photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF 

AN AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION

 

            This topic requires us to ask a question first, not just the obvious question of “What is an African centered education”, but what is required is posing the even more profound question: “an African centered education for whom and for what purpose?”

            I do not presuppose that a hypothetical African centered education is in and of itself of major value unless we know whom and what we are speaking about as both the subjects and the objects of that education, and unless we are clear on what is the purpose of such an education. My contention is that audience and purpose are the two least discussed sides of the African education triangle, whose third side is the content or curriculum of African centered education. Except for a brief comment at the end, I will focus my presentation on the questions of identity and goals.

 

            The dominant society Euro-centric educational modality presupposes that their education system is good for everyone, and if not good for everyone in the abstract, is de facto required of everyone over whom they have dominion, which is a large percentage of the world. Second, the dominant society presupposes that their education is a requirement of civilization. Unfortunately, many of us who reject Euro-centric educational information, often adopt Euro-centric educational methods and philosophy. We presuppose that audience is not a major question and that a dominating intent is a given.

            In addition to defining African centered education in terms of philosophy and curriculum, when we address this issue of African education it seems to me to be important for us to also clarify who the “we” of African education is and what is our purpose in obtaining an African centered education. Answering those two concerns, i.e. the identity of the audience and the intended goal of achieving education, will enable us to realistically define “African centered education” grounded in the context of functionality rather than abstracted into the context of rhetoric and fantasy.

 

AUDIENCE/IDENTITY

            Let us first, then, consider the question of the identity of our audience, which, of course, presupposes, that we identify ourselves. First of all, my concern for Africa is defined by Africa the people and not simply Africa the land. Wherever we are and whatever we do, taken in its totality, that defines what Africa is.

            Our ancient civilizations are important but they are not the sole criterion. Indeed, to the degree that our traditional life did not enable us to withstand the blows of the empire, to the degree that our traditional gods did not enable us to reject the missionary impulses or at the very least incorporate the new god into our beliefs rather than having the new god dictate the rejection of our traditions, to the degree that our traditional values and beliefs collaborated with the European invaders, to that same degree I suggest there are African traditions which, at best, need to be modified and, perhaps, even ought to be discarded.

            My first position is that I celebrate people and my second position is that I am critical not just of my historic enemies but also I am, and indeed must be, self critical.

            I do not buy the myth of race, the myth of racial universality, the myth of dualism, i.e. a thing, a person, an action is ipso facto either good or bad, and is not subject to transformation nor contextulization. I believe in the traditional African dialectic which recognizes that everything is contextual and all things are capable of transformation.

            Moreover, I believe, nationalism as currently practiced is not only a dead end in terms of social development, I believe nationalism as currently practiced is ultimately a socially negative philosophy that inevitably invites the demarcation of territory and the raising of the flag of individual ownership of the earth.

            There are no African countries in Africa. Each one of those countries are European defined entities which, at best, are administered by Africans, and usually Africans who are European educated. In fact, the concept of Africa as we speak of it, is itself a European concept, a bundling together of various peoples and beliefs under a racist label to facilitate colonialism. There will be no true African nationalism until the nation states of Africa are redesigned to facilitate the development of African people rather than maintained as a leftover form of colonial domination, forms which were established to serve the interest of English, French, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent German and Belgium colonizers.

            So I suppose, now is as good a time as any to deal with the question of what do we mean by African. What is an African? Is this a racial definition? Is this a cultural definition? Is this a political definition based on historical relations of the last five or six hundred years?

            Obviously, whether we want to or not, we must confront this issue of self definition head on. For example, are mulattos, i.e. mixed blood Africans, any less African than those who are unmixed? Be careful how you answer, because it is not our way to exclude. If we look around the room it is obvious that we African Americans are a mulatto people -- not by choice in most instances, but regardless we are mixed. Does that make us as a mulatto people any less African than continental Africans?

            The first task of an African centered education is to help us define what being African is. I believe that Africans, and all other people, are defined by color, culture and consciousness.

            Color is a racial definition, race in the sense of breeding population, a group of people with common genetic roots. I also believe that rather than create sub-categories, and sub-categories, and breakdowns to the point of absurdity such as quadroons, octoroons, etc., we should acknowledge quite simply a normative standard. For me, African is inclusive. One can racially claim Africa if some (although not necessarily all) of one’s ancestors are racially African and if one chooses to continue that racial identity. My qualifying “and” quite simply recognizes that if a single person who is racially African decides to dissolve him or herself into another group, be they Asian or European, then, over generations, the individual’s Africaness will cease to be an issue. In fact, my caveat is that color is not an individual definition but is a group and generational definition.

            Culture is a way of life, again defined by normative or group standards. The culture one exhibits is the culture that defines the person. We can learn, understand, and relate to many different cultures, but in the final analysis it is our social living which determines which culture we are. Most human beings are born into a culture, but it is also possible to adopt a culture, and over generations become native to the adopted culture.

            Consciousness is the critical element, particularly in the context of liberation. We must be aware of our people and culture, accept our people and culture, and immerse ourselves in our people and culture. Awareness means more than simple experiencing. Indeed one can witness and not understand, just as one can understand without being a witness. The best is to both witness, i.e. experience, and to understand, i.e. critically reflect on the culture. Given the reality of colonialism and neo-colonialism, it is impossible to be African in the modern world without being socially conscious of what it means to be African, what racism means, what colonialism means. To be African is to be self-reflective.

            Thus I define African in terms of color, culture and consciousness.

 

            African Identification Within The Context of the United States.

            I believe that there are three major categories of social identification for African Americans in the context of the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century. First there is the question of race, and more precisely, the question of racism. Racism has undeniably affected every area of our lives, and to the degree that an education does not address or avoids addressing the reality and effects of racism, to that same degree such an education risks being irrelevant, regardless of its nomenclature or subject matter. So then in a modern context, an African centered education will analyze and offer methods of coping with, if not out and out destroying, racism.

            Second there is the question of class stratification and class identification. Class stratification refers to a person or group’s economic identity vis-a-vis the economic or productive forces of that society. It is not simply a question of income. It is also a question of where one fits in relation to maintaining the economic status quo. A professional, a public school teacher or corporate secretary, may make a smaller hourly wage than a carpenter, but the professional has had to undergo specific social training in addition to skill development.

            The professional is expected to be more “civilized,” more “mannered” than the laborer. What does that mean? It means quite simply that part of being a professional is identifying with and adopting the social values of the dominant society. Indeed, the professional is responsible for propagating those values. In many ways the professionals are priests of the status quo. So then when we talk about a class analysis, income alone can be misleading. We should make an analysis of the relationship to and function on behalf of the economic status quo. An African centered education must attack capitalism, the economic philosophy which elevates the bottom line (or material acquisition) as the measure of social development rather than social relations within a society as the measure of social development.

            Third is the question of gender relations. I believe that the establishment of the patriarchy, i.e. male domination of women, was the first battle waged by Europeans in their attempt to colonize the world. Indeed, their whole mythology begins with overthrowing the matriarchy wherever it existed. Greek legends of the gods, Zeus raping Europa, or giving birth to a female god sprung from his forehead, are all nothing more than mythological rationalizations of patriarchal domination.

            Christianity and Islam continue this trend introduced by the Greeks. Christianity goes so far as to propagate the myth that a man is a “mother”, specifically that Adam, a man, through the intercession of god, gave birth to Eve, a woman. Furthermore, most classical Christian theology does not recognize women as fit to act as intermediaries to and representatives of god. Islam’s virulent strain of misogyny is even more oppressive. This question of gender relations also raises the issue of heterosexism in the form of violence against homosexuals for no other reason than homosexuals are different and not like normal people. An African centered education would elevate matriarchy and attack patriarchy.

            Although anyone of these three strains could be explored at some length, that is not the focus under consideration here. I simply wanted to identify, the three major lines of social demarcation in the contemporary context.

            Before moving on, I do think it important to point out, that one can be anti-racist but be capitalist and sexist, or could be anti-capitalist and be racist and sexist. I am saying that a progressive position on one side of the triangle, does not guarantee a progressive position on the other sides -- and, yes, I am defining as progressive, ideological and social struggle around anti-sexism and opposition to heterosexism, particularly opposition to so-called homophobia.

 

GOALS

            Finally, on this question of relevance, my basic contention is that in order for an African centered education to be meaningful it needs to be focused on development, meeting the needs of the working class masses of our people, both the employed and the unemployed, rather than focus on the career development of African American professionals, particularly those professionals whose day to day work is within the context of predominately, dominant culture, educational and business institutions. Moreover, African centered education should definitively be opposed to the development of a Black bourgeoisie, a Black class of owners who profit off the exploitation of the African masses.

            If an African centered education does not specifically address itself to the needs of our people then it has failed to be relevant to the struggle although it may have great relevance to individuals in their quest for tenure, for promotions, and for political office. As Sonia Sanchez so eloquently noted a number of years ago in evaluating a position put forth by some well meaning brothers, we should respond to all advocates of ungrounded and non-contemporary Afrocentricity with this phrase: “Uh-huh, but how does that free us!”

            How does that free us is precisely the question to ask -- especially when we are clear on who “us” is. I am not interested in joining any atavistic, nostalgic society that knows more about what happen four thousand years ago, four thousand miles away than it does about what happened forty years ago within a four mile radius of where we meet today. The purpose of calling on our ancestors is to sustain life in the present and insure life in the future, and not simply nor solely to glorify the past.

            Our people have very real needs today. We are faced with very real problems. For instance, as quiet as its kept, African American women are quickly becoming the number one victim of AIDS. This coupled with the dramatic rise in breast cancer deaths among African American women suggests a fundamental area of struggle far more important than arguing whether Alice Walker is dipping her nose in other people’s business in her crusade against female sexual mutilation.

            At the same time, I must note, that quite clearly, a contemporarily grounded African centered education would not only support the struggle against female sexual mutilation, it would also offer an analysis of that phenomenon and point out that sexual mutilation is strongest in those area of Africa where Islam is the strongest. Part of what we are witnessing is the brutalness of male domination of women, regardless of the fact that, on the surface it may seem like, women are willingly participating. We African Americans surely can understand self collaboration in oppression, we who have a long and regrettable history of house negroism.

            I reiterate the need to be self critical and the need to be grounded in the lives of our people. Far too many Afrocentrics are petit bourgeoisie professionals who are based at predominately Eurocentric educational institutions. Far too much of the focus of contemporary Afrocentrism is on the long ago and far away. Where is the community base? Where is the focus on the needs of the community? To a certain extent, much of what we see in some narrow Afrocentric theorists is an attempt to compensate for years spent suffering under the constant and withering intellectual onslaught of formal education teaching Black professionals that Black people are intellectually inferior. After one has invested so many years in academe, one sometimes spends an equally inordinate amount of time researching to prove to Whites that Black people are not only as smart as Whites, but indeed that we were the world’s first smart people. “Uh huh, but how does that free us?”

            The issue is not about proving anything to Whites. The issue is meeting the needs of our people, being grounded in our people. Furthermore the inordinate amount of energy devoted to the study, praising and admiration of African kings and pharaohs displays a serious sense of inadequacy and disdain for the common woman and man. What difference does it make to me how smart the leader was if the majority of the people are kept in ignorance? I don’t care what the priests knew about life, what did Ayo and Kwaku know, what did Bertha and Joe know? I don’t care how intelligent and spiritually refined the royal order was, what were the conditions, relative level of educational achievement and qualitative life of the people who were like you and I? Tell me about the lives of the masses, what we didn’t, what we did. Let us learn from our mistakes and build on our achievements in the context of building serious social relationships among ordinary people rather than this almost mystical interest in kings and things.

            I agree with Amilcar Cabral that the focus of the African professional ought to be to commit class suicide. Rather than identify with the dominant society via a focus on developing professional skills for the purpose of being a more productive professional or for self aggrandizement, professionals ought to focus their skills on the uplift and development of the African American working class (whether actively employed or unemployed). This is what DuBois had in mind as a mission for the so-called “talented tenth.” Today, too many who would qualify as talented tenthers on the basis of education have deserted the mission, and it was the mission, and not the level of educational attainment, which defined the talented tenth in DuBois’ perspective.

            Mission fulfillment is not a question to be taken lightly, because it is no small nor straight forward task to work in the interest of one’s people if most of the work opportunities are controlled by our oppressors and exploiters, and if the remuneration, both monetarily and socially, are so meager when one works in a predominately and/or all Black setting, that one is not able to sustain one’s self. We are faced with the task not only of waging political struggle but also we must engage in the very real struggle of economic support for one’s self and for those whom one has the responsibility of sheltering, rearing, or otherwise nurturing, not to mention economic support of the struggle itself. There is a subjective reality of survival involved in committing class suicide. But greater than the subjective question of individual survival is the objective question of group direction.

            The upliftment of the masses does not mean that our task is to turn our brothers and sisters into “junior Europeans” (to quote Kgositsile). The upliftment of our people does not mean that we are trying to civilize anyone, or to teach them how to wear business suits and ties, or to show them how to pay taxes and speak properly. In fact it means quite the opposite. The upliftment of our people means securing and returning to the hands of our people the power to define and determine our own lives. Upliftment quite simply means to end outside domination and exploitation, and to reintroduce our people as the subjects, the makers and shapers of their own destiny.

            In order to fulfill this mission, the petit bourgeois, the professionals, the educated, will have to physically and psychologically reintegrate themselves into the day to day life of the people who they hope to uplift. They will have to speak to and with working people about an expanded sense of the world and our ability to actively participate in building the future. Additionally, they will also have to listen to and respond to the concerns, aspirations and ideas of the working people. In short they will have to be organizers who both bring information and skills to serve our people as well as receive sustenance and inspiration to keep on developing. In short we are talking about the particular (the professional) and the general (the people) engaged in a dialectic of self-development and self-empowerment that neglects neither and enriches both —properly speaking a European language is not a prerequisite of this process.

            I hope that these observations with regards to goals and identity vis-a-vis African centered education make a contribution to the ongoing discussion and struggle to achieve peace and liberation for people of African descent wherever in the world we are today! In closing, please allow me this one additional observation.

            African American cultural expression, particularly African American music, on a world level is the single most influential force in contemporary African life. Moreover, among African Americans, our music is also the most expressive language of our community. The emotions, thinking, and soul of our people are expressed through our music. Indeed, before our writers and other intellectuals are able to articulate our realities, the essentials of that reality have been expressed in the music. Assuming that this assessment of our music is true, the question must be asked: how come many of us Black intellectuals can’t or choose not to sing, dance or perform our music? How come we don’t write about our music, do serious studies of our music which are detailed and insightful rather than non-serious miscellaneous general platitudes? If our music is so important how is it that in practice we devote so little attention to the study, documentation and propagation of Great Black Music? How come we don’t advocate the economic control of our music in terms of our own actual participation in the dollar and labor investment in the development of recording companies, distribution companies, production companies, and critical journals? If we are truly African centered, beyond listening to watered down versions of our music on the radio and owning five or six records, how come our personal libraries are so lacking in recordings, not to mention books on and about, our music? How come we are becoming experts on and conversant in Egyptian hieroglyphics but can’t tell the different between the sound of Johnny Hodges and Charlie Parker, not to mention have never actually listened to Robert Johnson or Rev. Gary Brown? How come we ignore our music? Could it be that we are not as African in the day to day expression and understanding of our culture as we talk and dress like we are?

            That’s just a little something to think about. I encourage questions and dialogue both now and after this particular session. I encourage sharp criticism of the system and sharp self criticism. I end with this poem.

_____________________________________________ 

There Is Nothing Inexact About Misty

(For Erroll Garner)

 

saints transform the world with the insistent

art of their actions

 

anviling the mundane inertia of america

into an ephemeral spiritual sublimity

 

unclogged by bathetic sentimentality but

nonetheless full of feeling, after all

 

which is more important: rocket science or creative

music emoting the ethos of its era?

