So Much the Same: no justice and no peace

My grandfather died last week. 

He lived as colored and negro before he was ever granted black or African American. A world war two veteran, he risked his life for America only to return to its abuses. Somehow he survived. Somehow he thrived. Sent his three children to college, traveled the world, lived just two months shy of 100 years.

I find that last bit the most remarkable. 

Ninety-nine years in America is a long time for a black man. Hell, 12 is a ripe old age for a black man in America, I say with every ounce of irony I can conjure.

Years ago I had a conversation about the ills of racism in America with PaPa. He was adamant that I focus on how far we have come. He pointed out that the descriptors on my birth certificate mark some level of change, of progress.“Does that mean we should stop?” I asked him.  “If no one is flinging ‘nigger’ at me does that mean I should be satisfied?”

He stopped for a moment. Looked at me and then shook his head. No. No we shouldn’t stop. 

For some reason my grandfather, my PaPa, is running through my head as I am waiting for BART to arrive, coming to the end of an 8-day trip book-ended by my PaPa’s funeral in Houston on one end and a conference in Philadelphia on the other.

My thoughts are heavy. It could be exhaustion or maybe reflecting on my grandfather’s journey through life provides the perfect canvas to paint all my grief all my loss, both personal and social.

Us gunned down in the street by agents of the state requires deliberation and evidence before the loss of life can be deemed tragic or unjustified by the American masses. Video isn’t enough, we need sound. We are guilty until proven innocent…guilty of what I am unsure.

I hopped online when my plane landed and Twitter, awash in RIP hashtags and outrage and mourning, brought me to tears. Just like that. Visions of every black and brown person I’ve ever loved swim before me because our lives are clearly viewed as disposable.

Maybe its our melanin. Maybe it is the visible proof of the enslavement written epigenetically in all of our progeny. Yeah, maybe we are a reminder of America's original sins of genocide and torture and it just can’t bare it, just won’t. America has to wash us out Lady Macbeth style- damn spots that we are.

I thought I was out of tears for all of this. Cried out when Zimmerman was released into the wild like some poisonous gas. But there have been so many…so many more. So many that the names begin to jumble and the timeline is a mess in my head because we are daily targets and nothing, not body cameras or being a child or respectability politics that demand we comply with raised hands, saves us. Our black and brown bodies are shot over and over and over again. 

And like entertainment, like the lynching postcards of old, those bodies are displayed on a loop. A warning. This is what I can do boy/gal. This is what you are worth. This is how little America cares.

I can’t bring myself to ask right now…can’t bring myself to beg for America to stop murdering us. It seems insane to beg for my humanity from the very thing stripping it daily.But yesterday my friend of 22 years, my 6'2 brown skinned brother, drove 2 hours to see me, to share a meal. And we laughed and we debated and we reminisced. And then he got into a car and drove two hours home through the dark Pennsylvania and Maryland night with only a thin layer of metal and wisp of grace to see him safely home. 

And for him I asked. For him and every person I love that has been kissed by some variant of brown I will continue to ask…please stop. Please stop killing us. Please. Stop.

At church on Saturday we celebrated my PaPa’s long life. We shared stories of his driving on long road trips and ability to eat any meal no matter ow horribly prepared. We marveled at how much the world has changed in the hyphen he lived between 1916 – 2016. He carried a computer in his pocket and waved at his granddaughter in Uganda through Skype. 

All that and the thing that strikes me the most as I arrange my thinking to a world that no longer includes him, is not all of the changes he experienced, but how black people’s place in it has stayed so very much the same.

Rest in Purple

People have been sending me condolences all day. I didn’t realize how much I talk about Prince, but I must. I must talk about him all the time. 

This morning, late to work as I am every Thursday, I didn’t have time to look at my phone. And instead of putting it face down as I usually do (it is always on silent) I had it face up as I typed furiously, attempting to catch up on the mountain of work that awaited me. 

The face lit up. Once. Twice. Five times. The flashing light caught my peripheral vision and piqued my curiosity. I never get that many messages.

A single swipe of my index finger and life is different. A single swipe and the world is forever changed. 

I remember where I was when news of Tupac’s death reached me, and I can see myself, more voyeur than participant, as people melted down around me when Michael Jackson died. But I never really understood. It never felt personal. It never felt like my loss, rather a thing that happened, a thing that happens. 

