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Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.
the race needs good, smart, disillusioned fighters.
“So what’s wrong with being an educator?” I thought about it while sipping the good hot soup. “Nothing, I suppose, I just think I’d like to do something else.” “Well, whatever it is, I hope it’s something that’s a credit to the race.” “I hope so,” I said. “Don’t hope, make it that way.”
to hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
MARCUS GARVEY
“You my brother, mahn. Brothers are the same color; how the hell you call these white men brother? Shit, mahn. That’s shit! Brothers the same color. We sons of Mama Africa, you done forgot? You black, BLACK! You—Godahm, mahn!”
weren’t they reaffirming their belief both in me and in the principles of Brotherhood, proving that they drew no lines even when it came to women?
The cop? What about him? He was a cop. A good citizen. But this cop had an itching finger and an eager ear for a word that rhymed with ‘trigger,’ and when Clifton fell he had found it.
Then the door opened and I looked past their heads into a small crowded room of men and women sitting in folding chairs, to the front where a slender woman in a rusty black robe played passionate boogie-woogie on an upright piano along with a young man wearing a skull cap who struck righteous riffs from an electric guitar which was connected to an amplifier that hung from the ceiling above a gleaming white and gold pulpit.
On the other hand, I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind.