 

far more valuable than scientific esoteria

is the subtle articulation of sensitive souls in motion

 

nakedly singing world witness, propelling

us to dare transformation into what does not now exist

 

to demystify technology, be unintimidated by history

& as adventurous as a kitten up a tree, look at

 

the lyrical possibilities of your life,

if you are brave and disciplined enough

 

to openly express your total self

secure in the primal knowledge that

 

no matter how high

you go or don’t, ultimately

 

all life is really

about is how deep you are

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

milton nascimento 

 

in the scheme of things, as flows this river called life, our barges momentarily close to each other, because the currents are what they are, fast running & strong, with an undertow that will sweep you off into areas you don't want to go if you don't steer your craft with determination, because there are also so many lights and sights on the shore, so many distractions, so many invitations to dock and get lost in enjoying the landside diversions, because there is sometimes fog on the river and also because of our natural wariness—and that's really a wrong description, our wariness is not natural, our wariness is "nurtured," after being on the river awhile one learns that everybody who rides a barge is not necessarily a fellow traveler—because of all of that and more, especially this fog and just the speed we travel, a speed which discourages skipping around from boat to boat, a speed which sometimes does not allow us to fully grasp what is happening as someone whizzes by us and we are also moving real fast and here passes us somebody else moving faster, like amiri baraka says, somebody's fast is another body's slow, and who knows when you are on your boat alone or I on mine, alone, who knows, and we be trying to make our way, even those of us straining to push our barge up river, no matter the direction we all are struggling along, all of us once issued from the mouth waters of our mother's womb are actually headed downward toward that big sea wherein we will become part of the eternal dust/water & spirit of this universe, how long do we have on the river, who knows, where we dock, that is our choice, how long we sit there, and then again, sometimes it is not really our choice, sometimes, like our ancestors we are forced into spaces and not given choices, not given the space to decide how to maneuver and negotiate our time on the river, fortunately, for us, we have a bit more leeway than did our ancestors in this regard—and I give thanx and praise to them because their struggles on, or should I say "in" the river, swimming without aid of boat or oar, swimming sometimes without even driftwood to hold to, swimming with balls and chains shackled to their limbs, the ways in which they miraculously waded through and parted the waters to make a way for us, to create an opportunity for us to acquire barges and boats and other vessels, the navigational lessons they learned and passed down to us, learned on the sly, on the fly, anyway they could, and passed on, goodness, we must give thanx and praise -- so here float we, sometimes moving on our own steam, crisscrossing the river of life, sometimes out of fuel just drifting, some times shut down in despair, and sometimes we're just out there and we've got everything we need to keep going except the will to do the hard work of moving our boats along on the big muddy of this river whose waters are increasingly polluted and stinking and sometimes even on fire, rivers literally on fire burning oil slicks, or sometimes we are in serious disrepair, rudders broke, holes in the hull and the like, sometimes got everything we need to move except good common sense so we waste our resources and the richness of our legacies handed down to us from those who struggled to get to the water in the first place, who waged the herculean battle just to get down by the riverside, when I use this metaphor of floating on the river of life, I mean more than just you and i, more than just a line I toss out to make conversation, I mean something so deep, so deep, so when I call out to you in the lightless night or through the morning fog, when I holler out my identifying shout and momentarily maneuver close, close enough so that our barges bump gently against each other, touch and go, as we float on down the river, and it is morning, or just after noon in a crowded river, or late past midnight and we are the only vessels visible in the darkness, or whenever, when I shout and sing my request, ask your permission to board, it is in the fullest awareness that my request is not about a merger of companies but rather a momentary sharing, a temporal but not temporary alignment of spaces and personalities, temporal in that it is time bound, you've got places to go, people to meet, things to do, and so do i, and neither of us intends to leave our vessels unattended for long, nor either of us give up our vessel for life aboard the other's, and similarly, I understand should I hear you sing, unlike sailors mythisizing some madness about the sound of women singing on the water is a siren song that will lead them to ruin, I understand—i'm listening to milton nascimento at this moment and his music is so mystically beautiful, so ethereal, I mean his voice climbs like sunlight descending on a shaft through the clouds except that it reverses the flow and rises where the sunbeam comes down his voice ascends and the melodies he utters and the stories in his voice, I don't speak portuguese but I hear milton's meaningful beauty, and when I read the lyrics translated it helps or doesn't help, but all i've really got to do is open my ears and listen, and that is the beauty of great art, we don't have to know how it was done, in many cases don't even have to know the language, especially when it's music or visual, all we have to do is be open to beauty and it will take our hand and lead us there, it will kiss us full on the mouth, lips open with the surprise of the tongue moving lucidly in and out our mouths thrilling us to our toes, ah milton nascimento—I understand you are not asking for anything all the time even though this knowing is forever, the paradox of life on the river, nothing lasts, everything flows on, everything changes, but awareness and knowledge of the deepness and connections between soul mates stretches pass any fence that time can erect, breeches the dams built to hold us back and exploit the movement of our waters, so sometimes I will call to you, or you to me, and if we are close enough and if the time permits, I mean if we are not busy steering through some particular rough waters or on a mission that requires all our attention, if there is time we will tie up to each other and one board the other for a moment, and that's all I ask, permission to board, not to stay, nor to take anything with me, but to be in you, with you for whatever sharing time there is for us on this river called life, encircled in your embrace, and, of course, you in mine, for whatever time…

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

MURDER

 

our sister is thin. she is leading her whole family down the street. her four year old is just ahead of her. she and her little man, two year old malik, walk hand in hand behind skipping and giggling sekou. she is not paying any attention to things in the streets: the cars, trucks and busses whizzing by in both directions. they had missed the bus they needed. the evening was nice. warm. so why not walk and why not take a short cut down napoleon avenue, a thoroughfare what used to be one of white folks' big streets?

 

a camera swung innocently on her hip beneath the medium sized windbreaker, which enveloped her. although out of sight, the camera was at the ready because she liked to shoot. most of the time without film. she would "see" a scene. compose an artistic comment from a chance encounter. but not being able to afford as much film and processing as she would shoot if she had the green to match her ambition, she would just flash the camera and capture the still in her mind's eye, the image frozen in her brain as the sound of the shutter-click indicated the shot was complete. some people did not understand taking pictures without film. they either were not deep into art or else they were not poor. but poor artists know, you've got to practice your art anyway you can.

 

cause she was on a family outing. listening to her boys be themselves. actually coming back from standing in line paying a bill and headed to the house that barely qualified as shelter, not to mention was a poor stand-in for a secure and loving place she could accurately call home. because her braids were in place and would not need rebraiding for another three or four months. because the essential bills were now paid. and she did have thirty dollars in her pocket for two weeks of food. because sekou was singing "space is the place..." his favorite sun ra song -- oh, she was proud that sekou dug ra. i mean, what parent would not be proud of a four year old with the sensitivity to embrace sun ra? because she was making sure she was walking slow enough so that malik could keep up but fast enough so that sekou would not outdistance them. because malik was just getting over the flu and she kept hugging him from time to time both to cuddle and to take his temperature. because she was enjoying her kids. and had taken fifteen shots of them already today. the last one a little shaky because she didn't use a flash and the shadows were getting long, which meant shooting at a slow shutter speed and her hand had shook a little as she focused on the look in malik's eyes and saw the man whose seed spawned malik. the hand shake was not out of hate or even any particular rememberance of love or passion, but rather because this little man looked so much like that big half-a-man and she could not help but wonder would little man grow to become the whole man that the older man was destined never to be. she knew that was her task. to somehow teach these little sweet knuckleheads to become men, somehow, in the absence of a steady man on the scene. if you are a young woman. attractive but not gorgeous. black in color and consciousness. poor as a welfare queen, except not even food stamps stuffed into your bra. proud in the classic "we may not have much but we're going to make it" way, estranged from your birth family because you have become, some-terrible-how, exactly what your upbringing and college education was supposed to prevent: a poor, single mother of two, head of household, fatherman long gone. if you have struggled with being a statistic for three or four years running. cooped yourself up. did odd jobs here and there. hung on by a thread. managed to hold on to your decency -- i.e. declined to live off of ocassional dollars left on the bedside by dawgs who liked the way you jocked their dick -- managed to stay physically clean of diseases (and you have found the easiest way to suffer sexual deprivation is to do without completely, except, of course, for the casual hand job in the tub or a particular good spliff of reefer every other week or so), so you’re clean and have managed to hold on to your pride. no begging back to mama. no buckling under to stern papa's patriarchal nonsense. if you were wearing synthetic clothes even though you prefered cottons and wools. payless sneakers when rockport walkers were really what you needed, especially given that you walked most places you had to go--a buck a throw to ride the bus added up to a tremendous deficit in the pocketbook, and besides, it was usually three bucks to ride because it was cheaper to take family outings then to even think about paying one of the kids in the block to be a babysitter, besides what sense did it make to let kids who were little more than babies watch your babies? if you had finally sold some photos to some magazine for less than you hoped but for as much as you could expect, cashed the money at the corner, paid your electricity bill, paid the rent, and still had thirty dollars and change left over to buy food for two weeks until next payday, because of all of that, if you were shooting a photo of your youngest son and you saw the last man who dispassionately screwed over you staring out of your son’s two year old eyes, your hand would quiver too. all of the above is why her hand shook a little trying while squeezing off that slow-shutter-speed shot.

 

because of ruminating on all of that and because she just never would have expected it, she wasn't paying attention to the brother walking toward her until he stopped in front of them. went down into his pocket and began pulling out a pistol that was so long it seemed like it took two hours for him to keep extracting it from its hiding place. he just kept coming up, up, up with that thing.

 

why was he showing her his gun? was all she could think of at first.

 

brother was tall but not overly tall. just regular ghetto brother tall. tall enough to be playing ball instead of pulling a gun on her. was moderately attractive, except she did not pay too much attention to his looks because she was faced with the fascination of a lethal weapon about to be aimed at her chest. he maybe weighted as much as her whole family -- sekou was no more than forty-some pounds, malik was only about twenty-nine pounds, and she weighed ninety-eight pounds wringing wet -- she had weighed herself the last time she took a bath at her girlfriend's house, her girl friend, whom she hadn't seen or talked to in months now, kept a scale next to the tub, so when she stepped out, it seemed like the obvious thing to do, to hop on the scale and give it a go, the scale registered ninety eight and a half pounds, she had deducted half a pound for the water dripping off her and for the towel she was clutching and rubbing across her body as she dried herself -- so 98 plus let's say 30 was 128 plus say 45 was 163, no 173, yeah, he looked to weigh 200 or so pounds. shit. he didn't need no gun to rob her. he could have been like most men and just threw his weight around. but she couldn't help paying attention to that gun.

 

a gun is a funny thing when it's aimed at your chest, when it's in the hands of somebody who doesn't give a damn about your life, when it's loaded and maybe also loaded is the person holding the piece. a gun is funny in the macarbe sense that even though she was a statistic of poverty she had never thought of herself as eligible to become a statistic of homicide until she was confronted by a little piece of specifically twisted metal, phallic shaped and capable of spewing a metal projectile that can rent flesh, shatter bone and easily cause fatal harm.

 

we had embraced when we met, the huge of my bear hug almost wrapped completely around her twice, my right hand on my left elbow, my left hand vice versa, her living flesh encased against my chest, i could feel her breathing, her small breasts, the slenderness of her back, the top of her head not fully up to my chin, she didn't look sick or anything, or feel weak, but no one would mistake her for being at the top of her game, she had a semi-nervous gesture when i asked how she had been, both hands went to her hair and tugged the braids back on her head, hands over her ears like she didn't want to hear the question, and she looked down, away from me, before answering that she was just kind of coming out of seclusion. while she made those silent sad gestures, i was thinking about her children being sequestered in a cramped shotgun double, and, of course, trying to be a bit sensitive, i didn't ask how she was caring for her kids, i mean i was just another man who was not going to support her two young negro males, and if you ain't going to solve the problem what right do you have to tell a young mother that she ought to take better care of her kids, doesn't she know that every day she gets up, dresses them, feeds them, as best she can? i guess if i were she i too would have been in seclusion. and then she tells me that she almost got killed.

 

but that's life in the waning moments of the 20th century, everybody is almost getting killed, life, especially in new orleans a recent statistical murder capital of metropolitan america, life is murder. i could tell from the quiet, unhysterical, deliberate, clearly ennuciated, without eye contact at first but then the quick glance up into my eyes, i could tell that life is sometimes death from the way she said the word for the day around our way: killed. i could tell this was not an exaggeration.

 

you know the old saying, what goes up must come down? it's not the lift off that's scary, nor the arcing descent, what is scary is surviving the crash. i'm beginning to understand the anxiety of survival. sort of like how it felt surviving the middle passage. what am i living for? how come i'm still alive? when friends and kin fall all around you, you wonder why you're still standing. in this case, i was also wondering how she was still standing.

 

i mean it was difficult visualizing her on the sidewalk, pulling malik close to her with a firm hand that just moments ago was leisurely linked to his little palm. or how did sekou, big eyed and backed back against her thighs, how did he look while some original gangsta practiced his mayhem tactics on this family trio. sister got less than nothing--all the cash she will beg, borrow, earn and steal this year will not cover her annual debt, and some hardleg is trying to jack her up. what a tremendous disrespect for life this is. what kind of parasite would ripoff a whole family whose liquid cash is probably less than the cost of the bullets and the gun being used to rob them?

 

sister laughs nervously as she relates to me how big the gun was, pantomiming the gun being pulled on her, coming up out the dude's pants, she uses her hand with finger and thumb stiff at a perpendicular angle and just keeps raising her hand higher and higher until it's over her head. i imagine when all the money you've got is thirty dollars and it's secreted on your person, and your two young boys are scrunched up against you silently waiting for you to do something, and there's this big dude standing in front of you about to rob you or whatever, i imagine, at that moment, the gun do look like it will keep growing in size, bigger and bigger and bigger.

 

"i told him, you know you wrong for that. you see my kids..."

 

i could not imagine being bold enough to tell a robber he's wrong for robbing. but beneath the stress of crisis, she rose to protest the moment of her assault.

 

"i had to tell him, man, you wrong for that. and then i kinda instinctively backed toward the street. before i knew it, we were standing in the street. a car came along. the driver hit his brakes. leaned on his horn. swerved around us and kept going. i was yelling at the car: stop, stop. the dude hollered at me: give me your money or i'll shoot you. but by then i was standing in the middle of the street, my arms around my kids and then another car was coming. they was just going to have to hit me and my boys, or stop. fortunately the car stopped. i jerked on the passenger front door but it was locked. roll down your window, i begged. help me. please. help me. i pointed at the dude at the curb: that man is trying to kill us."

 

i watched her unconsciouly re-enact the escape as she narrated the scenario of resistance to assault. the unsentimental starkness of her words connected me to her like a fishhook in the flesh, each syllable held fast and pulled me closer because it hurt to back away from her. when i had asked how she had been, i had no idea how near she had come to not being and how out of it i would feel as she related to me the tale of her near demise.

 

although each one of her quiet words conjured up an image in my mind, everything i was thinking was abstract compared to the knot of feelings wrenching my gut as i stood transfixed by the mesmerizing sight of her pantomime, her body jerking through the survival motions: the desperate pulling at the car door, her braids thrashing as she frantically grasped for an opening; the fearless pointing at the assailant, her arm extended, ending in an accusatory finger aimed at some spot to the right of me; the protective collecting of her children, the hugging of open space with right arm and left arm, the hunching over, making a shield out of her body. i was hearing her words with one mind and watching her body with another mind, and both minds were marveling at what they witnessed. she sang and she danced. her words were warrior song, her motions, warrior steps. and yet she was unarmed, all she was doing was defending, defending her right to be, to be woman, to be mother, to be walking down the street with her children. you know we're in bad shape when a single mother and two children are viewed as easy prey, when a literally poor woman who obviously doesn't have big bucks can't take a family stroll through the afternoon without one of her brothers pulling a gun on her, threatening murder, demanding her money or her life.

 

i was simply standing there listening to her story, painfully aware that i was doing nothing but listening. she was not only doing the work of telling the tale, she had also first done the work of surviving the murderous maze of choices facing her that fatefilled afternoon. when a robber puts a gun in your face, most people's minds shut down and they become incapable of making calculated decisions, incapable of making any decision. most people freeze up and simply do what they are told. but this sister in the flash of a few seconds figured out how to be a survivor. threaded through the labyrinth of violence and somehow found a path to avoid the palpable possibility of getting murdered. this sister refused to go silently into the book of urban armed robbery and homocide.

 

i was emotionally exhausted as she continued the story of a murder that didn't happen. since she was here telling me about it, i knew that the story did not end with her murder, but as she revived the terror of the moment with the sound of her voice and the intensity of her movements, i felt the helpless chill of realizing just how fragile we all are in confronting the callous brutalities of contemporary life.

 

even though it would have been a tragedy had she been shot, the greater shame is that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, unbelievable about this story. if i didn't know it before, i knew it now: the realities of late 20th century new orleans had predisposed me to accept murder as a normal way of life. i wondered what i would have done had i actually been a witness to the attempted robbery. how would i have reacted if i were a passerby? would i have driven away, like the driver of the first car that almost hit them, or would i have simply stood motionless as a tree witnessing a black on black lynching, a black man assaulting a black woman?

 

"it was an older black man at the wheel of the car that stopped. i pounded on the window. i looked over my shoulder at the dude standing on the curb with the gun still out. please, help us, i shouted. the man unlocked his door. i pushed my kids in first."

 

then she addressed me. reminded me that i was not innocently an uninvolved spectator. by directly addressing me, she did not allow me the simple escape of observing her as though she was a television or a movie screen. she reminded me that i, a man, was looking at her, a woman. what was the relationship of my manhood to her? as "a man" i could be a perpretator or i could be a helpmate. she reminded me that manhood was no abstract choice. day to day, incident to incident, relation to relation, one on one, one to many, one to none, each man had to choose how he related to each woman. i didn't say anything as she interrupted the narrative flow, looked directly at me and made a parenthetical remark as she continued. what could i say?

 

"man, it was some shit like in a movie. it was happening so fast. but what was i going to do? i didn't want my kids to see me getting shot or nothing. or whatever that man with the gun intended to do to me." the awfulness of "whatever" hung in the air like the scent of foulness in a slaughterhouse. i said nothing and just waited for her to hurry up and get away from the man with the gun.

 

"at first i was going to tell the kids to run but they wouldn't move. they just kept clinging to me. so when i pushed them out into the street, they kinda was resisting. but it was the street and maybe getting run over by a car or else standing still and getting robbed and maybe getting shot. lucky for us, a car stopped. so after i got the kids in the car, i jumped in behind the kids. the man who was driving asked me what was wrong. i said just drive please. please drive. and he drove off. i didn't even look back. to this day i couldn't really describe that dude to you, but i can still see that big-ass gun."

 

and then it was over. she stopped talking. went into herself for a second or so to lock down whatever emotions that retelling and reliving the tale had set loose.

 

once she was back to the present, she looked up and into me in real time, swung her attention to my presence and calmly met my gaze without the terror of the past beclouding her bright brown eyes. she was no longer back at the scene of the crime, she was now standing in safety before me, a slight, very slight, smile creasing her face. silent. and then she said: "i'm alright now, but i been kind of staying inside, yaknow." and then she giggled nervously. i mumbled something about being glad that she was ok, and then recognizing that i had nothing substantial to add, i changed the subject.

 

days later, i find myself facing the question: what are you going to do about it? it's over but it's not over. murder marches on. armed robbery careens through our community unabated. no matter how i twist the combination of causes and effects, proactions and reactions, i don't come up with any great new insights into the problem.

