*This piece contains spoilers from She’s Gotta Have It, Moonlight and Us.*
“Adults always say [it’s complicated]. Usually, the answer is not complicated, just unpleasant.” – Skylar from She’s Gotta Have It
I had an accent until I was 8 years old. It was a mix of Alabama, Louisiana and Oakland. Sometimes it sounded like a lisp. My first grade teacher suggested I go to speech therapy to become a clearer speaker. She thought I had promise and wanted me to participate in the oratorical fest, but didn’t think folks would understand me. So, I decided to kill my accent.
Before then, my favorite saying was, “You’s a liar and a faker.” Not only because I liked saying it but also because there were so many lies around me disguised as truths that I became confused.
I’d get in trouble for asking questions and for repeating things that grown folks said about other grown folks. Sometimes I was whipped. Other times, my things were taken and I wasn’t allowed to have company.
At no point did the people who were gossiping apologize to the offended parties—myself and whatever adult happened to be talked about. They were more concerned with my actions. It was my responsibility not to repeat things that weren’t my business. It was my duty to not question why people talked about each other like that, or why I was punished for repeating it.
These punishments exist both in children’s fictive and lived realities. From fairytales to lullabies, children constantly hear versions of “that’s not real,” “you’re wrong,” “you’re mistaken,” but what if what they feel is real, and they aren’t wrong or mistaken?
In season 2 of She’s Gotta Have It, we’re introduced to two 13 year old Black children named Skylar and Virgil. They’re good friends and attend the same prep school. Nola Darling, the show’s main character, and Jamie, Virgil’s father, were having an affair last season. Nola began dating Opal, Skylar’s mother, after her affair with Jamie ended. Jamie’s wife Cheryl kicked him out after learning about the affair, and by season 2 is seeking a divorce.
Later in the season, Virgil confronts his father about cheating on his mother and breaking promises.
“I thought you said you’d never leave me, Dad. Why did you lie to me?”
“I didn’t lie to you, son.”
“You didn’t lie to me? You don’t live here anymore. Should I even still call you ‘dad’?”
“Of course you’re supposed to call me dad. Virgil, I’m your father.”
“My father? Are fathers supposed to chase girls around when they have a wife and a son waiting at home? Was the sex that good to break a promise to me and break up our family?”
Jamie yells, points in Virgil’s face threateningly, and says, “What did you say to me? Virgil! Fall back. Remember who the hell you’re talking to. You understand me?”
Virgil and Skylar were right. When we collapse children’s autonomy we undermine their ability to contemplate nuance and sever the possibilities within whatever relationship we presume to have with them. We also teach them unhealthy ways of relating to themselves, and to other folks.
Jordan Peele’s Us, follows a Black family to their summer home in Santa Cruz, CA. Adelaide (played by Lupita Nyong’o) is convinced by her husband Gabe (played by Winston Duke) to go to the Beach Boardwalk and join their friends for fun and play. Adelaide had a traumatizing time at the boardwalk with her parents thirty years prior, and is plagued by the fear that her Doppelgänger is coming after her. That fear comes true and the family—Adelaide, Gabe, and their children Zora and Jason—are eventually attacked by identical beings called “the tethered,” as are other folks all around the world.
When I saw Us, I thought about the children, not the adults. When Adelaide tries to get Jason out of the room and away from danger by telling Jason to show his “tethered” Pluto one of the magic tricks he’s been obsessed with but hasn’t mastered, Jason holds Pluto’s hand and brings him into the closet. When Jason finally does the trick with a lighter, Pluto inhales, afraid of the spark from the fire, which allows Jason to close the door, trapping him inside. When Pluto cries, he sounds like an infant.
What struck me was how fervently Jason and Pluto (played by Evan Alex) were both interested in play and games. How they enjoyed tricks and being in the closet. How the “tethered,” who had been trapped underground and exploited in a government experiment, just wanted to live. It made me think about the dangerous balance that Black children have to navigate—between innocence/ ambivalence and being perceived as dangerous and violent—even when they are just trying to play. Even when it has been programmed into them.
I was disappointed by all of the conversations happening after the movie and what was not said: everyone expects Black children to be non-violent while being surrounded by violence. What happens when Black children are able to enact or communicate the violences and horrors happening all around them?
