Between the World and Me: Section 3

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.

She appeared to be somewhere in that range between forty and seventy years, when it becomes difficult to precisely ascertain a black person's precise age.

This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways.

But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country.

The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows.

The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food.

And when Dr. Jones described her motive for escaping the dearth that marked the sharecropper life of her father and all the others around her, when she remembered herself saying, “I’m not going to live like this,” I saw the iron in her eyes, and I remembered the iron in my grandmother’s eyes.

I remember her, of course, but by the time I knew her, her exploits—how, for instance, she scrubbed white people’s floors during the day and went to school at night—were legend.

But I still could feel the power and rectitude that propelled her out of the projects and into home ownership.

She was laughing lightly now, not uproariously, still in control of her body.

She could not acknowledge any discomfort, and she did not speak of herself as remarkable, because it conceded too much, because it sanctified tribal expectations when the only expectation that mattered should be rooted in an assessment of Mable Jones.

Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away.

She said, “Harvard. And if not Harvard, Princeton. And if not Princeton, Yale. And if not Yale, Columbia. And if not Columbia, Stanford. He was that caliber of student.”

Even when they succeeded, as so many of them did, they were singled out, made examples of, transfigured into parables of diversity.

I asked Dr. Jones if she regretted Prince choosing Howard. She gasped. It was as though I had pushed too hard on a bruise. “No,” she said. “I regret that he is dead.”

She said this with all of the odd poise and direction that the great American injury demands of you.

Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the ’60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion.

Whatever it is, that same look I see in those pictures, noble and vacuous, was the look I saw in Mable Jones.

She held so much under her control, and I was sure the days since her Rocky was plundered, since her lineage was robbed, had demanded nothing less.

They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.

To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.

She spoke like an American, with the same expectations of fairness, even fairness belated and begrudged, that she took into medical school all those years ago.

She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others.

I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.

She spoke of how her children had been raised in the lap of luxury—annual ski trips, jaunts off to Europe.

I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I’d once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life.

Perhaps they so willingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place.

And all those old photographs from the 1960s, all those films I beheld of black people prostrate before clubs and dogs, were not simply shameful, indeed were not shameful at all—they were just true.

I remember looking toward the goalposts and watching a pack of alumni cheerleaders so enamored with Howard University that they donned their old colors and took out their old uniforms just a little so they’d fit.

The birthmark of damnation faded, and I could feel the weight of my arms and hear the heave in my breath and I was not talking then, because there was no point.

That was a moment, a joyous moment, beyond the Dream—a moment imbued by a power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill.

And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors.

Even the Dreamers— lost in their great reverie— feel it, for it is Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what they holler in boldness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying.

I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow.

Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos...must inevitably plunder much more.

Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind.

But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent.

The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky.

It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age.

It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods.