Just Trying to Live in a Time of Dying
It’s tough learning every day someone you know has died: a friend you haven’t seen in years who played a part in helping you find your balance; a deacon you’ve known for three decades who sat with his wife behind you in church on Sundays and insisted on an honest study of the Word; the brother of one acquaintance, uncle of another, father of still another, sisters of two others; a first responder who was vulnerable because of her chronic asthma; the relatives, friends and neighbors of people on the morning prayer line, at former places of work, from membership organizations to which you belong, in your graduating class. It’s all too much. The numbers are overwhelming.
So in this time when bodies are being ravaged by an insidious virus bold enough to reveal itself anywhere, it’s hard to hear about and see racial indignities from police abuse of power directed towards people who look like you, laugh like you, live like you and whose stories are similar to yours. It’s hard to watch on screens of every size, police –sworn to “protect the public” and vigilantes pretending to do the same—pummel Black and brown bodies—especially young ones. Disproportionate suffering has been laid bare by a pandemic that has exposed not only a physical virus but a moral one. The friends I talk to have had enough of dying.
“Tired,” is the way one friend put it.
“Exhausted,” is what another said.
Neither is on the front lines. Both were talking about weariness from the news and masks they were more than ready to take off. Not the masks that were decorated with slogans or advertised as N95s or studded with buttons and flags or distributed in boxes of 10 at a “bargain rate” or boxed as disposable and surgical and hard to come by. They were not the masks that had been identified in off-again, on-again CDC declarations as life-saving face coverings. None of these masks were the ones my friends had in mind. Rather, each one of them meant a psychological mask like Paul Laurence Dunbar referenced in 1896 “that grins and lies...,” that covers real truths and raw feelings.
I read somewhere about the travesty of engaging in a conversation and failing to recognize that “this country’s national narrative does not apply to everyone.” That not all parents who try to love their children into living can do it. They soon realize they’re living at a time when loving is not enough. Loving is just not enough.
Given this moment in history, people are ready to take off masks and do what Bishop William Barber urged, “change the narrative by changing the narrators.” Because their anger and courage and fear have converged, they are saying things they have not spoken before or have said only to themselves and each other. They talk on Zoom calls and Google hangouts, on mobile phones and landlines. My friends speak boldly to people outside their circles and beyond their generations about encounters with police, personal affronts, painful moments that they had normalized and buried.
In conversations with me, some friends suggested they understood 27-year old Rayshard Brooks, caught on the parking lot surveillance camera in May standing in the streetlight interrogated by policemen. Those friends watched a casual encounter deteriorate into a physical struggle and end with fatal shots in the back. They had not themselves fallen asleep inebriated in a Wendy’s drive-through line and blocked traffic, nor had they been to jail for a year or any period, nor had they found it impossible to find meaningful work because of a police record, nor had they struggled like Rayshard to piece together a living wage to support a family. Simply by the grace of God, they had done none of this. But they still understood Rayshard’s encounter with police in Atlanta-- played and replayed on video. They understood it to be larger than a run-in with a few policemen in one place. They recognized it, they said, because they too were Black.
What happens when you have no control over how someone sees you? What happens when how you are treated is based on how you are perceived? How do you interact with the law? What to say and not say, what to do and not do, how to reach and not reach had been part of my friends’ education. I thought about it. That set of lessons also had been part of mine. What historical instructions had I received and passed on? What protective warnings had I been given and given away? What deep fears did I still harbor about a possible time of dying?
North Florida memories of my growing up rushed back. Daddy taught me to drive our family’s 5-in-the-floor stick shift English Ford when I was 9. He said he wanted to give me a good chance to live. Since I was tall for my age, my legs could reach the pedals. He just had to be sure my mind could grasp the urgency. Our home in Leon County, outside the Tallahassee city limits, was on a street in a “development for Negroes” carved out of what had been an old plantation property. In 1956, the six newly built brick houses on Oak Knoll Avenue were surrounded by woods. Everyday our family took the single way into town, driving on the little-traveled, two-lane Meridian Road which had only narrow shoulders for stopping and no real places even to change a flat tire. My folks whispered about nooses hanging from random trees, but I never saw them. They hadn’t seen hooded passers-by on Meridian– or if they had, they never told me. They did know, however, of hunter’s club rallies a few miles away where crosses were burned and late night vigils were held.
What my parents taught me about responding to the police I can still remember.
“If I’m driving,” Mama said, “and something happens to me, take my pocketbook, get in my seat and drive!” My wide-eyed nine-year old self understood. She and Daddy knew there was not much hope of reasoning my way out of a bad situation. We were on our own.
“And If you’redriving,” Daddy added, “and you look in the rearview mirror and hear sirens and see flashing lights trying to pull you over, follow the speed limit, don’t stop until you reach a gas station. If it’s dark, keep going until you get to some light.”
My folks believed there was hope in a populated area, someplace where there might be a witness. (I wonder what they would have said about Rayshard under streetlights.) With a little Black child, whose life – like theirs—was not valued by someone claiming to have authority, any wrong choice could mean the difference between life and death. What they told me and what I remembered would be critical.
Some years later after I became an adult and moved to the Washington Metropolitan area, I hadn’t forgotten the lesson on policing. As recent as fifteen years ago, I still took care to wear earrings when I drove in certain parts of the city – believing that any policeman seeing me in the car might not mistake me with my short hair for a Black man and pull me over for no particular offense. It is a disgusting reality and a heartbreaking admission. I want my children and my grandchildren to live, so I have taught them to move with caution and “to keep going” until they “get to some light.” I don’t want my grandchildren to live with a fear of dying unnecessarily so I’ve also taught them that when they are in the driver’s seat, to be there with dignity.
These past few weeks, death has been real and near. My community is one swathed in it. But I still have hope. As I watched the multi-racial multi-generational protests in D.C., Portland, Boston, Houston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and in hundreds of municipalities around the globe, I was reminded that the world is in a time of permanent transformation as we try to get a better understanding of one another. Calls to change the concept and premise of policing as we know it have been loud. From “defund the police” and scrap the system to turn it into a full partnership of equal collaborators—the demands have come from young protestors pushing for human dignity and insisting on being heard. We have yet to really listen to each other, but we’re getting better. It will take hard sustained work that goes beyond policies of policing; it will take hard sustained work that goes into our very lifestyles.
Forty years ago, Bernice Johnson Reagon wrote Ella’s Songin tribute to Human Rights activist Ella Baker who had the audacity to believe that unnecessary dying is not acceptable. It is a reminder to me and an anthem for us all:
We who believe in freedom cannot rest,
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest,
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons …
To me young people come first, they have the courage where we fail
And if I can shed some light as they carry us through the gale
The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on
Is when the reins are in the hand of the young who dare to run against the storm …
We who believe in freedom cannot rest,
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest,
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
We should try to live in a time of dying.