Adults often collapse children’s autonomy, voices and imaginations. We constantly redetermine and redistribute the parameters that children have to follow without asking for their input. Without considering the impact of doing this on their well-being. Rarely do we give children honest and full answers when they ask questions.
“Did you know Jamie was a dad and a husband when you were fucking him?” Skylar asks Nola.
“I’m sorry?”
“My friend Virg and I have been talking. He’s Jamie’s son if you haven’t figured that out… Why did you sleep with his dad? Virgil thinks that you’re not a good person. I told him that you are… My question is not rhetorical.”
“It’s complicated Skylar.”
“So you did know?”
“Yes.”
“You see? Unpleasant.”
Similar to Nola, we use this imagined and forced idea of complication in order to remove ourselves from the responsibility of communicating with honesty about the fucked up way we engage with folks. And children see through that.
I think we adults are mostly replaying the hurt we experienced as children. We’re trying to reparent ourselves. And instead of communicating that we are doing a poor job of it, we further perpetuate militaristic dynamics because we are afraid of fully positioning ourselves as children again. We don’t like the vulnerability of it. The way that folks get to determine our worlds.
We are fighting to shift patterns, but we get afraid and respond with scarcity instead of abundance. Children reflect the terrible things we don’t want to admit to ourselves and so we say things like, “it’s complicated” to them to save face.
Children have the capacity to see and call us on our contradictions, lies and omissions. Thinking that kids can’t handle information, that it has to be fed to them through filters, distorts the possibilities within intergenerational relationships. And, children find out these answers and realities anyway.
When sex ed conversations happen by telling children to “wait until marriage” or using terrifying videos of the most extreme consequences of sex, it does not prevent children from engaging. It just prevents children from trusting their caregivers to have that conversation. But entire worlds open up when we trust children to name their concerns.
In Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, a young Black boy named Chiron who struggles with abandonment and bullying meets a Black man named Juan. Juan operates as a father figure, ensuring that Chiron “Little” eats and has a safe place to sleep.
One day, Little sits at Juan and his girlfriend Teresa’s table and asks a series of questions ranging from identity and queerness to profession.
“What’s a faggot?”
“A faggot is a word used to make gay people feel bad.”
“Am I a faggot?”
“No. You could be gay, but don’t let anybody call you a faggot. Unless…”
“How do I know?”
“You just do, I think. But you don’t gotta know right now. Alright? Not yet.”
Little then asks,
“Do you sell drugs?”
“Yeah.” Juan puts his head down.
“And my mama. She do drugs right?”
“Yeah.” Little leaves the house without another word.
Juan starts to break down.
When adults replace the pressure of hierarchy—of always having the answers—we become better at asking questions and listening to the answers. We get better at silence. At loving Black children and making their existence a requirement. It not only expands what’s possible, but also what’s right.
Had I known better, I would’ve kept my accent. Had I known better, I would have recognized earlier this guiding desire I have now for buses of rowdy children who bump into folks and don’t say excuse me. For Black children who jump over fare gates and are seen as gymnasts and ice skaters instead of criminals. I want worlds where they get to be at the wrong place at the right time and still live. I want a world where “good,” “productive,” “promising,” “well-behaved” Black children are no more worthy of protection than Black children with silver teeth and gaps and sagging pants and guns and slick mouths and strong hands. I want all of them alive.
But my accent still comes sometimes, when I’m reading something written by a Southern author, when I’m drinking or when I cry late at night after listening to the last voicemail my dead grandmama left me.
Suggested Reading:
Toni Cade Bambara, “Gorilla, My Love“, 1992.
Nnedi Okorafor, “Zahrah the Windseeker“, 2008.
Brittany Willis, The polarizing responses to Killmonger reflect our inability to deal with Black childhood trauma, Racebaitr 2018.
Amber Butts is a writer, organizer, grief worker and educator from Oakland, CA who believes that Black folk are already whole. Her work centers Black children, Black mamas and Black elders. It asks big and small questions about how we move towards actualizing spaces that center tenderness, nuance and joy while living in a world reliant on our terror.
Amber comes from a long line of hairdressers, storytellers and loud women from The South. She likes cheese, comic books and sings off-key.