But this feels like I am missing something…or will be missing something. This feels like a slight. I flirt with the idea of full on temper-tantruming to show my dismay that there will be no next time to see or hear the genius that was and remains, Prince.

A Prince biography finally showed up in my library cue and, stuck on a cross-country flight last week, I eagerly cracked it open with Prince blasting through my earphones to properly set the mood. Mostly unimpressed with the book, it gifted me the inspiration to listen to more than the familiar songs on the 15 Prince albums I have on my phone. 

I’ve been listening ever since. 

Hanging out with my high school best friend in DC, driving in my car, plowing through research at work. Prince accompanied me through the week’s routines.

He sings to me with lyrics so familiar they could be my own name, and with undiscovered gems I didn’t know I would love.

And then he died. 

Just like that.

Last month I was screaming into the din of Oracle arena with 20,000 other purple lovers and today…today we collectively mourn the man who crafted the soundtrack to generations. 

A friend who I share a tacit agreement that if I ever had the opportunity to touch prince (or possibly pick him up, put him in my pocket, and run) that she would bail me out of jail no questions asked (except maybe, “what was it like to touch him?”) and who, after the Piano and a Microphone performance agreed to join me in Minneapolis this summer to go to one of his Paisley Park parties, wasn’t mourning with me today. Her eyes are firmly trained on what remains.

“He left so many gifts,” I could hear her smiling through the phone, “he gave us so much.”

I know she’s right. I know. But greedy I am…I want more.

I want the opportunity to sit in a crowd screaming so loud for him to return for an encore that the noise actually begins to sound like silence, like it did when I saw him at the American Airlines center 14 years ago. I want to wait (screaming and) patiently as he exits the stage for what feels like 5, 10, forever minutes before returning to regale me with encore after encore, like he did in Curacao at the North Sea Jazz festival. I want to watch him flirt with 20,000 people and forget that he isn’t actually flirting with me as he throws back his head, kicks over the piano bench, and marries random songs as if they were destined lovers because music is his language.

Music is his language.

He communicated love with his music…and prayer. He delivered the freak and the god in me. My soul weeps that I will never again stand among strangers pulled together by a purple thread of music beckoning us to go crazy under a cherry moon even as I am thankful that I once did.

My birthday plus one month

Little kid birthdays are full of cake and specter of toys wrapped in colorful paper just out of reach. Little kid birthdays are scored in the happy birthday song and the laughter of friends hopped up on sugar and an excuse to run around screaming.

Adult birthdays less so.

Except…

3 spices a month and recipes to go with them

Except when your friends are utterly amazing and tell you for forty days, in honor of your soon-to-be 40 years, that you are special and loved.

Forty days of 40 started with a microplane. My mom handed it to me while I was in Houston for xmas and I assumed it was a holiday present. It was a little strange because my family doesn’t really do xmas presents for the adults. But I’d been talking about a microplane for a while and my mother, ever thoughtful, had clearly been listening.

And so it began. A trickle to a cascade, the gifts came in from all over. A container of quarters (I always need quarters to wash), knives, a whisk, words of wisdom, words of beauty, warriors tickets, pictures, books, spices, earrings, socks, a food tour, music, amazon gift cards, a plant, edible arrangements. The list goes on. A list of whimsy and planning. 

As amazing as every single gift has been these last 40 days…the thought behind each one. The person who typed or wrapped or mailed or delivered is all the more.

I’m not even on Facebook, so every person had to be excavated from old group emails and the  daisy chain of who knew who. 

Books about food!

And they delivered. Each day a little piece of love dropped into my world. a piece of friendship. A smile. A laugh. 

I’ve never been too caught up in the steepness of my age. I’ve sometimes even been strangely excited by the passing of time. When Ms. Hall elegantly shared that the 30s were amazing, my then 21 year old brain began to anticipate 30 like few people do. and while 40 didn’t have the same incredible endorsement, I assumed it would mark its presence the same way most of my birthdays had…

I was wrong. 

Forty has been a path strewn with every beautiful thing a person could wish for…the overflowing abundance of family, both blood and chosen. 

Appreciation is too paltry a word, I love you to inadequate a phrase.  But for the moment they are all I have. I love and appreciate you all…40 looks amazing from here.