400 years have passed since the birth of a new people. Where do we go from here? CaseyGerald writes on his vision for the black art of escape
Photo: Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos There is a moment in Alvin Ailey’s dance masterpiece, Revelations — “Sinner Man” is the song — when, suddenly, from the far-right wing, a boy comes running. He runs. He leaps — hurls himself through the air, really — one spin, two, three. Perfect, soaring spins — electric, arms outstretched then clasped, legs flung then gathered, damn.
So, I watched those masked children shattering windows, stomping the hoods of police cars, setting fire to the pharmacy and the gas station, and I marveled not that they had done it, but that it had taken so long to come. Every now and then the kids say Fuck it. I offer my round of applause.Just as damn near every young black person took to the streets, I began to disappear.
It is true that free and enslaved Africans joined Spanish explorers in the Americas as early as the 1520s. There was, for instance, Esteban the Moor, who served as guide and translator for a party that ran into trouble near present-day Tampa Bay, ran into more trouble just off the Gulf of Mexico, trekked across the Texas desert and on throughout the Southwest and into Mexico on their genocidal adventure. But 1619 was a different kind of landing.
It was the song he’d been singing since we first met this kind and brilliant man, in 2004. That there is not a black America and a white America … there’s a United States of America song. Well, we’d learned there was a black America and a white America, and by 2016 neither seemed moved by the same old number.
It is easy, cowardly even, to criticize the president, any president, in writing, when you would likely yes him to death in person. As I did Mr. Obama’s predecessor, a few months before I saw Revelations, when I wound up seated next to him one evening, and asked a question relevant to our point here: Mr. President, how did eight years in the White House change you? Mr. Bush offered three answers, the second and third of which I hope to share some other time.
Between the ages of 4 and 10, except for one year between 5 and 6, my mother, my father, my sister, and I constituted, by any standard I believe in, a damn good family. For the final two years of that era, we lived in a run-down neighborhood, in a run-down house, for free, since my father’s father was the landlord and never charged a dime, as far as I know, and never fixed anything. Someone had, before we arrived, added a second story to the back of the original squat white-brick house.
My sister and I kept this up when, a year later, our father was sent to jail and our mother was sent to a psychiatric hospital. We did the same when Mama eventually escaped, not to be seen again for the rest of my childhood.
The first time I asked this question, December 2016, was in a booth at an Austin taco joint. A journalist I knew from Brooklyn flew down with his wife and two friends. His wife co-signed: I can only compare it to the way it felt in New York after 9/11. Wouldn’t you say that? Everybody’s been crying. Everybody’s walking the streets in … in a kind of daze … she trailed off.I have yet to discover any stronger response than Wow. I can say the Wow, but, to tell the truth, I have not felt a Wow.
Mr. House was a husband, father of an 8-year-old daughter, and longtime member of his stepfather Freddie Dixon’s church, Wesley United Methodist, founded in 1865 by freed black Texans. Investigators’ first theory was that Mr. House had been the victim of mistaken identity. Their second theory: We can’t rule out that Mr. House didn’t construct this himself, and then accidentally detonate it.
Thanks to FedEx surveillance footage, Home Depot’s purchase records, and vehicle registrations that led investigators to a specific red pickup truck, a suspect was soon located at a hotel in Round Rock, Texas. Late on the night of March 20, when the suspect drove out of the hotel parking lot and onto the Interstate 35 service road, a SWAT crew followed him and, before he could enter the freeway, pinned the red pickup between two SWAT vehicles.
Pirone, who called Oscar Grant nigger throughout the incident, was fired but served no jail time. Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, and served 365 days in the Los Angeles Central Jail. We continue to be, as Frank Wilderson writes, haunted by a sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture. The movement’s greatest impact, and a great impact it is, has been to give voice to this grammar and to these ghosts. Never in American history have more artists, filmmakers, writers, scholars, etc., etc., made a living by showing all the ways black life resembles social death. We have been granted, in place of revolution, a pep rally.
III. I first saw Revelations thanks to a sister-friend who remains one of the most beautiful humans I’ve known, and whose father, soon after being elected president of a large African country, was assassinated. It was she who scolded, over tea , You’re hiding when the world needs you. My condition worsened. Her diagnosis, not entirely incorrect: I possessed a crippled sense of self-esteem. You have got to unlearn that slave mentality, darling.
And … my mama … she — she just smile, all over her face … and she say — Ruby Dee chuckles — “Lord has showed me the way. I ain’t gone grieve no more. No matter how you all done treat me and my children.
Ecstasy may denote, he adds, 1) a raving condition, 2) alarm, 3) tranquility of spirit, 4) prophetic rapture. All, of course, defy human logic, as does human flight, perhaps the highest form of ecstasy. By human logic we should all be dead, so what have we got to lose? What, more urgently, have we to remember?
I planned to drop acid for this very purpose. A doctor warned that, with my genetic predisposition for mental illness, I might go mad and never come back. I settled for a safer ecstasy: meditation. Now, Trumpet man leader is really feeling himself — C’mon now! Naw not that way … give it to ‘em! — coming down hard on our pianist. If she was the type to be embarrassed, it would have been embarrassing. This continues for a few minutes, until, calmly, the pianist slips her fingers from the piano keys and rests them in her lap. She does not leave the stage. She does not shout or scowl. And she does not play another note. Well, you know how niggers is.
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