REMEMBERING ME

Abstract

My first memory is of my mother’s first memory of me She’s told me this story so many times that I feel like I’m telling the story from my own memory. As if I remember being in the delivery room… “Boy I remember that labor I had with you! Lord Jesus! You was the worst of all of ’em.” “You came out weighing ten pounds and five ounces.” “And once you came out, the doctors and all the nurses just looked at you like they was in shock. Then they kept calling other doctors in to come and look at you.” “But they wouldn’t let me see you. My legs was still propped up with that sheet in the way. So I couldn’t see nothin’.” “And they just kept calling more doctors in, and all the doctors kept saying the same thing:” Doctors: We’ve never seen anything like this! “But they still wouldn’t let me see you. Finally I just started yelling, ‘let me see my child. What’s wrong with my baby?!’” “The doctor finally looked at me and said ‘Ma’am, this is the cleanest baby I’ve ever seen.’ They gave you to me and you didn’t have any fluid or blood on you. Not one drop.” perhaps all the blood was used up from hundreds of years of doing nothing but bleeding When the doctor cut the umbilical cord, how different was that cut from the cut his great, great, great, great, great-grandfathers made when they cut us off from our African mother culture and all that was life-giving to me? and my life… a testimonial to the blade My earliest memory is of being two or barely three years old, walking into the kitchen and watching my mother change my little brother’s diaper. I asked her a question about the diapers. I can’t remember what I said, but her response was “I’m going to put YOU in one of these diapers, if you pee on yourself again.” I don’t know why she was so upset, seeing that when they brought us here on enslavement ships, they packed us like animals, forcing us to piss right where we were – on ourselves and on anyone next to, or below us. And it seems like I’ve been pissing on myself and everyone around me – ever since. And it seems I’ve been getting pissed on, ever since. So, what’s the big deal mama? I remember the first time I was with a girl. I was three or four. Her name was Chasa Palamore – and she was three. Her brothers pushed me and her into doing it once in the alley and another time in their oldest brother’s basement bedroom. I don’t think we ever really did anything; just naked and grinding. And it seems like I’ve been making love in alleys and dark hidden-away basements, ever since with far-away people still watching and cheering me on. yeah, over and over I attempt to make love but after the applause dies down everyone – including me – just ends up getting fucked and I can trace this one too, back to the white slaveowning sucker he wanted Lucile to have high priced babies so he forced me to fuck her And that can’t be washed away with constitutional suds when you create human breeding Farms, you produce studs and we still walk the streets, reproducing the culture whitey produced in us. I remember being four or five years old, living on 68th & Justine. Until I left home at 17, every place I ever lived was all black. The only white person on the block was my mother. But we still think she was a black woman trapped in a white woman’s body. I remember when me and my brothers would get into fights on the block. All the kids would gather around and sing: It’s a fight! It’s a fight! It’s a Nigga and a White. Gimme skin Gimme skin The Nigga gonna win Being 100% certain that I was black, the song never bothered me much. I’d just stand there amazed thinking, “These kids have got to be pretty stupid if they think I’m white.” These were the same folks I played with everyday. I remember having this thought that I didn’t have the vocabulary to express. The thought was like “Hey, I’m one of y’all, you idiots, Don’t you get it? How y’all gone let this shit split us up like that. Later I was to learn about the house Negro and the field Negro, and how our enslavers used “divide and conquer” to cause division and disunity amongst their captives. For hundreds of years, they’ve used our differences to cultivate division and hostility among us. They used everything from age to skin color to divide us. So when I stood in the middle of Justine about to fight, I was experiencing the lingering effects of the latter. I remember the Columbus song in fourth grade: In 14 hundred, ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue He sailed, and sailed, and sailed, and sailed! and found this land for me and you it was cold blooded murder I was a helpless nine year old child and they created that vicious lie and thousands more just like it and fired them into my defenseless mind it was cold blooded murder murdering my sense of self murdering my identity preventing the possibility that I could connect to a source of pride severing the connection between me and all that could give life to my spirit yeah I know of other truths now but can a fact learned at 30 overcome a lesson internalized at seven? I remember the winters on 43rd Street – a block east of King Drive. I remember my mother sending me and my brother out in the snow with a bucket. We’d fill the bucket up with snow, and stop to have a snowball fight and play in the snow. Then we’d take our bucket full of snow up to our apartment on the third floor, and set the bucket by the stove so the snow could melt. Once the snow melted, we opened the back of the toilet, and poured the water in, so we could flush the day’s waste. I remember eating oatmeal for every meal. Oatmealf or breakfast Oatmeal for lunch Oatmeal for dinner and for dessert? Oatmeal cookies and I didn’t think about it then, the way I think about it now. I didn’t know I had a right to live better than that I remember reading my first book. I was 19 years old and in the Navy. It was Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary.” Shortly afterwards, I’d read my first non-fiction work. It was the Autobiography of Malcolm X. In Malcolm I found the answers to all the questions the white world could not answer. Like the question of why in the fuck was I 19 years old and just starting to read! Much of what we accomplish is motivated by the belief that others have in our ability. I went through an educational system that couldn’t even identify my abilities let alone believe in them. Low tracked and labled I get sad when I think of the potential that was wasted in those years that I languished in a system that destroyed my belief in my own worth. Though tragic, that’s nothing compared to the potential destroyed by capitalism and slavery. What would our future African civilizations have looked like if Europeans hadn’t murdered us and our continent? Would we have performed cold fusion by now? Perhaps we would have produced a renewable energy source that didn’t harm the ozone layer, or pollute the air we breathe. If sons of slaves could produce a revolution in blood storage and perform the world’s first successful heart transplant, what could we have done by now if capitalism, slavery, and racism hadn’t gotten in our way? as a result, the most beautiful thing we’ve been able to produce under this oppressive system, is our struggle against it I remember last week Just this past thanksgiving I was at my brother Mike’s house. Mike is the oldest, then Carole, then Tony, then me, then Sean. Everyone but Sean was there and Mama had made her ridiculously delicious Sweet Potato pies. When I was little, whenever mama made those pies, people we know would come from all around the city to get a couple slices. I remember one year, lot’s of folks were in and out of the house, and a lot of pies came up missing, and soon they were all gone. We always thought someone was stealing them. But that night, this past Thursday, Mike finally told us it was him. Mike didn’t grow up with us. He and Carole lived with their aunt, and they were even poorer than we were. He was visiting with us that year in the late 70s. He told us he ate seven pies and hid two of them. We all had a very good laugh about that. But someone asked a question that night that never got answered “Why in the world did you eat SEVEN pies?” It’s not like Mike was overweight. He was slim, like me. Here’s what I believe America makes life very uncertain for Black people so many times we get all we can while it’s there, cause you don’t know if it will be there tomorrow Mike grew up not knowing where his next meal was coming from. you figure out the rest Hey, maybe that’s why I was born so clean maybe I knew that life on the outside of the womb wasn’t so certain so I consumed all I could while I was in there I remember tomorrow I saw it a few times in my dreams My great, great, great, great-grand daughter was reminiscing with her younger brother about how they’d wrestled in the grass when they were children. Then they discussed the meeting they have tomorrow with other teachers in the New Afrikan School System, in the United Republic of New Africa, in the southern and eastern regions of what used to be called the United States. They met and poured a libation calling out the names of all the ancestors who struggled to liberate our people I remember the work I must do to ensure my name is called

Citation

Kamau Troy LaRaviere, J. (2003), "REMEMBERING ME", Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 267-273. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(02)26017-2