All The Beauty
In my nana’s kitchen hangs a sign which reads, in bold red lettering, LIFE IS SHORT, EAT DESSERT FIRST. As a kid, that sign was the flashpoint for a series of alibis I’d often make when accused of eating too many sweets before dinner. Look at the sign, look at what it says! A quick exclaim, followed by the cutesy, innocent smile all kids put on in the shadow of guilt.
Life is short, eat dessert first. I’d move the phrase around in my mouth like hard candy. It amused me: its simplicity, its philosophical richness, its subtle reversal of the Western meal pattern. I loved it so much that I walked around her house repeating it, each time a new rhythm – a new song birthed from chipped painting on cheap, kitschy home decor. Eat dessert first. It could’ve been a motto in our family if anyone else believed it.
But we do, and that’s enough, she would say as she cut us both a slice of coconut cake.
It was 2009 then — the beginning of a new year — and Oscar Grant was murdered 2 days ago. The news doesn’t talk about it all that much because the fact of his death — his cold, black death — was a surprise to no one. We all lived in this America and we knew — whether or not we wanted to admit it — what it did to Black people, the horrors it inflicted on us. There was no news in Black death; just the same rhythm, the same song.
There was other news though: President Obama’s inauguration, which was two or three weeks away. The first Black president. History couldn’t have anticipated this anomaly! How could our president — who for so long acted upon us with brutality, inhumanity, and impunity; who, in almost every form that he took on, droned out our calls for help with varying degrees of terror — come to look like us? I was six of course, but I knew enough to know that it was strange. As strange as the dessert sign. But isn’t it a blessing? I couldn’t have imagined I would see the day. Mmhmpph, tumbles out of my mouth, and with it a speck of buttercream icing. Our laughs drown out the NBC nightly news report blaring like an awful siren from the TV room.
***
In my family, gluttony is a testament to our survival. Our Sunday communions begin with buttermilk biscuits and end with high cholesterol. Sundays are a luxury, says the Lord, so we commit to our excess. By 6pm, no corner of the dining room table is left untouched by food. There, potato salad dressed in paprika. There, a vat of fried chicken draped in grease and buttermilk. There, a pot of collard greens, steam forming in the shape of a grand, ivy flower. There, the bright orange sheen of the Macaroni pie. There, a ham hock lodged in a plate of green beans. There, the chatter and the gossip its own kind of sustenance.
On Sundays, we speak of love and nothing else: how it lives inside a pot of boiling yams, or maybe in the chest of auntie’s newest suitor. There’s no time to speak of our suffering on Sundays, no room for it on that big brown table. The pain, the grievances, the suffering; we reserve all of it for the weekdays.
The world is huge and cold and brutal to people who look like us, but I swear I can see all of it in the reflection of my spoon as I pour gravy into a tiny volcano of mashed potatoes. Sundays are for excess, I whisper under my breathe. And there is nothing more excessive than Nana’s coconut cake.
The coconut cake – a religious symbol on its own – was a grand white mountain peaked by buttercream and toasted coconut flakes. Soft and sweet and fragrant with rose oil. On Sundays, I’m Moses climbing the mountain and coming down with a tablet in one hand, and crumbs in the other. On Sundays, I’m the preacher’s son standing steadfast at the altar, delivering a powerful sermon with white icing around my lips. On Sundays – unlike any other day of the week – I am a believer.
Which is to say: God is enough.
***
It’s 2014 and Tamir Rice has been dead for two weeks. His death was unfathomable. Maybe because it felt so close to my own, which I relived in terrible dreams every night, convinced it would arrive – like a prophecy – at any moment. I spent that fall with a knot in my chest, horrified of leaving my house or cutting the wrong corner or walking through the wrong neighborhood. I’d seen enough of the world to know what it was capable of doing to me if I didn’t do all that I could to stop it. In the living room, I scroll through Instagram and see only photos and paintings of his face.
I swear I can see my own.
He was just a kid, reports NBC nightly news for the 100th time. But so was I, and so was Trayvon, and so was Emmett Till, and at this point, history could’ve guessed this anomaly.
