Manuscript and Bio Continued
First came a pandemic that persuaded the death-phobic population to contemplate their own mortality. Then those people bore witness to a death, one of many, but this one, a particularly slow, deliberate, calm and cold blooded murder of an unbearably decent man who proclaimed quietly, “I die now.”
In the past, the institutions shifted, as the vibration did not end. The dominant culture replaced one system of hatred and oppression with another. Their appointed leaders of the institutions pointed and pointed again at the effects of the social disease without the ability to comprehend the cause, the nature of the illness, failing even at fully believing in it. The physical bodies of the people of the dominant culture felt it. Their primal brains knew how to switch on, and school teachers, judges, juries, police and hiring officers looked at skin color and surmised who had what it took to be fully human, and who didn’t.
James, as most members of the African diaspora along with most other brown skinned people, knew of the lingering effects of slavery, genocide and institutionalized racism. James had known since he was six years old. Those not fortunate enough to know of the illness suffered the outward effects of the psychosis that lay hidden in the dominant culture.
James installed himself in the dominant culture as well as any man of African decent could in the late twentieth, early twenty-first century. He became an astrophysicist. Despite this, he began witnessing another less quantifiable version of reality. When he was forty years of age in the year 2019, he began on a course of letting a larger picture of existence emerge. He saw a ghost.
In 2019, James did not know of the outing of racism that the next year held. Nor did he know in particular what a corona virus was. He only knew to faint when he saw Leslie’s ghost. Much earlier in his life, during his undergrad years, he had postulated that, should he see a phenomenon commonly believed to be supernatural, he would video record it in order to subject it to scientific rigor. However, instead of pulling out his smart phone, he soiled his grey trousers and passed out on the floor of the kitchen, and there he laid on the floor of the house that his half-sister Rain, sold to him after her mother passed. Rain, the patrilineal half sibling, and also of my descendant. Our entire village died, but James lived on, he lay there on that kitchen floor about to wake up into a different world.
I am listening to the Spirit of the Almighty. She says to me, “speak about James.”
James
At five, James stood tall for his age, like he might reach six feet, maybe more. He did not have the distinctive look of any one native tribe of Africa, but he retained the look of the tribe of all those people who were taken into boats that went over the crest of the ocean’s horizon, lost for close to or completely forever. At five, he carried a sense of an invisible circle, comprised of and carried within and amongst the bodies of the people, carrying all of the wounds brought on by the passage, and in opposition to those wounds, a rhythm vibrating on the cells that made up the people’s bodies. He carried the sense of the circle that people’s bodies formed from the prayers in the form of singing and dancing and stomping, where the ritual of the drum and the song and the dance staved off the madness that their detractors attempted to will onto them. An invisible medicine that only their living cells held in allegiance, but that was enough. His mother carried the medicine when she carried him inside of her and later when she carried him on her hip. His father and his family carried the medicine, and his cousins and his extended family passed it on to him alongside another ritual. The ritual of schooling and acculturation and the people’s disavowing their own darkness of skin under threat of death, this and other attempts to survive the place.
When James started school at the age of five in 1984, he spent three weeks in kindergarten before skipping to first grade. His teacher, Mrs. Smith, at sixty-five years of age, looked at him and noted she was supposed to be fair to all of the children, even the Negros. She did not call them n——. Not like her daddy did when they lived back in Oklahoma when Daddy was still alive. Her father liked to recount a lynching he saw as a boy and he would occasionally talk to her on the telephone and say, “I hope you got yourself in a good school out there.” As a teacher, she wasn’t supposed to mention her folks like Daddy, nor would she say that she felt better about having more than the Negros. Nor could she articulate that she knew for certain that they couldn’t feel as good as her. Poor ignorant thing, her colleges would say of her if she did. Daddy, she recalled in her mind when she saw James, witnessed a lynching. She reminded herself that her father didn’t know better than to cheer the mob on, and he didn’t know better than to take a souvenir, a finger that he cut off of the corpse. He said that before he went off to college he buried the thing in the yard. But he still took pride, not so much as being white, but being better than them.
Through the later decades his life, James reminded the white people, Europeans who were no longer Irish, or Italian or English or Jewish, but just white, that they were living on stolen land in a technological world fueled by an oil economy, which in turn was fueled by an agricultural economy, an economy that was fueled by stolen bodies from Africa. Bodies like James’. This knowledge lived in them, in their bodies, causing their hearts to beat differently, causing the lining of their stomachs to stir a bit upon seeing someone walking down the street towards them, someone who reminded them of the country that they founded on theft and blood. They did not readily access this knowing, and when awareness came to them, it was too much for them to recall over eggs Benedict or tofu scramble, too much as they walked down the street holding a cup of coffee from one of the coffee shops that liked to multiply like rabbits. So each of them took a sip from a paper cup, and the body holding the cup, still aware of something unbearable, systematically dumped thought processing for fear. This knowing, this queasiness, caused them to quietly relinquish their niceness to loath him.
It accumulated into a heaviness, too heavy to juggle with the steaming hot cup of coffee, the four bedroom house, the new tie, the vacation in the planning, this toy that was supposed to do more than it did. Too heavy to contemplate that it all came at the expense of forced death marches of the folks who were here first, these death marches feeling not so long ago for the participants’ decedents. A distant history, according to the cultural mythology, or a physical distance in the parts of the world that still carried on like this. This knowing had a weight to it, even within the mythology that tucked all of the blood and theft out of plain sight, as out of site as the devotees of the mythology needed for it to be.
The year before kindergarten, James sat cross legged on his bed in his room in East Oakland reading books. He didn’t know that he was black as much as he knew that there were white people in the world who did not like him because he was born. He wanted to leave the earth. He read books about space travel, wanting to get on a space ship as an astronaut. His father told him that he needed math to be an astronaut, and his two older sisters that with him and parents showed him their math lessons. He wanted to stay at home on his bed and read or sit at the kitchen table with his sisters doing their math lessons. He was aware that his mother was an irritant to other grownups and he did not want to get dragged off to school by the arm with her.
They all lived three blocks away from a large complex of housing projects, four blocks away from an abandoned cookie factory, and one block away from a derelict cannery. Since they didn’t live in the projects, they didn’t consider themselves poor.
Before the first day of school, during Parent’s Day James’ mother, Mavis Washington, held James by his hand and walked him into the principal’s office. James took in, for the first time, the smell of school; wheat paste, chalk, pencil shavings, and newly polished floors. Mother’s footfalls echoed in the corridors as she told him to hurry along. Her voice billowed off of the walls.
“What are those, Mother?” His voice rang thin and high and small in those empty halls. Although his siblings called her Mom, he earned favor by calling her Mother, and he called Father Father.
“Those are awards, Jamie.”
“Can I see?” he asked.
“We don’t have time. Come on, now,” she replied. Every working day, his mother punched a time clock in a department store where she worked. She wanted to be patient and kind, but she didn’t have time, and rushing kept her from the patience she intended to have.
She had gossiped with her friends about rumors that the principal, a black man, was a good one. The secretary in the front office glanced down at her watch just as Mother and James walked up.
“Am I late?” Mother asked more as a statement, as though she didn’t really believe that she was actually late.
© Ann Marie Davis 2020 all rights reserved