Born a Houseguest

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (W.E.B Du Bois, 1903)

My great grandfathers’ blood fertilized the South Carolina soil where rice, indigo, cotton, and tobacco thrived. Their sweat is mixed with the mortar that served as the foundation of plantations and statehouses closed to them and prisons that were constructed to house them. Their tears and moans made music and art and poetry. Yet a vocal, not so minority, minority has the nerve to patronize, condescend, insult and murder us — the heirs of those who labored to build this country. They call the police on us (in what can be assumed as hope that we are gunned down, tased, beaten, or put in a choke hold) for breathing in their presence, then call us paranoid. But we are the problem, they say — a pox on their house. But it’s my house too, full of bones, terror and injustice. I claim it. It is mine. I admit it though I don’t like it all the time. In fact, I hate this house as much as I love it. The last several years have confirmed it.

Two years ago, after having a fretful night filled with dreams that a misogynistic, vitriolic bigot was the new president of the United States, I woke up to a dreary, rainy morning with slate grey skies that matched my mood and found that my nightmare was a reality. America is as I thought it was; its people are who I thought they were. If the last two years prove anything, it is that only a sliver of thread binds us together. The 2018 midterm election, for all of its progressive victories confirmed it.

Virulent racists weren’t shunned, ostracized or humiliated in their quest for power. They basked in their myopia. Their president and supporters emboldened them and their hate-filled rhetoric. Some were barely defeated by the slimmest of margins. Others won on unapologetic and overt white nationalist agendas. Still more fought a winning battle to corrupt the electoral process and suppress the votes of black, brown, and poor people using tactics we haven’t seen since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law — absentee and mail -in ballots weren’t counted, voting machines were either not functional or not delivered to polling locations, polling locations themselves were moved or closed altogether, and draconian policies were put in place regarding identification cards, signatures, and exact name matches.

So yes, today, I am on the verge of imploding. But I won’t. I can’t. I have to keep it together, keep me together. I am called upon to be respectable, to not embarrass or cause discomfort. There is responsibility in representation. It is a Sisyphean burden to carry. But I do. I tread lightly and politely and make few waves. All the while, I plot my escape because I am exhausted having to claim ownership for my foremothers, for me, for my son and for future grandchildren. Here, in my own house, my own country, there are places I wouldn’t dare go, don’t want to go, and people who wouldn’t want me there anyway.

I am like an unwelcome guest who has overstayed her welcome. It doesn’t matter that I can trace my father’s family back to 1837, not by way of Ellis Island in the late 19th/ early 20th century, but in the bellies of slave ships. Yet, day after day, I see indignity upon indignity; people like me are imprisoned, sick, and being gunned down in the streets. Every day I see us victimized and villainized in the same breath. People who look like me and who have histories like mine are still demanding recognition of their humanity after centuries of helping to build this nation— for free. I am weary, and as Mother Fannie exclaimed, “Sick and tired of being sick and tired.” I need different, a different place sans baggage for my own psychic survival. But, my desire to abandon everything here feels like betrayal to the ancestors. Then I tell myself that they fought for me to have choices.

So I contemplate leaving and being free of the burden of being African American in America for just a bit because there is something to be said about being a stranger in a strange land and not a stranger in my homeland. I am proud to be Black, but if “this land is my land…from California to the New York Islands,” I give it back for a while. Its ghosts, its pathology, its psychosis, I give back.

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