Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
A poetic memoir about coming-of-age in the AIDS era, and its effects on life and art.
"Sneed is an acclaimed reader of her own poetry, and the book has the feeling of live performance. . . . Its strength is in its abundance, its desire for language to stir body as well as mind."—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review
"She is a writer for the future, in that she defies genre."—Hilton Als
"This notable achievement, traveling from youth to adulthood, is a harrowing account of how Sneed transforms violence and pain into an artist's life."—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric
"There's an eerie sense of timeliness to this book, which features prose and poetry by the writer and teacher Pamela Sneed and is largely — though not entirely — about mourning Black gay men killed too soon by a deadly virus."—Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed
"OH MY GOODNESS, it was amazing. I was in tears by the end. What starts off as beautiful memoir evolves into incredibly moving poetry, painful and sweet and lovely."—Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
"Balancing and mixing, with rhyme and reason, love and anger, good and bad, memory and the created present, all to tell the story of a life, a memoir unrestrained, devoid of artificial forms. Honest. Free."—Anjanette Delgado, New York Journal of Books
In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed’s poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears—like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde—whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape.
Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts today's most pressing issues with acerbic wit and audacity. The collection closes with Sneed's reflections on the two pandemics of her time, AIDS and COVID-19, and the disproportionate impact of each on African American communities.
"Riveting, personal, open-hearted, risky and wise."—Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse
" . . . a tour de force about the collision between a coalescing 1980s 'Black lesbian and gay literary and poetic movement' in New York and the onslaught of AIDS."—Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Pamela Sneed's Funeral Diva is deft, defiant, and devastating."—Tommy Pico, author of Feed
"Funeral Diva is urgent and necessary reading to live by. This is writing at its finest. Keep this book close to your heart and soul."—Karen Finley, author of Shock Treatment
"Reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s Zami, Pamela Sneed’s memoir is, in itself, a healing balm, affirming in its truths and honesty. I cannot remember ever reading a book that illustrates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on our community more poignantly than Funeral Diva."—Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy
"Pamela Sneed takes enormous risks in this book. She tells the truth with fierce concentration and an abiding sense of purpose.”—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780872868113 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | City Lights Books |
| Publication date: | 10/27/2020 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 675,041 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, Poetry Project, NYU and Pratt Universityies, Smack Mellon Gallery, The High Line, Performa, Danspace, Performance Space, Joe's Pub, The Public Theater, SMFA, and BRIC. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Read an Excerpt
History
Uncle Vernon was cool, tall, hazel-eyed and brown-skinned. He dressed in latest fashions and wore leather long after the 1960s. Of all of my father’s three brothers, Vernon was the artist—a painter and photographer in a decidedly non-artistic family. To demonstrate his flair for the dramatic and avant-garde, his apartment was stylishly decorated. It showcased a faux brown suede, crushed velvet couch with square rectangular pieces that sectioned off like geography, accentuated by a round glass coffee table with decorative steel legs. It was pulled together by a large ’70s organizer and stereo which nearly covered the length of an entire wall. As a final touch, dangling from the shelves was a small collection of antique long-legged dolls. This was my Uncle and memories of his apartment were never so clear as the day I headed to his apartment with my first boyfriend, Shaun Lyle.
It was the ’80s, late spring, the year king of soul Luther Vandross debuted his blockbuster album, Never Too Much, with moving songs about love. If ever there were times in my life I felt free, unsaddled by life’s burdens and experienced in the words of an old cliché, “winds of possibility,” it had to be the time with Shaun Lyle heading upstairs to my Uncle’s house as Luther Vandross blared soulfully out from the stereo, “A house is not a home.”
