mikejonespens

[mikejonespens]

We Cried and You Didn’t Listen.

A child who touches a hot stovetop, realizes the pain it inflicts, then reaches for it again might be insane. If a Black slave understood the implications of articulating their displeasure with the workload-compensation ratio and violence against them to their slave master, and did so regardless, they might be insane. Protesting the same racial injustice in the same manner, yielding the same results, is accordingly insane. The spirit it takes to confront an abusive, corrupt authority is more than insanity—it’s fatigue. 

The protestors in Minneapolis were tired, too. The near-decade since Trayvon Martin’s murder, all I have seen are protests, and forgive my ignorance, but it was my understanding that the right to peaceful protest never guaranteed reform. The First Amendment allows citizens to “petition the government for a redress of grievances,” therefore the petition itself holds no power, except by the support of political officials, social influencers, and frankly the white majority that can move the needle. The racists and lukewarm Americans watching are not swayed when their comfort remains unthreatened. Rather, the supremacists mock our efforts and the I-don’t-see-color’s neglect to see us all together. Their bubble, a utopia flowing with milk and money, is guarded by a judicial system that will not value life over a badge, a racist-enthused president, and the lack of stake in the struggle. It has been made clear that protests are indeed acceptable among white people, because their taxes may fund a government threatening their basic human rights [to a hair cut]. 

Peaceful protests have been ridiculed just the same as the incident in Minneapolis, diminishing protestors’ reputations and subjecting them to death. Inexplicably, the "right way” to protest (Trayvon Martin, 2012) couldn’t afford a twelve-year-old Black child (Tamir Rice, 2014) his innocence, and furthermore has been ammunition to social influencers looking to delegitimize Black America’s cry for help. Inexplicably? I meant unfortunately, and unfortunately, this is the history of America. Martin Luther King Jr. was considered radical until Malcolm X’s appeal for violent protest. But Malcolm referenced the same violence colonists used to gain their freedom from the British, submitting that our freedom depends on the willingness to engage in violence. After a half-century of protesting since, is he wrong?

I admire Dr. King’s patience and that of the Black community. We’ve cried aimlessly, marching our local streets demanding justice. The regime does not change until that marching is on the doorsteps of the oppressors. Hear me, I do not want war and death. I want change. So when the narratives are formed against the victims and our government officials couldn’t care less, but you choose to blame an untended tree for baring bad fruit, oppression is succeeding. Slaves that followed instructions could not elude the whip, just as George Floyd could not cooperate enough for his plea to breathe to be considered. Racism is prevalent in America and its vessels have made it obvious: education and class, nor cooperation and deeds release Black people from judgement and execution. Additionally, it is not our responsibility to prove racism towards us is unjust.

Certainly, seek and implement “better ways” to influence legislative reform, but stop vilifying the oppressed for their reactions. Vote for politicians that prioritize freedom and rights for all Americans, but acknowledge the downfalls of our current system. Inform the community of the steps being taken to create change, but validate and address the problem and their anger. Protesting has been painted as the people’s means to influence change, which has been a lie, at least for Black America. The repetitive nature of protests is tiring, and amidst the insanity, accept that some will justly choose violence. As a charge to white America, consider the torment of the Black experience and sacrifice some comfort for your neighbor.   

If you have not heard this a million times, you chose to ignore it. When riots emerge across the United States and Black America is simply tired of not being heard, the people making satire of our struggle and the majority who are silent now will look back at Trayvon and Tamir and Philando and Eric and Atatiana and Ahmaud and Breonna and George and regret their indifference.

