The following are excerpts from a Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Project Transcript of a series of recordings between Miles Jenkins and his uncle Darren Jenkins, Bearer of Tradition for this project. Three Recordings were made between May 28, 2018 and November 15, 2018. Darren Jenkins speaks of a scholar whose work was transformative for him as a writer.
May 28, 2018 Interview
. . .If I had known her this well in life, I would’ve understood why she left me in her will, which is still a bit of a mystery to me. What I’ve come to understand, though, is that she knew me better than I knew myself.
When someone dies and names you in a will, it’s kind of a mystery gift: you open the bag and whatever’s there is yours, like it or not. And, no matter what people say, that’s no way to discover someone loves you–get some money, get a house, get some jewelry…none of that matters: what they really leave you is a relationship, you know? Now, keep in mind, Dr. Melba Higginbottom was not a friend of mine, we only met once, in life, but sometimes you meet people and even a brief exchange with them can change your fate forever.
First of all, she scared the shit out of me. She was one of those people who you’d want to sit with and ask questions of, but you also didn’t wanna look the fool. So, I spoke to her in like haikus and shit. [Laugher] You know? Talking to a legend in Shakespearean scholarship like Higginbottom was intimidating, but now, talking to her ghost? Definitely an extreme sport. I can dive into a dusty archive to satisfy my curiosities, but I don’t fuck with Ouija boards, so some questions just have to go unanswered.
But any serious reader of Shakespeare—even a hobbyist, like myself—would be pulled in by this final, unpublished work of hers, man. Her real gift was her ability to bring disparate subjects together to show their connections. That’s . . .that’s what I learned from her. Those connections opened new worlds… Finding connections between moments that you had no idea would connect with another. Just to break it down: Higginbottom took the position that since Shakespeare stole from other authors, stole from historical events and current events, why shouldn’t she. In her words, “Dude was a master thief.” And she loved pop culture—Housewives of Atlanta to The Masked Singer—so Shakespeare was a kinda kindred spirit for her. Shakespeare would’ve been keeping up with the Kardashians, for sure.
~
Say what? Yeah. You’re right, poetry; she did that, too. But her real groove was what we now call critical fabulation. She basically took New Historicism to a whole other level. [inaudible] I know, right?! Deep.
Higginbottom focused a lot on people and how they lived, power dynamics and all that. To say that she was a bit obsessed with these concerns would not be hype; I mean, she was like fanatical. Not to talk about the dead and all, but homegirl was a little strange. I’m saying, without her credentials—and, mind you, she was heavy: got her PhD from Cambridge in ‘77, a thesis on Shakespeare’s Moors—yeah, without that, people would probably just see her as some freak. But Higginbottom, eccentricities and all, was above all else a first-rate Shakespeareanist, which would be impressive enough, but growing up in Cleveland’s Hough housing projects in the ‘60s? I mean, she was there during the uprising as a teenager.
~
Yeah, yeah . . . Always reppin CLE. Like us, she was educated but she came up in the streets. Code switching, nephew. You gotta stay nimble. Keep moving forward with an eye on where you came from, which is a lesson I got from her. When I got my PhD, I never wanted to get to a point where I couldn’t talk to folks I grew up with. In that same spirit, she managed to carve out a life staying in the Cleveland area, teaching at Cleveland State and all that. And being a woman of excess in every area of her life, she built a home there: a timber-framed “wattle-and-daub.” Although the style of the home was more façade than function—the interior had radiant bathroom floors, a screening room, and a crystal grotto—her homeowner’s association was all fucked up over it. But Higginbottom just paid the fine and kept building, like the G that she was, and, in fact, the more they talked shit, the more square footage she added, until she reached just over 3,000 sq. feet. The sista was smooth and tough, a pianist’s hand in a Kevlar glove. Well, finally, the HOA gave in, and dispensation was granted when she agreed to install a concrete fence, blocking the view of the house from the street. It was some ugly shit, man, but she got the W.
