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Tin has a book called The People Could Fly, which are American Black folktales. In one of the stories, a lion keeps jangling everyone’s nerves because he keeps beating his chest exclaiming, “Me and Myself, Me and Myself” until one day Bruh Bear and Bruh Rabbit get him to meet Man whose gun teaches He Lion a lesson in humility. The cadence of these stories reminds me of the first time I read a Toni Morrison novel and thought how in her hands fictional narrative reads like poetry. It’s also how in a recent meeting about Ferguson when a colleague got up to speak from her heart, it was Spoken Word.

I wonder about this blood that runs through us, especially today with the news that Obama is lifting the embargo from Cuba and I think of my blood that’s all tied up in Spain, Cuba, Israel, Turkey, Louisiana and thereabouts. Stanley asked me today would I consider living somewhere else and I said I have – I have thought about this a lot. I am raising a Black child in a city that is the best and worst place to raise a Black son. I’ve thought about this when the waters rose all around us and we had to flee. But at the end of the day – New Orleans feels like Havana. New Orleans feels like Istanbul. New Orleans feels like Senegal, like Ghana, like Nigeria. New Orleans feels like this blood that beats through me. Sty said when he went to Paris he could feel New Orleans there. Exactly.

In the tale of the lion, the narrator ends most sentences with “like that” – it seemed to me to be a narrative trick, but recently I noticed that it’s a phrase Stanley uses a lot. “I was hoping we could go away to the beach, like that” Stanley tells me. And I always have to bring it on home, well, it’s like this, I’m here with my son, who is out of school, and I’m baking bread and I’m working on a report. And Sty laughs real easy because it’s all good, baby. He’s cool, like that. Easy, like Sunday morning.

Meanwhile I’m Monday.

It’s I who am wound up like a top with blood that flows like molten fire burning canyons into my bones and leaving me restless and always bouncing back from the brink of whiplash – self imposed, of course – I’m like this, when I really ought to be like that.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2014 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.