The young Black woman is bending over while clutching the small phone she holds to her head. In woeful disbelief, she cries, begging to hear what help the person on the other side has to offer. The phone call is about a youth that has overdosed in the apartment across the street from me, where I sit on a crate and am smoking.
She struck me as the one who knew it all along, who alerted his relationships to the warning signs. I justify her, myself feeling sadness and grief for the loss across the street. I am exhausted for her effort and the moments she couldn’t prevent. She never stopped trying.
People seemed to be walking away from the scene when they shouldn’t have, some of the hardest to witness, exhibiting human confusion and a naked response to death. I guess we’ve all been sitting outside today working through that criminal in our lives. I throw a pebble next to where my cigarette has formed a ball of ash on the concrete.
A little Black boy runs up halfway upon the scene behind the apartment building where the woman is pacing, deciding her next “right” response. I have a gut feeling when I see the little boy; that he could sense the absence without anybody telling him that there was a death. He teeters on the grassy plane, and with his little power throws rocks into my view. He keeps going, because he already knows he can’t help yet. Having witnessed a memory that will define his life for the future, I cannot do anything else but feel beauty, tears at his ballistic little arms, his open shirt flapping at the wind. He’s aiming at the adults across the street, because we always sit and do nothing. There is a taller girl on the pavement beside him, might be his sister. Instead of pounding her chest it seems, immediately she starts to transport a pile of laundry that had been sitting in the open trunk of her parents’ car. She does her chores, little woman doing what is necessary to carry on with life. She must have to be because she is a little helpless woman.
Of Hope
Music pounds in the most possible echo, the outdoors rattle from a car passing by. The beat is earth and at once guttural. How? The reason this neighborhood stands erect? A car is whipping through the street in front of us booming deep bass music and I think I hear, “lift your hands up, little helpless!” Then, “won’t you stand up! Won’t you stand up!” The song sang. So, the boy don’t give up.
Yet, people are more likely to die of drug overdoses than gun wounds. Gun shots, in this neighborhood, are really salutes.
There is a young gentleman of color outside the apartment where the fatality occurred. He is pacing back and forth with a controlled swagger that shakes a little nervously. I said that is no swagger, not the dangerous type. To have gone outside the room of the apartment maybe to process what happened was noble. He steadies, rocks standing up, and fiddles control of the phone. I watch and sigh to his deep need to be patient. In that moment it’s like a degree of his youth and sense of humor just decided to disqualify itself.
The draw has developed on my face. I am white skinned. I scowl at my face and at what I may look like and what it has not stopped being pretentious about, because of what my skin pretends to be on the other side of town where people ignore thinking, I’ll never get over my white skin. As I sit bewildered and ponder, I lovingly write back to Toni Morrison, her books which broke the modern book of love for me.
An author cannot contain the selfishness they require to portray life for others. A tiny historian, a viewer with little sense today, but that child is helpless, also, and will always be remembered in the future. This life is longer in length than we have time to write about it.
Empathy is Poetry 