Don't Cry for Me

by Daniel Black

My father grew up in a time when black children meant nothing to America. Most of them, including him, didn’t have a birth certificate. Their care, their education, their self-worth was optional. Whether they lived or died was insignificant to the state.

he envied the life he had provided for his children. He, too, had wanted knowledge, travel, enlightenment, but such was laughable for a dark black boy in the 1940s. So he hoped for me. Yet my freedom angered him.

He wanted what I wanted—to mean something to the world, to make a difference in someone’s life, to be admired for the man he was. But we never achieved that mutual clarity.

They might’ve known that some spirits come into the world to disrupt normalcy and thereby create space for the despised and rejected. And they might’ve understood, finally, that every son is an eternal blessing. If they’d been allowed to dream.

Let me start with this: love wasn’t a requirement of men in my day. It wasn’t a man’s achievement. In the sixties, when you were born, love was a woman’s passion, a mother’s hope. Fathers had far different obsessions: food, shelter, clothing, protection. My job was to assure you had these things, and I did that.

Slavery did a number on black people. We haven’t survived it yet. The institution is over, but its aftereffects still linger. We try not to think about it, our time in bondage, but it shapes who we are.

Everything we did, whether we were aware or not, we did with white people in mind. Our life’s aim was to make them believe we had value and worth, so we spent our nights trying to figure out what they liked, then spent our days trying to do it. We still haven’t pleased them, and truth is, we never will.

Even after freedom, we were not free.

We loved each other—if love is respect. Yet respect wasn’t what you and your generation wanted. You wanted something you could feel in your heart, and I didn’t know what that was. My generation had never had it.

We weren’t unintelligent; we were just desperate to survive.

I’ve told myself, over the years, that we didn’t know any better. We were taught what to think—not how. There is a difference, you know. It never crossed our minds that we were destroying someone’s life.

“You got this wrote down somewhere, Grandma?” “Yeah,” she said. “In my heart. That’s where you better put it, too. Can’t nobody take yo heart from you.”

I was a sports fan, too, as you know, so I loved going to Kansas City Royals and Chiefs games. Things weren’t quite as segregated in Kansas City as they were in Arkansas—although the racism was just as bad—so black people could enjoy outings just like white people.

A man’s history is all he has. It says more than his mouth ever will.

There are no do-overs in this life. Either you get it right or you wish you had.

find it funny that, at funerals, all dead people go to Heaven, regardless of how they lived. Perhaps this is black people’s way of rewarding themselves simply for having been black and survived—even for a while.

But more, I hoped you’d love me just because I was your father.

Now I see why you and your mother read so much. It makes you think, makes you see things you can’t see, and that was my problem. I had all kinds of opinions, but I couldn’t see a damn thing.

“I gave up everything for you, Jacob Swinton. Everything. And now you want my mind, too?” I said nothing. “Well, you can’t have it.”

If white folks don’t like you, they can mess up your whole damn existence.”

They love when we talk nonviolence. It means they go home alive while we bury each other.”

King was tryin to say that you don’t become like your enemy if you’re trying to defeat him. Yeah, it cost us a lotta lives. That’s true. But it changed America, didn’t it?”

the reason black people hate black people is ’cause white people made us hate ourselves.”

That ain’t nothin but an excuse. We can think for ourselves now. Slavery been over.” “No it ain’t. Not in our minds.

The point of history is to tell you how to live in the future. So people don’t make the same mistakes over and over.”

I was drowning in ignorance and afraid of knowledge. No good to a living soul.

Hurt is worse than anger, you know. Anger dwells in the head, then fades. Hurt lingers in the soul. It rearranges your feelings without your permission. It blinds you.

black labor had built America, but I didn’t know how black pride had been stripped from our flesh in the process. We had worked, hundreds of years, for absolutely nothing.

Many black people left the land in search of an easier life. The swap wasn’t worth it. We got to big cities and realized we had less than we’d had before. The land was our hope, our guarantee that we wouldn’t starve. Once we left it, our lives were up for grabs.

The ways of God are more obvious in the country.

Now I saw that she wanted a free son, yes, but not a different one.

I could’ve boasted that you were my boy, my brilliant, artistic son, but I didn’t. I didn’t say anything because my voice wouldn’t work.

That landscape really was a masterpiece. And you are the most talented person I’ve ever known.

I wanted you to ask me for some, to need me for something, but you didn’t.

People walk by sometimes, totally unaware that, just a few feet away, lies a desperate, dying man. I wonder if they’d come in if they knew.

I’d never read a whole book before. I didn’t even know books about black boys existed. Yet on every page I saw myself.

I discovered I hadn’t loved being black; I had accepted it because I couldn’t change it. I had not embraced it as a gift, had not seen it as divine.

“Do you think Malcolm really thought God was black?” “Hell yeah!” he said. “He absolutely thought that. It makes sense, too, if you think about it. Everybody around the world thinks of God in their own image except black people. Indians have an Indian God, Asians have an Asian God. That makes sense, don’t it?”

The idea scared me, to be honest. But it excited me, too. Here I was, for the first time in my life, considering that God might look like me. Me? A poor black country fella who ain’t never been much? I can’t explain to you what this did to me. All I can say is that it changed me forever.

My people had submitted to life, and dealt with it the best they could. We didn’t question God’s ways. We simply accepted things and swallowed hard. No one asked, for instance, if I were happy as a child. It’s not that they didn’t care; it’s that they didn’t know they could care.

They were pimps and drug dealers, but they were also black men who didn’t understand that the system was designed to destroy them. I hadn’t understood this either. Yet living in Kansas City and watching black men work and still fail, I knew something was wrong.

“I’m proud of you, Jacob. Everybody gets to grow—even you.”

Children don’t carry the weight of history, so their capacity for heavy things might be greater. But few adults believe this, so we pass along only what we think they can bear. Children wonder later why we didn’t tell them everything so they could avoid our mistakes.

They said a picture contains your spirit, and I’m inclined to believe this,

The more I read, the more I saw myself. Knowledge is a funny thing, Isaac. It informs by exposing. It shows you precisely how much you don’t know.

Every child wants their parents’ applause, and I had not applauded you. I’d celebrated your efforts, but not your being. Because I didn’t agree. But the words on the shirt asked me, Do you have to agree?

Silence isn’t always quiet though. It troubles a man’s soul, forcing him to admit what he’d rather forget.

I’d thought I’d outgrown God, but it was just the church I’d had enough of.

I spent years waiting for you—while you’ve spent a lifetime waiting for me.

No one should diminish themselves to prove their love.