Seeing Double

By William Jelani Cobb
SeeingBlack.com Roving Critic

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You slip into a cool sanctuary on a Southern August day and almost make your way to the back before you see her. Circumstance has put her on the front row in a pink floral dress, not quite looking bereaved, but more like she was trying to solve a calculus equation in her head. You say no under your breath and grunt the way your old man used to when his arthritis was acting up. And you know that this will be worse than you imagined.

She was there, trying to bridge the irreconcilable gulf between what she had sweated and pushed into this world and what lay embalmed before her. On the front row beside her were two girlfriends, because they had been to young to be wives. Her younger son, 19 years old and dressed in all white, speaks a single line of scripture: Proverbs 10, verse 2. Brief eulogy for brief life. He speaks those words and then passes his older brother and his first cousin who lays in a casket beside him and then he collapses. The preacher lays down a tired prayer, like he has a template for prematurely dead black men. This is a panoramic view of our common wretchedness and you want to be anywhere but there—in church, on a weekday, giving up wasted lamentations. Circumstance is this: two black men, neighbors of yours, young cats with whom you talked stuff and lifted weights were found shot in the head in an abandoned building.

Their lives merited several sentences, but no adjectives, in an Associated Press report. Police have suspicions, but no leads; their story ends with a cliché: suspected to be drug-related. You sit there, void and unpowerful, thinking that this is some Etheridge Knight poem. You are full with anger that goes deeper than your bones and want nothing of god-damned hymns, no cursed prayers, no useless solace. No 19 year-old eulogists and no mothers in floral dresses doing math problems on the front row. No girlfriends in mourning because the deceased were too young to have wives.

In a moment you move from anger to despair and worry for the future of your clan who do not know that a people who slay their own youth are damned to perish. You start thinking philosophically, like: What is a life if not a collection of days with a theme and if you're lucky you figure the theme out before the final credits roll. But more often it's like the movies where the audience sees what's coming long before the lead on the screen is wise to what is in store. And you wish that the two in front of you had been given a saga, not a short, an epic instead of a novella.

This is a piece that was turned in late because on the day of my deadline I went to a double funeral for two black men, aged 22 and 27, and couldn't mess with a computer when I got home.

If you invest your faith in the statistical palm-reading of actuaries, you know that a black man at age 34 is way overdue for a mid-life crisis. This piece was supposed to be about the reflections of a brother on turning 34 years and 8 days old, about losing a step on your baseline drive and shaving an inch off your vertical. This was supposed to be about hoping that you've gained wisdom enough to merit the colony of gray hairs—eleven of them now—that have taken root in your beard. About having a body that will do most of what it once could, you just have to ask more politely. About being old enough to have loved, lost and then loved some more. It was about wondering what your old man, gone ten years now, would make of you these days and asking yourself what he was doing at your age. You have his same Field Negro frame and Sonny Liston-sized hands, only you remember the distant past for a living and he lived to put distance between himself and the past. You sweat tenure committees and publication deadlines and he wrestled with the world for what it would relinquish to a black boy with three grades worth of book-learning.

And you could really trip off this kind of shit, wondering what it meant to be 34 in 1953, until you recognize that self-reflection is a sucker's game and what you know is this: being 34 in 2003 means being twelve years older than what lays before you in a premature coffin. It means that your people will not live to count gray hairs in beards, to talk about the feats of which they were capable "back in the day," they will not live to ask these kinds of questions.

On the way out you pass two other young brothers, you nod and say peace, but even here, at this hour, they are practicing how to be hard. You know you could hem them both up, because 34 or not, you got a field-negro frame and Sonny Liston-sized hands: you could do that and tell them that you know that deep down they are scared so you don't gotta front for me. You could tell them that you are in the audience and you know how this flick ends. You could tell them that Proverbs 10, verse 2 reads: Ill-gotten treasures are of no value, but righteousness delivers from death. But instead, you betray your people and maintain decorum. Outside you reflect on this bitter truth:

The hustle is interminable. The preacher is threadbare. The outside is hot and the church is cool. The cousins are their own eternal company, ride or die. And the world keeps spinning, like a set of Sprewell's rims.

-- September 12, 2003

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