Cold Drank

1.

Mama wanted me to love Michael Jackson as she did, but I couldn’t because all I could see was his work. My Mama, a 53 year-old woman from Forest Mississippi felt like she grew up looking horizontally at Michael and his brothers. Mama heard not only the Jackson 5’s work, but also their asphalted American journey. As a black girl who moved every summer from Mississippi to Milwaukee with her singing sisters, my mother recognized the contoured place from which Jackson’s bended notes sprang. Mama moved through the world a virtuosic, curious, confused, defiantly capable, black girl in schizophrenic post-Brown United States. Like Michael, Mama was the child of two beautiful, persistent and sometimes destructive parents.

Let Mama tell it, she grew up different, alone, the “peculiar dove” in a caring but limiting nest. Let both of her sisters tell it, each of them was the peculiar dove longing for belonging. All three sisters tell the story of my grandmother working hard to get them their first stereo and first record during the Christmas of 1969. The album was a 45’ with “I Want You Back” on the A side and “Who’s Loving You” on the B-side. After huddling in the living room and listening to the both sides of the 45 over and over, Mama remembers telling Grandma thank you, then wading through Chinaberry bushes and climbing a hanging moss tree where she wrote about Michael Jackson’s happysad voice, her hatred for ugly Isiah Horde and the colorful isolation she felt from the world.

2.

As a single working parent in the late 70’s,  Mama worked to create music despite the heartbreaking noise of flimsy job security, mangled romantic relationships, unpaid utility bills. Mama found some order through limiting my consumption. I could watch our 12 inch black and white television for one hour a day. I could go outside only after I wrote an essay using words that neither of us knew. I couldn’t eat much sugar, salt or cold drank unless Mama was there to okay it. Playing any form of Hip Hop was a beatable offense while all music played on my little radio couldn’t exceed 5 on the volume … except for Michael Jackson.

When Mama and I weren’t jamming til all hours of the night to Off the Wall tape I got for Christmas, I was in my room listening to the tape alone. There, I could sing the songs the way I wanted and be weird and fascinated by the minimalist album cover of Mama’s Off the Wall album. The Off the Wall cover foreshadowed part of my future with Michael Jackson. Like a lot of folk, I’d be mesmerized by the work of Michael’s feet while also wondering about his face.

The contrast between the dense black of Michael’s high-watered tuxedo slacks and the glow of his white socks up against a haggard brick wall created a depth, or a crease into which I could easily slip. In that crease, it’s easy to say that I wanted to be Michael. But I don’t think that’s really true. Much more meaningful that personal adulation or some strange kind of body transference, didn’t we all want to work, work it like and be worked by Michael Jackson. We wanted to dress as he did while he was at work and defy rhythmic possibilities. And we tried, too, didn’t we, over and over again in mirrors, at dances, in bedrooms, on stages, in classrooms, at parties, in our dreams?

3.

Michael’s work post Thriller changed the way we consumed music. Lots of black folks who I respect have said that Michael was ours on Off the Wall and he became the property of world’s post Thriller. I’ve said that shit too, but I’m not so sure about that any more.  I am sure that he belonged to music pre Thriller, and post Thriller, the video as a form and workable possibility belonged to him. In forcing MTV to play black music videos, Michael’s work dictated to us the tight vivid narratives in the songs we loved. Where all of us made up a thousand scenes, characters, familiar details of our own life to songs like “Rock With You” or “She’s Out of My Life” we now knew the exact the story of “Billie Jean” “Beat It” “Thriller” “Say Say Say” “Smooth Criminal”. Michael’s vision became ours. Hence the story of where you were, what you were doing, what you felt when you first saw “Thriller” or “Beat It” is as vivid for us as the “videos” we used to make up while listening to Off the Wall.

4.

