Black Gold

He donned his 14kt gold-plated hoop earring for the first time. His black denim jacket and

caramel complexion stood out against the pithy, underdeveloped bodies of his 4th grade peers. It

was the 80's. He looked tough as leather; yet, from the surface to the core he was as soft as the

child-sized earlobe that the hoop had been pushed through.

Where the gold had actually come from I will never know, and he had never considered.

Undoubtedly the hoop was sold as one unit of thousands to the Long’s Drugstore and Pharmacy

that offered the piercing services of a gum snapping and artificially caring high school student

for $14.99. The gold plating was surely done in China by sweatshop workers who had never

considered such body adornments beyond ancient myths of dynasties and valor: terms of which

their lives seemed permanently deprived. Where the factory got its raw material is unknown, but

to conclude that it came from the same continent as the boy’s enslaved ancestors would be no

stretch of the imagination. This is the circular irony of infinite connections that made his

elementary experience both quaint and massively traumatic in the same breath. There he stood,

December 5th, the day after his birthday—lookin’ tough.

Earlier that week as the 4th grade curriculum had wound its way through the tales of U.S.

history, the unit had switched over to the new nation and eventually would lead to a grazing

mention of the slave trade as the teachers prepped students for civil war simulations and boring

documentaries on laser discs with fanatical re-enactors.

The topic of slavery, Africans, and really anything to do with historical or contemporary black

culture fell heavily upon the boy, and he was expected to add insight and perspective in the

classroom. Once he was pulled aside by student teacher and warned about his failure to

participate in an activity where students were asked to write from the perspective of a slave.

"This is something that should be important to you, it’s YOUR history. You're a great student, but

if you continue this type of behavior, it’s going to damage your participation points," she warned.

The whole time period in history began to be uncomfortable, and everyday after science he

would begin to feel his ears get hot as if too many eyes were fixed upon him, challenging his

sheer existence in the classroom. He would distract himself by flipping to the back of the history

book, Into the West, with the overly lit studio shot of a 19th century covered wagon on its front,

and sifting through the maps of the world. He was unfamiliar to the concept of "backpacking,"

but he fantasized about taking boats down the Nile to Cairo and catching a caravan of camels or

land rovers across the Sahara to Timbuktu, which was next to a place named Niger, who's capital

was Niamey, and then down into Dakar which was a place his parents had gone together before

they had kids, and which also reminded him of the cologne his older brother wore, Dakar Noir.

Noir, he knew, meant black.

The class finally caught up to him when the teacher told them all to turn to page 988, a high

number which he quickly recognized as the map pages. Flipping there, he saw a map of Africa

with an inset of the globe, both tagged with the graffiti of transatlantic slave trade routes that

crisscrossed and wove deeper and darker in some places like lashing scars on the backs of the

slaves that had travelled them: his father’s forefathers. The mumbles and laughter over the names

of the African nations that had been formally recognized only in the last 20 to 30 years began to

irritate him, the irritation was exacerbated by the one other half breed student in the class who,

although they were friends, was sitting in his chair repeating "nigger, nigger, nigger" as if to

aggravate the boy further. When the boy attempted to quiet him, the friend pointed to the nation

labeled "Niger" and said, "It’s just a country in Africa...."

After class the boy and his mulatto friend, who had started to refer to the two of them as zebras

for their half-back half-white blood mixture, were walking out the classroom when the friend,

who was raised to be either impervious to, or unaware of, race, questioned: “If there's a country

named "Nigger," why do you get so angry when people say it...?” The boy, thoroughly lacking a

response, turned and walked off the playground unconsciously duped by ignorance.

That night the boy, seated at dinner with his bi-racial family, brought up the question that his

parents must have been anticipating since they had birthed their two sons as kings in paradox, or

at least a version thereof.

“Why is there a country in Africa named Nigger?” This set off a series of actions around the

house, his father reached towards the bookshelf, out came dictionaries and an atlas to correct the

linguistic and geographic errors, while his mother stood aimlessly unprepared for the racial

dialogue with her black son, although she had brought the eldest up to age 16 already. That elder

brother brought emotion and pragmatism with one pointed statement: “If anyone calls you a

nigger, punch him in the face!” This inadvertently jolted mom into the conversation. "I don't

want you getting into any fights.... Did someone call you that at school?"