~
This was classic Higginbottom. You see, this sista’s persistence in all pursuits became so legendary that her surname engendered a verb form, Higginbottom, or Higginbottomed, in the past tense; or, in the infinitive, to Higginbottom the situation, as when someone manages to accomplish something through preternatural persistence. Once when a Higginbottom acolyte used the verb form in an MLA committee meeting, the committee chair, a linguist of international renown, dismissed it as another form of to Barleby a situation, to which the acolyte clarified with some authority that to Bartleby is to do nothing; to Higginbottom is to do everything in one’s power. After 15 minutes of this digression from the meeting, trying to define the verb with metaphors ranging from Eugene V. Debs to sit-down protests to suicide bombings, the chair acquiesced to the acolyte. Yeah, the chair was, in effect, Higginbottomed.
So, when she died, her house was donated to the city of Berea. It’s now the site of their historical museum– advertised on the website of the Chamber of Commerce and everything. You could never predict what she would do. Her neighbors were surprised, at the public reading of her will, to find that the house was bequeathed to their shitty little hamlet. The executor of the will, Agnes Muncie, said that she, “hadn’t seen a will in language like this before.” I’ve never heard the reading of a will before myself, so I had no expectations of what one should sound like, but I knew it would be dope because Higginbottom wrote it, but, still, I wasn’t ready.
~
. . .Trust me: I was sitting there asking the same question. Why was I there? Like I said, I didn’t know her that well; we weren’t what you would call friends. We first met in Washington, DC, over drinks at a bar during a conference, in ‘96. See, I walk into the conference bar, and take the only seat available, which is next to her. I’m reading a book on black screenwriters, right? And she surprises me because she knows some of their names; everyone knows the directors, but few people know the screenwriters. So, we start talking about the structure of Killer of Sheep and how, in each vignette, there’s a little joy. And I say to her:
“I’m so tired of people telling me about the beauty of poverty in that film.” She looks out facing the bottles behind the bar, like she’s picturing the scenes in her head.
“Every scene turns on an act of love, and that’s really the plot of that film,” she says. I had to hold on that for a moment. I’m thinking, Yeah… I can see that. So I say:
“Yeah, I see it.”
“The girl with the dog mask.”
“Yes! I love that kid.”
“That’s what that’s about,” she says, pointing a finger at me. “A child playing. That says all you need to know. Somewhere in that child’s life there’s love.”
She pauses and turns to stare out again. I just sit with her for a few, in a kind of silence. Surrounding us, just the din of bar life, which is just as empty as no sound. And I’m sitting there, and I know she’ll say something else when she wants.
And then she hits me with it.
“‘No tongue! All eyes! Be silent!’ this is what the world says to the black man.” She says this like she expects me to do some call and response and shit, but I have nothing.
“Act 4, scene 1, The Tempest,” she says. “Prospero says this shit to Ariel. Basically, do as I say. No backtalk. You see what I tell you to see.”
“I’ve heard that my whole life,” I say, which is all I have to contribute.
“I know you have,” she says, “I know you have.”
~
No? You haven’t seen Killer of Sheep? Black Neo-realism. A must see, nephew. That early scene in it stood out to both of us. There’s this little girl who walks around in a rubber mask, a mask of a hound dog. Her parents fight, her father works at a slaughterhouse during the day, and neither of her parents show much evidence of joy in their lives. In the mask, the girl’s superpower, despite how sad the dog’s face looks, is her ability to play, to retain her innocence, despite what, on the surface, seems like little joy around her in the adult world. I felt all of this watching it, but I couldn’t quite put into words what I felt until that conversation. Now I see these moments of joy in every scene of the film, and there are days when I feel like that little girl when I want to hold on to some joy despite what’s happening around me.
We never spoke at length again.
~
[Darren stares off for a beat. Miles nudges him.]