Today, Michael Jackson, the greatest American worker of my life, is dead.  His work connected us. His work made us wear pants that flooded and strange white sequined gloves from our Grandma’s usher uniform. His work encouraged us save up lunch money for the Beat It jacket with the zippers that didn’t work. His work bullied us into celebrating the presence of a confessional, a plea and  incredible physical ferocity in one audio-visual setting. His work nudged us into acceptance of a cardboard kind of androgyny, though we didn’t know what that meant. His work redefined rhythm, rhythmic abrasion and colorful darkness while moaning “look at me” and “look at you” and “it hurts if you look at me too hard.” Michael’s work was our badman, our trickster, our tragic mulatto, our Pinnochio, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, all at once.

Most of us all remember where we ran, or where we wanted to run, after we watched Michael turn around with those yellow eyes at the end of the Thriller video. We don’t just remember his many moonwalks; we remember Motown 25 and way his work brought us out of seats and really made us wonder if we were watching some altered televisual effect. We worried and dropped our cool when we heard he’d burned his curl while shooting that Pepsi commercial, but even then we never ever thought he could die.

5.

As we’ve grown into our 30’s, we’ve become more capable of looking horizontally at Michael Jackson, too, just like our parents. Post Thriller, Michael’s body became as important as his voice to his body of work. In a nasty, but almost awesome twist of fate, we’ve been forced to reckon with our greatest American worker being a ferocious American black boy from Gary who performed in white face while begging us to “shum on.” Michael Jackson, like us, didn’t really know what to do with the eyes of white folks. He seemed to believe that one could find asylum from the aestethic burdens of blackness in the creation of ultra black music and parodying of white skin and features.

But we do reckon, and we know that there are more ways to perform in white face than to bleach your skin, slice off your nose and fry your hair. 50 years ago, James Baldwin wrote that it is only in “his” music that the American Negro is able to tell “his” story. Baldwin, as boldly imaginative as he is, could not forecast what Michael Jackson’s work would do forever to the way we heard and saw our story. Michael worked to entertain us and at the end, like most good workers, he seemed to believe the customer was always right (even though he had to know that there are far too many customers and far too much good work to take for granted for that to ever be true).

Like a lot of you, I been up all night waddling in the work of Michael Jackson and wondering if we failed to let him know how thankful we were for his work. I cry not when I think about his dead whitened body or when I think about his kids. I cry when I see my Grandma watching my aunts and my Mama huddled around the new stereo in their tiny living room in Forest Mississippi. Grandma is behind the door swelling with pride as her daughters listen to that last note of “Who’s Loving You” spin safely away into a series of grainy hiccups. Neither Grandma, Mama, Aunt Linda or Aunt Sue can imagine a day some 40 years in the future where their grandson, son and nephew will write that The greatest American worker of our time, a curious little black boy from Gary who felt compelled to work in white face while changing the way music and black masculinity sound and look, died today. Michael Jackson will never work for us again.

Thank you, Michael. You were so fucked up, and so are we. We see you, really. And we love what we see. We know you were tired, and now maybe you wanna go take care of yourself. But please don’t worry. The work ain’t going nowhere.  Get your rest, brother.

Your work is here.

Ether.

Ether.

1.

Dear Uncle Jimmy,

            As a boy, I knew that there was a rickety bridge between right and wrong. And I learned that I would be disciplined more harshly for even looking towards the wrong side. But like you, I did and didn’t give a fuck. I broke bets I made with myself, defied authority and was lazy about most things of substance. And I did all of this, Uncle Jimmy, with a warning in mind. You were that warning. “You driving my sister crazy now,” Aunt Sue told me the night I drove my Mama into a nervous breakdown “and you heading down the road of your Uncle Jimmy.”

The Uncle Jimmy road, like the Emmett Till road, ran adjacent to the refined, sanitized curbed avenues of how sisters, aunts, Mamas, Grandmas and old Niggas wanted black boys to behave. I feared the road to Jimmy because the road seemed so painful and inevitable. Whatever consumed you would eventually consume me. Even as I jogged away from Mississippi to Ohio, then Indiana and now New York, if I looked down I saw familiar footprints and artifacts of the Jimmy road.

