“The central quality in the Negro’s life is pain — pain so old and so deep that it shows in almost every moment of his existence. …The Negro while laughing sheds invisible tears that no hand can wipe away.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Freedom I have tasted only once in my life, drifting over my wounded soul like a sweet warm ocean breeze.
But never in this my country, where as a black man I am still America’s most hated and most loved. Most envied and most investigated. Most celebrated and most assassinated. Socially castrated. Emancipated. But still not free.
I am both outcast and stranger in a house built by the blood, sweat and bittersweet tears of my ancestors. Centuries-old is our sojourn to be free — still hoping, still longing. Eyes sometimes too clouded by salty tears to see.
“Sweet land of liberty.” Land of hypocrisy. Still an America that sees me as Public Enemy.
Land where my fathers died. Land of the pilgrims’ pride. From every mountainside, land where the color of my skin remains my vexing unforgivable sin. Land where we perish daily in bloody red pools, targets of state-sanctioned murder and trigger-happy fools.
I am Botham Jean, 26, delighting unsuspectingly in a bowl of ice cream in the sanctity of my own home. Fatally shot by a white female cop. My promising black life extinguished, my heart stopped.
So my soul has gone home. And that 10-year prison sentence for Amber Guyger, convicted of my unjustifiable homicide? So damn wrong. But it is the same old song: White is right. Black is wrong.
And the long arm of justice too short to right these wrongs. Seemingly incapable of prevailing against this cursed veil that shrouds the souls of black folks still — 116 years since W.E.B. Du Bois declared:
“One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
I am torn. My soul mourns underneath this crushing weight of living while black. Of breathing, walking, eating and sleeping, and existing while black. In an America that intimates that our sufferings and afflictions have now passed. That racism and America’s original sin called slavery have not forever cast a dark shadow on this nation’s founding and future.
That would suggest that systemic oppression does not now take the form of a New Jim Crow bathed in black mass incarceration, in conspiratorial drugs-and-guns saturation, and our preplanned mass miseducation.
Only by faint imagination can I still see Freedom’s shores. Still dream of a place where black lives are not abhorred. I am at war. With voices inside my head that call my anger unjust, or that wish me dead. I stand perplexed by so-called moral men who turn their heads. Who sit silent amid the slaughtering of lambs upon hate’s bed.
Silent while rekindled racial animus flickers like ambers in the night. Stirred by winds of hate that blow from a White House devoid of even a faint righteous light.
Middle class and yet second-class. “You are still not a man,” American winds decree. I am loathed for my willingness to speak truth to power, for my inability to stand for an anthem whose hypocrisy makes me fall to my knees.
I am Colin Kaepernick. I am Laquan McDonald, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Philando Castile and Tamir Rice. I am choked and shot. I am extinguished black lives. From 1619 to 2019, 400 years of incomprehensible dread. And untold millions dead.
I am Atatiana Jefferson — not immune as a black woman from this hate and pain that so consumes. And perhaps I am doomed to never know freedom in my own land.
But I tasted freedom once, standing on the shores of Ghana, the warm breeze and ocean soothing my invisible tears.
Write John Fountain at: Auhor@Johnwfountain.com
Send letters to: letters@suntimes.com.