My bad . . . so, the best way to explain why I was in her will is like I said before. Sometimes you just connect deeply with someone even though you don’t have much history with them, but the little history you have means something—could be good, could be bad, but a brief encounter can change your fate. That conversation was mine . . . We were just friendly enough to wave at each other, even once blowing kisses to each other while riding opposing escalators at a later conference, so I was surprised to get the notice that I was included in her will and then surprised at the reading of her will to find she left her unfinished verse play, When I Waked I Cried to Dream Again, to me. The best answer I have is that I don’t know why she chose me, and her will didn’t help any, either.
Here, I brought it with me. [The unfolding of paper] The language in her will . . . it read crazy, man. I’m gonna stumble through this, so excuse me:
Item 6, I, Melba Higginbottom, bequeath unto the belabored scholar Darren Jenkins the manuscript and the capsule in the handeth of the town execut’r of this will Agnes Muncie, jointress unto Mr. John Q. Muncie. The manuscript wilt beest edited and did complete within six months or ‘twill beest did destroy according to the true meaning of this, mine wilt.
Nephew, when she read that shit out loud, I didn’t understand a word. Just my name. But the executor held up a thumb drive and the hard-copy manuscript and motioned in my direction. I looked behind me to realize she was speaking to me, so I stood up and took the handwritten, ink-smudged pages.
[Sound of the pages in Darren’s hands]
And now I have less than six months to make these edits and present it to a publisher; otherwise, it’ll be destroyed.
~
[Darren sighs. Silence. 15 second pause on the tape.]
Ah, I know. I see you smiling . . . I didn’t answer your question about my youth. Well, nephew, nothing I read influenced me in my youth. I wasn’t the reader then that I am today, just comic books. But an incident that involved your uncle Gerald and me . . . and your grandmother. This stayed with me. You see your Grammy now with Alzheimer’s, but her common-sense quotient was genius level when I was a kid, and she took no shit off no body. It must’ve been 1973; I was eight years old; your uncle Gerald, 15. It’s fall, so we’re wearing overcoats, but we just left church, so we also have on suits underneath. Mom brings us to this plaza where she has to see this lady, a seamstress. Gerald and I are just kids, so we’re bored as hell. We ask if we could go to the drug store at the end of the plaza to get some candy. We walk down to People’s Drug, and once we get in there, well, of course, I have to look at the comic books, which your uncle Gerald has no interest in. You know, of my brothers, I’m the nerd. So Gerald goes to pay, and when he finishes, he tells me to come on.
We begin our walk back to the other end of this plaza, which was just a block long. Well, we get about halfway there, and these cops pull up, and I mean they come in hot, gangsta their squad car right up on the sidewalk. We’re standing there with our mouths open like what the fuck. But we’re young and don’t know shit, so we think we’re about to watch them apprehend some bad guys, like on TV; they jump out of the car with their guns drawn. Still, we’re thinking, this is some cool shit we’re about to witness. In our minds, finally, the day is getting exciting.
Next thing you know, they’re standing in front of us, guns in our faces, yelling for us to drop the bag of candy and to get against the wall. Gerald elbows me to act like him and raise my hands; I was clutching the inside of my pockets like I could pull myself down in there and hide. I finally reach for the sun. I’d seen enough westerns to know that when a gun is pulled on you, you raise your hands, but that shit doesn’t come naturally. The most natural thing to do is to freeze. You don’t want to move anything; you want time to stop, but it doesn’t work like that. That’s why some people pee on themselves or even take a shit, frozen in fear. Well, a few seconds later, another car of cops pulls up, also like they’re about to nab bank robbers or some shit. At this point, I start crying, which pisses Gerald off, because he’s already mad and looking at the cops like if they didn’t have guns, he’d have their asses.
