Strung Out
Reflecting on Toni Morrison, the lie of Black History Month, and being strung out
“White boys are circling.”
As we close the month of February, I reflect on a fellow carrier of the ink, Toni Morrison, an elder spirit in the space of word weavers, one who bled ink and blood and story, whose imagination dwelled far beyond the formalities of structure and cohesion, one who was baptised in that sweet, salt water where secret stories sing and rage, where unknown histories pillage, where the drums and tambourines still beat in that infinite dawn.
“White boys are circling.”
Toni Morrison’s grandparents had a farm in Alabama. They were sharecroppers. Her grandfather was a traveling musician, a violinist, and went to Birmingham to make money. Morrison’s grandmother sent a message to her grandfather that she was leaving Alabama for Akron, Ohio, where she had family.
“I cannot stay here. White boys are circling.”
Morrison repeats the phrase. “That’s all she had to say.” Her mother and aunt, about 12 or 13 at the time, were growing up and white boys were watching them from a distance.
I have listened to this interview repeatedly and am always struck by this one phrase: “White boys are circling.” I am fully aware that even as I type these words that girls are being hunted all over the world, their clitorises torn off, their underdeveloped bodies at 10, 11, and 12 forced into the smarmy grasp of a man in his 60s in the name of god and prophecy, breasts and backsides tossed in the dust of war, bodies ripped and invaded by soldiers.
But Morrison, who arrests with her languaging techniques, leaves me limp when she says the words: “White boys are circling” in an interview. I am instantly transported to that small farm in Alabama–streetlight-less, dense with darkness and intentions so foul, so wild, even evil weeps.
But that was America. Recy Taylor, who in 1944, was kidnapped and raped on her way from church by six men in Alabama, never seeing an indictment in her 97 years of life, is America.
Black History Month is not America. The idea of singling out a month to honor American history is so absurd and irrational but makes as much sense as everything else in this country. To separate American history by race is an amputation, a disembowelment. There is no separate history. There is no Native American history. There is no Japanese American history. It is one history belonging wholly and fully to us, a strung out people.
We are so strung out on the idea of American democracy that the reality of its non-existence keeps us in a prison of delusion we label, hope.
Sometimes, I get strung out, too. I remember when a dear friend, Sol, started talking about Beto O’Rourke–a Texas congressman who represented the state's 16th district in the US House of Representatives from 2013 to 2019.
It was 2018. Representative Beto O’Rourke was running for governor against Senator Ted Cruz. And it seemed like the world was watching. There was something cool and fresh about O’Rourke, maybe because we, the strung out people, were tired of the drumless rhetoric of old, out-of-touch, white men.
He talked about racism without the requisite awkwardness of previous politicians. He rolled up his sleeves. He had the energy for this grassroots campaign–knocking on doors in small Texas towns, even sundown towns.
He was showing up–skateboarding, smiling, listening. In the end, he came within three percentage points of defeating Senator Ted Cruz. A year after the loss, in August 2019, 21-year-old Patrick Wood Crusius shot and killed 23 people and injured 22 others at a Walmart in El Paso.
The sound of bullet torn bodies was steadily becoming America’s official national anthem. In the center of yet, another mass shooting, this time, not at a school or at a music festival but at Walmart, was Beto O’Rourke, connecting with people, sharing their grief, speaking to us, the strung out American public, too numb to give a fuck but also overwhelmed by the sight of this ongoing pageantry of pain.
O’Rourke was showing up.
“White boys are circling.”
Then I saw O’Rourke’s interview with Oprah Winfrey as he was contemplating running for president. Oprah asked him about the work he was doing in Tornillo, El Paso, Texas, where children were being separated from their families, where children were being detained for immigration violations.
“Here you have this great country,” O’Rourke said to Winfrey. “Taking little kids and babies from their parents after they’d survived a 2000-mile journey, much of it on foot, if they were lucky, on top of, not inside of, a train called The Beast or La Bestia, coming to this country of asylum seekers and immigrants and refugees from the world over going generations back, and at their most vulnerable, most desperate moment, that baby for whom they risked everything, is literally taken, torn from their arms. What do they do in the face of that?”
There was the humanity in his words and in his tone, a humanity that seemed irredeemably lost to this group. I listened closely. This America he was speaking of–a mirage of justice and equality, now was growing skin and bone as he continued to speak.
O’Rourke issued a call to action the way Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had done in 1965, inviting people of good faith from all over the world to join him in the walk from Selma to Montgomery. He invited people of good faith to bear witness to the imprisonment of children describing it as “tantamount to torture.”
“Do not blame this on Donald Trump,” he continued. “Do not blame this on a political party. Do not blame this on someone else. If we’re a democracy, then the people are the government, the government is the people. It’s on every single one of us to make it right.”
This statement reminded me so much of that John F. Kennedy quote my father loved so much, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.”
That interview aired in 2019. On November 1st of that year, due to lack of funding, it was reported that O’Rourke had ended his bid.
I recently rewatched that Oprah Winfrey interview. It’s hard to believe it aired six years ago, just before Covid-19 was being taken seriously in The United States. Six years before the massacre of Miami’s middle class. Two years before an official war was waged against the sharing of American history in classrooms and workspaces. Emmett Till, Recy Taylor, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, Trayvon Martin, and Sandra Bland were being separated from American history like those children being separated from their parents.
“White boys are circling.”
As we close the month of February, I reflect on America as a writer, a literary artist, seeking the guidance of those who wrote stories during the most dangerous times in history. As the content of informed, conscious influencers become blocked and journalists are fired for sharing the truth, this America that O’Rourke spoke of returns to its mirage state.
And, so I lean on language, on fellow courageous carriers of the ink. In an interview about Toni Morrison’s work, American poet and writer, Sonia Sanchez says, “In order to survive, you should reread Toni every ten years because every ten or fifteen years, we have to reimagine ourselves on this American landscape. You won’t survive if you don’t do that.”