Even then — when history knows, when history can predict — there’s no comfort. It’s 2014, and I’m terrified of my blackness. I’m terrified of the way it exposes me to all those terrors and all those horrible dreams. Perhaps, I’m terrified even more of the realization that the Black man in the White House ten or twenty minutes from my house can do — perhaps, wants to do — very little to save me from the terrors of my country. All my HOPE is gone – buried deep somewhere in the attic. All I have left is terror. But my terror is for the weekdays.
It’s Sunday and, today, I’m a believer in holier things. Like love and coconut cake and the patters of an irregular heartbeat. If you keep eating this quickly, you’re gonna have a heart attack, my mom rests her hands on my shoulder.
The table shakes, heads fly back, chairs twist, and a chorus of laughter swarms through the house.
I can’t bear it, and before I can stop myself: I’d rather die choking on a piece of coconut cake than with a cop’s gun to my head, I joke back. Grin wide. Expectant eyes.
Waiting for the laugh track. Instead, the floor creaks, the table stills, chairs root themselves back into the ground, and heads untwist. Instead, the sound of a hundred wails sirens throughout the house. Instead, the table floods with tears.
***
Perhaps, I knew that what I said was shocking. I knew, precisely, that I had said it to elicit shock, to get them to recognize and feel my pain; to make it known that I had no real sense of salvation, not even on Sundays. But perhaps, it was shocking because it revealed what we all felt, deep down, and perhaps what we were all acting on: that if we were to die, it had to be on our terms.
My family, like many black families, has a tumultuous health history. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart murmurs. For as far back as our family tree stretches — which is not very far — every cause of death, every fallen branch, can be traced back to poor health.
My family says that I’m lucky to have escaped our generational curse – that if I die, it’ll have to be an accident: a car crash, a freak incident, a letter laced with cyanide.
But I can’t see it that way. It’s 2014, which is to say: if I die, it will be at the hands of the state. If I die it will not be on my terms: congestive heart failure, a blood clot, malfunctioned kidneys. My death will be orchestrated and terrible and history will remember its brutality. If I die, it will be because I turned the wrong corner or cut through the wrong neighborhood or passed the wrong cop car. If I die, it will be with a gun placed squarely on my chest, or with cold hands grasped firmly on my neck. My mortality will not be my choice.
This country is my death sentence.
***
But that has never stopped me, my family, or any of us, from trying to get free. Against and on the run from history’s fatal capture, black people have forged beautiful experiments in a life otherwise. Despite the death sentence we call America, despite the historical anomalies, despite the broken promises and promises never made, despite the never-ending duress of our horrifying racist normal, we carve out space for our survival.
We dream. We sing. We write. We dance. We cry. We speak tongues. We practice. We yell. We jive. We shuck. We shelter ourselves.
We invent, with the scraps of forgotten recipes and the tools that nobody else wanted, our capacious dream-worlds. We know that our freedom is our only claim to wholeness, and so we don’t mind giving up something of ourselves.
We have committed to the radical act of sacrifice because we know — whether we say it or not — that to get free, something of ours must be given up. Our health, our delusions, our happiness, anything. Our freedom is at the edge of our survival. So we commit to excess.
***
All this to say: Sundays are for freedom.
Every 7 days, I swallow a slice of coconut cake and whisper under my breath, each time: I’d rather die choking on a slice of cake than with a cop’s gun to my head. I say it so no one can hear it: its sad song, its rhythm formed out of despair. I roll the phrase around like hard candy in my mouth. But it’s freedom. It’s freedom that has taken us this far, and it’s our love — for our freedom and for ourselves — that convinces us to stay.
Perhaps, history couldn’t have anticipated this. But history doesn’t know anything about Nana’s kitchen and that sign that hangs parallel to the stove. History doesn’t know how it rings like an omen in my mouth: LIFE IS SHORT, EAT DESSERT FIRST. History doesn’t know about love and Sunday dinners and how much happiness can fit atop a brown wooden table. History doesn’t know anything about us; we aren’t subject to its delusions or degradations or anomalies. We are fugitives in this death sentence of a country, plowing through fields of sugar and coconut flakes, strange flowers blooming in our mouths.
Maybe that’s what makes our freedom — however tiny or transient or quotidian – so beautiful: it can’t be discovered. History can’t remember it. History doesn’t want to remember it. But here it is, nonetheless: all that beauty that lives buried – in bold red lettering – under all that terror.