Well, just when I think this shit can’t get worse, mom comes flying out of the seamstress shop. Man, she starts cussing these cops out like they stole something. They tell her to calm down, which makes her cuss even more. Then she tells them to explain what the fuck was going on that they felt the need to pull guns on her children. These Keystone muthafuckas look at one another, until the one cop, the one who jumped out of the car first, says, “We had a report of two individuals, fitting your sons’ descriptions…shoplifting.”
“Shoplifting?!” She says, and then she looks at us like, were you? And we just shake our heads like, hell no.
Man, I don’t remember what happened next, but we walked away, with mom still cussing them out the whole way back to her car.
~
. . .Yeah . . . “Damn” is right. So, to your question, the verse play gets into these kinda moments, the moments we carry with us, but we have to tamp them down and walk around in the company of white people like everything is fine in the world. Higginbottom looks at a situation like that, and she ties it to Shakespeare. She always mentioned, pretty much in every talk she gave, that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing about the relationship between black people and the police.
~
She made no apologies for being seen as an angry black woman or uppity, and she never tried to soften her stance on anything for mixed company. She was always herself.
If you can imagine this, at a dry-ass cocktail party once, the party’s host—another Shakespeareanist, whose name I won’t say here because he’s a colleague– makes a performance of his magnanimity by inviting Higginbottom into a conversation about Shakespearean actors. This after going on and on about how Olivier was the natural heir to this dude named Burbage, he asked her, “What do you think?” To which Higginbottom in classic Higginbottom fashion, asked, “What was the longest running Shakespeare play on Broadway?” She knew the answer, but she wanted this scholar, who put Olivier up on a white-men-only pedestal, to say it.
“Oh . . .that’s a good question.”
“The quality of my question is not in question.”
“Well, of course not, I just meant—”
“—Othello. Paul Robeson’s Othello. And he proved it could be done without blackface for 296 performances between 1943 to 1944, so why Olivier felt the need to black it up 20 years later, I’ll never know.”
She hit him with the highbrow lowbrow. She would never have to ask, directly, why don’t you include James Earl Jones or Earle Hyman or, yeah, Robeson. (And you went to Howard, theater major, so I don’t even have to tell you about Ira Aldridge.) She simply, with dignity, refused to play into the mythology.
But that was one of the last times people saw her in public. She had become a recluse in her house, not a hoarder or anything, but a recluse. People mentioned at the funeral that they often saw her sitting by a window, working at her desk. She had retired at 62, and no one had seen her in years. Her colleagues would invite her to dinner parties and events in the department—she had emeritus status—but the invitations went unanswered.
[tape clicks off]
~
After Darren Jenkins has spent two months with the manuscript, Miles Jenkins checks in with his uncle. With many asides in this portion of the interview, the archivists decided, after much debate, to include the tangents, uncut.
MJ: So, how’s it going with the deadline? You look . . .you look a little tired.
DJ: I know I don’t look good. Yeah, I’m tired. To say that the manuscript haunts me would be an understatement. It’s like a specter, willing me to action from the afterlife. A few weeks ago, in the middle of the night, I felt my bed move, man, serious business. Shit woke me up; it was 4:40am. I had been dreaming of my childhood. The westside of Akron. My teenage years, a house party, a black lightbulb, and my glow-in-the-dark teeth smiling beneath it, as I prayed for a slow song. The strange part wasn’t the dream but the fact that I knew I was dreaming. I mean, who knows they’re in a dream while inside the dream itself? But let me tell you: I felt the comfort of that space, that house party; that light blacker than our bodies, making our bodies glow; the music those young bodies made — all of it frivolous and all of it necessary, all at once.
“Throw your hands in the air,
And wave em’ like you jus’ don’t care!”
And every night I dreamed, and every night I went back to that party, getting closer to a slow song, and every morning I woke before dawn, before I could get my slow dance on under the vibrato of Luther Vandross’ voice.
