Essence Ward | nonfiction | Love in the Time of Genocide

    
   
Love in the Time of Genocide



He approaches at a stoplight, squeegee in one hand, spray bottle in the other. He wears a hoodie, jacket, and backpack, the black of which do nothing to conceal the grime. My friend declines to have her windshield washed, but because she does so with a smile, he puts a question: Y’all got some chicken? They laugh and I feel obliged to raise my cheeks. In the minutes it takes to get on 95 we encounter a starting lineup of young men and men men milling intersections in search of customers. My friend is chatty, but I can hardly follow, for I am disturbed, the interest compounding every point three miles. I leave Baltimore the next day, but as a citizen of African America, there’s really no departing the despair.

At home in Philly miles of residential blocks are treated like a shooting range. In 2022, there were over 2200 shootings, after which 474 beloveds never again embraced their people. I realize how pervasive guns have become nearly a decade before when my babyfaced cousin shows up to a family gathering with a dip in his step. He owns his own home, drives a sanitation truck, and married a woman several years his senior, counting her maturity as the prime attraction, yet here he is in our grandmother’s living room looking every bit the derelict. A cousin teases him about coming strapped to an event whose only danger is cracked jokes and bruised feelings, but he is without shame. Indeed, the attention functions as a kind of praise, his smile banana wide, his hand resting on the gun’s hilt. He was reared in my grandmother’s home, and if she were here instead of turning in her grave, she’d jump right in his world. When I, a junior usher at Transfiguration Baptist Church, forgot her religion and had the gall to press palm to hip, I was ordered to take my hand off my imagination. Acting grown stirred her ire, but nothing was worse than stupid. Stupid had a body count. I could just hear her putting him out now, Go on, Simple, before you mess around and get somebody killed.

When my grandmother was alive, a man dared not enter her home wearing a hat. Aside my grandfather, a corporal in the police department, a gun was unfathomable. The fact that no one stood up to tell Babyface to stand down, that we—or maybe it was just me—spent the afternoon tracking the proximity of his hip to foreheads that barely cleared the holster, suggested how imperiled not just our family but the larger community had become.

Having quit Georgia some seventy years before, the Wards and the Hodgeses settled in Mantua. It had always been rough, a reality enshrined in the nickname, The Bottom, yet my uncles and brother never made a habit of parading guns. Talking with friends, I kept going back to the idea that Babyface had no need for arms, that the weapon was all for show. Later that summer a man was murdered at his barbershop, and still I criticized his excess. Only with the attention that writing requires did my conviction begin to wobble. When The Inquirer puts out a new shooting map, a cluster of dots inevitably hovers over Mantua. In 2021 fully 85% of victims across the city were black men and boys. Who was I to question what any of them did to feel safe?

Predictably, the shootings are attributed to bad tempers, drugs, love triangles, but such problems belong to everyone. To understand what is going on in the Bottoms all over the country one must set aside immediate events to examine the very long cause. Genocide, I mean. Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
 Genocide provides that murder, serious bodily injury, and serious mental harm are genocide if they carry the intent to destroy. For black people obliteration has always been the threat. To survive by spray bottle, guard by gun, stave off the ever-proximate ruin of losing one’s job, home, or overtaxed mind, is the logic animating far too many days.

It makes me anxious. Anxious for us to use the vocabulary of war, speak at the scale of the crime, rightly name what is happening to us. The value of accurate language is plenty, but in this, my fourth decade, its promise for women seeking love among the battleworn settles near the top of my consciousness. A few years back I noticed several friends discussing singlehood as personal deficiency. Instead of setting their sights on the true culprit, they searched themselves. Had they put themselves out there enough? Did they intimidate? Was this just more fallout from the difficulty with their dad? To me the quest for suitable partners was so obviously about numbers. Preying on us all, the genocide has been most successful in sabotaging our counterparts. Despite attending the same underfunded schools, we fare far better. Black women lead the nation in higher education-seeking. Meanwhile, around fourth grade black boys start losing out on learning as teachers cast them as threats to be managed and subdued. As men, with the broader society deputized to the same, their rates of trouble, every kind, shoot straight to the top. In this context partnering suffers, and much else beside.

We used to know this. Back when our romantic prospects became media fodder, when everybody and their daddy felt equipped to editorialize our horizons, when the book appeared asking if marriage was for white people, when Very Smart Brothas taunted that our degrees weren’t going to keep us warm at night, when OkCupid declared us the least sought after online,
 and the Times published that piece about missing black men, as if the absence was a mystery, rather than proof of unmitigated terror, my cohort at least knew that the trouble lay in structure, nothing to do with ourselves. The country’s appetite for black suffering, especially that of boys, and those that dare to reach the age of men, wished to consume us all.

Last fall, living the days we’d long feared—unmarried, childless, responsible for getting every glass of water I would ever need—I was finding it not so bad. I praised the independence, relished my friendships, wondered if as one had suggested, all the singleness was happening for us, if we were being inducted into a powerful sisterhood with bonds to rival any combination of woman and man. Easy for you to say, said a friend. You have someone. My whole body was an eyeroll. She knew the nature of that having, that Someone wasn’t exactly mine. A wife, an ocean, and his ambitions for his country left little room for me. But I heard her. I workshopped another idea: Perhaps this was a way of ushering black women into greater divinity, for everywhere I looked solitude correlated with expansive spirituality. Staring at the ceiling, thinking over our wants and don’t-wants, we pillowtalked with God, the only man available. My dear friend sighed. If the options were to be loved or evolved, her choice was clear.

Months have passed and still, here I am, struggling to speak to the disappointment that wasn’t just around me, but lodged within. If I were to tell you about Someone, he’d win your heart. Brilliant, kind, daring, he’s an impressive sort. For sixteen years we’ve been in and out of each other’s lives. (My vanity wants you to know that I pre-date his wife.) The love we have trumps what we’ve felt for others, but if it weren’t for the genocide I would let him go today. Instead, I think about a boyfriend. Someone on this side of the water with whom to devour a
 sheet of potatoes, paint the back room, lie on the couch, head to socks, texting poems, brass-trimmed espresso machines, jokes that work on any continent. I tell him and he is unfazed, actually a tad amused. You’re not breaking news. But I am. This fight, an annual tradition, had always been about breaking up, not adding on. I don’t say this, though. We’ve had enough truth for the day.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of a boyfriend. It feels of a piece with blackness, a coming at the world slant. With conversations and covenants ever kudzuing to restrict our movement, we’ve always had to color outside the lines. Why would love be any different? For my generation, the die has been cast. These are the men. Ain’t none on back order. Wise, then, to get our love how and where we can. The junior usher in white gloves and black, criss-cross bowtie would be scandalized. But she had no idea what was coming. Having passed through everything we have, she might just have her own questions come judgment day—What, in the world, was that all about, God? Why’d you set us up like that? To what possible end?


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