Of course Shaun was not the first or last person with whom I’d experienced feelings or sensations of unbridled freedom. Like seasons, freedom came in cycles, like in fall, in college with no money, chumming around with my best friend and school buddy Michael. We spent late afternoons wandering Manhattan’s East and West Village, searching for cheap drinks and pizza at happy hour specials, ecstatic in our poverty. Michael was a blond Irish Catholic punk rocker from Boston. We met when I was an RA at The New School’s 34th Street dorms at the YMCA. They were narrow tiny rooms like closets and some floors served as a hostel for homeless men. Punk music blared from Michael’s room. I would knock on the door commanding, “Turn it down.” Eventually, we united over the fact he put a towel under the door to block smells of weed smoke that frequently leaked from his room into the hallway. Michael and I were both writers, astute critics, and teacher’s pets. In fiction writing class, we formed a power block. No piece of writing done by another student escaped our scathing critique. Professors deferred to us. “Michael, Pamela, what do you think?” We sat next to each other with arms crossed. A student writer friend confessed to me later, “I was terrified of you two.” We were obsessed with Toni Morrison. I will never forget the last lines of Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, which Jane Lazarre, our fiction teacher made us read out loud as a class together.
“And Nel looked up at the trees,” said “Sula, girl, girl, girl, all the time I thought it was Jud I was missing, but it was you.”
Jane’s eyes welled up as did mine and the whole class cried. Sula was a story of women bonding and friendship and longing and loss. “It’s a truly feminist novel,” Jane would declare. Feminism was her favorite topic. She was straight woman with kids. She had grey hair and admitted she smoked pot. She was so cool, she’d write things on the board and say out loud, “Oh I can’t spell.”
Michael and I were both work study students. We covered for each other. He would call me after a night of drinking and partying and say, “I just can’t do it. I can’t go in. Will you go?”
“Sure,” I’d say.
One day Michael and I skipped school and hung out near the entrance of 72nd Street and Central Park West. I stared at a figure across the street in a café. “There she is,” I said.
“Who?” Michael, asked.
“Toni Morrison, and beside her is June Jordan,” I said.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “No way. That can’t be them. How can you see that?”
“Yes, it is.” We investigated. Sure enough, sitting beside a low fence of the café was Toni Morrison with June Jordan in dark sunglasses. I approached. Michael lagged behind, astonished. “I love your work, Ms. Morrison,” I said. At the time I wasn’t such a huge fan of June Jordan. I’m not sure if the reason I disliked her had to do with the fact she had tried to pick up my girlfriend Cheryl while visiting/lecturing at The New School or perhaps I wasn’t ready for her message. Knowing what I know now—if only I could go back through a time capsule and tell her how much it meant for me to hear her in person. Long after she would die of cancer and wrote the words in dialect “G’wan, G’wan!” telling u,s a new generation, to go on. Long before the collapse of the twin towers, before the massacre of so many gay men from AIDS, wars against brown bodies in Iraq, Harlem, and Afghanistan, before the growing epidemics of cancer, rape, police violence, domestic violence, mass incarceration, depression, demise of our pop stars, she said to a class at The New School in the true form of a prophet, speaking of the U.S., “This country needs a revolution.”
Maybe it was June Jordan like Audre Lorde who taught me the power of what words could do. In retrospect, she opened the doors and flung open the windows to my consciousness, like when I heard Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise,” when I was nine years old. It awakened me. Just recently, with the terrible results of the 2016 presidential election, with Donald Trump elected, I can see June Jordan in sweet smiling profile, reciting as resistance, “ Poem About My Rights.”
Michael and I had many other adventures. We frequented Lower East Side Clubs like the Pyramid and The World. The Pyramid was a dive on Avenue A near Tompkins Square Park and famous for its vodka and lime specials; where some nights vodka gimlets were 2 for 1. One night I was asked to dance by a handsome young white-skinned man. I learned he was from Brazil. When the dance ended, I walked away.
“OMG,” Michael said. “Who was that guy you were dancing with?”
“I don’t know,” I answered and shrugged.
“He’s beautiful, “Michael exclaimed. “Go back and get him.” Michael had a thing for Latin men.
I danced back over. I yelled over the music, “My friend wants to meet you.” I introduced him to Michael, and the rest was history. We learned he was visiting from Brazil and on vacation in New York for two weeks. It was his first time to New York. He spoke little English. He was bisexual. He and Michael had a two-week affair and fell in love. His name was Karim.
