quickly. don’t die.
quickly. don’t. die
Quickly. don’t. die.
Quickly. Don’t. Die.
QUICKLY. DON’T. DIE
Can you imagine this being the soundtrack—no not the soundtrack, the sound of the surround—to your being? To be suspended in a state of urgency forever? To be moving, always moving, away from and towards death, quickly? To be enveloped in the knowing that if you don’t move quickly—here, there, anywhere—you might just die?
Surely it is a hard thing to imagine—it is hard for me too—perhaps that is why I find it unspeakable, nearly unthinkable, and only sheepishly commit it to words in this moment. There is something deadly in talking about the shadow of death. Scripture implies this but even the profits dare not speak the whole of it. They instead, offer a prayer, a hope, a plea
“Yay, as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I shall fear no evil”
The trembling in the verse is evident to anyone who knows the shadow of death. Anyone who has felt the cool warmth of the haunting. Anyone who knows what it means to be prey to something beyond your full understanding; but something you know has a taste for the young, the old, and the in between. Anyone who knows what it means not to know if you have yet ripened to taste. Dear reader, do you know what it means to be a meal yet unserved? I suppose I could simply tell you the short of it. To be Black in Amerikkka is to dance the dance of moving quickly, in an effort not to die, so that one may avoid the cutlery of consumption and, if sliced, to try and make haste, so the violence of redaction does not erase you.
To be born Black, to be born Queer—BlaQueer—to be born po’, is to be the foodstuffs of those born human.
I think I first knew to move quickly, as not to die, when I was four or five. I think it was then that I realized that something was yet stalking me. One might think, those who know me intimately, might assume that this knowing begins with Blackness, or perhaps with crawling of the Brown Recluse across my face and the tattoo that it left, or perhaps with homophobia? No, dear reader, it did begin there.
Instead, it began with a dream. The dream of the death of a loved one. There, they came to me, sweet and warm as usual, before telling me they were going home, to stay in the books—yes, I was reading at four or five, quite well—and to take care of the family. The next day they were dead. This happened again and again and again and again until I was quite sure I was killing people in my sleep; until I deemed myself to never dream a dream a dream again; until I alternated between going to sleep with a Bible across my chest and the various Michael Jackson, Prince or Luther Vandross tapes playing in the background. That is where I came to know not to die. Learning to move quickly came later; when I realized I was not the reaper, but a thing to be reaped, by kin, by klass and by kountry.
You know that story well enough though, don’t you? Well, at least some version of it. I will tell it again, and I will tell it true, in this substack, in the next book and each time I dare to bear good witness to myself and those whose presence commingles with mine. I will tell it right and I will it true, but not today, because today, I must move quickly, so as not to die; but also, because I have a paper to deliver at Tulane and I am a bit taken by Anthony Paul Farley’s presentation of his new work Love’s Labour’s Lost, or, Black Communist Romance, and I have lectures to record my criminal law students and they appear on the verge of a meltdown at my absence and the recurrent snow days—don’t know they know that criminality ain’t going nowhere and the door’s of the jail will always be open?—and I have to hurry up and take it easy too, this is New Orleans after all, baby.
Pictured: Me in downtown Kansas City, a few days ago, because my hair was gorgeous and I quite liked the look (nvm the brand of the hat on my head, it was cute).