks. Quick as a whip and honest as a dollar, I say to him: Never can tell, Kid. But we’re gonna damn sure take a shot at it.

Thank you to everyone who has ever learned to sing in a world that does not want to hear your voice. Lastly, a message to the Black boy that was: You are beautiful. Be kind to yourself, even when this country is not.