By M.L. Thompson
Last summer when my depression was really taking hold, I went to lunch one afternoon and was stopped along the way. There is a Black queer man swinging punches on the corner by my job. This nigga almost hits me. I tell him to watch out, but he’s not listening. My face scrunches ugly, I put a hand on my hip, back up toward my work building. What is this nigga doing? Hail mary’s! These are hail mary’s! I don’t be trying to fight, but watch one! I’m down.
He swings again. My eyes adjust to the sunlight, to his movements, trying to focus them both out of their blur. Then I see; he is trying to hit every white person who walks by him. He is mumbling under his breath and swinging closed fists. I chuckle, continuing to watch—marvel, really—at this man who is doing what I want to do most days: take a fucking swing.
But I have not thrown a punch at a white person idly sauntering by on the sidewalk, lips downturned, meekly offering their kindest, whitest face. What is his story? Why is he swinging his fists this early in the afternoon? He should chill, right? This is definitely something police shoot niggas for, right? He knows this. He swings again. The white people walking toward his fit dodge but mostly ignore my nigga. He raises his mumble to an audible “Fuck you, fuck you!” I watch a bit longer, getting my life, temperature fluctuating, a chill down my leg, as a lucky white lady just missed what she’s due.
The white people are calling police, and he gives no fucks. He has nothing to lose, I guess. He understands there is not much to lose, I guess. He is shoeless, shirtless, and without water on the corner of 13th and 5th, during a 80-plus degree heatwave. He knows that nothing matters. He is alone.
He is swinging like if he connects the simulation will crash, all white everything shattering to dust. He has me thinking about death. How fear of death keeps me complicit with forces of domination. Keeps me paying taxes and holding onto my mind. I do not know that he is not fearful on this corner. Is his attack a defense of his mind? Against white realities? For what feels like his life’s sake?
He is what Black people look like when we lose our minds. Not “lose our minds” in the immediate, ableist sense, but like what happens when your mind goes off searching for freedom beyond political rights and social politeness. In a way that shows an imagination recognizing its capacity.
I stand and smile as ole dude loses his shit. A lone Black person watching this other Black person, while other Black people skirt by without any acknowledgment. A few niggas shake their head in disapproval, amusement. I continue for lunch. Think about myself to myself. Think about “community.” About my own sanity and list of people to punch. Think about how I could have helped, but also how it seemed as if he did not need help. It seemed as if he had it. You know, the things we tell ourselves to keep risk out of our life’s way.
***
A year later, rinsing potatoes, chopping broccoli as the beans warm to a light boil, I take in my first sense of calm in awhile. My roommate and her man are watching Blue Is The Warmest Color. I hear French conversation coming from the TV—a murmur humming under our A/C unit. Much less abrasive than U.S. English’s incessant chatty screech. I place my knife on top of the counter and walk toward the television, my shoulders lower, my jaw loosens.
At some point between this moment and seeing that guy last year, I started grinding my teeth. A habit I cannot pinpoint, but attribute to my perception of my life. My paranoia of street harassment and communal unacceptance, both coming my way because of the homophobic agenda. The rally against the way I hold my boyfriend’s hand and the length of my shorts. I get the message, and am uninterested. I refuse to give my labor, love, and intellect to a country who repeatedly feeds itself Black queer people. Our country is a monster hellbent on having me lose my mind while it devours my body.
I have no love for France, either. So maybe it is the nonstop U.S. news cycles, and the way national attention is siphoned toward popularity while disregarding urgency, that makes French so sweet to me this day. My roommate’s boo is ready to watch something else, and I text my boyfriend, “We need to leave the country.”
Blue Is The Warmest Color revolves around white lesbian relationships, and does little for me in its exploration of socio-political heteronormativity, class, or race. The white girls on-screen and I do not share much context. But the language, food, scenes of green and cigarettes hanging from laughing mouths take my mind to James Baldwin. When he left the U.S. When he talks about France. When he says to Jordan Elgrably in the Paris Review, “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France—it was a matter of getting out of America. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France, but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under.” Baldwin left the U.S. for space to see his country, to reckon with her, without distraction. Leaving the country seems to be the only option.