 

in terms of dealing with our very real social problems, i am a beggar standing lonely outside a banquet of the damned. i don't possess any secret solutions or even any short term suggestions. but i know i must say something. so i raise up these few words and shout out to all my brothers: hey, my brothers, if you see a young sister, reed thin, dark skinned, walking down the street with two big-eyed kids, hey, please don't fuck with them. and brotherman, if you find them in trouble, please help them. that's the least a human being can do. help, and, most certainly, do no harm.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

DOING BATTLE ON THE CULTURAL FRONT

 

 

What is more important: reality or the perception of reality?

 

In the long run, reality is always more important than perception. For example, if we are sprayed with a poisonous gas, whether we could perceive that gas would not determine whether that gas killed us. Or if we were Sioux and made a treaty with the U.S. government, whether we believed in that treaty or not would not prevent us from dying at Wounded Knee, Wounded Knee (1 or 2 for that matter).

 

The facts are that in the long run, reality always rules. However, what we must contend with is the unfortunate truth that perception dominates human discourse more than reality. In the minds of humans, myth is more important that truth. How we perceive reality will determine what we do, far more often than reality itself.

 

In this context, cultural workers occupy a critical position. Through the power of our art work, we artists can either reveal the truth or maintain myths; can wake up the consciousness of our audience to the realities of our world or hypnotize people into believing that beliefs are synonymous with truths. The invaluable role that entertainment plays in stabilizing the status quo is why artists as entertainers are paid disproportionate to other workers (such as teachers and farmers) in modern American society.

 

Perhaps here we need to clarify the distinction between artists and entertainers, that is assuming there is a distinction. First of all, all successful art entertains, i.e. engages the imagination and emotions of its audience. That is the essential power of any art. So then being an entertainer is part and parcel of being an artist. An artist must be able to move people.

 

The real question then is not whether the art is entertaining but whether the art reveals truths or reinforces myths -- and because we live in a period and a place where truth is multifaceted and often contradictory, it is both easier to communicate received myths to the general public and for the bulk of contemporary Americans to accept myths than it is to communicate and have the bulk of people accept revealed truths.

 

Received myths are easier for the mass elements to swallow because these myths conform to the perceived reality of Euro-centric domination. Moreover, it is easier to market such myths, especially because the means of communication, not to mention the amount of remuneration, is generally tied to adherence to and propagation of the existing mainstream. Thus, even an avant garde which protest bourgeois values but does not lead a revolt against bourgeois domination is acceptable to the status quo as a safety value outlet of frustration that might otherwise be channeled into rebellion, or, "god forbid," social revolution.

 

An essential difference between art and entertainment is that art reveals the realities of history and the status quo, and proposes a vision of a significantly altered future, whereas entertainment reinforces social myths and proposes the futility of revolution past, present or future. Judge for yourself, but sooner or later, those essential characteristics will manifest themselves in all artwork. You can deal with this or you can deal with that, one way or another, you either conform to or transform the status quo.

 

Given our current state, which is a contradictory mixed bag (i.e. we both  conform and transform, but tend to conform more than  we transform), the real question for us as artists is how to mount and sustain cultural warfare with the avowed goal of winning the hearts and minds of our people away from conforming to the status quo, win our people over to transforming the status quo reality.

 

So that is the revolutionary duty of the artist: to reveal the truth. This is intrinsically a revolutionary duty because in a period of cultural domination the revelation of truth in and of itself is oppositional to the status quo which works to maintain hegemony.

 

We have tossed around two big words: reality and myth. Let us consider briefly, what we mean by these terms. Reality is simply what is. But reality is also complex. Reality is the event and the interpretation of the event; the conditions that lead to the event, the context within which the event took place, and the resultant outcome of the event. A myth is an accepted, symbolic explanation of reality. A myth could be true or could be false. By this definition of myth, it is obvious that I believe that there is nothing inherently incorrect about myths. However, within our contemporary context, a context of Eurocentric world hegemony, the myths of the status quo are intrinsically in opposition to the truths of non-European peoples.

 

For example, a Euro-centric myth is the belief in man dominating nature. Modern urban architecture (which I call "modern cave architecture") attests to this belief. The prevalence of air conditioning--enclosed spaces designed to keep the outside out. The drive to dominate nature is not just a reflection of atmospheric and environmental conditions. For example, the Inuit people live in cold weather but they don't try to dominate nature. No, I think the effort to dominate nature is a social characteristic which is intrinsic to Euro-centric thought. Native Americans, Africans, people of the so-called Asia subcontinent, and the peoples of the Pacific, all manifest either a reverence for or at least a respect for nature and see ourselves as part of nature.

 

A corollary of all of this is the Euro-centric move not only to separate man from nature (and notice when I speak of Euro-centric thought I specify "man," and when I speak of other modes of thought I specify people), but indeed Euro-centric thought puts man at odds with nature and even goes so far as to say that man has the right to control, or dominate, nature. Thus, we have this Euro-adopted trinity of sky gods, i.e. 1. Yahweh; 2. God the father, son and holy ghost; and 3. Allah, all of whom exist without a female principle (Christianity even goes so far as to make Adam the mother of Eve). All of these religions bestow to men dominion over the earth. and reserve the dominion of heaven (and by extension, hell) to the control of God. This then becomes the mythological justification for Europeans (even though Europeans did not create any one of these three religions) to conquer and control the world and all its diverse peoples.

 

I suggest to you that an artist who has not come to grips with the patriarchal and dominating nature of a so-called "universal" sky god, is an artist unable to break the psychological grip of Euro-centric thought, and hence, regardless of the so-called political content of their work, that artist will invariably end up supporting the status quo, and thus in the long run end up being an entertainer. Of course, there is much more to discuss in this context, because this is a very complex topic, but I think you see the general outlines.

 

All of this is the context within which I think our battle for cultural equity and cultural diversity takes place. I believe what we are struggling to do is defend and develop ourselves based first on revealing the truth of our day to day lives and our history, and second on taking responsibility for the shaping of our future.

 

Our social truths are tough and complex in that they include all kinds of contradictory social realities, some of which are shameful, nearly all of which are painful to reveal. Our failure to stop the colonizer was often because of a failure to unite with others who had a common battle to wage even if they were historically our enemy; a failure to curtail collaboration with the enemy; and ultimately a failure to overcome our own weaknesses in thought and action.

 

The fact is we were enslaved by the millions and the magnitude of that slavery could not have taken place without strategic mistakes and critical sell-outs. Fortunately, as our ongoing struggle makes clear, we have been delayed but not denied. So the task of our artist and art institutions is to reveal both the perfidy of the enemy and the pitifulness of our own weaknesses. You see when we talk about what needs to be attacked, the internal contradictions must be very high on our list. Most of the major slave revolts in the United States were betrayed from within.

 

So art must look unblinkingly at the past and the present if it is to offer a clear-eyed vision of the future.

 

Furthermore, the future of our struggles for equity and diversity, for empowerment and tolerance, must be grounded in specific realities and aimed toward a general embracement of the oppressed and exploited including huge sectors of the so-called "white" world who are more confused than we are, and certainly more spiritually and emotionally bankrupt than we have ever been. We may not have much wind in our sails, but there are literally millions of white Americans running on empty who live in a world of dread and angst. While I feel no moral responsibility to save them as whites, I do feel a responsibility to address them as human beings.

 

I do not fool myself into thinking that the majority of people who think of themselves as white will heed my words, but, at the same time, I am wise enough to understand that I in no way diminish myself by helping others, even if those others have historically bought into their alleged superiority over me. For you see, deep down in their souls they know, just as deep down in my soul I know, that none of us are superior, we are all humans struggling to survive, procreate and find a measure of peace and happiness.

 

The effort to accurately communicate the complex and contradictory nature of truth is the battle I envision as a human being, the battle I wage as an artist.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

How We Sound, Is How We Are

 

 

How we sound, i.e. how we make music is the beat and best of us, the meaning and measure of us. Is how the world knows us and how we know ourselves. This essay will explore the historical development and cultural implications of the various music forms that, collectively considered, some of us call “Great Black Music.”

 

The term “Great Black Music” (GBM) is not a racial term per se, even though it contains a racial element. When African Americans refer to someone as Black, we generally mean a lot more than race; after all, we are a mixture of races. The biological is the least important of the three elements of Blackness, which are color, culture and consciousness. Culture and consciousness are the more critical elements. Culture roots the individual in a social group, a community of people who share behavior, attitudes, ethos, and ideals. Consciousness is identification with and examination of; to be conscious is to choose and commit to, not simply to be born into and experience. Consciousness is the most critical because an individual can be biologically Black and Black-acculturated by rearing, but still choose to serve as a representative of some other cultural interests. Additionally, just because a Black person does something does not make that act or creation representative of Black culture.

 

The music most of us refer to as Black music is not slave music. This music is the expression of an emancipated people. Although the music we revere has some historical roots in slavery times, three (gospel, blues and jazz) of the four principal genres (popular music is the fourth genre) all developed after the Civil War.

 

While it is common to divide the music along sacred and secular lines, to say that we had “religious music” that gave praise to God on one hand and “good times” (or bad times, in the case of the blues) music that gave praise to pleasure (or bemoaned the absence of pleasure) on the other hand, and although it is also popular to say that religious music preceded the other genres, the truth is a bit more complex, particularly if one equates religious music with Christian liturgy.

 

When we were enslaved during the African holocaust of chattel slavery and colonialism, with the notable exception of Congo Square in New Orleans, those of us forcibly brought to the United States were not allowed to publicly speak our African languages and publicly practice our African customs. We, of course, found ways to retain essential aspects of our African languages and customs, and these aspects are called African retentions, but the retentions were forced to reside inside European forms and/or Creole forms—in this case “Creole” refers to new cultural forms that resulted from mixing, amalgamation and adoption within the context of a multicultural, although White-supremacy dominated, context.

 

The reason that religious music was the first organized expression of African American musical talent is because of the restrictions of slavery. In the crucible of chattel slavery, we were denied the opportunity to practice our religious rituals and retain our languages. To the degree that anything beyond subservience was taught us, we were taught Christianity, and as scholar/historian Vincent Harding accurately asserts in his important book There Is A River, although we were involuntarily conscripted into Christianity, we shaped Christianity to meet our needs and, in so doing, became the authentic practitioners of Christianity as a theology of liberation.

 

 

GOSPEL

 

In ante-bellum America the initial development of Black churches and the development of unique forms of musical worship by African Americans took place exclusively in the North. Reverend Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopalian (A.M.E.) Church in Philadelphia in 1797, and in 1801 Rev. Allen compiled and produced a hymnal which contained original musical compositions as well as variations of traditional Christian praise songs. This music was closer to what became generically known as “Negro Spirituals” than to what we consider “Gospel” music today.

 

In the South, where the overwhelming majority of our people were, the development of independent churches was not tolerated, and the compilation of hymnals was mostly by  word of mouth. In the early 1800s a wave of religious revivalism swept across the South. In many cases, African Americans were included in the services, although segregated either in special sections of the camp meetings or at separate camp meetings.

 

We practiced African-intensive religious modes of worship in these Southern camp meetings. The modes included trance and spirit possession, dance, communal chants and semi-sung oratory (“talk-singing”), improvised musical passages, and community sharing of hardships. Practices such as prayer services and the telling of one’s determination gave each individual the opportunity to “speak” her or his piece as well as the opportunity to seek her or his peace in the Holy Spirit. While some African American Christians deny the relevance of such cultural practices and consider them either quaint or reprehensible expressions of illiterate people, these cultural expressions are philosophical projections of an African sensibility rather than simply a reflection of ignorance of European culture.

 

The music that is considered classic “Negro Spirituals” was codified into a cultural force in the late 1800s when the spirituals were “spruced up” and presented as concert music in 1871 by the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Here begins the common practice of dating developments within African American music by its presentation to the Euro-centric mainstream and its acceptance by “Whites.” Here also is the nexus of cultural production and cultural authenticity—i.e., until Afro-centric cultures are produced for (or more importantly “produced by”) Whites, the culture goes unrecognized by the mainstream unless “money” can be made from controlling the sale of the cultural “product.”

 

It is worth noting that the selling of Black music is directly tied to the technology of reproducing the sound of Black music. In this case, it is no mere coincidence that radio and sound recordings, not to mention electrical amplification and movies with sound, all developed and came to fruition after the Civil War and before the Great Depression, the same time period that saw the development of the genres we known today as blues, gospel and jazz. The technology of capturing sound is important because Black music can not be appreciated or replicated solely as notes on paper.

 

The precursor of modern Gospel was Rev. Charles A. Tindley, who composed and published what some critics consider the first modern Gospel songs. Rev. Tindley was at his height between 1901 and 1906 and marked the beginning of known individual composers of African American religious music. The main creators of modern Gospel were composer and pianist Thomas Dorsey and vocalist Mahalia Jackson. It is instructive to note that in the mid-1920s when Dorsey, Jackson and others began to practice this new Gospel form they were rejected and, in fact, prohibited from performing in some churches because they were accused of “jazzing up” religious music or of bringing “the Blues” (i.e. the “devil’s music”) into the church.

 

Nearly a century later, the “contemporary” Gospel movement as exemplified by Yolanda Adams, numerous “mass” choirs, and composer/choir director Kirk Franklin, represents a continuance of the Dorsey/Jackson rejuvenation of Gospel to “include” the significant and essentially Afro-centric musical developments of the day into the religious music canon. Those who reject contemporary Gospel artists today because they are making worldly music and calling it Gospel are of the same temperament as those who rejected early Gospel in the 1920s.

 

In the overall scheme of contemporary Gospel music, perhaps the single most significant development is the insertion of the drum. The drum, considered the “most savage and pagan” of all instruments, was indelibly associated with our African origins. The drum had always been excluded, indeed condemned, in Christian music making except, of course, drumming through hand clapping, in which we used our bodies as a percussion instrument. Next we developed an unrivaled facility with the small hand drum, known as the tambourine. But it was not until the Black Power era of African affirmation that Gospel music actively embraced the drum set as an integral part of the instrumentation of religious music.

 

That the drum today is found in the choir stands and on the stages of  almost every Gospel concert is an amazing development that indicates not only the strength of African retentions but also the inevitability of Afro-centric cultural expressions surfacing among the masses of African Americans, even among those who had consciously rejected the drum in previous times.

 

Gospel has retained much of its African character precisely because it is ritual rather than commercial. Indeed, except for a handful of professional recording artists, most Gospel artists seldom tailor their performance to commercial considerations. Moreover, the network of independent churches provides both a stage and a conservatory for the development of artists apart from the vicissitudes of popular tends. This is not to say that there are no trends in Gospel music. Certainly Gospel is subject to fads and the mass adoption of certain styles in a given era, but the adoption or rejection of commercial influences is not a life-and-death issue for Gospel artists.

 

The primary audience for Gospel music is an audience of “believers” who partake in the music with the expectation of being moved to religious ecstasy. Through their collection offerings the Gospel audience (i.e. the church) supports the vocalists, choirs, instrumentalists, and musical directors. This audience validates the worth of the artist, not some recording executive, not the status on the commercial charts, not television (or radio) popularity, although all of these certainly play a role in contemporary Gospel music.

 

 

BLUES

 

Contrary  to popular belief, the Blues is not slave music, even though slave-era work songs, field hollers, chants, and the like were some of the basic ingredients of the Blues. In fact, the archetypal image of the wandering blues musicians, roaming from town to town with his guitar, is de facto testimony that blues musicians, as we know and mythicize them, could not have existed prior to Emancipation because our people did not enjoy freedom of movement during slavery.

 

The initial form of itinerant Blues must that became known as Country Blues is best exemplified by Mississippi’s Robert Johnson. Johnson, who was born in 1911, was not the first to record nor was he the originator or even popularizer of the Blues or various Blues vocal and instrumental techniques; however, he was easily the most developed and forceful Blues musician of his era to record.

 

An extraordinary guitarist and seminal composer, as well as a mesmerizing vocalist, Johnson, who recorded only 29 songs during two different sessions in 1936 and 1937, set standards for acoustic Country Blues performance that stand today. Literally thousands of performers, including many of the most popular and best known rock recording artists, have extensively “borrowed” Johnson’s melodies, riffs, and even whole songs, often without crediting Johnson.

 

A second form of Blues is known as the Classic Blues, the only modern genre of music that has been led by women. In a country dominated by patriarchal values and male leadership (should we more accurately say “overseership”?), Classic Blues is remarkable. Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Sippie Wallace, and the incomparable “Empress” of the Blues, Bessie Smith, were far more than simply female fronts for turn-of-the-century Blues Svengalies. These women often led their own band, chose their own repertoire, wrote or co-wrote their own songs, and certainly composed or chose their own lyrics. Moreover, those who were truly successful, like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, actually ran their own production companies. The was not one major male singer of Classic blues.

 

Never again since the Classic Blues era of the 1920s have women as a group performed leadership roles in the music industry, especially not African American women. The entertainment industry intentionally curtailed the trend of highly vocal, independent women—most of whom, it must be noted, were not svelte sex symbols comparable in either features or figure to slender White women, but rather these sisters were robust, dark-skinned, African-featured women who thought of and carried themselves as the equal of any man. America fears the drum and psychologically fears the self-determined empowerment of the bearer of the first drum, the feminine heartbeat that we hear in the womb.

 

Indeed, chronologically, in terms of recordings, the Classic blues came before the Country Blues. Aesthetically, the music the Classic Blues divas sang was closer to an amalgam of popular music of the era infused with blues elements than it was to Country Blues per se. When Russian-born immigrant Sophie Tucker was unable to make a recording date because of contractual conflicts, vaudeville and Blues musician Percy Bradford convinced Okeh, a small record label at that time, to allow one of his featured singers, Mamie Smith, to r4ecord. Eventually, they produced “Crazy Blues,” the first Blues record. The record was released in August of 1920, selling over 75,000 copies in the first month and over one million within a year. Soon the then fledgling record industry was literally rushing to record every Blues-singing Smith woman they could find, thus beginning the industry trend of churning out clone after clone of whatever is perceived as a “hit formula.”

