The America I Fear
All the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now
a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like
a wall between the world and me.
~James Baldwin
My orange tabby, Calvin, is afraid of everything. If the wind blows, he runs. If I spray Windex, he jumps. If I touch him, he moves. If I leave the room for a minute he’ll come find me. I always have to calm him down by saying, “It’s okay, Calvin, don’t worry.” He was adopted from the animal shelter. We’ve lived together for almost fourteen years. I’ve wondered if he was abused in my struggle to understand why so much frightens him. Then the insurrection happened and gave a better understanding.
On January 6, 2021 my fear as a Black man in America heighten to a zenith I hadn’t experienced. I felt like every white American hated us Negroes, like a mob mentality was out to kill us. Sure, I’d experienced prejudice, and had racist epithets hurled at me. When I was in the first grade, a classmate told me that his parents said he wasn’t allowed to play with niggers. But this was different. This meaning the attack on the Capitol, meaning a civil war, meaning the end of democracy, meaning the nation succumbing to white supremacists, and the return of slavery for millions of us Negroes who spent hundreds of years striving and dying to attain freedom and equality.
The racism on display, the white supremacists trying to kidnap and kill legislators, the Black custodians cleaning up the blood, piss, feces, and used IV’s left behind by the insurgents left me with mounting fear and a petrifaction that plagued me while sitting in my car at a red light, while grocery shopping, and picking up prescriptions. Over the next two months, my fear swelled over me like storm clouds darkening a clear blue summer sky, and pulled me out of myself. I also worried that on March 4th, the day Qanon Trump supporters believed Trump would be inaugurated, they were going to do something much worse than storm the Capitol. The mental terrorism message I got was white supremacists would kill the current state of the American landscape by any means necessary.
The morning of March 4th, I was as tethered as I was on January 6th, the bitter cold late winter wind was making the closed chimney flue in the fireplace bang, the motion sensor floodlights over the garage and in the backyard flash off and on, and the garbage cans to be collected that morning to fall in front of houses up and down the street. At 5:30 I got up, fed Calvin, and gave him his insulin shot as usual. Then I proceeded to clean his litter box. When I picked up the scooper, he rubbed against my leg. I jumped and yelled and scared Calvin, myself as well. He booked it down the stairs to the basement. I felt so bad. He had brushed up against me a million times over the years, but my out-of-control fear took hold of my rationality.
I walked down the stairs to calm Calvin, but as I took a step towards him, he took a step back. We did this until he was hiding behind the washing machine. For long minutes I baby talked him, which usually gets him purring, but his purr was nonexistent. He just sat there staring at me, his big innocent gold eyes glowing. His mackerel pattern was more visible than usual. I grew frustrated with his distrust of me. He knew me, had been cosseted by me. I loved him the way Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved told Blacks to love our Blackness, “We flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.”
I couldn’t convince Calvin to come out so I went up to the kitchen, got a can of his diabetic food, and opened it. He scurried up the stairs meowing impatiently. Hearing the can opener opening the can always got his attention. As he ate, I was overcome with ire that had been simmering below the surface for decades. Angry because I had scared Calvin, angry because I was letting white supremacist insurrectionists scare me, and because I had spent so much of my life living in fear in my own country because of the brown skin that I was born with. In high school when I made white friends, my mother said, “Boy, don’t you ever trust a white person. I watched them take out Martin and Malcolm right on TV like they were bowling pins.” She terrified me to the point that I would catch flashes of myself getting pulled over by the police. My hands shackled, my head underneath the boot-heel of the officer, my body disposed of in some underbrush.
After Calvin finished eating, I put him on top of the couch where he prefers to sleep and sat myself down. A volcanic burst of anger shot out of me. My face grew hot. My teeth gritted. I began biting the inside of my mouth exhausted, infuriated with waiting, wondering if something was going to happen. MSNBC was on and reporting that the House of Representatives had passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act overnight because they wouldn’t be in session that day for fear of a repeat of January 6. I thought to myself, George Floyd was lynched the way a slave was lynched four hundred years ago, his murder was videotaped and seen globally, his murderer was about to go on trial, yet every single Republican representative along with two Democrats voted against the bill, and it had little likelihood of passing the senate with Republican senators already planning to block the passage of the bill using the same racist abstract tactics that senior adviser to President Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater used, “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” Atwater said in an interview with Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. “By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
I peered over at Calvin sprawled out on top of the couch looking at me purring contently, peacefully. He put his head down, closed his eyes, and exhaled. I turned off the news, and turned on the PBS documentary, Looking for Lincoln that I had started watching the night before. What came on was Princeton University research scholar, Allen Guelzo speaking to Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Guelzo said, “As far as Abraham Lincoln was concerned the Confederate states did not exist. There was no such thing as the Confederate states. He would never even use the term Confederacy. He would call them those insurgents, and what do you do with an insurgency, what do you do with an insurrection? You don’t negotiate with it, you don’t come to terms with it, you don’t recognize its legitimacy. You put it down.”
Then Gates said, “It’s sometimes easy to forget that the enemy was not some menacing foreign power. On the other side stood us, Americans fighting against each other. Sometimes, families divided straight down the middle, brother fighting brother.”
I paused the documentary, and stared at the screen shocked that Lincoln had called the Confederates insurgents, shocked that the Confederate’s behavior reflected the white supremacist insurrectionists. “It’s like today,” I blurted out. “It’s just like today.” Realizing I said that too loud, I turned and looked at Calvin to see if I had woken him, but he was on his back with his paws curled up underneath his chin still asleep. I took a deep breath and exhaled. My fear was gone. It pushed right out of my body like hands pushing the body up on sinking sand. It was as though the fear could no longer find a place inside of my body to settle. I had been so institutionalized by American racism that I never thought of the Confederacy as insurrectionists. Lincoln’s line of thinking tripped my brain’s power cord and rebooted my system.
“It is the duty of every Government to give protection to its citizens, of whatever class, color or condition,” Lincoln wrote in the General Order No. 252, an Order of Retaliation that he issued on July 30, 1863, livid by the atrocities happening to Black Union soldiers. “To sell or enslave any captured person on account of his color, and for no offense against the laws of war, is a relapse into barbarism, and a crime against the civilization of the age.”
I can no longer be elliptical about my Blackness, and how I expend my energy greatly, profoundly, inextricably affects my Blackness. Corralling my anger means helping usher in an era of anti-racist reforms. It means that anger risen to biblical proportions, like Lincoln’s, can ignite the right spark to permanently, eternally obliterate racism from American life. It means that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is as relevant in 2021 as it was in 1863, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
I have a new buoyancy, a revolutionary fervor. I don’t know how long this new buoyancy will last or when the fear might revisit me, but what I do know is the racist pornographers involved in the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, in imprisoning the Central Park Five, in blocking the Emmitt Till Antilynching Bill, and in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th are trying to depict Negroes and democratic forces for equality as “trying to take over the country” against the peace of the country. These pornographers rank with Klansmen in promoting hatred, subjugating whole races into slavery, and turning Blacks into, as Billie Holiday sang, Strange Fruit. They do not accept what is the past. They do not understand the future. They are not coming to the future. Not everyone can come into the future. Lincoln was the future. Lincoln still is the future, and it’s the future where we put down racism. It’s the future where we rise above it all.