Six months later, after Karim had returned to Brazil, Michael and I were in Tompkins Square Park. It was the time right before they’d begun to gentrify the park. They started to impose curfews and later the police occupied it in a standoff with local residents. Michael and I were swinging on the swings. He had a container of beer masked in a paper bag. We were discussing Toni Morrison. Out of the blue Michael said, “I want to go to Brazil and get Karim.”
“Sure,” I said, just like that, no questions asked. We saved all of our money and six months later ended up in Rio. It was our first stop in a month-long trip to Brazil. Our mission was to get Karim and bring him back to New York.
I had only ever been out of the country once before. In Boston while still at Northeastern University, I met Annette. I’d been invited by her to go with her and her family to Jamaica. It was an exciting and new endeavor getting my first passport. It was also exciting when I received the blue square document, too square and big to fit in my wallet. Annette was mixed race, Jamaican born, with brown skin and green eyes. I was working with the African American Institute at Northeastern to assist in recruiting more Black students. I traveled to New York with a Black man who looked like Sidney Poitier. He was dark and very proper, from the Islands as well. We stayed at a high-rise, budget hotel on 34th St. It was far from luxury, but you could see buildings and some rooftops of New York City. From the window you could also see people bustling on the street below. It was hot, there was a steel beige air conditioner in our meeting room.
The pool of Black applicants came. I noticed Annette immediately, she was pretty and exotic. I didn’t have a language then for attraction. Annette looked at me and shouted “That mole.” She was referring to a prominent black mole on the left side of my nose, a beauty mark. Annette also had a mole in the exact same place. We bonded over our shared feature. Later, I’d notice former President Barack Obama also has a mole also in the exact same place. I see myself in him, in his long elegant stature. I imagine sometimes, not knowing my origins, he is my brother. Annette ended up enrolling at Northeastern. We became friends. We were both pot smokers. Annette’s appetite for it was much larger than mine. She stayed most days in a near coma. I suspected then she was hiding something, always numbing herself, but we never talked about it. She never talked about her feelings. I did learn something which surprised me then, that she had a white boyfriend and expressed disdain for Black men. Still, she was fun in other ways and at the end of one school year, she invited me to Jamaica with her family. I was introduced to many new concepts. We stayed at a resort condo and her family had a cook and a housecleaner.
In Jamaica, I learned of and tasted many new foods like breadfruit, ackee, and salt fish. I was also introduced to a tropical climate and encountered for the first time the phenomenon of a flying cockroach. It flew through the air like a mutant ninja beetle. I heard of new names and places like Negril, and I went swimming in Dunge River Falls in Montego Bay. I tasted curry goat for the first time. I bought a large print dashiki and wore it to a family event and beautiful dark Jamaican man stared at me. On the beach together, Annette and I met a young Jamaican guy who sold us weed and wove it into baskets to hide, unravel and then smoke when we got home. This young Jamaican guy was also a delight to tourists because he knew how to eat or swallow light bulbs. I’m completely serious. The trip to Jamaica was life changing. The turquoise waters, the tropical air, the warm climate, winds blowing gently, the sun. I came to crave it all of my life; it was the very beginning of my wanderlust and appetite for freedom.