 

The third category of the Blues is the Urban Blues—the up-South, big city, electrified variation of the mainly acoustic Country Blues. Most of the founding fathers of Urban Blues, such as Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Willie Dixon, and literally hundreds of others, were Mississippi-born transplants.

 

These artists laid the foundation for modern pop music. Except for the wholesale raiding of Robert Johnson’s repertoire, there has been no larger cross-cultural appropriation than the coveting and covering of Urban Blues songs by White pop artists—especially the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, two groups that, unlike their American predecessors and peers, actively acknowledged that they got their music from African American Blues artists.

 

Although White American artists such as Elvis Presley became rich copying “Hound Dog” from Big Mama Thornton and recording the songs of Otis Blackwell (an African American composer who would send Presley tapes so that Presley could learn to sing the songs), most White American singers did little to acknowledge and celebrate the sources of their riches.

 

By the 1990s, other than a handful of legendary figures, and a larger number of relatively unknown elderly practitioners, Whites dominated Blues—or, more correctly, they dominated the “representation” (as opposed to the creation) of the Blues. One central fact needs to be kept in mind: Other than the three schools of the Blues (Classic, Country and Urban), over the last fifty years there have been no real developments of the Blues as a form, although there have been significant transformations and off-shoots. In terms of ongoing development, the Blues is at a dead end.

 

One of the most vexing and seemingly contradictory aspects of GBM is that the majority of Blues fans, and arguably the majority of Blues musicians (no argument if you only count people 35 and under), are White. Why don’t Black people listen to and play the blues today?

 

There are all kinds of theories, but there is one simple fact: GBM is functional. Unlike Western culture, which is obsessed with eternal life, African culture accepts the inevitableness of death and rebirth through generational transformation. Thus, when something dies, we grieve and then move on, carrying the spirit of the deceased within us as we create anew.

 

The Blues is dead because the soil that produced the blues either lies fallow or has been covered with concrete, and because the social conditions that produced the Blues no longer exist in the same configuration as during the Jim Crow era. However, the Blues sensibility, the impulse to rise above by declaiming just how tough times are, the laughing to keep from crying, the celebration of the transformatory power of violence—all of that is found in the Blues music of the turn of the 20^th century, which is, of course, Rap.

 

We as a people have never been hung up on perpetuating the American status quo. Our goal has always been to either flee Babylon or burn it down, to leave it or fundamentally change it. In the case of the Blues, as a specific reflection of Jim Crow America, we did both—we left the Blues as a specific genre of music and we transformed the Blues into other popular forms of music. In fact, what is Rhythm and Blues but post-WWII Blues, and what is Rap but a literal recitation of the Blues over “phat beats”?

 

What we must distinguish is the difference between process and product, between focusing on a sensibility that informs the creative process as opposed to fixating on the forms that are the result of a specific creation. The Blues as a historic genre is moribund. The Blues as a sensibility is very much alive. The Blues is dead. Long live the Blues.

 

 

JAZZ

 

One of the most common and inaccurate myths about Jazz is that it was born in the brothels of Storyville at the beginning of the 20^th century in New Orleans. The truth is that Jazz was born in the streets and parks of the New Orleans African American community. Initially, Jazz was primarily an outdoor music performed at social occasions such as weddings receptions, funerals, parties, births, parades and picnics.

 

The immediate precursor to Jazz was a piano-based music known as Ragtime. The major figure of Ragtime was Scott Joplin who composed numerous popular rags and also composed a ragtime opera, Treemonisha. Ragtime was a highly syncopated, up tempo, happy music and reflected the high hopes that our people had during the period of Reconstruction that grew out of the North’s victory in the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Ragtime was also the first American-born cultural expression to achieve international acclaim. The dance steps associated with Ragtime, most notably the “Cakewalk,” were a worldwide rage. However, the end of Reconstruction also marked the end of Ragtime as a major musical form.

 

Jazz played Ragtime but with a major infusion of the Blues. Jazz was also a band music, whereas Ragtime was primarily, but not exclusively, a solo piano-based music. It is also interesting to note that the technology associated with Ragtime, piano rolls and the “player piano” were eclipsed by the development of records. Whereas a player piano could only replicate piano sounds, the record could replicate every musical instrument and the human voice. What cds have done to vinyl, 78-records did to piano rolls.

 

There are many other elements in the development of Jazz, which moved up river from New Orleans to St. Louis and Chicago, and from there to New York and the entire East Coast, as well as to California. Jazz became so dominant a cultural force that the advent of modernism in America, i.e. the 1920s, is popularly known as the “Jazz Age.”

 

Key to an appreciation of the cultural dominance of Jazz is the fact that from the beginning there were White practitioners who, not surprisingly, received more acclaim than their Black peers (who were the chief innovators and creators of Jazz). Thus, the first major commercializer of Jazz was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), an all-White group led by cornetist Nick La Rocca. In February of 1917, while performing at Reisenweber’s Café in New York city, RCA gave the ODJB the opportunity to record the first Jazz record.

 

From 1917 on, there has been a continuous racial boosterism of specific Whites as the dominant forces in Jazz. Over the years, ODJB was followed by Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, Kenny G. and so on. This complicates the appreciation of Jazz as GBM, but just as Blacks singing opera doesn’t negate the fact that opera is a European Classical artform, the existence of Whites as Jazz musicians in no way means that Jazz is not an African American artform.

 

The major eras of Jazz were New Orleans Jazz at the turn of the century as the founding style. Then came “Swing” Jazz, followed by Bebop, the Avant Garde, Fusion and finally what is today called Smooth Jazz.

 

The dominant figures of early New Orleans Jazz were trumpeter Louis Armstrong and pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton. For swing music, the reigning trio of big band leaders were Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and the incomparable Duke Ellington, all of whom were consummate arrangers, with Duke being the greatest modern American composer (George Gershwin notwithstanding). Bebop is undisputedly led by saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy  Gillespie and pianist Thelonious Monk. The Avant Garde was championed by saxophonist John Coltrane. Trumpeter Miles Davis is most often cited as the popularizer of Jazz Fusion. Smooth Jazz is the result more of marketing than of any significant musical developments, although the mixing of Jazz with Soul music by musicians such as saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. and pianist Ramsey Lewis, directly led to a style that is now dominated by Whites such as saxophonist Kenny G. and mainly White groups such as Sypro Gyra and others too numerous to mention.

 

Jazz is quintessential 20^th Century American music. Jazz embodies the basic concepts of freedom and democracy more so than any other music form or genre. However, at the beginning of the 21^st century, Jazz is at a decisive crossroads and its future is unclear. The major problem with much of today’s Jazz is that many young musicians are so intent on recreating old forms that they have nothing new to say. A major part of their silence evolves form the fact that they are the products of an uneventful assimilation into the American status quo. Their music has no fire because there is no fire in their personal lives. And, as Charlie Parker (the legendary “Bird”) said, what comes out of your horn is your life.

 

Historically, poorly paid Jazz musicians were the epitome of “starving artists.” They persued their art despite economic injustices and inequities, not because they wanted to starve but because making money was not the main reason for creating Jazz. Jazz was their religion, rather than simply their career.

 

After the 1980s Jazz became a middle-class, respectable pursuit. So is it any wonder that much of today’s Jazz does not relate to the lives of the working class, under- and mis-educated, poor and de facto segregated urban masses of African Americans? At the beginning of the 21^st century, Rap has over taken Jazz, and unless there is a radical development, Jazz will go the way of Blues.

 

 

RAP

 

On the one hand it is undeniable that Rap is the dominant musical artform and on the other hand is equally undeniable that the majority of Rap is merely entertainment during a period of extreme trauma in the Black community.

 

My basic contention is that if our popular music is in sad shape, it is because we as a people are in sad shape. What we are witnessing (and too often participating in and collaborating with) is the total commercialization of our music. Thus R&B (regardless of whether it is called “Neo-Soul” or “Funk” or whatever) and Rap are both designed mainly not only to sell records but also to sell to an audience, the majority of whom are not African Americans. If this audience was mainly the large majority of people in the world who are the descendants of the colonized, this would be a good development. However, the “auditors” of fame and fortune in America are mainly White: White youth in momentary revolt against their parents, a White music industry who capitalize of the sale of Black music, a White-controlled media that exists as an adjunct (and advocate) of the business sector and that uses GBM to sell products.

 

The integration of African American artists into the mainstream of entertainment media necessarily results in a dilution and/or prostitution of the music. There is no better example of this co-opting and corrupting phenomenon than what has happened to Rap music.

 

While some adults still argue about whether Rap is really music, Rap has become “the” major force in American popular music and a major force on the international music scene. Regardless of what one thinks about the language of Rap, the reality is that Rap speaks directly to and for African American youth, as well is influential on the lives and outlook of youth internationally. These youth, especially those in the working class and underclass segments of society, are alienated, marginalized, mis- or un-educated, abused, and socialized into a life of crime and/or dependency. Most over-40 adults have no idea how hard it is to be an African American teenager in an urban setting. In fact, many adults will never understand, because much of the more dangerous and damaging social and psychological pressures felt by youth did not exist in preceding generations.

 

On the other hand, the adults who run the recording industry callously exploit this reality. Driven by both the need and the greed for profits, the recording industry—the same industry which commercialized Blues and Jazz—is now pushing Rap for two reasons: There is money in it, and there is a large talent pool.

 

The existence of this talent pool (i.e. surplus creative labor) is critical to Rap’s profitability as a commodity. Literally thousands of would-be Rappers daily submit demo tapes to record executives in the hope of landing a contract so that the aspirant star can “get paid” and “live large.” This talent pool nurtures and grooms itself, and in many cases delivers “demo” tapes that are virtually finished products. There is no necessity for the recording companies to make a major investment in studio time to record these potential million-selling artists. At the same time to make it difficult for the artists to avoid signing with them, the major record companies in union with cable television have made having a professionally produced video the new gold standard. In order to “go gold” a recording artist is almost required to have a video, which costs a couple of hundred thousand dollars to produce. But, again, as has been the case throughout the history of GBM, technology plays a major role in the status and development of the music. Digital video is on the verge of making video production affordable and accessible, and could also pose a serious challenge to the strangle hold major record companies currently have on emerging artists. The stakes are high because the music industry is a multi-million dollar industry.

 

Rap has a genre has brought two major innovations into popular music: First, Rap reintroduced the Afro-centric oral tradition as an artform, and Rap demonstrated a profound advancement in the use of computer technology in the service of art. Rap’s use of electronic instruments and recording equipment is an advancement whose far-reaching significance is akin to the African American appropriation and elevation of the saxophone at the beginning of the 20^th century.

 

The verbal wordplay of Rap is a major advance on the general state of lyrics in pop music. Whereas most pop lyrics are content to use end rhymes, commonplace metaphors and similes as their main literary devices, rappers have significantly upped the ante through the employment of a sophisticated approach to word play. It is not uncommon to hear rappers use rhymes within as well as at the ends of lines; the metaphors and similes range from the satirical to the surreal; and the use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and other forms of word wizardry is, in the mouth of a master rapper, astounding.

 

But Rap is more than just technique. Rap has also reintroduced the relevance of “saying something”—i.e., political and social commentary. This is especially important during a period when Black popular music had become little more than hip elevator music and commercials for consumerism run amok.

 

In terms of using computer-aided technology to create pop music, rappers are pioneers and originators. Just as few people think of the fact that African Americans created the trap drum set, many people are unaware of the technological innovations created by Rap artists. Sampling—using selected passages of pre-existing music mixed with other elements to form a new composition—is Rap’s best known, but by no means only, innovation. The use of environmental sounds and noise elements as part of the music bed is another example. But perhaps the major achievement is the turning of computer and electronic instruments into drums used to produce poly-rhythms—and not just simple backbeats, but complex cross-rhythms of “found” (sampled) and “created” (programmed) sounds, creatively patched together in an aural quilt of musical scraps turned into a magic carpet of head-bopping motion.

 

As an aesthetic, Rap is both a throw-back to basic voice and body percussion and a look into the future when music becomes simultaneously more natural (in that it draws on every available sound in the environment) and completely synthetic (in that it can be created without using “musicians” per se). Rap is both the literal creation of music without musicians and a major redefining and expanding of our perception of what a musician is and does.

 

Although the technical achievements are awesome, perhaps the most significant effect of Rap as been to create more space for musical artists in every genre to make overt political statements and social commentary in their music. The political immaturity of “gangsta” Rap notwithstanding, Rap has reintroduced the concept of the artist as social critic at a time when popular entertainment threatened to inundate us with romantics, clowns and minstrels.

 

Philosophically, the major deficiency of Rap artists is buying into the mainstream assertion that “racism” alone, and ipso facto, is the only problem stopping African Americans from enjoying the good life. Unless and until rappers confront the need to oppose commercialism and other divisive “isms,” such as patriarchal sexism, the music will never achieve its full potential and will always end up debasing itself for the dollar.

 

 

THE WAY AHEAD

 

Whites now seriously compete with African Americans both as producers and as artists in all genres of GBM. Although White domination of the genre has not yet happened in Gospel, White rapper Eminem is widely recognized as a major, if not the most popular, Rap artist. Some people view Eminem as an abnormality and point out that the overwhelming majority of major Rap artists are Black and that Jay-Z, the most skilled Rapper, is also Black, and that therefore there is no chance of Whites taking over. However, that same argument was made in Jazz thirty years ago and we see the color of Jazz today. Not long ago there were serious statements that one could tell if Jazz musicians were White or Black simply by listening to them. Obviously, that is no longer the case. Not only do some Whites sound Black, but a number of Blacks sound White—assuming that one even entertains a discussion of sound being synonymous with biology.

 

On the other hand, from a cultural and consciousness perspective, “sounding White” is simply accepting the status quo and attempting to conform to a standard that has been established as the paragon of sound. “Sounding Black” is making an individual statement within the broad social context while utilizing the basic principles and traditions of GBM. Thus, any individual person, White or Black, can sound White or Black depending on the individual’s culture and consciousness.

 

We need cultural workers and warriors who understand that, within the broad and capitalist-driven American social context, “sounding”—i.e. making music—can not uphold the status quo and at the same time contribute to the development of African Americans precisely because the status quo is based on economically and politically exploiting us. (For those who doubt the extent of this exploitation, any examination of social index figures, whether it is wealth and income; or sickness, morbidity and life expectancy; or education; or incarceration, and examination of such figures will show that not only are we as a people disadvantaged, the examination will also show that the gaps are widening. Moreover, we have only to look at what happened to Black voters in the last presidential election to get a clear and undeniable picture of the political exploitation of African Americans by the American mainstream.)

 

Any and all music worthy of the designation GBM must oppose the status quo exploitation of African Americans. Throughout the history of GBM, African American artists have struggled to create their own record companies, to secure their publishing rights, to control venues and how the music is presented, and to form collectives, associations and businesses to bring these objectives to reality. The challenge facing GBM, and facing both Rap and Jazz in particular, is how to regain the independence they had when the artists existed either on the periphery of or totally outside of the music industry mainstream.

 

There are many other challenges, for example: no major African American-owned publications which seriously focus on and critique GBM; the declining significance and existence of Black-owned radio stations; the almost total lack of community-based, Black-owned music venues; the abysmally small number of GBM festivals, conferences, and special events which are controlled, organized, and curated by African Americans.

 

Today we have more African American musicians and entertainers who are millionaires than ever before. At the same time we have less control, less ownership, and less independence than at any time in the history of GBM. What we face is neocolonialism of individual musicians who, in exchange for big salaries, do nothing to confront some of the very real problems and deficiencies GBM faces. What we have is the near total control not only of the production and distribution, but also of the discourse about and documentation of GBM by forces that are de facto siding with the status quo in the continued exploitation of GBM.

 

In the final analysis it’s all about context and control—what we do with and in our own space and time. Everything is informed by its own time of creation, existence and demise: what was happening when it was going on.

 

The social and aesthetic significance of African American music is neither abstract nor biological. The social and aesthetic significance of GBM is very precisely its warrior stance in the face of status quo exploitation and its healing force for the victims of that exploitation. Ultimately, the best of our music helps us resist exploitation and reconstruct ourselves whole and healthy. Traditionally GBM is been both an inspiration to keep on keeping on and a healing force in the universe. That is why GBM is such a joyful noise!

 

—kalamu ya salaam / 2006

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

BROTHERS, CAN WE COLOR US FATHER?

(six reflections)

 

 

1.

i don't like using rubbers. never did. but, when i was coming up (i was born 24 march 1947) the world seemed totally different from the way things are now. 

 

we worried mostly about catching the clap, which is what we called gonorrhea. and secondly, about getting a girl pregnant. we heard about syphilis, but didn't think too much about it. from what we knew, a shot of penicillin in your ass could knock out most anything you might catch. there wasn't no herpes. and no aids. and some might say: hey, those were the good old days.

 

as for the girl getting pregnant, well, that was a risk, but it was really more of a risk for the girl than for us, cause we believed if she really didn't want to get pregnant than she would do something to make sure she didn't. and we only hoped that the "something" she did wasn't refusing to have sex unless we wore a rubber.

 

you see, some things never change. when it comes to sex, males want as much pleasure as they can get with as least responsibility as they are forced to accept.

 

in today's world, the extremely high incidence of aids in communities of color is forcing us to be somewhat more responsible, but generally only because aids is a killer and we already got enough stacked against us without adding this killer disease to the barriers blocking our survival. therefore, we use condoms not out of any real allegiance to our partners, but rather out of a sense of self-preservation.

 

...now before somebody goes off the deep end and starts talking about how they use condoms all the time and nobody has to force them... why don't we just confess, given a choice of using or not using (especially if we think it is otherwise safe), we won't use a condom...

