Dear Ancestors,
I once told a therapist, “The only reason I haven’t killed myself is because I’d anger and hurt so many people who love me.”
At the time, this was a complaint.
Can you believe that?
I was complaining about love. I was complaining about love’s doggedness in keeping me alive. Of course, I was also complaining because I wanted to die. But I suspect I was mostly complaining because love was teaching me a hard lesson about identity, was hacking away at my American sense of individualism.
“The only reason I haven’t killed myself is because I’d anger and hurt so many people who love me” is an imprecise way of acknowledging that if I kill myself, I also kill the people who put me here, and hold me here. I continue to exist, in no small part, on account of my connection to you. I am a stitch in the crucial story that you’ve knitted, interlocked with the stitches at my sides, holding me in place as I hold them.
For all of its horrors, I must confess that America has, at least, taught me much about the many ways a life ends. Eric Garner’s strangled body. A Black child’s smothered innocence, like the final, softening words of Elijah McClain. Sandra Bland’s swinging corpse. A Black American’s murdered sense of country, like the San Francisco teenager telling James Baldwin, “I ain’t got no flag.” A lynching as the death of a social contract. Riots as the death of pretense.
I’ve learned death so well I see it in all that I do.
Every time I pricked a page with a pen’s tip I knew I was killing it. The pen acts as a scalpel, pulling word-shaped organs from beneath the page’s flesh when I create some stories. And there is a lucky carve, producing a bleed of ink that forms correct letters, when I discover others.
I’ve speared pages with pens because the page was the animal I chose to sacrifice. Because I’d heard that animal sacrifice was how one reached the gods.
Dear ancestors, please hear me. Please don’t let the death of this page be in vain. Let it move you if for no other reason than that my being Black in America is being surrounded by too much vain death already.
I have drained the veins of pages. And their sacrifices have produced the worlds I’ve needed in order to survive the world I inhabit. My pen has proven mightier than swords. Brighter than lightsabers. Has connected me to you and your stories, from which I have been designed. And by way of that connection, I have done my own designing. The afrofuturistic survival of pandemics. A Black fairy godmother in pursuit of freedom. Philando Castile’s life reimagined as that of a spaceship captain instead of another American violation.
But the world I inhabit has grown stormier. And the raindrops have made the words run from the pages. The worlds I’ve built are now stains and I can no longer remember their worth. I can only stare at their disarray and, as with Rorschach Tests, speculate.
In the woods, there are no more fires to sit around and speak stories over because there is a plague burning through my people, scattering us. We call it COVID-19. And, in the cities, there are so many fires to stand around and scream over because there is a plague burning through my people, scattering us. We call it police brutality. Nothing is happening. And everything is happening. And I am squeezed on all sides by this paradox.
Atlanta burned recently. And the flames had the same skin tone as those of Watts in 1965 and Chicago in 1919. Poets wrote about a lynching today. And their words had the same bone structure as those of Malcolm X in 1962 and Ida B. Wells in 1895. Tomorrow, the sun will rise over American shackles, and those shackles will gnaw on wrists as was done in 20th century chain gangs and on 18th century slave ships.
Stories have ancestors, too.
There is one last page wriggling in my left hand and my best pen gripped in my right. One day, I will be one of you. One day, my stories will have descendants.
Help me carve carefully.
Fill my pessimistic fingers with hopeful lyrics.
I want to rewrite America with new stories. Stories where flames have the skin tone of campfires and Juneteenth barbecues. Stories where a poet’s words bare the bone structure of dancers. Stories where our descendants can, instead, experience the many ways life happens.
I want to obligate my descendants as you have obligated me. I want them to be seen, even in this moment which precedes their corporeal existence. I want to share their burden of American grief and have them know that in their hands lies both their lives and ours.
And if they complain, during that first hard lesson about their lives being more than just their individuality, I promise to be understanding.
With the love that you taught me,
Quentin Lucas
Suggested Readings:
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson, a fantasy set in a dystopic Canada surrounding a Carribean family with a talent for magic which considers the burdens and blessings of family traditions and expectations.
Dawn by Octavia Butler, a science fiction novel about Dawn, a woman whom aliens use to begin the repopulation of Earth after its been destroyed by nuclear war, ultimately forcing Dawn into a maternal position against her will.
Black Earth Rising, an eight-episode series on Netflix about a survivor the Rwandan genocide which left me contemplating the way family operates inside of us even after we’ve been physically separated.
Quentin Lucas is from Boston and loves iced tea. When not loving up on iced tea, he is either teaching writing classes, a student in writing classes as an MFA candidate at Emerson College, or telling a new one-minute story which he does daily on his Instagram (@cue.luke) and Twitter (@Lukeslytalkr) accounts.
Some of Quentin’s other works can be found at QLuke.com.