[mikejonespens]

“After eighteen years of silence, he was finally learning to speak with his hands…”

    Jamie made his slow-winding way to a bar stool. He lifted himself with a hollow grunt, sliding one leg across to the other side and planting his aching buttocks onto the worn leather cushion. He’d have the usual Long Island Iced Tea. Heavily arched over his drink, he drew from its contents and exhaled. The thrusting of his breath mimicked the exhaust dispersed during a launch in Florida, swiftly scattering whatever dust was beneath his jawline. The bartender, Callie, a seasoned woman with silky black hair that draped her broad tested shoulders, glanced along her cat-eye to his direction. She conjured another beverage and walked it to him, with a slight raise of her aging cheekbones and subtle squeeze between the angles of her lips. Jamie broke the chalk of his skin to resemble a reciprocate smile but mustered merely minuscule motions, confusing his facial muscles with an unfamiliar request.

    Callie removed three glasses from in front of him, wiping the rims with a used rag and placed them in a bin for Al, the busboy. “I heard the birds singing some sweet tune earlier,” she said as she pushed the fresh drink toward him. Trailing serpentine behind the sweating dish, her dingy rag hardly drying the mahogany topside. “You’re not thirsty, suddenly?”

    Jamie gripped the handle and tilted the liquid to investigate what it could be. It wasn’t a long island. Perhaps vodka or gin. He dismounted the lemon from the rim and strangled the juice into Callie’s fluidic offering, then stirred deliberately. Before partaking, he reached into his jacket pocket, maneuvering between his keys and loose change to reveal a pad of sticky notes. He dabbed the tip of a ballpoint on the surface of the drink and wrote What song?

    Callie looked down the bridge of her thin rounded nose into the blot left behind by his pen. Her waning smirk lowered in pendulum contrast with the opposite brow. “Before your time,” she shrugged.

    Jamie sighed and lost any interest he summoned. In his neck, the gears ground sharply against each other to turn his attention outside the windows. The windows’ frame stretched upward and on days as this one, luminous bright white beams land softly through the transparent entity onto the floor. The wooden planks were stained and mildly warped. Each watermark tallied the years Regular Joe’s Bar maintained, from hosting state championships to mediating political debates among local drunks. Jamie remained stage right intrigued with the performance but seldom participated. On rare occasion, he exercised expression, contributing dim chuckles or shaming head wags. Though in the midst of riveting yet quarrelsome discussion, he was easily distracted by the light that coated the topmost layer of the uniform planks. When Jamie remembered to raise his sight line (the chiropractor urged his minding his posture) and the light gleamed through the glass, to him it blurred their facial features and transformed agitated faces into abstract, animate characters trading wit rather than clashing their egos. After too long, he knew the atmosphere was different than his own perception alluded and needed to filter the deceiving light.

    Thump! A bird, a pigeon likely, rammed its beak into the glass windows and descended quickly unto death. Jamie’s neck jerked down into the cavity of his upper shoulders, returning to Callie’s glare, a numb right glute and chilling perspiration in his palm resting against the unidentified fluid object.

    Reality haunted him, its deceptive nature is unmatched and omniscience all the more daunting. Even his imagination, a supposed remote destination, the alteration of uncomfortable present events, was often aborted before developing into sustainable thoughts or hopeful notions or definitive ambitions or anything notably intangible. Its reach is boundless and where no presence is welcomed apart from his own conscience, reality would refine the grainy images that pleased him. Stills and motion pictures that, when lacking resolution, invited his interpretation which seldom translated trading blows to genuine animosity. Must’ve been a simple misunderstanding, he thought or, What sport! Plausibly, Jamie was simply naive to bend the light of truth, refracting what’s plain and direct into colors that satisfy the need to see something more (or less). So when annoyance turned distressed in the widening of Callie’s eyes and her focus stretched past his position, naturally, he expected some minor occurrence like the elderly tumbling or a stickup.

    “Keep your hands off her! Last time I’ma tell you,” a recognizable voice warned.

    “Man, back th-the f-f-fu’up. Tha’s my woman. I can do the hell I please with m-my woman.” An upchuck flirted with his tongue, attempting to diminish his prowess and save the man from an inevitable scuffle. Four shots into a young evening and little would reel back his cognizance, thus seven shots earlier ruined his chances of returning home unscathed.