I kept thinking about the LED digits on my clock…wondering why at this hour. Then, I gave up. I couldn’t sleep, padding my way to my desk after making a pot of coffee, I pulled out the manuscript, and I saw Higginbottom’s phone number in the lower left corner of the title page, area code 440.
I tried to ignore it, but that shit started sinking in, man. I would lie in bed, tossing and turning, intermittently looking at the clock: 12:05am, 2:12am, 4:40am and then time to get up, go through the manuscript, and start my day on campus. Since I couldn’t think of anything other than the political morass of the country, the declining health of my mother, and Higginbottom’s manuscript, I opted for the latter to distract me from the pain of the two former. I mean, what could I do? I held the yellowed, dogeared pages in my hands, flipped through them, and came to understand Higginbottom more through her commitment to this off-beat project of personal letters, a mysterious thumb drive that only had some music on it, just the one song; news clippings; poems in staggered lines; historical asides; poems set in squares within squares; and poems, all of them, cast in the voices of characters from The Tempest and in the voices of contemporary figures in conversation with those characters. Why would her last project be a collection of poems that resembled the remnants from a Dos Passos novel? Greater yet, why entrust it to me?
So, daily, at my 4:40am alarm, I settle into my armchair, and I transport to this imaginary island–the Devil Strip, she named it–with black inhabitants, and the storm of Higginbottom’s pages carry me into her world. And I do mean pages: The first surprise was that the thumb drive didn’t have files on it, man. It only had two MP3 sound files. One file had a full version of James Brown’s “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved,” and the other had the same song but all instrumental. [James Brown’s voice bleeds in and then the horns kick in.] When I listen to the music, it becomes a kind of soundtrack to my reading, but I can only listen to the instrumental version. The lyrics sing like ghosts in my head.
MJ: Can you read a little bit of it? Now I’m curious.
DJ: I can read from this intro section. It’s full of tangents, which I love, but hold on, youngin; she does go there.
~
[Darren Jenkins reads from the original, handwritten manuscript]
After a long rumination, I now return to the page, exactly one year to this Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, during which time I’ve studied the case of Tamir Rice, 12 years old, slain by rookie police officer Tim Loehmann. I’m trying to hold my pen like a gun, a gun held sideways like young gangstas hold guns in films. I’m trying to inhabit the skin of the black man in Loehmann’s imagination — not Tamir Rice. The black man in Loehmann’s imagination couldn’t be further from Tamir Rice or any of the black men I’ve known and those I’ve loved and those I’ve made love to and those in whose eyes I could see God. I’m writing in the vein of the imaginary monster in the mind of Prospero, the imaginary monster he wants all of us to see as a true monster, Caliban, who, like Tamir, gets explained to us without his beauty. If you destroy something of beauty, you have to find an excuse for your crime actions. O’ how white cops fill their dreams with niggers black men!
[Inaudible language from Jenkins]
[Papers fall to the floor]
MJ: Not what I expected.
DJ: It’s full of surprises. This is just the beginning of a 5,000 word intro to the verse play. Did I mention that this was handwritten? [ We hear Jenkins pick up the pages.] I realized that Higginbottom wanted me not only to edit these pages but also to get them typed into a Word.doc. I should’ve been insulted—I mean, typing?– but I felt a need to answer the call, something, finally, stirred within me after I read that opening paragraph. And it did ignite something in me, some élan vital, to trace her words in this way. You see, a kind of nihilism had taken root in me over the years, after seeing one killing after another of unarmed black men on the news. It should’ve had the opposite effect, but I felt kind of anesthetized. I mean, how else do you get up and go to work in the morning, except to tamp it down and keep it moving? I can’t say, Oh, that news about that brotha who got shot by the police was triggering to me. I can’t get in my car and come in to work today. I mean I should’ve been saying that shit, I should’ve been able to say that shit, but I’m embarrassed to admit that the killings were becoming a white-noise, a cliché, playing in the background. It was all the same story, read on the nightly news like some Gothic lullaby, and I had become a somnambulist of sorts.
