Lieutenant (LT) L____ is like my white man, and I’m his black, and it’s the eighteen hundreds.
He makes me feel stuck, stalled. Our exchanges remind me of Sophia and her white lady in The Color Purple. How Sophia finally gets to go home for Christmas, and her white lady is proud of herself.
But the white lady can’t do the simplest things, and when she finds she can’t drive herself home, casually cancels Sophia’s visit, so Sophia can drive her.
The white woman never registers the reality of who she is, or what she is. All of Sophia’s sanity is founded on her knowing what the white woman is, and of Sophia knowing who she herself is.
The dynamic is so similar to the one between me and my Mom, my Maam.
LT comes into the room, shortly before we are to be released. He’s hosting a small cookout for his officer friends. He doesn’t know how to light charcoal, and he doesn’t know what utensils or cooking ware he needs. He’s already sent some boys to get the meat, earlier in the morning, but they don’t refrigerate it, so I know I’m not eating it.
How are you my age and not know the first thing about a cookout, I think. Even down to pans to put the food in, or how to light charcoal. At least the guy should act embarrassed, but he was arrogant and condescending.
_I’ll get the pans,_ I said, forcing the words through my lips. I silently got the grills, and set them outside his office. But I forgot about the pans, and left, to meet up with K___, so we could eat chow and work out. I remembered the pans shortly after.
If I had been conscious, I would’ve picked up on how angry I was, but couldn’t deal at the time, so I thought instead, f_ck it. When I can’t deal, I’m just mean, self destructive even. I just drop the ball and walk away.
I ran into Sch___, now Sergeant Sch___, at the MWR. He told me how much trouble I’d caused him. He said the LT had freaked. That S__ had to go to the chow hall kitchen and get the pans, that S___ had to walk the LT through hosting the cookout. I still couldn’t deal, so I just apologized to S___ even though I felt like apologizing was wrong.
It seems contradictory so I wrote these notes. Whenever the LT speaks to me, it’s like he’s reminding me what a mule I am.
_______
I was put out to work when I was fourteen. At the time I was easily manipulated. For years they kept trying to convince me that your worth was your job. Mean-spirited, cheerful lectures over the dinner table about money and contributing and how much it cost to keep me and how much I owed them. To them I was still that supposedly-retarded baby whose heart stopped during and rarely cried afterward.
My first week at S____ton farms was a hundred hours at five dollars per. The next week the same. My shoes were bad, and I got an infection on my foot that I had to scrape every night with a butter knife.
I developed this pain where I would bend over to work and my lungs would stop working. It was something to do with my ribs. I would stay still and wait, in the midst of the steam of summer, surrounded by glistening workmen, trusting my breathing to begin in so many seconds.
On the surface I felt happy to work. To be outside of the House and away from them. Between that and the money, I could almost see a way to freedom, could almost make out what it might be like.
I didn’t know my parents already had plans for the money. But it was a fine life if you were healthy. I was only fourteen but it was a secret. They thought I was at least eighteen, despite my malnutrition and small-size. Later they said it was my Ancient eyes. I wasn’t as strong as them and knew nothing of sex so at times the other guys seemed suspicious of me, but it turned out okay.
When I was sixteen I began working full time legitimately. My parent’s tactics were hemorrhaging my paychecks. R__ and Mom refused to spend money on me, even medical care.
Finally I had to sign away my rights to overtime and began working sixty hour weeks in the store. My sixteenth summer the bottoms of my feet split open. For months there was a pile of blood-stained socks in the corner of my room.
On the weekends I would wash and bleach them, while afterwards washing the puss out of my tennis shoes. I got up to consistent eighty hour weeks when I was seventeen. I got down to forty-hour weeks the summer before I turned twenty.
That level of work exhausting, especially for a kid. It began to affect my temperament, so that I began to mistake these affects for my own personality. It seeped into my thought processes, began to simplify me, tame me, from a human being to a mule.
For a long time I didn’t mind being a mule, because it got me out of that place, and there was a certain numbness to it, that got me through. But at twenty-three, I had been free for four years, and the idea of having been a mule made me angry.
I remembered June 1st, MY skin, MY life.
I had gone to the unemployment office to sign up for work. But now, at twenty three, in the midst of signing up, I suddenly had other things on my mind.
There was something about being a mule that made me feel more virile. I sat in the unemployment office and ran a hand along my forearms as I remembered the black oily dust on my skin as I worked the long hot days on S____ton Farms and the machinery they used.
I remembered the stank smell of fast food that claimed clothing despite a hundred washings. Muddied, exhausted, hardened limbs and my chest pounding from soldiering during a time when soldier’s lives were considered cheap.
At the same time that my body flexed with the anger of having been a mule, it also relaxed with the feeling of having strong mule arms, and strong mule legs, a strong mule stomach and strong mule chest. I wondered about my mule face compared to the faces of those in the movies.
My muscles were the only thing that was ever good about me. Even the older woman who I had to deal with when I tried to sign up for summer classes kept looking. She acted like they were accosting, like each pec was a sign of danger.
Even the therapist couldn’t stop stealing looks at my chest and arms. I should’ve been muscular, for all the hard labor I’d known, so I didn’t see what the big deal was about. Seems like I could’ve gotten a lot of sex because of it, but all I got were glances and stolen looks.
It was like being a mule had infused my arms and legs and fingers with a kind of worldliness, a kind of knowledge, that knew just what to do, and how to do it, in just the right way. I knew what I would do. I didn’t know if I could trust what motivated it, but I would do it anyway.
First, I would leave E___. I was back in my Hometown, after what would’ve been my first deployment fell though, because my busted feet didn’t pass medical.
I’d been trying to pull away from her more and more, but had had a hard time. I would have to quiet-up again, like when I was a kid. This place could quick become a small town. I would tell few people of the unemployment checks, getting two part time jobs under the table. I would save. The criminality of living under the table seemed correct.
There was another part of the plan, that didn’t break any laws, but felt just as criminal. I would educate myself. I would check out Victims no Longer by Mike Lew, a book I hadn’t yet had the nerve to check out from the library. I would also check out a slew of other books on the subject, the librarian looking at me coldly. I would take painstaking notes, be up for slews of days and nights, studying, working, in the little apartment, with its exposed beams and brick walls.
I would learn my heritage. Sicily, Spain, Ireland, Africa, beginning each branch from prehistoric times, working my way forward in fifty year increments. Notebooks full of notes, quotes, and more notes.
I would begin on the documentaries, American Experience, Frontline. PBS became central. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer every evening, Charlie Rose every night. The syndicated _Starting Over_ every morning.
The latter program was a consistent trigger for me, it was about a kind of rehab facility where people with similar backgrounds to mine got it together with the help of the likes of Iyanla Vanzaant.
I would learn to take notes of my own, instead of just quotes from Bartlett‘s. I began to write, in the moment, in a notebook I kept in my pocket, while I waited for the bus, or waited in a line, or when I was resting my feet after work.
The more I would write, the more the notes became a physical reflection of my Consciousness.
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