In the perfect quiet, my friend,
their shapes
are not unlike nights
-excerpt from Amiri Baraka’s, The end of man is his beauty
I’ve rarely been more livid watching a television series than when I watched episode one of Terrance Nance’s HBO series, Random Acts of Flyness. It’s called Everybody Dies and Ripa the Reaper takes reluctant black children into dark set pieces where she announces their demise.
My child hadn’t been born yet but the show stirred the already present fear inside of me. Death is inevitable. And Black children are certainly no exception.
Until 2016, I ignored conversations that included dying. I was afraid of it, despite its inevitability, and my relationship to blackness only strengthened these anxieties. I’d like to swim to the surface, or at least know that my child can, with a developed language that looks out into history and finds meaning.
When my Great grandmother transitioned, some twenty Thanksgivings ago, I didn’t have that language. The Temptations mini-series was airing and David Ruffin’s savory tenor crooned. I couldn’t have been more than six when she passed, so her passing and the events of that day serve as my most tangible memory of her. That and Ruffin’s tenor.
Maybe it’s just a matter of association. But, for me, there is something between the passing of my Grandmother and Ruffin’s death which parallel. Maybe it’s the respective ages of their passing, the preventability of death or something deeper that I don’t yet have a vocabulary to describe.
Either way, it’s a short distance between them, in grief, because of the interchangeable conditions in the patterns of black mortality, often to do with a subtext of historical oppression influencing the deaths of kin, and similarly with persons unrelated.
This type of grief, this temporal grief, I would argue operates as a mode of intergenerational trauma. Considering how the impact of racial trauma hides in coexisting diseases/conditions/disorders, and how that might color familial memory, the same might be hypothesized about cultural memory. Tragedy functions as a throughline in how our celebrated figures, and kin, meet their end. At some point, this shared lineage of survival, which is constant beyond lines of relation, influences how we ruminate, and craft discussion, on death.
Grief is never singular. Grieving for one’s mother is grieving for Marsha P. Johnson is grieving for John Singleton, is grieving for Phyllis Hartman, is grieving for Bill Gunn and is also grieving for your great great Uncle. Death becomes cultural making and self making more intimately. Grief is less a response, compartmentalized in phases through time, but more so an edict of being.
I’ve stopped trying to determine who the wounds belong to because the afterlife of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade is complex and grief never begins, nor ends. It just is. And yet, I can’t help but wonder how observations of grief, and whatever lies between it and death, might warp such determinations of meaning. Anecdotally, my relationship to my father’s morbidity offers a window into that very concern.
I spent my teenage years resenting my father after he was diagnosed with diabetes. He’d let his body become his enemy. The hospital visits and failed weight loss attempts were reminders that I should begin prematurely mourning someone whose demise was preventable. I saw him as just another black man whose health was second to being cool and believed he deserved his condition.
In my own obesity, I saw him when I looked in the mirror -another impending reminder of black male morbidity. From the most literal sense, I wanted to cut him off of me. And with this self abuse, I felt that if I filled his footprint, I deserved all that he does. But my shame was an insidious manifestation of a historical vocabulary which subverts the life value of black folks. This eugenic value is determined across institutions where black folks’ propensity to live/die is predetermined.
This process of assigning value suggests that between life and death, there is something to measure, and skin color determines the metrics of measurement.
Our deaths, even in private, are suggestions of what we deserve. And they are always in relationship with the state. My relationship to the morbidity of my father isn’t separate from the ways our health care, and penal, systems impose our status as non-human.
So many have been taken by mechanisms of this world’s intention, and the little recourse for undoing harm is a heavy fucking weight. I’d like to leave that weight unattended, even if only in my imagination, but I can at least begin the work from a name or place.
Upon initially viewing Everybody Dies, I wanted reprieve. I didn’t get it. As that segment transitioned, I wanted the artists to be responsible enough with my emotions to offer consolation for my panic.
But how could I expect such comfort when this segment was their meditation on the hole between blackness and death? Which has no answers and of which, they were transparently working to find? I was exhausted because they were exhausted. Exhausted with death, with a shared weariness, which begs for a shared discovery of rest from that fatigue. For both the dead and alive.
Everybody dies, yes but as black folks that means something else. Something we have to find, name and master.
Reading Suggestions:
“The Reapers Garden”,Vincent Brown (2010)
“Passed on: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial”, Karla FC Holloway (2003)
“The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation”, Daina Rainey Berry (2017)