At the hotel in Rio with Michael, I was rereading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon which informs an unpublished memoir I wrote called My Soul Went With her. It is titled after Winnie Mandela’s memoir Part of My Soul Went with Him written in the apartheid years when she and her freedom fighter husband Nelson are separated, and he has gone underground to evade capture. Song of Solomon uses the mythology of the African runaways who could fly, but my story is based on a mother who left trying to escape an abusive marriage and me imagining as she takes flight, runs away for freedom, a part of my soul is going with her. I imagine for all slaves left behind, forced into separations, part of their souls too went with the runaways, the dead, the lynched. I imagine a character in Chimamanda Adichies, Half of a Yellow Sun set during the Nigerian Biafra war, and a traumatized mother carries her dead sons head hidden in a calabash. Besides the stories of the Africans who could fly what I remember from Song of Solomon was the character Hagar, who had fallen in love with Milkman, who decides if she couldn’t have his love, she would have his hate. I also remember the character Pilate, Hagar’s mom, who wears a hat and sucks straw through her teeth. She is mostly silent, but when Hagar dies, she breaks her silence, walks into a church, and screams out, “Mercy, I want mercy.” That scene is resonant today as so many Black mothers have to bury their children prematurely because of police and state violence. It’s like our collective grief as a people is being expressed. Trayvon Martin, Emit Till, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland… We are all Pilate and the real life Mamie Till in 1955 looking into the coffin of her murdered fourteen-year-old son , his face battered beyond recognition shouting up to the rafters, “I want mercy.”
Karim met Michael and me in Rio. Initially we weren’t sure if he’d even show up. He was traveling from his residence in Brasília. While waiting in the hotel, I serenaded Michael with Nina Simone songs. Michael always shook his head appreciatively when I did this. “You’re Nina,” he’d say.
Michael spoke Spanish and it helped us navigate the Brazilian Portuguese as both languages are closely related. In the first few days, Michael and I watched the sunset on a beach in Rio. We were obsessed with caipirinhas and the beach at Ipanema as we’d heard it in the song, “The Girl From Ipanema.” Though Michael was a White Irish Catholic punk-rocker and I, a 6’ 2” Black girl who’d grown up in the church, he and I like lovers had begun to resemble each other, had sifted into each other like sand.
There was a funny moment between us when I noticed that all the women on the beach in Rio wore G-strings and bikinis and I wanted one. We went to a bikini shop. I tried on a G-string and stepped out of the dressing room. Michael’s face turned flush red. “My god,” Pamela he said, embarrassed. “You look amazing,” but I noticed he was shy to look.
When we were giving up on Karim and left the hotel for dinner one night, we saw Karim walking toward us. We reunited and spent weeks travelling around Brazil. Karim took to us to his home. It was city nothing like I’d expected Brazil to be. We spent a few nights there snorting pure cocaine. Instead of making you speedy, it made you numb. Whitney Houston was popular at the time and every five minutes she played on the radio. The announcer yelled excitedly, “And Whitney Houssssson,” omitting the T.
Our trip was successful; months later Karim relocated to be with Michael. He enrolled in film school. During this time, Michael and I eventually outgrew each other, but moments of freedom came again and again, like the summer I spent with a lover, wearing Gucci sunglasses and her driving a Mercedes convertible through North Carolina’s back woods and hidden roads, imagining paths slaves once traveled, pursuing liberty. Top down, wind behind us, her one hand on the steering wheel, other in mine, we felt contented as we listened to hip hop sounds of the reigning soul priestess Mary J. Blige. In a piece I wrote called Motherland and Chitlin Chimichanga, I imagine the intersection of Latin and African American culture, the presence of Black blood all over America. In the past now and forever there is black blood.
“In North Carolina looking at trees in a forest, you can still taste, smell, and feel remnants of black blood. Driving past newly rekindled and restored plantations you can still imagine crimes that occurred, imagine hierarchies that defined us for centuries, house niggahs, field niggahs, overseer and master.”
The main character of Motherland is a designer from North Carolina searching for her Black identity, who would like me would become deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis.
