Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel.
It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.
The worst of white folk will not be persuaded; they can only be beaten. And when they are beaten, they fight more ferociously. They bruise us. They buy us. That is why we are so tired. That is why we are awakened. We are fighting an enemy we’ve shown exquisite grace, an enemy we’ve tried to educate, coddle, and outrun, an enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die.
Titillation.
I lather my hands in sanitizer and google gun shops in Lafayette County on my phone. I do not believe in guns. I do not believe in prisons. Yet I know I need one if I am to continue living alone in this Mississippi, American town.
I look at the grizzled cotton fields outside my truck window on Highway 6. I want to ask, where am I?
But I know.
This is not home.
If this is home, it is not healthy.
I do not want to humiliate. I do not want to be humiliated. I do not want to kill. I do not want to be killed. I want us to be free. I know what I feel. I know what I’ve felt. I must buy a gun if I continue to live in Oxford, Mississippi, so I cannot continue to live in Oxford, Mississippi, no more. It took way too much Black death to get here, and here is where I’d love to live without guns, without prisons, without monuments of humiliation, without the undervalued expected sacrifice of essential workers, without the worst of white folks. Here is where I’d like to tenderly, honestly, radically live and love with you.
And here, one day, will be Mississippi.
No comments:
Post a Comment