The Free List : Vol. 1, No. 1
THE IRONY OF MY GENTRIFYING NEIGHBORS CLAPPING FOR THEIR MOSTLY BLACK AND LATINX IMMIGRANT AND LONG-TIME RESIDENT ESSENTIAL WORKER NEIGHBORS FOR EXACTLY THREE MINUTES EVERY NIGHT IN HARLEM
The irony of my gentrifying neighbors clapping for their mostly black and latinx immigrant & long-time resident essential worker neighbors for exactly three minutes every night in Harlem is–
That’s it.
That’s the irony.
There’s nothing else to write, there.
The irony of that contradiction between my new neighbors (Their unit is newly-renovated and we think they may have even put in stairs. To where? Who knows, but there is a loud and hollow sound that echoes and shakes the floors when they pace through their new home.) and our other neighbors is wordless.
We have donned the former with rather dehumanizing nicknames to help us cope with the fact that they are here. With the fact that there was an elderly black couple living in that unit before them for forty some-odd years.The wife died first. The husband then moved and the board of the building–which is becoming increasingly white as the black residents die or get evicted–sold it to them: The Woolly Mammoths.).
Like I said, rather dehumanizing, but still mammalian!, if we're sticking to old hierarchies that somehow make that better. I don’t know their actual names and I have not been interested at all in introducing myself during the pandemic. Not saying I’m necessarily proud we call them 'mammoths,' but it makes me laugh. When they stomp, we laugh. And when we laugh, I try to make sure I open my mouth as wide as I can to let in more air than I think I need so that I can be loud, too.
I envy their ability to be so loud. To cheer. To set a timer for a few minutes each night, clap for the blacks and “mexicans”, “muslims” and mutts who keep them alive and then go back to watching Frozen—again.
Who knows what they're actually thinking, since I haven't asked. But they do seem quite comfortable. I know because mammals don't stomp on land they're not comfortable in. The nervous system has to be a some-kind of calm to flatten the feet.
Sometimes, the footsteps bring an electric wave through my body that explains the high hypertension rate killing off my people since The Ships–I am reminded of hospitals as places where my degrees don't matter. Hypertension, black maternal mortality, heart disease,
I can't breathe
can't breathe
can't breathe––
evens out all the education. It could come for me. Us. At any time.
I want to scream from the fire escape. I don’t
because:
mental health oppression.
It could be dangerous to be seen as the “crazy" young black lady living downstairs. And again, I can’t guarantee that having an Ivy League degree would save me from being seen as savage and unsalvageable in those moments. I have also been (rightly) warned that if the mammoths were to make a noise complaint, it would mean more to the building than (when) we do.
(the parentheses are not a mistake.)
What is evermore clear to me is that it is not me who is crazy. There is nothing wrong with me. I can just see the invisible scaffolding holding this whole Real Unreality up. Some of us can see it. Most of you on The Free List, I’d venture to say. You see. And more of us need to see. Quicker.
The etymology of the word apocalypse is latin from greek (when was it that Rome fell again? And how long that did that take?)
a·poc·a·lypse-
Latin from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein ‘uncover, reveal’, from apo- ‘un-’ + kaluptein ‘to cover’.
And this is an uncovering. A revealing. It is ugly, violent, hard on the body, and
gorgeous, too.
We really do laugh a lot. We are getting our big little black lives drinkin our cashew milk, watching Greenleaf and dreaming up the next phases of our creative work. I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my creative life. I have some money. Janet Jackson had a birthday May 16th. When Little Richard died, I celebrated because I definitely thought he had died years ago (ME: “isn’t he like, Fats Waller old?). From my Harlem monastery, I bear witness to friends and strangers around the world figuring things out they haven’t had the space, the attention or the readiness to do before Now.
Now is a time of coffee
and coffins.++
My thing is,
can there be a proportionate number of black people sipping coffee (or cashew milk if that’s what we feel like) if/when the likely second wave of this thing hits?, which by the way could have very well been caused in the first place by the hastened habitat destruction required to keep the Plantationocene* going, which started with the invention of worldwide indigenous death as acceptable?
I'm not even saying no Black death (even though, honestly: black people could take a couple of centuries-long death-break and it would be quite just), I get that everyone dies, I'm just requesting a proportionate amount of black people dying from Plantationocene causes.
But then, the Plantationocene is defined by disproportion. That's what it is.
With anti-blackness as a key player.
And yet I cry
Still, I will cry:
THIS. Oh–this.
Can we not do this again?
?!
Another question:
Will black anger ever cease to be a primary source of cultural production?
Does this beautiful piece of culture; this necklace of language I am making out of my grief right now keep Rome from burning?
or does it create the kindling?
Or is something else happening?
Fissures? Fusions?
May it be valuable, dear god/dess, may it please be of use. May the fire I feel heat the pavement and move, move, move the feet: dance, dance, dance to a new world, open the veins, open the valleys, open the freeways to fallow ground where new remembering can take root and Hallelujah,
D A N C E is King.
++ (two crosses for my two black elder neighbors who passed from covid this month. May they transition in glory.)
All of the work here is brought to you by the gifts of our Ancestors; seen and unseen, known and unknown. May we remember our rising, may we light the shadows. May we all together thrive.