The next day the science lesson caused an involuntary anxiety to grip the boy, anticipating the

forthcoming history lesson, and another hour of looking at pictures of slaves on ships and auction

blocks brought about the type of nausea that comes not from stomach sickness, but from fatigue.

When the class broke for afternoon recess the boy and his ‘Zebra’ friend walked in front of a few

other boys. One of them, Raymond Horatio, a fat Jewish boy who's family had undoubtedly

suffered its share of marginalization, called the boy’s name. As he turned around, Raymond

asked "Were your parents slaves?" A muted and broken "Shutup!" spurted from the boy’s lips as

the arrow nearly hit his heart. Raymond laughed. "Whatever, nigger..." The laughter continued.

The boy reached the end of the walkway and took one step onto the grass. About face; stand at

attention. As Raymond closed the four-step gap, still laughing with his friends at his display of

bigotry, the boy balled his fists.

With adrenaline pumping through his veins, the boy’s body began taking blood from his brain,

causing everything in his vision to seem as if highlighted by a backlight. Subsequently, there was

a trail of shiny glittery soul power that followed behind his fist as it bolted through the air and

planted contact on the fragile cheekbone of the Horatio boy like a comet with enough power to

extinguish the dinosaurs. Glass jaw Raymond was spun around, and stumbled backwards down

the sloped knoll. The boy pounced like a panther; clad in his black denim jacket, today with jeans

to match, he looked like an affiliate of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and fought just as

viciously for a similar egalitarian definition of humanity. Although the Panthers before him had

created a calculated movement, he acted upon the same visceral impulse that each of them, and

every other black man in this nation, has felt at one point or another in their lives.

Landing upon the Jewish boy and rolling down the grassy hill with him, the boy asserted himself

on top and began to pummel the Jewish boy whose great grandparents may have even been

ancestors of the boy’s mother. The caramel knuckles were white- tipped like snow cones at the

movie theater, and with each crushing blow they reddened and eventually began shredding the

pale flesh of his opponent. Left, right, in a military cadence inherited from his grandfather’s time

at Tuskegee, transmitted from his fathers time in ‘Nam, now the left blows hitting low, cracking

Raymond’s winter chapped lips and striking Raymond’s throat, the right hitting high and now

forming a bulb over Raymond’s left eye that would later seal shut.

The boy’s supersonic comet soul power had blocked out the screams and yells of the now-

formed crowd, the whistle blowing from the teacher trotting across the yard, the muffled moans

from Raymond and the war cries and victory screams the boy had channeled from tribal

forefathers and his native bloodlines. This is for Geronimo, and this is for Soujourner; this is for

Nat Turner, and this one’s for MLK and Malcolm, this one’s for Hector Pieterson and one for

Emmett Till—the spirits each took a shot as if the meaningless revenge would cool the centuries

of anger that burns in the souls of black folks. The blows freed the caged bird, and Mumia, who

had been locked up since the year the boy was born: free - if not for more than a split second....

Amidst his rage the child foreshadowed the signing of peace treaties between both the Crips &

the Bloods and Palestine & Israel. His world was simultaneously spinning at a heightened speed

as well as standing perfectly still. Then it faded to black.

At some point in the five days of freedom he was awarded from the suffocating institution of

education, he noticed the golden hoop was missing from his ear. It had not been pulled out, but

rather in his unfamiliarity with its design he had never secured the clasp properly, and in the

tumble it must have fallen out. He chose not to replace the hoop with the solid black onyx stud

that had been used to pierce his ear. There was something in him that felt as if he had grown far

beyond any manhood or toughness that would come from that jewelry. He no longer felt the need

to wear his blackness or the stolen gold, on his sleeve; somehow, he had internalized his struggle,

and with it, a piece of his identity. Today, the ear is still scarred from where the hole closed

before it had finally healed, but the wounds left unknowingly by the schoolyard boys have long

since been shifted into positive self-healing energy, the pain has evolved into a dedicated self-

expression in support of the movement towards an active educated populace, in hopes that future

generations will not have to tussle in the school-yard to define their blackness.