After he was laid off from the factory, my father worked as a janitor and all-around utility man at a local pharmacy. I saw how the white owner of the store eyed him. The man valued my father’s epic strength. But at the same time he infantilized my father. I even heard him once say to my father that he acted like a boy. I half expected my father to lay him in his tracks and prayed he wouldn’t do so. Yet I was angry that he hadn’t done so to preserve his sense of dignity and manhood. This same black man who was so tough on us kids didn’t say a word. It gave me a hint of the psychic costs of black manhood, of thrusting and parrying with the cold facts of white dominance that hushed one’s rage and yet encouraged it to flow against one’s own family. I suspect that my father’s suppressed rage found an outlet when he encouraged his sons to box each other, with gloves on but no headgear, to the point where we bloodied each other’s noses in our ghetto basement. This was a poor black man’s therapy.
At age seven, on our family trip south, I imagined what the word nigger might make my father do. At age fifteen, I saw in the pharmacy what it did to him. The word didn’t just exist in the air, to be brushed away like a gnat because he knew better. It resided in him. It resided in all of us. We black folk also viewed his dark skin with cruel disregard. He was the nigger, not just to you, but to us, too, because we have learned to see through your eyes. I saw what seeing himself through your eyes did to him. It ate at him. It circled his mind and frisked him like an abusive cop. I saw that he had chosen my golden-skinned mother—he called her “Ivory”—at least in part as an escape from the prison of his own darkness. In black life light skin is valued because it is closer to your white skin, and those with it are deemed to be closer to your so-called civilizing influence. That very notion reeks of barbarism, reeks of a crude, primeval equivalence between epidermis and humanity, reeks, therefore, of white supremacy.
Sometimes my father beat us something awful. It was ritual and tradition, of course, in so many of our communities. He got beat, and, therefore, he beat. It had long since passed into rite and folklore, long since been an artifact of the agonizing anthropology of complicated black domestic habits. It had now become part of the art of punishment and control—in part to keep us from being slaughtered in the white world. The logic is as simple as it is brutal: I will beat my kids so white folk won’t kill them.
That’s some black-on-black harm you never seem to take credit for. That’s some abuse rising from fear you never seem to take notice of, even a little responsibility for. You ever consider this, beloved? You ever have to apply the cane, or stick, or switch, or belt to your kid’s backside for that reason? You certainly took the high road when it came to football player Adrian Peterson brutally switching his son. But you have no idea of the history of corporal punishment among black folk and some of the reasons it exists. Do you see how this might enrage us against you even more? We are angry that fear leads us to hurt our kids. We are angry that even after beating our kids, sometimes with sadistic regard for your criminally intense need to monitor us, you still manage to find ways to kill the flesh of disciplined black people.
White folk created the world where black whipping was necessary. White folk also created the world where black parental punishment is seen as savage. Our disciplinary practices are used to argue our questionable moral and mental health. Some of that may even be true. But white folk hardly ever want to admit they have a hand in all of this; you never assume responsibility for making it so. When my father beat me, I wondered if he was really flailing at himself, at an idealized self that was reflected in my lighter body but always beyond his reach. Nigger didn’t just happen to us. It happened in us. Your continued acting on it and our internalization of it destroys us both.
As it did my younger brother.
Named after our father, Everett, a nutmeg brown, was a couple of shades lighter than him, but among the darkest of us boys. He adored our father. He loved whatever Daddy loved and wanted to do whatever Daddy did. My father loved cars, and when Everett was young, he built and raced go-carts. Competitive and bright by nature, he not only built the best go-carts, but brought them to victory more often than not. Once he was old enough, he traded go-carts for real cars and you could see him side by side with my father under a raised hood on a hot summer day, hands covered in motor oil, a rag hanging from the pocket of his faded blue denim overalls.
When Daddy died in 1981, none of us was ready. It deeply affected all of us. But Everett was the one who was broken by it. With our father gone, he seemed to lose his grounding. Like me, he had always been thoughtful and reflective, but where I read books, he read the streets. We both saw the corruption and injustice of the system we lived in, but while I sought to overcome it, he sought to beat it at its own corrupt game. He sold drugs. He thought he could outsmart the system. But in 1989, at the age of 27, he was tried and convicted—I believe wrongly—for murder, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He has lived behind prison walls ever since.
I cannot blame his imprisonment on skin color, but I can say that how he was treated before he got locked up put him in a prison of sorts too. Like our father, his dark skin marked him for special treatment of the kind no one wants. When we were young, like so many dark-skinned boys, he was often predesignated as the troublemaker. He didn’t finish high school, and got his diploma a few years later in prison. The bad nigger. It was assumed that he’d be more violent, more likely to do wrong, most likely to “catch a case” and commit an act of crime. If enough people, white and black, treat you like the nigger for long enough, you can start to see yourself that way. His life, like our father’s, was lived in reaction to that word.
I saw, too, the favor, sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring, that my yellow skin got me. I saw how the teachers warmed up to me while spurning darker children. I saw how foreboding racial mythologies haunted the classroom, stalked the social settings where black folk lived. The teachers didn’t give some of the darker kids the nod like they gave me; the darker kids didn’t get the benefit of the doubt of being smart. I saw how it ruined many a Negro. I saw how many dark-skinned kids weren’t encouraged in the larger society to believe that they had the skills they assumed I possessed just by glowing in the skin I had.