 

although staying healthy and alive is a major issue, the problem with focusing only on health is that focus allows us to avoid the more important issue: fatherhood.

 

2.

notice i didn't say, "the girl getting pregnant." if a male and female are sexually active, then pregnancy is always a possibility, even with condoms, even with the pill, etc., etc. and though pregnancy is important, the question of fatherhood is even more important.

 

while the figures detailing sexually transmitted diseases grows higher and higher and the percentage of babies born outside of marriage is over 50% among african americans (and is now also over 50% among poor people in america regardless of color), none of those statistics addresses our major problem: young men do not know how to be fathers.

 

and worse yet, there are indications that we might not want to be fathers.

 

3.

listening to the popular music on the radio, watching the videos on cable, going to the hit movies at the show, can lead you to believe that nobody puts a real high priority on having or being a father. 

 

certainly, being a father is seldom presented as part of the process of keeping it real, which increasingly is defined as getting paid, getting laid, and getting away with whatever you feel like doing.

 

i believe that, for men, making babies is biological and raising babies is cultural. nobody has to teach us how to make a baby, we'll figure that out. but unless somebody teaches us how to be a father, we'll probably never figure that out.

 

in america they have schools and books for everything. you can get a ph.d. for studying roaches, but where do you go to learn how to be a father?

 

most of us learn by example, by watching our parents. so what happens when so many of us don't have fathers? the answer is simple: exactly what's going on in our neighborhoods today: we can't be what we don't know how to be.

 

my father and mother had three children. my first wife and i had five children. after sixteen years of marriage, i left. and though i was not there on a day-to-day basis for my children during their high school years, they knew their father and as young children had grown up with their father. 

 

one of the more interesting characteristics of the five salaam siblings is that both of the males are married and only one of the females is married. 

 

i suggest that it is infinitely harder for today's young black woman to find a black man who is both ready and able to commit to creating and maintaining a family than it is for a young black man to find a black woman to do the same. and it is not just the proverbial numerical shortage of  black men. where the real shortage is, is in the hearts and minds of brothers struggling to make it modern american society, a society which encourages materialism and individualism.

 

can anyone imagine the bulk of today's rappers as fathers, as people responsible for rearing sons and daughters (don't even mention being a committed companion to their partners)? yeah, i know a number of rappers are family folk with children, but do they project that as part of their image of who they are?

 

rappers, athletes and entertainers are the most visible success stories for young black males—and how many of those success stories feature and foreground fatherhood?

 

and yet, regardless of media projected images, i believe that it is the personal day to day that ultimately influences what we do, and thus, i am not surprised that both of my sons have married their high school sweethearts and are working hard at being caring, supportive and committed fathers. more over, i know that being committed fathers is no easy matter. in fact, fatherhood is a challenge that on any given day can be almost too much to bear. nevertheless, i am proud that both of them are working hard to beat the odds.

 

i would say that part of the reason for their willingness to accept the challenge is that my sons mtume and tutashinda had the example of fatherhood in their lives, even if that example was not perfect and even if i ended up divorcing their mother.

 

4.

there are a couple of hard truths that we men ought to own up to: 1. no one woman can sexually satisfy us forever. 2. marriages may or may not last, but being a mother or father is forever. let me explain, because neither statement is as simple as it may seem on the surface.

 

generally speaking, sex is a pleasurable biological act that also has deep individual psychological aspects, as well as far reaching social implications for both partners. 

 

our sex drive is not a choice, this impulse is a part of our nature (or biological make-up). however, how we express (or suppress, transform, transfer or otherwise manifest) this impulse is based on cultural conditioning and individual choice. although there are extreme examples, such as artificial insemination and the future possibility of cloning, for the overwhelming majority of the human species, sex is an inextricable part of procreation.

 

perhaps a reason sex feels so good to us is because procreation is necessary for ongoing human existence. however, strictly from a biological basis, immediately after what most of we men consider the most pleasurable part of sex (the climax) we are finished with our role in the procreative act. for women, if conception results, that moment is a beginning and not a conclusion. this is one of the major reasons for the different approaches to sex of the male and the female. 

 

in other words, after ejaculation (and a moment to rest), the male is ready to move on. afterwards the female desires companionship, and, once she becomes pregnant, actually needs companionship. unlike other mammals, a pregnant woman can not easily survive by herself.

 

questions about being faithful, being honorable, being moral, christian, etc. etc. really are not the foundation of our inner feelings. the biological basis precedes any of our beliefs. when considering procreation, because men and women function differently, it is not surprising that our basic view of roles and responsibilities vis-à-vis sex are different.

 

biologically men are more attracted to young women in their prime childbearing years (late teens to late thirties) than to women in other age groups. nobody remains in the same age group forever, but regardless of age, the preferences of men don't really change that much. the "actions" of men may change as a result of conscious choices and social customs, but the preferences remain the same precisely because it's biologically wired into our makeup.

 

although there are exceptions, for the most part, regardless of his age, a man's sperm can impregnate a woman, but a woman can not get pregnant regardless of what age she is. what does all this mean? it means that most heterosexual men will feel an impulse or an attraction to different women throughout their lifetime, however most of those women will be in their childbearing years. 

 

no woman can stay young forever. as she ages, no woman can remain "sexually attractive" in comparison to other women. moreover, if we are truly honest with ourselves, we men will acknowledge that we are not only attracted to women in their childbearing years, we also find satisfaction in being able to "conquer" or "capture" an attractive woman. ironically, this means that because she is already a "captured" woman (a "wife"), regardless of how attractive, a wife does not offer us the thrill of conquest. i suggest that it is in the biological make up for men to be attracted to "other" women.

 

i am not arguing biological determinism. i am not saying that biology absolutely determines how we will act. instead, i am arguing that there are deep seated, biologically-based emotions we have as males that influence, but do not necessarily determine our thoughts, feelings and actions. additionally, i believe what is most important is our culture, i.e. how we view ourselves and view the world, what values we hold and how we act based on our views and values. my concern is that popular commercial culture is overwhelming in pushing negative views and values, thoughts and actions regarding interpersonal relationships between men and women. 

 

when we say "don't hate the playa, hate the game," do we really understand that there would be no game if no one played? playas playing is what makes the game. and right now, sex without commitment is what sells. indeed, the whole definition of a playa does not include being a father, and that is a problem.

 

here is where the culture of the group and the choice of the individual come into the equation. in different cultures there are all kinds of approaches to the question of sex, marriage and fatherhood. my contention is that in modern america, for most young black males, there is no specific cultural orientation to the details of being a father.

 

fatherhood, like sex, has two aspects: biological and cultural (which has both the group dynamic and the individual choice dynamic). the blood relationship of parent to child is fixed at conception and exists forever. the cultural relationship is dynamic and dependent on how people act. so then, the question is: what does a father do?

 

5.

by his actions, my daddy impressed on me the importance of taking care of your family. for him that meant more than wife and children. that meant caring for my grandfather in his elderly years, for my aunts, helping people in the neighborhood, and actively supporting the then developing civil rights movement. fatherhood was both a responsibility in the home and in the community. 

 

he never gave me or my brothers a specific lecture on how to be a father. he never bought us a book that told the story. and he wasn't too keen on church, even though his father was a jack-leg (or itinerant) preacher, and my grandfather on my mother's side was a pastor who had a church in the country and a church in the city. so we learned by watching and by following his directions.

 

he made his sons clean house, tend the garden, mown the lawn, pick up trash and keep the neighborhood clean. seems like we were responsible for the whole block where we grew up. whatever we had, we had to share with others. he always gave people rides—we lived a long way from the bus stop and when we were driving home in the evening he would never fail to offer a ride to neighborhood people walking home from the bus stop.

 

my kids grew up watching me. and their uncles and the members of our pan afrikan nationalist organization. we had our own school and educated our children up through fourth grade. did you ever think that maybe early childhood education was a parent's responsibility?

 

but it's a different world today, a very different world. and the examples of fatherhood are fewer and fewer, and further and further apart. especially if we look at the issue of the larger community, one think is clear: the majority of young black children are reared by their mothers and seldom, if ever, see their fathers. 

 

whether we are conscious of it or not, life long, monogamous marriages are relatively rare among our people today. our social expectations and behaviors are changing. and driven by the images around us in popular culture which shape and influence us everyday, most of us change with the times but never really think about changing the way things are.

 

have you ever thought about being a father? what it would mean specifically—that is, what you would have to do to be a father and whether that is what you want to do at this point in your life? 

 

i know i didn't consciously think about it before my wife and i had children. and that's my point: if we don't consciously think about doing something, we will unconsciously do it. if we unconsciously father children, when it comes to actively being a father to our child we will fall back on the social examples we have. if we have no examples... 

 

6.

you ever tried with all your heart to do something and couldn't do it? you ever really, really worked hard to achieve something and just couldn't get it? and then after awhile, you decide, well maybe i can do without it, maybe i didn't need it anyway?

 

some of us think we can do without fathers. some of us think maybe we don't need fathers anyway. i came up ok, and i didn't have a dad around. some of us try to fool ourselves.

 

we are not ok without fathers. our communities are in a shambles. chemical dependence among our people is an all time high—whether you are talking about cigarettes, alcohol, over the counter medications, prescribed drugs, or so-called "illegal" drugs, it's all a form of chemical dependence. 

 

although i don't buy into the "young black male is an endangered species" syndrome in the sense of raw survival, i do believe we are a people in crisis. the shrinking number of black fathers is but one symptom of that crisis.

 

it is sometimes tempting to wallow in the mud of self-pity and failure. you know, woe-is-me, look how they done/are doing us wrong! but while our condition may not be our fault, getting out of the sad shape we are in is our responsibility. it is on us to change the way things are.

 

there is no mystery to breaking the cycle of fatherlessness. 

 

if we want fathers in our communities, we have to work at it like we work at anything else we really want to achieve. the first step, however, is an individual choice: do i really want to be a father?

 

brother, can we color you father?

 

and don't tell us your answer. show us your answer by the way you relate to your child and to the mother of your child, and to all the rest of the people in your community.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Ales Lear

 

 

 

 

AND THEN THEY LAUGHED

 

SCENE ONE.

 

 —Places, everybody.

 

A somber, chartreuse funk deftly settles expectantly into the cushions of the wicker sofa right between John and Angela.  Scooting its ass back deep into the throw pillows with the oriental scenes embroidered on them, looking from left to right, back and forth, checking out first the woman and then the man, the woman, the man, and greedily anticipating a rousing good fight, funk's emerald eyes were shinning with a scintillating brilliance.

 

 —Rolling.

 

(If you were John right now you would be wondering why this woman was being so hard on you, calling your cards marked, your dealing cheat, throwing her hand to the floor, turning the table over and screaming about the sins of gambling.)

(If you were Angela right now you would be wondering why do men make you treat them so hard, why do they take a woman who sleeps by herself for some kind of rainbow trout to be caught with hook words, split open, gutted, fried, seasoned with dollops of hot sauce, and eaten with relish leaving only bones and a shriveled head on the otherwise bare plate.)

(If you were John you would be tired of this shit.)

(If you were Angela you would be tired of this shit.)

 

 —Action!

 

Funk knows that the fun part about this prime time drama is that an argument doesn't have to be about anything real to make a good show, it just has to be emotional.

 

Once (a year to the day after their first date—she reminded him she had to remind him!) Angela wanted to talk about their future in the third quarter of a close game. 

Another time (about six months after he moved in) she wanted to discuss bills, 11:38 at night. 

Then there was the time they had just finished eating (at that time they hadn't even discussed living together) and John had even volunteered to wash dishes and Angela wanted to stand next to him rinsing the dishes and asking him questions about what he did with his dick.  With suds half way up to his elbows, John couldn't care less about what she put between her legs when he wasn't there so why, as he washed dirty dishes, did she care about who all he saw or why he wanted to sleep with a woman who wasn't her, shit, maybe the bitch was fine.  He even wiped the beige enamel top of the stove clean and wrung out the well used (three holes and frayed edges) dishrag.

But though he cleaned the kitchen well, John had neither clue nor key to unlocking the deep concern he had for Angela which was incarcerated inside his size 47 1/2" expanded chest.  John's maturity, but a seed yearning for spring, was winter blocked by acquired emotions and ignorantly assumed stances that always seemed to missile guide the first words out his mouth -- maximum overkill syllables designed to destroy all vestiges of life.  John sincerely believed you had to be finger quick on the button push or else the other person's ICBMs would blow you away.

Angela, on the other hand was visibly shaken, quietly close to crying.  Though she knew without a doubt when she was being fucked with, Angela was completely ignorant of what was happening inside of John, and, based on her ignorance and the stupid things John said and seemed to do with periodic regularity, Angela assumed the worst.  When the ground moves rapidly you don't have to be a seismologist to know it's an earthquake.

It wasn't personal, there were many different Angelas and Johns tussling with this same bear.  Is there something in the air that makes it so hard now a days?

"I don't know, maybe we, maybe I should be alone." Self-rejection didn't even sound like her voice. John was well enough equipped to interpret the no trespass termination inherent in the dangerous-colored, slicing sharp, concertina barbed wire gradually unraveling out of the cotton softness of her sound.

 "I don't understand what you want out of this." A torrent of cold, quick darting lizards fell into his lap. Well, he didn't want to always be on trial, that was for sure. She was smelling up the air. Wasn't she woman enough to say it straight out if she really didn't want him anymore? Every inch of her body was covered. After loosening the reptiles, Angela looked like she was headed underground. John flinched and moved back an inch or two in distaste, although he didn't know he was moving back.

Angela saw the small movements of his flesh which portended major emotional shifts. She foresaw his big feet walking out the door. His green shirt turning sundown forest dark as he slammed the door behind him without speaking or saying any kind of goodbye other than the finality of his olive drab silence.

Angela saw John's muscular back hovering over Crystal's nakedness and sensed his delight in being inside of Crystal. He had someone else (even though he swore that "it" was over, Angela had seen:

(how Crystal eyed John when they had gone to the mayor's inaugural reception and Crystal was allegedly working the room for the mayor and had shook John's hand two beats too long and had barely, limp-wrist offered Angela only the top half of her fingers in a half-hearted gesture that was supposed to pass for a sisterly greeting,

(and, besides, Angela was neither blind nor vain, there was no way Angela's lanky leanness could even come close to any one of Crystal's eye-popping curves—not that John ever publicly gave Angela any reason to feel jealous but still every woman knows when a former girlfriend and potential lifetime rival is the kind of fine that every man wants to fuck,

(and besides Crystal looked like she always got her man, plus anybody else's man she wanted,

(and Angela, even though she hated herself for hating Crystal, well not really hating Crystal but rather hating Crystal's body, hating that Crystal had that kind of body that other women can't help hating because it made a woman feel, well, feel inadeq… ah, uncomfortable, especially if one was a little overweight, or a lot, or a little underweight, or a lot, or just a little skinny—like Angela was—or whatever,

(Angela really didn't want to dwell on how thin her thighs were,

(Angela must have been the only woman in the world who "loss" weight after having a baby,

(and Angela never could find a really pretty hairstyle to complement the long oval shape of her face—what shade of lipstick was that Crystal was wearing?—shit,

(Angela could understand why former-collegiate-all star quarterback John was attracted to Crystal who, even at thirty something, looked preppy as a goddamn college cheerleader,

(well, at least I'm taller—not quite up to John's 6'3" but at least 6" taller—than she is, is what Angela rationalized to console herself when Crystal brushed pass John for the third time in less than two hours,

(Angela was tired, if John wanted that—and there was no doubt in Angela's mind that "that" was waiting by the phone to call John the minute John walked out of Angela's door and was fully able to avail himself of the various female options lined up waiting for a chance to do what Angela had not been able to do,

(oh la-dee-dah, if it was going to be all this then let him go to Crystal, men always had someone else…) to be inside of and she had no one else she wanted inside of her.

Angela wanted to want John, but considering how everything was turning out, at that moment she didn't want him inside of her again ever, no matter how good it felt and it did feel good most of the time, but, so what, no matter, she could handle missing him, missing it. It would be hard but the way to deal with a snake is to cut its head off, don't delay, don't play, don't hesitate.

"John, please leave."

 

—Cut!

 

Funk lay back exhausted but utterly thrilled, marveling at the depth of Angela's self-depreciating workout. Even thought that thing with Crystal had been over two years ago, Angela made that stale episode live again. God, she was good. The crying bit in the next scene was going to be a snap.

Angela was glumly biting her lower lip, which she always did when the stress became a bit much. And John had just dummied all the way down, had not said a word as he did a mental inventory of what were the downsides to cutting his losses and booking up soon as this next scene was through—damn, she had said "please leave" just like she meant it, all soft and shit and with just enough resolve to make it razor sharp, soft but sharp, how did she do that?

Funk could hardly wait for scene two.

 

 

SCENE TWO.

 

—Take it from the dialogue. Speed?

 

—Speed.

 

—Action.

"John, please leave."        

 John had his directions backwards.  When he should have been moving forward he had backed up, now he was reaching out for her with his snakes outstretched. Like he was trying to capture something.

He noticed that she was wearing the silver earrings he had bought her. She could keep them. He wouldn't ask her for them back.  Nor the red suede shoes or the orangish Kenyan woven handbag. Or the three hundred twenty-five he had "loaned" her. "This is a loan, not a gift," spouting mixed signals. He knew when he wrote that check that he wasn't going to see that money again. He never meant to see it. John only meant for Angela to be in his debt.

She stood up.

Vultures were on the roof. Patient.

Angela knew nothing stays fresh forever but must all flesh rot so quickly? Was this cancer or murder? 

She looked up and the jury was glumly filing in.