    The two men invoked a forming congregation. Rumbling floorboards tickled the hairs sprouting Jamie’s neck and the unrest of the crowd pulled his helix to face them, but not yet his complete concern. Men along his peripheral gained interest and abandoned their brew to consume this other distraction. Still, he remained in the impression of his seat. In part because he lost sensation where his backside occupied space, but also the gleaming rays began to again beckon his presence in the void of his imagination.

    Sloppy rebuttal continued, “Mind your own business, boy. Tha’s my wo-man.” He dragged his rubber limb like a ball-and-chain from behind him to the direction of his opposition, shifting his balance from one side to the other. In another attempt, he landed his flailing knuckles against a sober clavicle.

    The man with the familiar voice clasped his grip to the drunkard’s collar chuckling with amusement, almost embarrassment for his upcoming victim like watching your nephew stumble on his lines at his first play, “You messed up, family.”

    Family? Jamie thought. His spine whipped upright and rotated toward the source of jargon. Lincoln the Third, his brute of a confidant, was planted right knee first in the drunk’s gut. His bloodied fists scraped the whites through punctures of thick cocoa skin. The surrounding persons began to close in and barricade Jamie’s view. He stood, but his slender tower failed in effort to overcast the spectators. His steps gradually accelerated haste. The slew of observers, in a sudden uproar of excitement, shock, discomfort, and guilty pleasure, became dense and forcibly resistant. Jamie thought, Lincoln the Third must have finished him off. Must’ve gone for the throat or pierced his intestines or yanked the jerk’s collar straight out or… no, he’s honorable—an air-tight stranglehold would suffice.

    When he broke the edge of the crowd, with Lincoln the Third in his sight, another man was abusing his gut, presumably in favor of the drunk. That drunk bastard. Lincoln is taking some tough blows, there. He—wow, he’s really in deep shit.

    The rampant punches continued and Jamie became eager with rage and impulse. Around him, their bubbling skin and entertained eyes begged for the ongoing onslaught, and that annoyed him. His tongue crawled back into his throat the same moment “Get your ass off!” hiked up his esophagus and made post in the cave of his mouth. Grunts and moans replaced his call for truce and plea to stop the scene before witnessing manslaughter. An invisible tightrope bordered the match, and Jamie dared step in the ring. Amidst a loud simultaneous bellowing of amusement (louder than their excitement following this other man sneak attacking Lincoln the Third), he dug his unkempt, dark-rimmed fingertips into the man’s posterior and yanked him up off of Lincoln, then plummeting the man’s back into his bony kneecap. The laughter turned into agonized surprise and a hum of disbelief. Gasps and varying exclamations.

    Jamie pulled his friend by the wrist from the blood on the floor and thought, I couldn’t let him keep at you! Discomfort, embarrassment and pride blanketed his faint smile.

    Lincoln the Third, with whatever strength he had left and the brace of Jamie’s extended arm, hoisted himself into Jamie, leaning and panting on Jamie’s jacket. He pushed himself back just inside Jamie’s field of vision, patted his chest twice, open palm, and sighed a relieving gust of air. “Are you okay?” He looked toward the lady he had been protecting, “Really hopin’ I ain’t take those licks for nothing.”

     “I’m—I don’t even know him. I’m so sorry,” she seemed ashamed. “Thank you, really.”

    “Mhm.” Lincoln dragged himself along Jamie’s pace, his arm loose around his rescuer’s shoulder.

    Jamie rested Lincoln into the same stool he’d been in then sat adjacent, gazing at his own hands. Lincoln knows I’d do pretty much anything for him. He’s done good by me, but now he knows I’m good for it. He knows.

     Barely a word had been spoken between the pair for so long, Jamie wondered what Lincoln stayed around for. His words of appreciation, of camaraderie during their drinking sessions, of interest in Lincoln’s stories eluded him very often, but after eighteen years of silence, he believed he’d learned to speak with his hands. He looked to Callie, who was still stunned by recent events, and he pointed to the sweating glass she gifted him, suggesting curiosity.

     “Lemon water,” she replied.