There are ways I’ve come to crave Blackness like never before
search its eyes for some semblance of me
a way I watch Black shows on television
listen to the rhythm of our speech endless amounts of shucking and jiving
a way I’ve studied those Black male musical singing groups like the Temptations
fascinated by steps we’ve devised
a way I watch young Black & Puerto Rican girls on the block near my house
the way they’ve fastened gold to their ears, wear name belts
I saw this young Black girl sashaying down the street the other day
in a shirt that looked like the American flag
the way I hear the clipped and musical patois of West Indian women
and want to call some of them mother
the way I need to watch how our hips curve
our bodies move perfectly when we dance
the way I’ve gone to some offbeat dance club
on a rare occasion and heard someone playing drums along to the music
then an updated disco remixed version of Patti Labelle’s You are My Friend
and me getting the holy ghost
feeling as if it was early 1991 all over again
all my brothers were still alive
they really all didn’t just die on me
I really did belong once to somewhere, something
and no matter how much I grow, attempt to move on
I never stop thinking of never stop missing those men
their hands
beautiful black hands
hands that shaped America’s soil
black hands
unseen hands
creative forces
purveyors of style
masterminds who’ve made much
of music and fashion what it is today
black black beautiful hands
working like miners in the mines of South Africa
like slaves to whom I owe almost everything
men like nameless and tireless women
working every day in the country sides and fields of Nicaragua and Mexico
Those masked fighters those men, like women and girls barely bloomed
once called them Sandino’s daughters
who risked everything to fight in a war against dictatorship
went against tradition left their families, everything
to create futures for their children
beautiful, black black queer hands
I know I’m just a designer
I shouldn’t know and feel all of these things
but I do read do travel
and Sebastian says, I could make a great leader.
On the topic of freedom and runaways, there was a winter, a whole season spent with a lover. We drove her beat up Volkswagen to escape the city, like runaways hiding out upstate at bed and breakfast for ten dollars a night. We did nothing except eat, make love, and hold hands as we stared into a warm fireplace.
Years later, long after I first began to pen this story, I travelled to Ghana and met Joshua. He was twenty years old. He was my guide. We sat on a hilltop overlooking the beach, and kissed as he blew weed smoke into my mouth. Someone rode a bicycle on the wet sand. In Ghana, Joshua and I travelled up to Aburi Gardens, its tall trees formed a holy corridor. Afterwards, we sat in the red dirt waiting for a tro-tro, a dilapidated mini-van, and shared a bushel of small bananas. From the paths near Aburi Gardens we could look out over all of Accra and see tin roofs and tiny hills.
There weren’t many words between Joshua and me. Perhaps we both wanted pieces of each other’s identity. We were from very different cultures. When I wanted to run an errand, he’d say things in the popular phrase, “Go and come,” which meant finish your business, come here, stay here and be with me, but we did share a common language when we packed and boarded the tro-tro. He negotiated prices with the driver in Twi or Gha. We held hands as we sped by images of Ghanaian fields. We were silent. Joshua took me to the beach at Kokrobite, outside Accra and we’d swim. We were somewhere in the hills in Burkina Faso, it looked the way you’d imagined Africa, tropical, with large palm leafs.
In a small hot room, he tore my bra off and we fucked. “I like your sex,” he’d say, which was his way of saying he liked the way I moved with and beneath him.
There were times too with Joshua when the outside disappeared and it was just he and I in a room somewhere in West Africa fucking. There was a time too when it got serious, after I’d left the first time. He would call me and say “Come home.” He knew that for African Americans there was wound there, a wound that had us searching all over Africa for an identity, a place to belong. As a guide, I wonder if Joshua was trained to know there was a wound in me, that in general for African Americans home was a fractured place. Time after time he’d seen the desperate looks in African American eyes, those mythologies about Africa being a homeland that made us bend down and kiss the tarmac when we arrived. Maybe there was something Joshua knew when he took me for the first time to Cape Coast Castle, the slave fort. I am not a religious person, not into ancestral worship, but I went immediately to the water banks near Cape Coast and began to anoint myself with water and pray. Joshua knew to be silent and watch.
