I Felt That, a Diary Entry
For Black Girls Who Have Considered Burning the Entirety of America to the Ground
Now, when James Baldwin said that to be Black and relatively conscious in America is to be state of a rage almost all the time, Lord, I felt that.
I do not know how to fix my fingers to write a think piece about Black pain. I’ve tried to intellectualize my misery, to make art out of anguish, but there are no words for it. At least, there are no words I could publish. I am a maelstrom, a rage-filled hurricane, and what I want to say is violent and bloody, bright red with the unexhumed anger instilled in by twenty-three years of being Black. What I want to say is fuck this, fuck this country and the people that made it this way. Fuck the blind eye the government turns to white supremacists and their manifestos. Fuck ironic anti-Blackness, 4chans and memes, white laughter, white teenagers and the hateful people they grow into. I want to burn this place to cinders. I want to hop on the nearest spaceship and set me and my folks up on Alpha Centauri, Earth be damned.
When Janelle Monae said, I’m packing my spacesuit, taking my shit and moving to the moon, I felt that.
But because I am not in possession of apartheid money or the billions of dollars generated by slave labor, I am bound to this land. Church, has anyone ever felt bound to a land? Turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor!” This land is your land, my land, but at the moment, it feels more like shackles, the kind not so easily shaken off with a dance. Sorry, Mary Mary, but I’m tired of dancing. The music don’t drown out the gunshots, and you can’t disco when you’re dead.
By the way, can we talk about death? I want to say something intellectual and lofty about Americans refusal to mourn, the WASPish allergy to emotion. I want to say something intelligent about how Black people have never had a single moment to mourn, that life is one long funeral procession interrupted sporadically by releases of new music to lament to. There’s not a moment of peace. Every day, there’s a new hashtag, another one of us lost to anti-Black violence at the hands of the state, of police, of individuals. Bullets destroy us, or inadequate healthcare, or food deserts, or poverty. I won’t linger by the grave—we’ve had more than our fair share of coffins—but I want us to look down into it for a moment, take in that familiar smell of damp earth and perfume, folks gone too soon and folks laid to uneasy rest.
Here, have a tissue. No, don’t hide your tears, I know the shape of them, the weight of them. Let your lip tremble, let your makeup run. We started crying on the Middle Passage, and we’re still crying now, some of us outwardly and some of us quietly. Stiff upper lip, never let ‘em see you cry.
Well, why can’t they see us cry? What is this country, this world, that it expects us (us, of course, being Black people) to keep a stiff upper lip? We’re not meant to waver, wobble. Weakness is not an option. Must we fix our faces, stop crying ‘fore they give us something to cry about? My face is fixed, I’ve been fixed since the first time I ever had a white teacher look at me like I was less than dirt. Face fixed by violence and circumstance—Screw you, America, I’m crying.
Mournful tears, rageful tears, frustrated tears—what matters right now is that my face is brown and wet. What matters is that I am twenty-three and tired. On my back and on my head, I am holding generations of trauma. My blood is permanently changed by the actions of white people long dead, and the suffering of Black folks buried. I carry my grandparents and my great-grandparents, the Lewises and Bucks and Scholfields, on and on, back and back, onto that first sorry soul to have been snatched from West Africa.
When Fannie Lou Hammer said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”, I felt that.
You know, I used to be suicidal? It was years ago now, back when I was fifteen or sixteen. Mike Brown had just been killed, and life felt pointless. I saw how little my life was worth as a Black person, as a Black woman. I saw the future coiling out ahead of me, formless, shapeless, all hidden in shadow. What was I supposed to become? A statistic? A flash of a memory in someone’s mind before dispersing into nothing? My art felt pointless. I felt pointless.
I didn’t go through with it (obviously), partly out of cowardice, and I’m glad I didn’t. If I didn’t stay alive, I wouldn’t have written my book, wouldn’t have grown and seen the worthiness of living. I wouldn’t have come into myself, met my friends, become more and more of myself. I would’ve been a brief flash, memory and then nothing. Still, there are times where life feels much too heavy, times like now when I can scarcely breathe for all the fear I feel. Once again, the future unfurls, and I see naught but shadows. I crumble, the country crumbles. I mourn and grieve and hate and rage. The only torch I carry is fury.
Well, not only. Only dilutes the value of anger, makes it weak and pointless. Anger is the greatest weapon I’ve got on hand, pure and cutting, and I sharpen it, whet it like a blade against the whetstone of love. Because I do love this earth I’m bound to, and I do love the people on it. I love my Black skin, my Black hair, my Black nose, and I love your Black nose and his Black nose and hers and theirs. I love the blessing of waking up each morning, the freedom of being alive. I love being alive, and it is my rage at white complacency and at racism that will keep me breathing.
There is a reason I’m not dead yet, be it God or fate or luck. There is a reason I have not killed myself, have not surrendered to the depression that has beleaguered me for what feels like all my (relatively short) life. Spite, yes, and a refusal to be struck down, an Aries-esque stubbornness against melancholy, but also love and life, friendship and family, magic and hope.
When I said I would live and fight on and love and loathe until I can’t no more, I felt that.
ive had this tab open forever and i read this tonight and felt shivers on the back of my neck and of course it was you