You Have the Rite Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Me and the boy wear the same shoe size.
He wants a pair of
Air Jordan 4s for Christmas.
I buy them,
and then I steal them from his closet,
like a twisted Grinch-themed
episode of “Black-ish.”
(Laughter)
The kicks are totems to my youth.
I wear them like mercury
on my Black man feet.
I can’t get those young
freedom days back fast enough.
Last time I was really fast I was 16,
outrunning a doorman
on the Upper East Side.
He caught me vandalizing his building,
not even on some artsy stuff,
just … stupid.
Of all the genders,
boys are the stupidest.
(Laughter)
Sixteen was a series of
barely getting away
and never telling my parents.
I assume that my son
is stewarding this tradition well.
Sixteen was “The Low End Theory”
and Marvin Gaye on repeat.
Sixteen is younger than Trayvon
and older than Emmett Till.
At the DMV, my boy’s in line to officially
enter his prime suspect years:
young, brown and behind the wheel,
a moving semaphore, signaling
the threat of communities from below.
On top of the food chain,
humans have no natural predator,
but America plays out something
genetically embedded and instinctual
in its appetite for the Black body.
America guns down Black bodies
and then walks around them,
bored,
like laconic lions next to
half-eaten gazelles,
bloody lips …
“America and the Black Body”
on some Nat Geo shit.
Well, he passes his road test at the DMV.
He does this strut C-Walk
broken “Fortnite” thing
on the way in to finish his paperwork,
true joy and calibrated cool
under the eye of my filming iPhone,
the victory dance of someone
who has just salvaged a draw.
He’s earned this win, but he’s so 16
he can’t quite let his body be fully free.
When he’s three,
I’m in handcuffs in downtown Oakland.
Five minutes ago, I was illegally parked.
Now I’m in the back of a squad car,
considering the odds that I’m going to die
here, 15 minutes away from my son
who expects that in 18 minutes,
daddy’s gonna pick him up from preschool.
There are no pocket-size cameras
to capture this moment, so.
I learned a lot of big words
when I was 16 getting ready for the SAT,
but none of them come to me now.
In the police car, the only thing
that really speaks is my skin.
I know this:
I was parked on a bus zone
on 12th and Broadway,
running to the ATM on the corner.
I pull the cash out just as
a police car pulls up behind me,
give him the “Aw shucks, my bad,”
that earnest Black man face.
He waits till I’m back in the car
and then hits the siren,
takes my license with his hand on the gun,
comes back two minutes later, gun drawn,
another patrol car now, four cops now,
my face on the curb,
hands behind my back, shackled.
I’m angry and humiliated,
only until I’m scared and then sad.
I smell like the last gasp
before my own death.
I think how long the boy will wait
before he realizes
that daddy is not on his way.
I think his last barely
formed memory of me
will be the story of how
I never came for him.
I try to telepathically say goodbye.
The silence brings me no peace.
The quiet makes it hard to rest.
In the void there is anger mushrooming
in the moss at the base of my thoughts,
a fungus growing on the spine
of my freedom attempts.
I’m free from all except contempt,
the spirit of an unarmed civilian
in the time of civil unrest,
no peace, just Marvin Gaye falsettos
arching like a broken-winged sparrow,
competing against the empty sirens,
singing the police.
Apparently some cat from Richmond
had a warrant out on him,
and when the cop says my name to dispatch,
dude doesn’t hear “Marc Joseph,”
he hears “Mike Johnson.”
I count seven cars and 18 cops
on the corner now,
a pride around a pound of flesh.
By the grace of God,
I’m not fed to the beast today.
Magnanimously, the first cop
makes sure to give me a ticket
for parking in a bus zone,
before he sets me free.
The boy is 16.
He has a license to drive
in the hollow city,
enough body to fill my shoes.
I have grey in my beard,
and it tells the truth.
He can navigate traffic
in the age of autonomous vehicles.
You know, people say “the talk,”
like the thing happens just once,
like my memory’s been erased
and my internet is broken,
like I can’t read today’s martyred name,
like today’s the day
that I don’t love my son enough
to tell him, “Bro, I really
don’t care about your rights, yo.
Your mission is to get home to me.
Live to tell me the story, boy.
Get home to me.”
Today’s talk is mostly
happening in my head
as he pulls onto the freeway
and Marvin Gaye comes on the radio.
I’m wearing the boy’s shoes,
and the tune in my head is the goodbye
that I almost never said,
a goodbye the length of a requiem,
a kiss, a whiff of his neck,
the length of a revelation
and a request flying high
in the friendly sky
without ever leaving the ground.
My pain is a walking bass line,
a refrain, placated stress
against the fading baseline.
Listen, this is not to be romantic,
but to assert a plausible scenario
for the existential moment.
Driving while Black
is its own genre of experience.
Ask Marvin.
It may not be the reason
why you sing like an angel,
but it surely has something to do with
why heaven bends to your voice.
The boy driving,
the cop in the rearview mirror
is a ticket to ride or die.
When you give a Black boy “the talk,”
you pray he is of the faction
of the fraction that survives.
You pitch him the frequency
of your telepathic goodbye,
channel the love sustained
in Marvin’s upper register
under his skullcap.
Black music at its best
is an exploded black hole
responding to the call
of America at its worst.
Strike us down, the music lives,
dark, like tar or tobacco
or cotton in muddy water.
Get home to me, son.
Like a love supreme, a god as love,
a love overrules,
feathers for the angelic lift
of the restless dead,
like a theme for trouble man,
or a 16-year-old boy, free to make
mistakes and live through them,
grow from them,
holy, holy, mercy, mercy me,
mercy,
mercy.
Thank you.
(Applause)