For those who haven’t seen Cape Coast Castle, it is a slave fort, the dungeons or warehouse where the British and Portuguese first held sugar and then slaves, thousands of them before being shipped to the new world, parts of the Caribbean and America. There are slave forts all along the coast of West Africa, just as plantations are lined along the Mississippi. In Ghana, Cape Coast is among the most famous and a huge tourist attraction. It’s a huge sprawling castle and underneath are dungeons where slaves were held. There are different dungeons for male and female slaves and rebels. They are dark, dank rooms where a guide points out fingernail scratches in the wall where captured Africans clawed to get out. The guide also points to the window high above where food was dropped down into the dungeon where slaves stood knee deep in vomit, feces, and urine. In the last part of the tour, you are shown the door of no return, where you look from the dungeons onto the Atlantic ocean. Once slaves stepped through this door, they would never see their homeland again. Maybe Joshua knew a lot more than what he actually said when he took me weeks after Cape Coast to an African Village for a naming ceremony to receive my African name. It might have been a heist and a hoax gone wrong, because I was supposed to receive my name in a little ceremony, pay and go, but when they dressed me up in African garb, and the Village gathered around me and the Village priestess said, “Thank you God for returning our daughter from across the ocean,” and said to me, “You are home now, you will never be a stranger and sleep in a hotel again,” something in me like rock split apart. I started to cry as did she and we couldn’t stop.
I know Mandela used to do that—embrace African Americans. In a simple gesture he extended his arms and said, “Welcome home,” and that embrace could make men weep. I do believe contrary to all intellectual beliefs, there is something spiritual in returning. There is something that happened to my soul, making that zig zag trek across the ocean. There is something about being a survivor. There is something in my D.N.A. There is something monumental at least there was for me, standing in Cape Coast Castle, looking from the door of no return onto the Atlantic ocean. There is something about seeing the first leg of our real journey and the enormous ocean we crossed.
Like Alex Haley in the film Roots and finding his people, I resisted every urge to throw myself down on the ground and shout, “I found you,” with all the tears and snot and the holy spirit jerking my body all around like the way it did to church folks. There is something about passing through these huge newly constructed gateways, memorial arches on a beach in Ouidah that symbolize the Door of No Return, and next to it, The Door of Return, like arms extended to all of those descendants of slaves dispersed into the diaspora. It was part of Kwame Nkrumah’s dream, to unite a fractured and broken Black people. There is something too that made me feel victorious, that despite all odds we have triumphed. As Audre Lorde once said of women, of lesbians, of people of color, “We were never meant to survive,” but we have and thrived. Like many, I never expected to feel anything at Cape Coast, some don’t. Some think it’s a tourist trap, but it changed me. In fact if my life were divided into halves, I would label them pre and post Ghana.
I had stayed in Ghana for one month. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans happened while I was away. I watched horrified from a hotel room on television how a tidal wave of water rushed through a building and trapped a young Black woman in the basement. Her head bobbed up and down, she gasped for air. I also saw while staying in the hotel a film about organ harvesting and poor people who are tricked into selling their organs for profit. The film starred a young British actor of African descent Chiwetel Ejiofor who would go on to become the star of the American film made by a British director, Steve McQueen, Twelve Years a Slave. The hotel played the mini-series Roots on rotation, about Kunta Kinte captured from his African homeland and sold into bondage as an American slave. In this way, the hotel was peddling to tourists an identity, or a nostalgia for the past, creating connections where there may be none. Many Black Africans do not consider African Americans to be their family or long lost tribe and actually resent this type of thinking.
After meeting and traveling with Joshua, I returned home. My worldview had changed considerably. The first film I saw upon returning was the remake of King Kong. It was offensive to me, the fact that Hollywood would adapt and release a film with very racist origins. Though couched in science fiction, it was about a Black man (a monster) who was infatuated with a white woman, Naomi Watts as Faye Wray. In 2005, this film was regressive. I was appalled as were several Black men in my neighborhood who saw it. I decided to write a satire as a protest of that film titled Kong. What I saw after returning from Ghana was Kong’s voyage, stolen from Africa, lured, drugged with chloroform, chained, made a slave, loaded unto a ship, a journey from his homeland through the middle passage to America. “This Kong,” I wrote, “you want to be free.” What became evident to me was not only the racist caricature and configuration of white men’s fear, but Africa’s displaced and missing son.
The only saving grace for Peter Jackson’s King Kong was that Kong was not just a racist fantasy or byproduct. He was resurrected in a post 9/11 world. In Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Kong is an American soldier, handling business in the jungle. He works on behalf of justice. In the famous scene where he is shot down from on top of the Empire State Building by ironically tiny planes, we are meant to see America’s vulnerability. He is the American people, a Great Goliath being slain by the young David. Kong is America’s innocence.