Guilt grew over time as I read through Higginbottom’s pages. Why hadn’t I picked up a pen, like a gun—or a gun like a pen!—and fought back yet? I had to think about that one for a while, not really having a good answer.
~
D.L. Hughley, the comedian, once said that the most dangerous place for a black man to live is in a white man’s imagination. I made a meal out of that, mulling over the words. I realized how it’s also dangerous for a black man to visit the white imagination, to get comfortable there, and to move in. Hughley’s words tapped into a fear of mine: I feel as if I’ve been turning, becoming more accommodating, speaking out less. It’s like, year after year, I can feel the bass draining from my voice.
[a pause. Inaudible mumbling.]
MJ: Where’d you just go?
DJ: I’m here . . .I’m good.
[another pause. Jenkins collects himself, wiping his eyes]
MJ: O-kay, so, shifting gears, why did Higginbottom get so obsessed with this project?
DJ: Tamir Rice. When you read her take on it, her words just… man, it just takes you over.
[Jenkins reads further into the handwritten manuscript.]
The Shooting of Tamir Rice on Video
He shuffled his feet and the camera caught him bored November 22nd, 2014; few people saw him trying to have fun. Cudell Recreation Center was covered in snow, and Tamir wanted to play like it was summer. It was work to play like a boy, and no girls came around to give him reason to act like a man. Cleveland boys wore suits or hoodies, carried guns or books–depending on the day of the week, depending on who was watching. Tamir played in the park outside the rec center, where everything fell silent, no balls bounce in the snow. Girls stayed inside from the cold, keeping their skin warm by the radiators. No cameras in their homes. The cameras trained on boys in the park. Tamir looked bored, I’m telling you, bored and cold. He made snowballs and threw them into the ether. People walked by, but he played on. Sometimes he pulled out an Airsoft, pointing it, Bang! Bang! at people, who walked away, not ran, seeing that Tamir was just trying to have some fun. Plastic pellets never fired.
The surveillance video can’t capture details of his face. Cleveland police try pushing in for a close up, try to explain what happened, but Tamir just blurs even more.
Where is the child with the toy gun? The 12-year-old boy? The police said they thought he was 20. Huh?
Remember that episode of The Andy Griffith Show, “Runaway Kid,” when Opie plays cowboy with his friends, all carrying six-shooters that look like real guns, pearl handles and all? The sheriff–his Pa, Andy– pulls up, gets out of the police cruiser, and Opie and his friends tell the sheriff, “Draw”! But Andy doesn’t– the sheriff of Mayberry never carries a gun– so Opie shoots, like Tamir does, with his mouth, “Bang! Bang!” Andy reels back, grabs his heart, pretending he’s been mortally wounded.
Tamir died on November 23, the next day, the day after he was playing in the park, after he was shot playing in the park. The day before, when the police showed up, Tamir was sitting with his head down on a picnic table in the gazebo. Bored to death. The police cruiser barrels through the park on grass, right up to the gazebo. They come in so fast, Tamir jumps up and starts walking to see what’s happening. On video we see the police cruiser pull up, and before the car settles to a stop, we see Tamir fall. The officers get out of the car; the officer on the passenger side, closest to Tamir, was close enough to shoot from his seat. Tamir is shot in his torso, as officers train to do, in less than two seconds.
How many hours tick away in two seconds
and whose watch keeps time?
Yes, other kids were in the park and they fell back as soon as the police pulled on the grass to the gazebo. Soon, Tamir’s 14-year-old sister comes running over. An officer tackles her. She’s screaming, but the camera has no audio; it’s an empty scream. They keep her restrained, despite her void screams and lack of weapon, until back up comes.