But when I face talk like this now, it reminds me of the man on the corner. What did he feel his options were? What did he know the U.S. to be? What did he know was happening to him here, and what did he offer for freedom?
If the guy swinging at white people on the corner is an embodiment of a type of Black sanity, then James Baldwin is the thorough BlaQueer American Psycho, driven to a career of servicing white people through his work. In a clip posted to YouTube entitled “James Baldwin – On Being Poor, Black and Gay”, The white interviewer asks Baldwin, “When you were starting out as a writer you were a Black, impoverished, homosexual. You must have thought to yourself ‘well gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’”
To which Baldwin responds, quick in his way, “No, I thought I hit the jackpot.” The audience and interviewer laugh, then applaud. Everyone eases in the desired air of respectability. Baldwin smiles with every tooth, chuckling as well. Then he continues, “It was so outrageous you could not go any further. You had to find a way to use it.”
The scene is cringy. Baldwin’s denial of this struggle and performance of a forced sanity by way of smiles and wit. His lined face twitching with inquiry. Shrouded in the rhetoric of white-privilege and co-opted to atone for white terrorist histories. His face and legacy is packaged in Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, un-queered and doing that Hollywood movie thing. You know, when the cigarette leaning out from his lips is a prop, not a mechanism to curb anxiety.
Classic American drama is why I am in therapy. The U.S. traditions of violence, denial, mediocrity, solipsism, and cliche have me seeing a psychotherapist two times a week, 45 minutes per session, working through anxiety, depression, isolation. A common holy trinity of affliction for Black Queer & Trans Americans. Black Americans who, according to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Mental Health, are “20% more likely to report serious psychological distress than white adults.” Distress, in part, brought on by homelessness, long job searches, general disenfranchisement, being called “Minority” and more.
The State will continue to wear me down, too. I know myself. I need to leave like all the Black people from my favorite stories. Black people who disappeared of their own volition. The ones who evaded familiar harm through wanderlust, ignoring the demand of their presence for reasons that are selfish and survival-centered. The stories of Black queer expats who left for a fresh mode of survival: LaQuan Smith, Josephine Baker, Sylvia Rivera, Frank Ocean, Darryl Pinckney, leading me to some other country simmering in dystopia and opportunity. Away from this place that is driving my Black mind un-queered and psycho.
I do not know how to write about my own sanity. In some way, I feel I have to keep my mind to write. In many ways, I feel I have lost it long ago and I am biding time. I believe my paranoia is a projection to maintain long-held realities for comforts sake. My country’s reality is driving me into a very dark depression. I stare into it. Familiarity washes over me.
There is a butch queen throwing punches on the corner by my job and I am losing my mind too. This country has me on the verge of a kill. Moving around death like ballerina’s feet in a minefield. If I take the right step, then maybe I am on the corner, maybe not another country. Maybe I stay here, honing our culture for Black American children in need of other ways to be in the world. But what I see ahead is dreadful and anti-Black. A continued road of economic disenfranchisement and racist presidents. A reality of loving Black people back—that is the reality I want. A reality where vengeance on white people is as righteous as laughter. Where the risk feels worth it, and punches less futile. I wait for that day. Until then the plan remains to leave.
Suggested Readings:
- Ernest Baker, Black American Psycho, 2016
- Harmony Holiday, “Preface to James Baldwin’s Unwritten Suicide Note“, Poetry Foundation, 2018
- Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, “My Great Grandfather the Nigerian Slave Trader“, the New Yorker, 2018
M.L. Thompson is a writer, model, and filmmaker. He is from Cleveland, Ohio. Get a peep inside his brain on Instagram & Twitter @dreamyuncle.