That’s what I felt before the summer you didn’t get up.

On July 7^th, three days after you toted a bag of meat to Grandma’s house, and three days before the NAACP had its symbolic funeral for the word “nigger,” I got a call that Grandma was looking for you. She came over to your house because you wouldn’t answer the phone. When Grandma got to the house over on 49, though you were on the other side of the door in the kitchen, you didn’t answer the door.

You couldn’t.

On July 12, two days after the NAACP put their “N word” to death, we gave my Grandmother her 78^th birthday party. The party was supposed to a surprise party for you and her. Earlier in the morning of the birthday, Grandma and her daughters walked into Mapp Funeral Home. Never a fan of the aesthetically unpleasing, your mother and sisters made the morticians lighten your skin and change your shirt as they readied the body of Grandma’s first child and their only brother, for public viewing.

Unlike the burial of the so-called N-word, your July 13^th eulogy was performed and attended by folks who knew and loved you with little concern about what white folks thought. The greatest emcee alive, your sister Sue, eulogized you in the same Concord Baptist Church where we all were baptized. At the core of Sue’s eulogy were three ideas: 1. “Niggers” do not exist. 2. Perfectly sanitized, wholly responsible black people do not exist. 3. You, her brother, were equally wicked and wonderful as we all are. 

Sue made the church know that you lived a life of badness, not bad meaning good or bad meaning evil, but bad meaning bad. In traditional Old Testament style, she explored justice and recreated in you someone who had prepared themselves for death by finally accepting and earning life in the days before your passing. Sue told the Church the story of your bringing that meat to Grandma’s. She told us how you wrote, “This Mama’s meat.” She told us that you had gotten your finances in order. “Jimmy wasn’t no different than no one this church,” she told the church. “No better or no worse. And that’s what we have to accept. He was a part of our family. He was my brother.”

While Sue stood in the pulpit teaching Niggas about acceptance, I realized that you are the only child of Grandma who is not a teacher. Given your paroled status as a southern Nigga born in late 1940’s, it would have meant more to Grandma if you fought your way into the position of school-teacher. You might not have been any physically healthier since we know that occupations aren’t shields from sex, drugs, cowardice and recklessness. But Grandma would have found far more peace the day of your passing if she knew her only boy and oldest child taught somebody somewhere something before he died.

2.

As Grandma’s youngest child gave the church words to lean on, your mother, the thickest, most present human being either of us have known, folded up at the end of the pew. Grandma cried herself breathless as your bloodless body now lay right over the site of your baptism forty-five years ago. Nigga, if you could have seen Grandma, you would have accepted your beauty and accepted your responsibility to your people and your family. Uncle Jimmy, how I wish I could leave this essay with resilient tears and regretful vengeance over the life you chose. I want to leave this essay valiantly with some textual foreshadowing that my charge to seek acceptance and love, unlike your failure, is inevitable. I want the writing of this letter, the making of this mixtape to prove that I loved you.

But it doesn’t. It can’t.

I needed you not only more than I let you know, Uncle Jimmy; I wanted you to be better than you were but never loved you enough to tell you. I could have shown you by calling you or walking you down Old Morton Rd when I visited in the summer or Christmas. We could have joked and tossed ironic jabs back and forth as Niggas do, harnessing the courage to knock each other’s hustles. I could have finally said, “Uncle Jimmy, Nigga you drowning yourself with that crack and hate. I love you and I need you to live.” You could have told me, “There’s more than one way to drown, li’l Nigga. At least I know I’m under the water.”

But those words were never said. We talked, but we didn’t reckon. Hence, all of our voiced communication created no echo, no meaningful reverberation outside the imagination.