When Tamir lived, he played in his school’s drumline, and he enjoyed basketball. Two activities that keep a boy’s hands busy, not pulling on his waistband, as the police reported. The “pulling on his waistband,” presents a defense for the police, justifies the shooting. A 12-year-old black boy with his hands not handling a basketball or drumming with sticks presents reasonable cause. “Show me your hands, show me your hands, show me your hands”! One officer reports he said this, but he was driving the car, and the car hadn’t rested to a stop when Tamir fell. It takes nearly four seconds to say, “show me your hands,” three times fast. The driver, not the shooter, gets out of the car, gun drawn, and stands near the front of the cruiser with his gun trained on Tamir, who is writhing on the ground, out of sight from the camera, occluded by the car. The shooter takes cover behind the trunk of the car, peeking over, looking down at Tamir’s body.
Whose shadow casts farther,
the standing cop, smoke rising from his gun,
or the shot boy, sprawled on the ground?
In the “Runaway Kid” episode, later, Opie and his two gun-slinging friends, decide that they’ll play a trick on the sheriff, Andy. They decide to release the brake on Andy’s parked police cruiser and push it in front of a “fireplug.” The deputy, Barney Fife, comes along, sees Andy’s cruiser in front of the hydrant, and, you know, the law’s the law, so he writes Andy a ticket. Andy pleads his case to his deputy, telling him that he’s never in five years as sheriff ever parked his car in front of a fireplug, and Barney, seeing his point, let’s Andy go free. It’s comedy, so the action moves fast, even in Mayberry. Soon, Andy goes outside to move his cruiser, setting a good example for the citizens of Mayberry, and along comes Opie, still dangling two pistols from his waistband. Opie tells his Pa that he and his friends moved his car:
{audio of The Andy Griffith Show kicks in}
ANDY
I still can’t see how my car got in front of that fireplug.
OPIE
I know how, Pa.
ANDY
You do?
OPIE
Yeah, Steve and Tommy and me pushed it there . . .
You gonna arrest ‘em? I think you could get a confession out of ‘em.
ANDY
Well, uh, why shouldn’t I arrest you, too?
OPIE
I didn’t push very hard.
[laugh track]
ANDY
Oh, I see, that does make a difference.
[laugh track]
Well, uh, how come they pushed my car in front of the fireplug?
OPIE
Oh, just for a joke, Pa.
[Inaudible mumbling. Rustling of paper in Darren’s hands. Long Pause]
MJ: Hmm…That show was so long ago.
DJ: Not really.
[tape ends]
~
[Two months later. November. The uncle and nephew meet again to finish the interview.]
MJ: You look . . . Where are you with the manuscript now?
DJ: I finished it.
MJ: You’re finished? On that deadline? I didn’t…that was fast.
DJ: I felt the pressure, but I settled into a groove. My alarm stopped going off at 4:40am; I would already be awake. I might hear an inner voice telling me to sit at the desk, but I didn’t need coaxing. Little else held my attention. The trees kept losing leaves, and I couldn’t be bothered to rake them. Children would kick through them on their way back and forth to school, and I tried to remember when I was that young. Watching these kids with their lives ahead of them, finding a way to play even while so much was dying around them….
I would read passages of “When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again” aloud to myself, and it became a soundtrack as much as James Brown’s piercing demands, which started to fade in intensity the more I listened. The only music was Higginbottom’s verse:
A mother wails for a dying son,
like a son’s last breath
cries out for his mother.
I would approach my desk by approaching the challenge within: if I hoped to live not simply day to day, aimlessly, but truly to open my mouth with an urgent plea, to speak urgency into others, I first had to honor someone who lived her life as I wished to live. I see the manuscript, the fragments of a mother explaining to the world that her child is not a monster, just a boy at play.
Tamir was outrunning the imagined Tamir, dodging in and out of boyhood, morphing between the 20-year-old Caliban captured on video and a 12-year-old child with a toy. He skipped through the imaginations of rookie police, the pixels masking him on video. And, so, I typed . . . I got into it, man; I typed away and the words came rushing after him and after the next boy, one after the other.