When I left Africa for the first time and returned four months later, Joshua had become a man. When we first reunited I teased him and asked, “Where’s my little boy?” I saw his shirt sleeves rolled up, the muscles and veins in his arms strong. We were in a room with a thatched roof, on the beach next to Cape Coast Castle, the slave fort. “Come here. Move here. Be with me. We can travel,” he said. “Travel,” was the word that got me. I was tempted by the idea of leaving everything behind, going with him, traveling, but I was ultimately just passing through. “Your eyes don’t say forever,” he’d say. I’d quickly look away as if caught.
At the beginning of this story, I spoke of Shaun Lyle, whom I met in the season of Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.” In the end, he doesn’t qualify as a real boyfriend, but he was a first for me. I’d known him long before he’d ever noticed me and long before that fateful night we kissed on a balcony overlooking the city. I’d already spotted him. I was a freshman in junior high school and he was a senior. Like spring, Shaun arrived late in high school years. The first time I spotted him he stood outside on the top steps of my school. He wore a fashionable brown tweed tailored suit, which was uncustomary and sophisticated for a student in our small town. His face was turned away in profile smoking a cigarette. He resembled the Romans or a Greek God, a bronzed statue you’d see turning pages of an ancient history book, face turned away in profile with a sharp European nose, only Shaun was Black, mixed race, with caramel skin, hazel eyes, and hair a mosh of soft brown ringlets. He hadn’t noticed me, but I’d noticed him and his beauty. I was deeply desirous and promised myself, one day he’d know me.
In fact, from that day forward, I went out of my way to walk downstairs in the high school to the ground floor near senior lockers, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I prayed our eyes would meet and truly he’d see me. Besides being in different classes, we were in different leagues. I’m sure in his eyes I was some gangly young freshman, no one who could be of consequence and merit to him. So based on these facts, neither of us could have guessed he’d be the man introducing me to destiny, would be the vehicle I drove and ultimately arrived at myself. He was my introduction to a new world.
Shaun was that beautiful, but he had problems which had to do with family and history. There were scandals and rumors that preceded and followed wherever he went. His family, the Lyle’s, were the most notorious of our small town and surrounding ones. Some of the problems had to do with his mother, who was also beautiful, a white porcelain-colored Black woman with the elegance and chiseled features of an Egyptian Nefertiti. It was suspected she was addicted to prescription painkillers, often in car crashes, and spent months out of work, living like a reclusive heiress. She seemed interested in men only for what they gave and had the erect posture of a kept woman. I felt there was something incestuous between Shaun and her, never actualized but an uncomfortable union. There was also his sister Roberta who’d been in and out of jail, notorious for hooking up with criminal men. Then, there was Shaun’s slightly younger brother, Scott, who might have been beautiful, but in stark contrast to his flamboyant family was remote and lifeless. Shaun, in his early t...
Table of Contents
1 History 1
2 Ila 29
3 Funeral Diva 38
4 Never Again 62
5 Untitled 65
6 Ruth Vick 67
7 There Is Me/There Is My Mother 70
8 Mysti 73
9 Sidewalk Rage 75
10 You Can't Get Out from Under 77
11 Twizzlers 79
12 Parable of the Sower 83
13 Parable of the Sower 2 85
14 Bey 89
15 Uprising 91
16 Post-Election 94
17 Rope-A-Dope 96
18 Silence=Death 98
19 For Donald Woods 102
20 Hold Tight 104
21 Survivor 107
22 Citizen 109
23 Circus Acts 113
24 Black Panther 117
25 Mask 120
26 Prophecy 123
27 Born Frees 128
28 A New Story 133
29 Marked Safe 135
30 When the Rainbow is Enuf 138
31 A Tale of Two Pandemics 141
32 I Can't Breathe 144
33 Why I Cling to Flowers 146