Wes had beat her twice. The first time he just knocked her down

and if they had not been living in Houston

and if she had not had a baby who was five months old

and if she had not been so young

and if she hadn't just made up her mind to make it work

and if her Honda didn't have thirty-seven more payments

and if Wes hadn't been tearfully pleading, his knees scraping the mauve, stain-resistant Dupont carpet on the floor of their three bedroom dream/nightmare house, his pale blue linen-shirted arms encircling her thighs, not caring about how he must have looked, singing an Al Green beg about how sorry he was

and we're going to make it

and I'll never ever hit you again,

and if her mother had not just gone back home after staying five weeks helping with the baby,

and if she were not up for a promotion at Xerox,

maybe she would have left then and there,

and thus, never would have gotten slapped a second time and ended up going off on his ass, pouring a whole pot of just cooked spaghetti down his back and grabbing a long, long kitchen knife when he started to move at her, remembering the way her jaw had hurt for five and a half days after he had knocked her down that first time and then promising herself, like a Jew viewing relics of the holocaust for the first time, "Never again. Never again."

She had told John this story. He knew not to hit her.

 

Look at her she thinks I'm going to hit her. John couldn't help his thought process; his Negro male ego, having successfully gnawed through the rope holding the door, was now fully uncaged and roaming the streets of John's emotions. A well chewed human dove's feathers warmly covered the bellicose, blood stained jowls of John's unfettered ego.

This was a strange ass woman.

This was an ordinary male.

Nothing prepared him for living with something he couldn't control. All his examples were wrong. He had never seen any of his peers treat a woman like their new car and really take care of her. From what all he knew about women John would bet the farm that if you didn't watch out they had a secret way to make a man cry, and what man wanted to cry?

 

"John, please leave."

"John, please leave."

"John, please leave."

If she didn't stop saying that he was going to have to punch her out.

"John, please leave."

 

Regardless of what John thought he was hearing, after saying it the first time, Angela had not said another word.

At a moment when it would have taken a whole lot of understanding or at least the image of some man John respected advising John on the manliness of admitting confused emotions and admitting to being lost on the relationships frontier, John pushed on confident as Custer that he could cope with whatever Angela had in mind. On the wide screen Eddie Murphy (whom John mistook for an experienced navigator/scout) was acting the fool, his manic guffaws misdirecting John. It made sense to John.

John had watched tv football.  He knew what was happening. A fatal loop of instant replay was stuck in John's head. Angela was standing over John's quarterback, pointing an outstretched finger into the poor boy's face. Actually she was standing astraddle him doing the Cabbage Patch over his prostrate body. How did that look on Monday night television, a sack on his fifteen, and she jumping up, standing one foot on each side of his hip, "take that motherfucker, take that motherfucker!"?

"On who?  On you!" that finger with the blood red fingernail kept saying.  About thirty-six million people was watching her knock him flat on his ass and then gloating with a long red finger in his face!

"John, please leave."

Where were his blockers?

"John, please leave."

Five minutes passed like that.

"John, please leave."

Although there was always another game, who wanted to lose like this?

Angela didn't want to repeat herself. Once was enough. What she really wanted was to disappear. She also wanted her little girl Harriet to grow up in another kind of country where she wouldn't be expected to be some man's woman. If there was such a country, Angela's daughter Harriet could be happy. She could have children if she wanted to. Could have a lover, if she found one she wanted, but she wouldn't have to be "his" woman. That's what she wanted.

John was leaning against the podium wondering what he was supposed to be doing. He didn't know how to talk his way out of this one. Worse than that, he didn't even know he was not trapped in something that he had to escape. The microphone was on, the tape recorders were documenting, the reporters had their pens ready to scribble down every word of the post-game, wrap up.

John was almost forty. He had seen a lot of shit. He had been with a lot of women -- well, without really counting closely, he had been with seven, uh eight women in some kind of serious, well, almost serious, well like he had lived with (more or less) four different women in the last seven years and almost got married twice. He was tired.

He was also unreconstructed. He didn't know how to disarm. How to divest of the need to own. John was afraid to let go and afraid to hold on to a woman's inquiry into his guts. John's EWAD (Early Warning Defensive Radar System) went bonkers -- Angela was set to launch fifty questions. His ego was asking him why did it have to go back in the cage. There was no logical answer.

And Angela, his sweet, sweet angel, had her own pack of troubles to tote, she couldn't help him with his. Besides she was no expert on safe cracking, there was no way for her to reach into his head or even if she could, how could she know his head was not what most needed reprogramming.

How does it happen that you can get to someplace but you can't go back to where you came from? How does it happen that you long for something you ain't never had? Something dim but very valuable was in the distance and they both were reaching for it, but it was far off, far off. Very far off.

John decided he was too tired to talk but really his problem was he couldn't read the script. All he knew was English, albeit at a first year college reading level, thank you; English, a language severly limited in conjunctions and in nouns denoting inner realities. John had fifty-seven ways to express anger and only two words that he knew of that seemed to fit this puzzle. He didn't even know sign language. He had his arms folded.

Angela was deeply hurt by John's refusal to unknot himself, but she was determined. She had journeyed to the crossroads at midnight many times before. Sometimes confused, perplexed and in a quandary, Angela had simply sat on her rump and stoically greeted the dawn. He never met her there; one usual lie was that you had to go to the crossroads alone, but if two was one then being together was alone, right? Sometimes, just marching on down the highway, she would catch a reflection of her moon-shadow on the roadside and realize how doofus she was being by courting the devil behind the particular simpleton in whose hands she was considering placing her life, and invariably on such occasions when even a little sliver of a moon would throw a sharply defined shadow sprawling across the gravel, invariably those would be the times when she knew that the particular man was not worth the particular effort, so even before getting to the crossroads she would back down and return home, would tell Alfred, or whatever his name happened to be in this particular incarnation, "This is not going to make it."

Angela had become strong enough to resist jumping in the water just because a swimming pool was conveniently near, clean and available. Once she had gone right, got married to Westley Richardson, II, Esquire. Blood turned out to be an excellent lawyer, the natural profession of liars. And once she had gone left and not married Julius James Johnson, the man all his friends and acquaintances affectionately called J.J., even though returning the rings and canceling everything damn near broke his heart, Angela knew that was better than going through with getting hooked up to a plow she was not prepared to pull. By then Angela had learned to listen to her stomach which invariably got upset at the way J.J. treated women, and Angela didn't take it personally because the fool was even hard on his mama which was a sign clearer than that storm God dropped on Noah that things wasn't going to work out. Yes Lord, Angela had been to the crossroads.

At the crossroads anything you did had its ups and downs but, based on the lessons life had smacked hard into her head, for sure it was better to walk than wait, "Let's just end this now before one of us hurts the other."

 

—Cut.

 

Of the three, predictably, Funk was the only one not hurting: Don't stop now. Keep the action going while it's flowing. (You know Funk is a midget and likes to drag everybody down to its level.)

Angela was so into the scene she didn't hear the director yell "cut." Even though there was this tremble in her voice, somehow, she was still holding her head up and keeping her face dry, even though a floodtide was raging just behind the brown damn of her determined-not-to-cry eyes.

Funk knew it would be a waste of tears if Angela didn't cry until after John booked up. Funk decided to take matters in hand and started whispering the name of every man who had ever fucked and left Angela. Wait a minute, Funk thought, that's a redundancy of the first order. Everybody Angela ever slept with was gone—well, of course, she had put a couple of them out, but they were gone, and hence, had left. It wouldn't be long now before she jumped to the grand conclusion that going to bed with a dude wasn't nothing but a prelude to the man leaving her. Funk liked the symmetry of that: getting laid was a prelude to getting left—how they said it? Wham, bam…

 

 

SCENE THREE.

 

(Do a slow-mo, three sixty shot.)

 

—Action.

 

John stood up. Turned slowly to walk out the room. And then, inexplicably paused. His back was to Angela. She wasn't looking. His voice stopped his feet from moving. He was shaken by what he heard himself uttering. He couldn't even look at her and say it. The words had thorns and ripped his lips as they poured out. Deep inside him he faintly heard something cursing at him. The mumble was the muffled indignation of his ego protesting confinement.

But there was also a warm light beckoning through the fog. John could hear its slow blinking, an E major seventh chord with a husky Ben Webster whisper, only John didn't consciously know Ben Webster's sound so he could only recognize it in his subconscious having stored it deep in his memory cells when he was a child and his parents were playing Duke Ellington's "In A Mellowtone" RCA album with the 1940 Ellington orchestra's rendition of "All Too Soon" or the 1942 "What Am I Here For," both of which featured Ben in all his majestic glory. Although John could not have called Ben Webster's name to save his life, Ben Webster's sound was the singular touchstone that kept John from making a total fool out of himself and walking out the door.

When John had first heard Ben Webster his mama and daddy were dancing in the front room and he was hanging over the side of a tub they had put him in to keep him from crawling around, and they were speaking some funny language that John did not remember sounding like the language he later learned to speak by mimicking them. That sound that was blinking like a beacon inside of him. He wanted to be his daddy dancing. He wanted Angela in his arms. He wanted to hear Ben Webster again. But he felt awful stupid. He had hugged a lot of women before. But none of the others made music in him and suddenly like a baby, all he wanted was what he wanted, nothing more, nothing less, don't give him no other arms, he wanted his mama, he wanted Angela to be his mama and he wanted to be his daddy.

But just like John didn't consciously know Ben Webster, he also didn't consciously know what he wanted. Which didn't make John feel better; actually, not knowing what he wanted made him feel worse. Meanwhile John's feet stayed rooted to the carpet. E major 7th. He could hear it but he couldn't think it. John didn't think his inability to leave was right, in fact he felt down right weak. If Angela had been hugging him at that moment and had had her head resting on his chest, she would have heard a faint grunt, an involuntary exclamation that acknowledged that at least John knew exactly what Stevie Wonder meant when he sang "There's something 'bout your love..." da-da-da something "...that makes me weak, and knocks me off (pause) my feet."  Even though Stevie was blind, Stevie had peeped this, so maybe, John having all his faculties of sight intact, just maybe, this was the right thing to do. Or something. Maybe being weak was right. John was barely passing his first lesson in submission to human love.

But Angela wasn't looking. When John had stood up, she thought that was it, blood was about to do the famous fifty yard dash right on out of the danger of relating to a female other than his mama.

Angela was deeply hurt by what she interpreted as John's refusal to speak in the mother tongue rather than growl in the colonial language. His silence handcuffed her, and him. She started to nickname him Cortez. Made love with his boots on. Saw her indigenous femininity as virgin territory to be mounted, surmounted, claimed and controlled, a phallic flag stuck into with its nuts waving in the wind. Thinking of love like a business: what he could gain, what he stood to lose. Angela was really tired, at that moment, so she didn't hear him stop, desert the armed forces, and of course she didn't hear that E major 7th, nor the Ben Webster buzz. But what she did hear, she didn't believe at first, even though she had been wanting to believe.

"Angela. I don't know what to do. I'm scared of you. But, I love you."

 

—Cut.

 

Funk was furious. What a revolting development this was. Funk was sure that shit wasn't in the script.

After checking the newly revised script, Funk was even further dismayed to find out that Funk was eliminated entirely from the last scene.

Don't tell me you're going to shoot some lame-ass, happily-ever-after bullcrap Hollywood ending. Naw, couldn't be. This stuff just doesn't happen in real life. Not to Negroes; and weren't we supposed to be keeping this one real?

Funk's bad breath was all up in Kalamu's face, but you know how  Big Mu can get when his mind is made up. Funk and Kalamu stood toe to toe for a minute, psychically parrying and thrusting retorts back and forth. Just looking at them, it didn't look like nothing was going on, but Kalamu was arguing with Funk the way authors do with their fictional characters, telling Funk, you don't like it you can just go head and write and direct your own story. But this is my project.

Funk, of course, shot back, naw, this ain't your story, this some bullshit trying to appeal to the women by putting men down cause a brother wasn't going to put up with somebody telling him it was wrong to feel the way he felt. Besides, Kalamu, you know good and well there ain't no happy endings for 99 out of a 100 Black couples.

Well, Funk, just call this: the one after ninety-nine. And with that Kalamu turned his back on Funk and called out: Make sure everybody has the revised script. The one with the Black ending.

Kalamu knew that no matter how consistently acquainted with sadness this society forced our people to be, love and laughter was what we intimately craved and would risk everything to achieve. Fourth and inches. The safe play was to punt. But without a second thought, they lined up with two wide receivers and everybody else blocking.

Funk reluctantly split behind the cameras, but staying nearby just in case one of them muffed it and Funk would be able to slip back in and put a real-ass ending on this bad boy.

 

 

 

SCENE FOUR.

 

—Is the crane ready for the overhead? This is the last scene, let's do it in one take. One smooth take. Tilt down as the crane goes up, zooming in as you rise. And Funk, back up, we're catching a bit of your shadow in the shot and we don't need that.

 

—Action.

 

Angela jumps up quickly but very quietly, she doesn't want to frighten him. Angela takes John's hand. Turns him around. He isn't crying. But his hand is shaking. She doesn't have to look in his eyes. She doesn't have to look period. Everything is bright, red bright, makes her close her eyes. She glances furtively at him before shutting her eyes.

John's eyes are open but he isn't observing anything outside of himself. During this brief moment, John's eyes are a double mirror: he is looking inward at himself (even though he appears to be standing with his eyes wide open staring straight ahead at the hanging ivy in the ceramic pot with the macramé tie that Angela had labored on during the four and three quarter month period the last time she wasn't "seeing" anybody) and at the same time, Angela catches her own reflection in the opaque blankness of John's stare.

Angela knows, with the unprovable certainty that those who believe in god possess, she just knows that at last, and also for the first time, somehow, John is deeply inspecting himself instead of questioning her motives when there is something he can't figure out. A pheasant, feathered the most dazzling green, flies across Angela's line of vision. She knows it has sprung from John's chest, free to fly the friendly skyways of her dream visions.

Angela instinctively starts chanting prayers of thanksgiving. Cognizant that she is near a threshold and wanting to remain on the path, Angela humbly and silently asks the creator for guidance. There is no sound and she thinks the silence is the answer.

"Don't do anything. Don't say anything. Just hold me."

After he held her, they talk for thirty-nine straight minutes. It is a start.

 

***

 

Today, it's one thousand, two hundred and forty-five days later. John and Angela are still together.

They laugh about this now.

 

—Cut! Ok, that's a wrap!

 

By then Funk, in a truly foul mood, had angrily put on his wrap-around shades and silently slithered off the set into the urban shadows.

 

###

—kalamu ya salaam

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

ALABAMA

 

1.

it is late in december 1998, the weather is uncharacteristically warm. there is much that is wrong. an old man has killed himself. 

 

if he had been an airplane and fell from the sky, the forensic engineers might have diagnosed: metal fatigue—the quality of structural breakdown when the weariness caused by the ravages of time destroy an object’s physical ability to bear the weight of existence. but this fellow was not a passenger jet. he was just a chestnut colored, elderly african american whom everyone said looked remarkably good for his age.

 

his eyesight was fit enough—without glasses he could drive day or night. and he would step two flights of steps rather than wait on a slow elevator. he was sensible about his diet and walked two miles every morning to keep his weight down. plus, any day of the week, he could out bowl his son. no, his age was not a problem.

 

so what was so disastrous in his life that the permanent solution of suicide was the action of choice to deal with whatever temporary problem he was confronting?

 

we are not sure what exactly was wrong, but we do know that when he resolved to end it, he was watching television. got up and said something to his wife, who was in the kitchen. shortly thereafter went into his back yard with a gun in his hand—no  one in the house saw him go outside. but what if they had? could they have stopped him? probably not. at best they may have been able to momentarily postpone the inevitable, but eventually life turns cold. or we are deluged with the dreariness of chilly rains. and we die.

 

what did the slow moving man think as he descended the steps into the back yard? indeed, did he think, or was his mind blank with certainty?

 

his body died there, but was he already dead in spirit? does it matter what happens to the body, once the spirit has been broken? this is a story about death.

 

2.

i have often thought about those stark black and white photographs of lynching scenes. we know what happened to the lynchee, but what happened to all the lynchers? the ones standing around. some smiling into an unhidden camera—look, you can see that these people know that a photograph is documenting them. a number of them are looking at the camera full on, challenging the lens to capture something human in the grisly scene. a significant number are children, young boys and girls, leering.

 

i have heard stories of whites who were repulsed by those death scenes. those who were changed forever by witnessing a lynching, hearing about a lynching, backing away from their parents come back home chatting about the nigger who got what he deserved. ok. but what i want to know is what happened to the lynchers who did not back away. those who took in the murder scene as acceptable. later on in life, how did they raise their children? do they have flashbacks of lynchings—occasionally? often? never?

 

does watching a man or woman die a violent death diminish the person who enjoys the spectacle? can one revel in the fascinating flame of a human on fire and afterwards remain emotionally balanced? and what about memory, does the extreme violence of mob murder involuntarily replay years later triggered by scenes such as oj maintaining he did not slice nicole’s throat or wesley snipes on the silver screen bigger than life kissing a white woman who favors irma singletary, your daughter’s friend who divorced a black man after he beat her one night and she refused to press charges against him the next morning?

 

in many of those garish photographs there are a lot of people standing around. i wonder how many among those audiences are alive today, driving america’s streets and buying christmas gifts?

 

3.

richard hammonds was a handsome man. he was moderately intelligent. could work hard but really didn’t like to exert his body to the point of sweating. believe it or not what he was really good at was leather work. give him a piece of leather and his tools and he could make anything from shoes to hats and everything in between. and he would do it well, so well that a number of people have been buried wearing shoes richard had made—their family knew how proud the deceased had been of richard’s handicraft, so that’s what the corpse wore at the funeral.