I spent years creating fictive versions of you that were, sadly, more interesting, and more loving than you. More often than I want to admit, Uncle Jimmy, I honestly saw you as “nigger”, a static icon on whom my morality and possibility rested. This is the belabored truth, a confession that is even more wet with indulgent guilt and sadness when I acknowledge that all the of the women in my writing who are based in the characters of Grandma, Mama, Sue and Linda are far less moving, round and paradoxical than the actual women. And this has less to do with my writing than it does about my love and understanding of these human beings. I mean, if Aunt Sue really is my Nigga, why aren’t I writing about her? Even in death, I’m giving you ink you don’t deserve. I loved the women in our family enough to ask them questions. (They loved me enough to answer those questions with questions of their own). Echo. Honestly, I don’t know if I ever asked you any real questions other than the questions I asked about Vietnam when I was ten, Hip Hop when I was around eighteen and about a friend of yours in rehab when I was twenty-four.

My recreating more loving and interesting characters based off of you doesn’t make me despicable; it makes me an artist. What makes me a despicable coward is that I never showed you the art and characters that you inspired. You inspired thousands of paragraphs, hundreds of scenes, but I never even showed you a sentence. I was afraid to know for sure that you thought my art was my hustle,  a shinny indulgent waste of time. But more than that, I didn’t want you to see and know that I wanted you to be better. I didn’t want you to see that it was possible that I saw in the real you someone I never wanted to be, a big “nigger” with two glass jaw, who fought and lost and  forfeited his desire to be a beautiful southern black man.

Near the end of My Name is City, the character Uncle Lonnie Lee creates a documentary about the undocumented workers in the trailer park next to his mother’s house. He, like you, has been a drug addict, a user and abuser of women, an utter disappointment to his mother. After seeing the documentary, Uncle Lonnie Lee basks, for the first time in his adult life, in joy of being recognized for creating something beautiful and lasting in front of his family:

“Uncle Lonnie Lee sat down in Reverend Cherry’s womb chair with his knees spread and his arms dangling between his legs, almost at his ankles. He kept looking down at his hands and twirling the little threads of his sock around his finger. Every few seconds, he’d throw quick glances at Grandma. He never looked at me. Uncle Lonnie Lee looked like a child, not an embarrassed rogue child or a child who fiended for more and more praise. Naw, Uncle Lonnie Lee looked like a little boy who’d lived a life of raw badness. Folk had given up on him ever being decent, and Uncle Lonnie Lee knew it. But now he looked like he’d finally  made somebody who loved him proud. No matter what he’d done in the rest of his life, you’d have to love him and he’d have to love himself if both of you could have seen him sitting in that womb chair with his knees spread and arms dangling to his ankle.”

I should have shown you. We both needed to reckon with the possibility that …

3.

… Nigga is not “nigger” and neither are you, Uncle Jimmy. Nigga, as it is used by many black folks is the awkwardly joyful acceptance that we are neither African, nor conventionally American, neither subhuman or superhuman, neither tragic, nor comic, neither defeated, nor victorious. Nigga is tinged with the awareness that our blackness is both burden and benefit. Nigga is the paradoxical adjustment that almost all black folks in this country have made with the “nigger” within. Nigga is the revelatory apprehension that most black folk in this country have when wondering from whence we came and where we can go. Nigga is not African. Nigga is not Eurpoean. Nigga is American. Nigga is insanely human. Nigga is unashamed of its dirtiness and boastful of being clean. Nigga is not “nigger” and neither are you.

After thirty-two years of life and death in this world with you, all I’m left with is the hope that I am able to love your sisters, your mother, myself and our people more ably and passionately than I was able to love you. And Nigga, I have to hope that even in your death, if I can speak my love, acceptance and active regret for you into the world, it may one day feel true. Today is not that day, but I gotta keep trying to violate that parole with your memory and this dusty repetitive plea. Nigga is not “nigger” and neither are we.  Nigga is not “nigger” and neither were you.

 Uncle Jimmy … I should have loved you better.

Your little Nigga and nephew,

Kiese