Page 90 of You've Got a Place Here, Too
That’s why, he claims, we talk so much about Trump and not the white folks who make him.
Hence, every dead Black person in this country died prematurely from white folks, and every living Black person in this country lives knowing that white folks want us dead prematurely.
This, he claims, is not analysis. It is descriptive.
We aren’t here to memorialize or seek reparation or even for revenge.
C:What does he want then?
K:He said he wants our dead to feel good.
C:Feel good or feel ease?
K:Psychological ease.
And they’re solely reliant on white suffering for that pleasure.
But white suffering is one thing that brings our dead pleasure. Ease.
I’m trying to understand this fool when he says, “The Candy Lady is in my apartment building, man, and she would like to talk to you.”
And I’m like, “Excuse me now.” That’s when I realized I was in somebody’s horror novel. Our friend loves to fuck with language but he’d never, ever say, “She would like to talk with you.” So at that point, I have read and seen enough. I’m planning on getting the fuck up out of there and never turning around, calling this nigga, texting, nothing.
“She’s inside with the Sharecropper and the Faith and theImagination and the Economy,” he says. “They would like to talk with you.”
So if my hips weren’t fucked up, and it wasn’t cold, I would have just taken off running, but I’m thinking I need to be very strategic. So I just started talking about anything, setting up my sprint.
“The Candy Lady,” I say to him, “a woman who”—I start counting on my fingers—“is over 110 years old, is in your apartment with a nigga named the Sharecropper, another nigga named the Faith, and another nigga named the Imagination?”
“No,” he says. “Truth be told, I just saw the nigga named the Imagination right over there in the quad.”
Our friend’s phone rang as he was laughing.
I’m standing there trying to fake yawn.
I saw the name on his phone glow blue over our friend’s shoulder.
I dropped my keys.
“I’ma just run to my car and get my phone,” I told our friend. “I’ma be in directly. What apartment you in again?”
Our friend turned to me with the phone to his ear and said, “That’s what’s up. Go on and get your phone. I can explain when you come in. When you walk in that side door, go straight down the stairs to the basement.”
Then, to whoever he was talking to on the phone, our friend says, “Tell her we’ll both be down directly. Me and Kiese.”
I turned my back on our friend and walked back to the car. I’d walked into the middle of a novel or a novella and I did not want to make it to the end. But I ain’t have the will to want to know the beginning.
Black Madness.
Black Dead.
Black Romance.
I thought about something you wrote inHumane Insight.
You wrote, “In looking at the dead or dying body, in person or in its photographic representation, there is no egalitarian reciprocity at play. In semiotic terms, the dead are not merely incapable of self-representation through language; rather, they are antithetic to language itself.”
This is what you wrote. And it hit different this time, as I sat there in the parking lot of faculty apartments at Jackson State University, where I was conceived and born.