 

for example, brother james sweet—his name was actually james anthony johnson but, with a twinkle in his eye, he would raise his left hand, flashing his ruby and diamond pinkie ring, graciously tip his every present gray stetson, and, in his trademark rumbling baritone, request that you call him “james sweet, bra-thaaa jaaaames sweee-eat, cause i’m always good to womens, treats children with kindness and is a friend to the end with all my brothers”—well, brother sweet had instructed everyone of concern in his immediate family to bury him in his favorite, oxblood loafers that richard had hooked up especially for sweet. there were no shoes more comfortable anywhere in the world and he, sweets, which was the acceptable short form of brother sweet, certainly didn’t want to be stepping around heaven with anything uncomfortable on his bunioned feet (nor, likewise, running through hell, if it came to that—and he would wink to let you know that he didn’t think it would come to that). of course, at a funeral you don’t usually see the feet of the recently departed but that was not the point.

 

the point is that people were really pleased with richard hammonds’ handiwork. unfortunately, in terms of a stable income, although richard hammonds excelled at making leather goods, what he actually loved to do was watch and wager on the ponies. and since he lived in new orleans and the fair grounds racetrack was convenient, well, during racing season, which seemed to be almost year round, richard spent many an afternoon cheering on a two year-old filly while his workbench went unused.

 

fortunately, richard hammonds seldom wagered more than he could afford to lose and on occasion won much more than he had gambled for the month. however, winning at the racetrack was uncertain. no matter what betting system he used, richard could never accurately predict when he would win big or how long a loosing streak would maintain its grip on his wallet.

 

routinely, richard would do enough leather work to pay the house note and give eileen an allotment to buy food and then it was off to the races. needless to say, had eileen not worked as a seamstress at haspel’s factory in the seventh ward, this would have been an unworkable arrangement.

 

but richard hammonds didn’t drink more than a beer now and then, went to mass every sunday morning, and was moderately faithful, so what could have been a precarious and intemperate social situation settled into a predictable and manageable state of affairs until richard was wobbling home one october evening—he had had a very good day and had indulged in a few drinks at mule’s, in fact, he had even bought a round for the guys and stashed a small bundle in his hip pocket for eileen and still had in his inside jacket pocket enough money to pay for every bill he could think of.

 

when the police stopped richard his explanations of who he was, where he had come from, where he was going and how he came to have so much cash weren’t sufficient to please the two officers who were looking for a middle-aged colored man who had robbed and raped a woman over in mid-city.

 

we do not have to go into any details. the focus of this story is not on the beating, the injustice of his subsequent death, or even the condemning of the two police officers. remember we are concerned with death, and the question is: when, if ever, did richard know he was going to die and what was his reaction, or more precisely, what were his thoughts about that awful fact, if indeed he ever realized the imminence of his demise?

 

4.

everybody, sooner or later, thinks about dying. for many african americans there is even a morbid twist on this universal reflection on the inevitability of mortality. for us, it is not just a question of when we will die but also a more thorny question, a question we seldom would admit publicly but one that at some occasion or another consumes us in private: would i be better off dead? if you had been reared black in pre-sixties white america, sooner or later, you probably looked that thought in the eye?

 

however, the universality of death thoughts notwithstanding, there is a big difference between abstract speculation about the eventuality of death and the far more difficult task of confronting the stale breath of death as it fouls the air in front your nose. death is nothing to fuck with. indeed, actually facing certain death can make you shit on yourself, particularly if death not only surprises you but also perversely gives you a moment to think about crossing the great divide. like when a lover in the throes of getting it on, sincerity announces through clenched teeth that they are about to come, you respond as any sensible person would by doing harder, or faster, or stronger, or more tenderly, more intensely, more whatever, you increase the pressure and help usher that moment, well, when it’s death coming what do we do, do we rush to it, or do we withdraw from it? don’t answer too soon. think of all the people you have heard of who died as a result of being some place they really shouldn’t have been, being involved in some situation they should never have encountered, at the hands of someone whom they should never have been near. think about how often we die other than a natural death—and then again, what death is not natural, because isn’t it part of human nature to die, and to kill?

 

richard never expected to die on that day, especially since he had just experienced the good fortune of a twenty-to-one long shot paying up on a fifty dollar bet. even when the tandem took turns trying to beat a confession out of him, even after his jaw was broken and he could only moan and shake his head, even then richard still didn’t think of death. he was too busy dealing with pain. when they put the gun in his mouth, he perversely thought, “go head, pull the trigger, that would be better than getting beat like this,” but even then, richard didn’t really expect to die. he just wanted the beating to be over and if it took death to end it, well, he was feeling so bad he thought that death might be preferable. yet, richard didn’t really think he was going to die. in fact, as is the case with so many of us, richard died before he realized they were going to kill him.

 

we blacks wonder about fate and destiny, justice and karma. sometimes there seems that there is no god, or rather if there is a god then he is capricious with a macabre sense of humor—we grant him humor because to think of god without humor would be to concede that we are at the mercy of a monster who enjoys literally tormenting us to death.

 

which brings up another question, would we procreate if it were not so pleasurable? if sex didn’t feel good, would we bother with conceiving children? for many of us the answer is obvious; of course, we wouldn’t. that’s why birth control was created—to protect us from disease and children, to make it possible for us to enjoy the pleasure of sexual procreation with none of the responsibilities of child rearing. which means that the drive to have children may in fact not be as strong as we have been led to believe, or maybe, it’s simply that in modern times we have been conditioned to think only of ourselves—the personal pleasures. but the question i really want to raise is this: what if death were pleasurable would we end ourselves? what if it felt really good to die—not just calming but totally pleasurable?

 

of course, richard was not thinking any of these sorts of questions as the two officers smashed in richard’s face. formal philosophy is a task engaged in by those for whom survival is not a pressing issue.

 

5.

every age, every people, every society has an ethos—a defining spirit. and this spirit expresses itself in sometimes odd and fascinating ways. for much of the 20th century the ethos of african americans was one of contemplating the future with a certain optimism. why else march through the streets of birmingham, alabama and sing “we shall overcome” to bull connor, a man who was not known for any appreciation of music?

 

the birmingham of bull connor was just about half a century ago. during that period when bombs regularly sounded throughout birmingham and the deep south, if you go back and look at the pictures of black people of that era when they posed for a portrait, especially if they were college educated, you will invariable spy among the men what i call the classic negro pose of hand to chin in contemplation. a variation is one temple of a  pair of glasses held close to or between the lips; then there is the pipe firmly grasped, not to mention the college diploma held to the side of the head like a sweetheart—these are iconic images of optimistic negroes, images that capture the ethos of their era.

 

today, the hand has moved from the chin. we no longer pose in contemplative ways, what is cropping up more and more is the hand to the crown of the head, not in a woe is me posture, but more like: damn, this is some deep shit we’re in.

 

unconsciously, during a recent photo shoot, i ended up in that pose. when the picture was published i was mildly surprised, i did not remember adopting that look of serious concern. but just because i don’t remember it does not mean that it didn’t happen. clearly it happened. there is my unsmiling portrait. and i see that pose more and more, particularly when i look at the publicity shots of writers. we are children of production—we are shaped and influenced, even when unconscious of it, by the prevailing ethos. a lot of us look like we are gravely weighing the upsides and downsides of both life and death.

 

and when people tell you how much they like that photo, then that tells you just how much the photo reflects our current contemplation of death. in those photographs rarely are we smiling. our eyes are wide open. we are not dreamy eyed romantics. we are not lost in meditation. we are looking at death. the disintegration of our communities, the fissure of our social structures, the absence of lasting interpersonal relationships, the proliferation of age and gender alienation. the death of a people.

 

and when i took my photo it was supposed to be a happy occasion. but obviously the myth of the happy negro is long gone.

 

6.

i wonder when the old man put the gun to his head did he hold his head with his free hand?

 

7.

richard couldn’t put his hands to his head because his hands were handcuffed behind him.

 

8.

which story seems more plausible: the old man or richard? is it not odd that by piling up details and framing the story in a believable context it is relatively easy to believe that richard hammonds actually died as a result of a police beating and shooting in the late fifties in new orleans? and that the old man seems to be a metaphor. but an old man (whose name i don’t want to reveal because it would add nothing to our story) actually killed himself during the christmas holidays (of course i speculate and fictionalize a lot of the old man’s story, but the suicide actually happened) and the story of richard hammonds is totally fictitious except for the cops who killed him—cops did kill negroes in new orleans.

 

9.

the old man and richard hammonds had gone to high school together, and gone to bars together, making merry, drinking and acting mindlessly stupid on a couple of occasions. they had double dated a couple of times, and had once even engaged in sex with the same woman (at different times, months apart, but the same woman nonetheless—she remembers the old man as the better lover because he was more tender, seemed more sincere.

 

(there had been this untalked about but often expressed rivalry between richard and the old man. close friends are often bound by both love and jealousy, so there was nothing unusual about them being attracted to the same woman. but remember richard was the handsome one. he was also glib, perhaps because he learned how to hold back his feelings. he could talk a woman into bed, or more likely the back of a studebaker—richard’s father worked as a pullman porter and made nice money for a colored man and had bought a car but was often not in town to enjoy the car and richard, though he didn’t personally have much money, did have access to the car. anyway, richard never thought about what the women he bedded in the back seat thought about before, during or after he bedded them. after all it was just a moment’s pleasure.

 

(but the old man, well, he was a young man then, he thought about how other’s felt about him a lot, and though he fucked mildred, it was not because she was available but because he was really, really moved by mildred and told her so. told her, “girl you moves me.”

 

(“i do?” she was used to men wanting to sex her, but not to men admitting that they were deeply affected by her.

 

(“yes, you does,” and he twirled her at that moment—they were dancing and he was whispering in her ear, dancing in a little new orleans nite club, to a song on the juke box—he twirled her. and smiled. and she had never been twirled quite like this gracefully dancing young man twirled her. and when she reversed the twirl and spun back into his arms, he momentarily paused and said, “i wish i could dance with you all night.”)

 

the old man had not been angling to get her in bed, he was just genuinely enjoying her company. he liked to dance. she liked to dance. they were having a good time. and when somehow they ended up making love on the sofa in her front room that night while her sister and her sister’s children soundly (he hoped) slept two rooms away, he had been a little nervous at first.

 

her softness felt so good, before he knew it, a little cry caught in his throat. he was trying to be quiet, but goodness and quiet sometimes do not go together. i mean, you know how good it hurts to hold it in? well the possibility that the sound of your love making will disturb and awaken others nearby, that anxiety about discovery adds to the covert enjoyment. so, instead of surfacing upward through his throat, the cry was redirected down into his chest, but it bounced back and was about to pop audibly out of his mouth. mildred felt that sound about to pour forth like a coo-coo clock gone haywire, and with the mischief that only a woman can summon she cupped one hand tightly over his mouth and with her other hand reached down and gently squeezed his testicles.

 

ya boy liked to died. he shuddered. he couldn’t breath. her hand tightly covered his mouth and partially blocked his nose. and he was coming like mad. and he moaned a stifled moan, air yo-yoing back in forth between the back of his mouth atop his throat and the near bursting constriction of his chest. finally, he wheezed gusts of exhales out of his distended nostrils, which flared like those of a race horse heaving after a superfast lap. and then he cried out and tried to call back the sound all at the same time. and that was followed with another terrible quake. in a semi-conscious state, he lay helpless, wrapped up in the murmured laughter of mildred’s playful passion.

 

but he didn’t hear her soft, soft laughter. he didn’t hear anything. he was totally out of it. he was struggling to catch his breath, in fact had almost slipped off the large couch—if her legs had not clamped around him so firmly, he would have tumbled to the floor. after that he didn’t distinctly remember anything until he woke up the next morning, at home, in his own bed and didn’t know how he got there. he must have walked home or something, but all he could remember was her softness, her touch, his lengthy orgasm (he had never come that long before), and the way her legs held him when he almost fell over. you can easily forget a short walk home, but there are some experiences that are so sharply etched in the memory of your flesh, those encounters you never forget.

 

a couple of days later when richard asked the old man about mildred, whether they had done it, the old man had said, “no, we just had a good time dancing and i took her home. then i went home.” richard had replied, “you should have got it, she likes you. i got her drunk and got it once but she never would let me get no mo. but she likes you. you should get it.” the old man had said nothing further, merely looked away, certain that richard would not understand that what the old man felt for mildred, although initiated by the sharpness of their sexual encounter, was, nonetheless, a feeling deeper than a good fuck.

 

many years later, when the old man was watching the house of representatives vote to impeach bill clinton for lying to the american people about the monica lewinsky affair, something terrible took hold of him. although he continued to see mildred for over twenty years and even had a kid with her, the old man had never told his wife. and he felt intensely guilty. intensely.

 

he felt horrible. felt like he had felt at richard’s funeral. sitting in the catholic church before a closed casket. the body had been too brutalized to have a public viewing. the police had shot his good friend richard, shot him in the head.

 

while he sat between his wife and two daughters on one side and his young son on the other side, the old man was thinking about his dead friend when he looked up and saw mildred looking over at him with those large, limpid, brown eyes. nearly every time he stole a glance her way, she seemed to be looking directly at him. he could not read her eyes.

 

but his friend richard was dead. and his wife and legitimate children were at his side and his woman was across the isle staring at him, and the old man felt really guilty about how he was living his life, and he put his head in his hands and just wanted to ball up and die. and he didn’t realize he was crying until his wife daubed his face with her handkerchief.

 

10.

a murder is a crime against society. we look at pictures of murderers and wonder about them. wonder what led them to do it. wonder do they have feelings like the rest of us.

 

what motivates one human to lynch another?

 

in the case of a suicide, everyone who survives wonders not only what led to the murder but also, particularly for those who were close to the victim, we wonder what could we have done, what “should” we have done to prevent the murder.

 

murder is a crime condemning society and suicide is particularly damning of those who were close to the murderer (who is also the murderee). if you think about someone close to you committing suicide, you have to ask yourself, what did i fail to do that would have prevented that person from committing self-murder? while sometimes we ask that question of a mass murderer—what could have been done to prevent them from acting the way they did—we always ask that question of a suicide. and why? if we can not stop people from committing large and impersonal murders, how can we hope to stop small murders, the most personal of murders: the suicide? the question is perplexing.

 

after awhile though, you come to an awful realization: maybe it is impossible to stop people from killing each other and themselves. indeed, is it not a certainty that it is impossible to stop suicide?

 

11.

if you are shot in the head with a large handgun it can be messy.

 

12.

if you shoot yourself in the head with a large handgun it can be messy.

 

13.

the old man’s casket was sealed before the funeral mass just like richard’s had been. a closed casket is a terrible death for it is a death which suggests that this death is much more worse than ordinary death. this is a death you can not look in the face. and what can be more horrible than imagining how horrible death looks when the corpse is too horrible to look at?

 

14.

mildred was at the old man’s funeral. so was their son who favored his mother but had his father’s skin color. mildred had not talked with the old man in over two months, and then it was only briefly over the phone. he had said something about being sorry he had never been brave enough to marry her. and hung up. mildred had waited in vain for him to call back. as anxious as she had been, she had never once broken their agreement. she knew where he lived, knew his phone number, but she never called. never. and now he was dead, gone. life is so cruel, especially when much of your life is lived cloistered in a box of arrangements shut off from what passes for normal life. to everyone mildred looked like the statistic of single mother with one child: a son, father unknown. but what she felt like was a widow, a widow whom had never been married but a true widow nevertheless, her de facto husband’s corpse sequestered in a closed box, not unlike her whole life, lived unrecognized outside of sight. issac (mildred and the old man’s son) used to ask who his father was, but he stopped asking after weathering junior high school taunts. and once he was married and had children of his own, he understood that what was important was not who his father had been but what kind of father he would be for his children. when his mother called and asked him to accompany her to the old man’s funeral, issac at last knew the answer without ever having to rephrase the question. mildred and issace both remained dry-eyed throughout the service even though inside both of them were crying like crazy.

 

you can not gauge the depths simply by looking at the surface. printed on the program was a smiling snapshot of the old man. next to the closed casket there was an enlargement of this same posed photograph. but what picture of the old man was in various people’s mind?

 

moreover, what does a self murderer look like whose death has left the corpse too gruesome to witness? certainly not like the smiling headshot on the easel surrounded by flowers.

 

was the look in the old man’s eye as he pulled the trigger anything like that wild look in the eyes of white people staring at a lynched negro—of course not? but what did he look like looking at his own death?

 

15.

have you ever seen a picture of the man who was convicted of bombing the baptist church in birmingham, alabama and killing those four little girls? he looks like a white man. and once you get beyond the racial aspect of the murderer, he looks like a man. and once you get beyond the gender aspect of the murderer—a grown man killing four little girls—well, then, he looks like a human being. murderers are human beings. they look like what they are. it is a conceit to think that murderers look different from “ordinary” human beings. what does a killer look like? look at the nearest human being.

 

16.

while i admit i have not seen a lot of pictures of white people—and then again i have undoubtedly seen more pictures of white people than of black people when you consider how the image of whiteness surrounds us and bombards us in school, in commerce, in television, in entertainment, in advertisements, everywhere—but anyway, i don’t remember seeing many white persons in the classic negro pose of yore nor in the contemporary iconic hand to the crown of the head pose.

 

in examining the photos of lynchings i see none of the concern for the future that the hand to the head would indicate. that hand to the head indicates that a person has a heart. that a person is feeling life, and though the life that is felt may not be pleasant, at least we are still feeling.

 

but when you watch and listen to and smell a person dying, and when you cut off your feelings for the fate of another human being, well...—and you know it is not biological. have you read about the civil wars in africa typified by the hutu vs. tutsi conflict? how literally thousands of people are hacked to death. it is one thing to fire a gun or drop a bomb, it is another thing to whack, whack, whack with a machete slaughtering a human being as though assailing a dangerous beast or a tree that was in the way of progress. when any of us, be we white, black, or whatever, when we severe our feelings to the point that not only do we methodically and unfeelingly commit acts of mass murder or acts of ritual murder, when we can watch murder and not feel revulsion then obviously we have moved to the point that death gives us pleasure.

 

when i first raised the issue about death and pleasure you may have thought, “oh, how absurd.” but the next time you are chomping your popcorn and sipping your artificially flavored sugar water while watching thrilling scenes of mayhem, murder and mass destruction on the silver screen (perhaps i should add that you have paid for the privilege of this pleasure), but the next time the bodies fly through the air, the bullets rip apart a young man in slow mo, the very next time you watch an image of death and get pleasure from it, see if you can remember to say “oh, how absurd.”

 

i think you won’t be able to, any more than at the moment of orgasm you would holler “oh, how absurd.” for you see pleasure in and of itself is never absurd, perverse perhaps, but never absurd. and taking pleasure in someone else’s death: oh, how... what? how do we describe that pleasure? what is human about enjoying death? or perhaps, since deriving pleasure from someone else’s demise seems to be a norm today, maybe i should ask, what is inhuman about enjoying death?

 

there is much that is wrong.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

The End of the World, As We Know It

 

"Little Zutie asked me, what is god?"

 

"And you said?"

 

"I don't know."

 

"Zutie, please, I'm sure you know what you said."

 

"That's what I said: I don't know." Big Zutie's eyes twinkled as she raised a wrinkled digit to the crown of her hairless head. "Little Zutie piped back at me, you an elder Ank, you know the answer. Then I said, I told you the answer to your question."

 

Big Zutie dropped to the floor. I brought her a bowl of gumba. Zutie thumped her foot in an excited 6/8 rhythm. "Oohh weee, you killing me."

 

"Good.  Die happy," I laughed as she finished the bowl in two quick gulps. I grabbed the empty ceramic container and glided back to the stove, refilled it halfway, and then returned to where Big Zutie was lying on her side and humming to himself. I knelt before her. As I offered her the bowl she shook her head and pulled at my penduta. "Wait, tell me about Little Zutie," I asked. There must have been a reason Zutie even brought this up. She doesn't usually make small talk with me.

 

"What is there to tell? I told Little Zutie, whenever someone says 'god,' all they're saying is, 'I don't know'. God is the mystery of life. Whatever we don't know, that becomes god." While Big Zutie is talking she is rubbing me and my penduta firms up beneath her touch.

 

"Look how pretty and long it is."

 

She embarrasses me whenever she talks like that even though it is true that my penduta is longer than average. Zutie always said she picked me because of that, "You know, the thicker the penduta, the sweeter the nectar." I turned my head away. My penduta was sensitive now. I moaned.

 

"Come  here, I want a mouthful."

 

I tried ignoring Zutie. Most Ank's would slap you silly if you ignored them, but Zutie and I were different. I pushed her hand away with my left hand as I picked up the bowl in my right hand and slowly sipped from it.

 

I felt Zutie listening to me as I noisily smacked my lips. I started to move to place the bowl in the corner but Zutie pulled me by my left arm and tightly grasped my penduta in the pudgy softness of her left hand. Sometimes, when their cycle comes around, I think Anks would rather nurse than eat.

 

Zutie and I have been together almost a whole rotation, and despite my age I was beginning to feel a certain tenderness for Zutie, and I know that's crazy. Separating love from need is very difficult. When you don't need someone and then you love them, then it's easy to know that what you're feeling is genuine and not just survival masking itself as some self-deluding emotion…

 

"Deimos, you think I don't know that you are afraid to die."

 

"Death is nothing." My back stiffened as I stood up while backing away from where Zutie lay on the floor. Anks always think we penda are obsessed with dying. Even Zutie, who is so open in how she thinks, even she does not understand—but how can she? She is a womb. She lives to suck nectar and to give birth, and I survive by supplying nectar and by working hard.

 

As I turned to remove the bowl, I tried to sound nonchalant in contradicting Zutie. "No, Zutie, I do not fear death. I fear living without love." There I had said it, admitted it.

 

"Death is real. Love is nothing," Zutie spat the words out like fruit pits. When I returned Zutie was standing, reared up to her full height. Zutie fixed a withering stare on me. "Love… ask me… look at me!" Zutie sternly commanded, her voice dropping to a hiss. I kept my head slightly bowed as I looked up at her. "You are a penda, I am an Ank, and love has nothing to do with any of it. Nothing."

 

I was trembling, now. Both brave and afraid. "Some times, Zutie…"

 

"Some times what?"

 

"Some times love makes life livable and death bearable."

 

"Oh, what a load of crap." Zutie slapped me so quickly I did not see it coming. The blow staggered me. I would have fallen but she caught me and steadied me. My head was ringing. Her breath was rancid on my face as she embraced me.

 

Blood rushed to my fingers. I hid my pulsing hands behind my back. But Zutie heard. She hears everything. Zutie grabbed one of my hands.

 

"Your pulse is screaming. You are really upset. I understand that." There was a long silence. "Deimos what am I to do with you?" I said nothing.

 

Zutie dropped my hand. "I like the taste of you. We both know I could have as many other penda as I want. I have had many penda in my long life. So many, I have forgotten…" Zutie turned from me and spoke with her back turned. "Do you think the fact that I happen to really like the taste of you is love? That I keep you safe, is that love? That I talk with you?"

 

There was an awkward moment of stillness. Waving her hand just above her shoulder although not turning to face me, Zutie beckoned for me to come near her. I stood so close to her, the hairs on her back swayed in time to my exhales.

 

 "What I love…" Zutie turned, stared at me briefly, patted my penduta and chortled a short, cynical laugh, "…is the taste of your sweet nectar." Then she lay down on her side, leaning against the wall.

 

A tear formed in my eye. Was providing nectar all I meant to Zutie?

 

"Stop being so sentimental. Old as I am, you may even outlive me. Now that Little Zutie is matured, and…" Zutie quickly turned melancholy. Neither of us said anything for a minute as we both knew that the rise of Little Zutie, who was both Big Zutie's offspring and her successor, meant that death was near for Zutie whose body could produce no more Anks and that death was also near for me simply because time was catching up with me. Besides, I was sure that Little Zutie had her choice of penda in mind.

 

Though they both said my nectar was still the sweetest, I felt like the well was almost dry. My reverie was broken by Zutie’s hoarse but subdued revelation.

 

"Deimos, my transition date has been set." Zutie gathered up the bulk of herself and slowly sat up. "It will be soon. Sooner than you know…"

 

Zutie pulled me close to her. I didn't resist her touch, but inside I stiffened. I felt depressed, overcome by a sudden weight of guilt for not taking better care of her in her last days. I wondered how long she had known her time.

 

"Deimos, stop crying. We all die, eventually. The world will go on." I didn't know I was crying. Zutie pulled me close and licked the tears on my face. "Mmmm…"

 

Her hand was on my penduta again. Stroking. It hurt so much the last time. They say when the pain gets to be almost unbearable is when it happens.

 

I have known this conversation was coming and had tried to prepare myself, but obviously I had failed because I couldn't stop crying. And the more I cried, the more Zutie's tongue lapped at my tears. Then she pushed me flat on my back and moved her mouth onto my penduta. It felt good, but I knew the pain was coming. It felt really good. Really. And then her hands were on my nipples. Pinching. Hard. The pleasure was almost too much.

 

Suddenly she stopped sucking… I opened my eyes. Someone else was here. It was Little Zutie. Little? She was almost the equal of Big Zutie's massive weight. I didn't like Little Zutie. She never talked to me other than to give me instructions. I turned away from the sight of Little Zutie lumbering towards us and found myself looking at the cool stare of Big Zutie who drew back a bit and continued earnestly stroking my penduta with one hand while leaning on her side and staring blankly at me. Little Zutie started making that wheezing sound of anticipation that was normal for her when she was about to eat. I didn't want to, but Zutie's touch was arousing.

 

Emitting deep grunts of satisfaction, Big Zutie roused herself, rolled slowly beside me, bent over and resolutely started kissing my face and sucking my teardrops, which I was vainly trying to staunch now that I understood that Big Zutie was preparing me for Little Zutie to drink my nectar. There were so many other penda available. Zutie could have gotten one just for Little Zutie.

 

"Stop thinking so much, your thoughts will sour your nectar." Zutie pinched my nipples again and then moved aside as Little Zutie scooted over to us. Little Zutie took my penduta into her mouth. This was my first time nursing Little Zutie.

 

Even though I able to will myself to stop crying, Zutie's rough tongue kept lapping around the edges of my eyes. Meanwhile I tried to hold back, tried to stem my arousal by concentrating on the pungency of Big Zutie's breath, but I could not help myself. I moaned as I felt the nectar stirring in my penduta, ready to geyser forth. And at the same time there was a stinging pain building in my groin. I moaned louder.

 

"Suck harder," Zutie instructed and Little Zutie complied. My toes clinched as I screamed. The pain grew so quickly. I started thrashing. Zutie pressed down with her full weight to hold me still. The pain was so great my eyes hurt. Zutie clamped down on my face, my screams muffled by her body. I tried to buck, to turn my head to breath, but my nectar was about to erupt.

 

"Now."

 

Little Zutie stuck a finger into my rectum. Spasms shot through my body and two long streams of nectar erupted. Little Zutie sucked harder after each spurt.

 

I must have blanked out for a few seconds. My penduta was soft. Little Zutie had rolled over onto her back, her tongue lolling out of her open mouth. Big Zutie was down between my legs. She gently squeezed my gonads and took a soft suck on my penduta. Pain shot through me, but I was too weak to do anything but utter a feeble yelp.

 

"There is always a little bit left in there after they erupt." Zutie smacked her lips. I guess she was talking to Little Zutie, instructing her on the art of sucking nectar. "And it's all good, so don't let any of it go to waste." When Zutie finished, I crawled into her waiting embrace and fell fast asleep.

 

***

 

"I knew of only two penda who lived to be older than thirty, and both of them never nursed," Phobos said to me as we walked back to the shelters. The atmosphere was wonderfully chilly for this time of rotation.

 

"How did they manage that?"

 

"They were the ones who discovered Eroz rocks."

 

"Eroz rocks?"

 

"Yeah, you know Eroz, the planet."

 

"I don't get it. Eroz rocks, so what?"

 

Before Phobos could answer, we heard the tinkling of bells. An Ank transition procession was coming. Phobos and I stepped aside and bowed to the Ank who was being carried by four penda, each of whom was much younger than us. They were headed down the mountain to Dry Lake. You didn't usually see Anks on the surface unless they were like that group, headed for the last go round. It must be hard knowing for a long time before it happens exactly when you are going to be carried away. Much harder than just dying in an orgasm like we do.

 

"They say it's painless," Phobos whispered when the palanquin rounded a bend in the road and was gone from sight.

 

"Yes, I’ve heard that too."

 

Almost as though he read my thoughts, Phobos added, "I heard that when a penda participates in an Ank transition, they give you this medication that dulls all the pain. You erupt and then you die but you don't feel anything."

 

I tried not to dwell on those morbid thoughts, but before I knew it, I was adding my own concerns to the mental image I had of dying, adrift on the floating pyre of a burning raft. I had never seen the ceremony, but we all knew about the disposal of Ank's too old to breed… like Zutie. "Zutie's time is almost here. She has not told me when, but from the way she is acting, I think it is soon."

 

Phobos looked at me with the longing of one moon for another. I tried to smile to reassure Phobos, "But it's ok. Zutie says she is going to get four new penda for her transition."

 

I didn't tell Phobos how much I disliked Little Zutie, nor did I mention anything about how much pain I had felt when I nursed Little Zutie because I knew it would make Phobos sad to know that my time was also near. But then, Phobos had to know. Just like I knew that his time was near. We were penda born of the same Ank.

 

Phobos put his arm around my shoulder. I looked at him. He briefly touched his forehead to my forehead. "Soon this old life will…"

 

I put a finger to Phobos' lips to silence him. I loved him so much.

 

As far back as anyone could remember, we penda had short life spans and did all the hard work. Although the pain of nursing eventually killed you, at least life was both easier and longer if you serviced an Ank than if you worked the interior. But only a few of us were lucky enough to be chosen by an Ank.

 

There was no way to know what attracted an Ank to a penda except seemed like all Ank's were crazy about nectar, and who could know why one pend's nectar tasted sweeter than another? Maybe it was chromosome 13. Who knew?

 

I adjusted the straps of my water sack, hoisting the load a little higher. "Come, let's get back before night light." One moon was already barely visible, and the second was not far behind.

 

Phobos leaned in to touch foreheads again but I drew back, afraid that we would not be able to control ourselves. Phobos responded with a tight embrace. I closed my eyes but tears still squeezed out. My pulse raced against my will. Phobos began drinking my tears, greedily licking up and down each cheek beneath my eyes. As soon as he swallowed his knees buckled.

 

"No, not here." I tried to hold him up, but I was not strong enough and he sat down clumsily, pulling me down with him. "No." I stared at him. But he ignored me and his face became wet with tears. I could not resist him any longer. I leaned into him, kissing every wet spot I could find on his face.

 

We both knew the potency of our tears. We both knew how weak we would be and that we would be knocked out and might not awaken in time enough to get back to the shelters before night light.

 

I don't know how long I was blissed out, but the next thing I knew Phobus was pulling me up. For a short while I did not know where I was, and then I remembered. Phobus just smiled at me and then started humming. I forced myself to get up but I really felt like sleeping.

 

I looked up into the emerald sky. We still had time. Phobus handed me my pouch, which I didn't remember removing, and then he turned back onto the path. I pushed my arms through the straps and caught up with Phobus.

 

Although we walked hand in hand, we were both loss in our own thoughts. I glanced over at him. He looked straight ahead, almost as if I were not beside him. We hiked in silence, except for the barely audible sound of our breathing and the distinct swoosh of our footfalls on the ochre-colored, dusty slope.

 

Finally, I remembered to ask him about the Eroz rocks.

 

"Oh, it's this theory that life started on Eroz and came here through the rocks."

 

"That's religious."

 

"No, no. There is this zone that supports life as we know it…"

 

"What do you mean, as we know it?"

 

"The theory is life didn't start here. The bang force of the universe zoomed the nine planets away from the sun and there is a certain distance from the sun that supports life, and Eroz passed through the zone before us and now it's our turn and next…"

 

"Next will be Gaia, the third one from the sun."

 

"Yes, and life goes from planet to planet carried by rocks."

 

"So, you believe that life exists on Eroz?"

 

"Existed—long, long ago, but we're it now. And, of course, every manifestation is different. There is no way for us to know what life was like on Eroz or even to guess what form it will be on Gaia."

 

There was a distinct note of pride in Phobus' voice as he shared his deepest musings with me. As attractive as he was, he could have made it on looks alone without thinking one original thought, but rather than his body, it was his beautiful brain that he was most proud of. His intelligence was breathtaking.

 

"You know so much…" I intoned admiringly and he responded to my complement by squeezing my hand a little. My voice stumbled slowly over the syllables as I offered up my self-depreciating assessment, "…and I know so little." I looked down as I talked. The dust felt cool on the soles of my bare feet as we walked. When I took a quick, shy peep at Phobus I was startled by the concerned look on his face. I tried to joke away my embarrassment by referring to my other attractive asset, "I guess I just have sexy tears."

 

Phobus stopped and yanked me around with a tender tug. "I told you many, many times, I love…"

 

"I love your spirit," I finished his oft-repeated declaration. He grinned. But I fell into the funk that only the homely and the ordinary know. If anyone likes us, it is always for our intangibles. But the truth was I wanted to be beautiful, I wanted more than a big penduta, I wanted a body like Phobos', I wanted to be able to think like Phobos. Who doesn't…

 

"Deimos, the Anks got you believing that tears and nectar are all you are good for, but the way life is is not the way life has to be. That's why knowing about Eroz rocks is important. Eroz rocks prove that the world can be different than it is."

 

Phobus' sincerity was energizing. I smiled despite the feeling of futility gnawing at what little confidence was inside me. I diverted my gaze to the road ahead. When I peeked back out of the edges of my peripheral vision, Phobus was steady smiling at me. I held my head up and after a few more steps, Phobus continued, "They say there are at least ten Eroz rocks in one of the secret Ank chambers."

 

"Yes, but a rock is not life."

 

"Aha, but that is what Nef and Amo discovered. Inside the rocks are spoors that are the seeds of life."

 

"Seeds of life, that is what some Anks called our nectar."

 

Phobus looked over at me and smiled sadly, "Yes, except rocks don't have feelings."

 

***

 

"Zutie, have you heard of Eroz rocks?"

 

She looked at me over the rim of her bowl of gumba. Licked her lips, took a long sip which emptied the bowl and then lay supine placing the bowl beside her, "Yes. They exist."

 

Zutie said nothing else and simply stared at me as if to say, Deimos, where did you get this knowledge. I looked away. Who was I to question an Ank?

 

"To me, Eroz rocks prove god exists."

 

"What did you say?"

 

I could not bring myself to look at Zutie as I repeated my words.

 

"Deimos, there are two big challenges in life: one is to be satisfied with the life you are given and the other is to always reach for more." The vein that ran back down the middle of her head bulged as she stared at me. I waited dutifully for her to explain but, instead, Zutie intentionally changed the subject. "The gumba was excellent."

 

"Cave water instead of synthetic wet. Makes a big difference." I picked up the bowl and gestured to ask did she want more. Zutie shook her head no.

 

"I'll take a little more," Little Zutie said.

 

I moved to get her bowl but Big Zutie stopped me with her voice, "No, Deimos. I want you to eat the rest. Little Zutie and I are full enough. Besides gumba makes the nectar sweeter."

 

I said nothing but my head was spinning. I was getting too old to keep on giving nectar. Nursing was going to be the death of me. Would there ever be a time when penda were more than simply a source of something sweet to suck? Maybe in the next world…

                                                                                                                                                                                                           

—kalamu ya salaam