My Love Letter to Black Men

The plight, the pain, the eternal joy.

I stood on the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Havenscourt contemplating breakfast at the Muslim bakery. I was waiting for my friends before our morning bus commute from Oakland to Alameda. My Sony Walkman was rotating a mix of 3X Crazy, Destiny’s Child, Big Pun and TuPac. I had on a white windbreaker (the kind that folded up into itself) and my edges were laid. My cousin braided my hair the weekend before. I had a crush on a boy named Christian.

I scuffed the concrete with the toe of my shoes and felt the Bay breeze fill my hood and chill my ears. The sound of cars passing by filtered through music — which would occasionally skip. One car didn’t pass. This car stopped. A Chevy Caprice pulled up just before the light and a man rolled down the passenger-side window.

“Damn girl. How old is you?”

This guy looked about my uncle’s age and he was lowering his chin so he could rest his gaze onto me. His lips were ashy and fixed like a letter “U”, holding his question in the air. I squinted through the morning sunlight, shifted my weight and said what I was taught to say by all my big cousins.

“Please get the fuck outta my face.”

“Whoooo! Aight then, bitch. Lil ass girl.”

He was right. I was a little girl. I was 14 years old.

The boys at school were obsessed with words like “titties” and “pussy” and discussing who was a “10” and who was “too dark” or “looked like they suck dick”. I wasn’t impressed by any of it. My passion was writing and figuring out how to navigate life after my family broke in half and my father went to prison and everything kind of turned upside down.

Men approached me like that all the time. They approached a lot of my friends in school. They were mostly in their late teens 0r early-twenties — but sometimes they were older, old enough to be my father. It didn’t matter that I put my hand up to them or told them to fuck off or walked away or lied and said I was nine years old. No matter what, they would take something from me each time. I hated them. I hated their hungry stares and their thick tongues saying thin words like, “damn girl…” Telling me what they bet I’m like in bed, what I probably do with my hands and my mouth.

It made me hate Black men a little. It made me feel abandoned by them a little. It was something that tainted the way I loved men for a while. It seemed like a entire collection of men in my life were taking Black girls so casually that they weren’t even considered commodities.

The images on television weren’t as invasive back then, but they were there. After all, our ace boon coon was Aalliyah and everyone knew she had a thing with the perv of the century — R. Kelly. It was in the air. Young girls were easy bait and older men saw a big, flashing sign above our heads:

“OPEN SEASON”

I must have tricked myself into believing none of that mattered somehow and carried on despite the holes. But feeling like a paper thing for so long takes a toll. It can make you afraid of heights and of depths. It can make you cling to the shallow bits of love and trick yourself into feeling satisfied. Even when I eventually got married — I didn’t think much about the quality of the love we were giving each other. Love was just a word to me that basically meant I chose you, so don’t fuck up.

And I was always the girl who didn’t like the club. Because it’s a virtual meat market and I felt up for sale. A drink, pretty words, a flash of a smile, a tug on the elbow and I was supposed to submit. I didn’t work like that. I would refuse the drink, scoff at the pretty words, return the smile with a side-eye, and jerk my elbow back when touched. I was the leave me alone, I came to dance with my girls girl. If I wanted a warm body in my bed at night I knew who to call. Because there was always that guy.

We all have that guy.

What’s sobering is settling myself onto a plastic chair in a classroom at the family courthouse. I sat there while someone gingerly explained to me exactly how to tear my family in half. The family I created with someone I loved. But didn’t love enough. And who didn’t love me enough — because how could he possibly? Because sometimes you only love what you’re allowed to see, and we peered through the cracks in the barriers we had each built, trying to see each other and never could. Because barriers are like that and cracks aren’t enough. At the very end, just like any other class, the instructor asked if there were any questions. I had a question.

I wanted to know why I didn’t see it coming.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t ready for marriage, because that’s a learning process by default, so no one is truly ready. It was that I didn’t know shit about love.

Loving a Black man isn’t like loving anything or anyone else. Some Black men will hurt you, but some Black men are not all Black men and the remainder of them will kiss every part of you and protect you and assist you and allow you to assist them.

But all I could see were the ones who beat me down who called me a woman when I was still a girl. I didn’t truly pay attention to Black men — the colors that existed underneath their melanin. Not until I gave birth to one.

It was the year Trayvon Martin died. George Zimmerman was released on bail the day I found out I was to have a son. I cried in the hallway that day. Belly round and heavy, choking on my own breath, wanting to pound on the wall but holding back — trying to compose myself. A girl I could handle, because afterall — I was a girl. But a Black man? How would I manage to raise him not to be weak, not to be bull-headed, not to be blind, not to be one-track minded, not to get lost, not be lead? I tried to build a plan in my mind and convince myself that all I needed to do was be stronger. I formulated ideas about how I could control things I actually couldn’t control. Because the fact of the matter was that I was giving birth to someone the world would want to stomp out.

I began to understand Black men that day, and mother’s of Black men as well.

Then one morning Orion and I waded in water, separated by flesh and bone and holding the same breathing pattern. In that moment, and for the first time ever, I was submitting to a Black man.

Albeit, a fetus.

But I made a deal with him. I would trust him if he would trust me. I would accept the pain, the pressure, the unimaginable work — if he would trust me when I pushed. I had no control over whether he (or God) would honor this deal, but I made it anyway. On the other side I was holding my baby — or he was holding me. I never felt stronger or more exposed or more tireless but it created a new version of me. A version that saw a Black boy in every Black man and therefore loved them — even the ones who hurt me. Because at some point they were just boys, who smiled and laughed because everything was funny. Because somewhere along the way they learned to toughen up and slap a booty walking passed and lie about their truths and do what they had to do to get by. Because boyhood is like that. But Black boyhood is especially like that. And sometimes, some Black men don’t quite grow up — and I can even understand why they might not want to. I can’t excuse it or say it’s ok, but I can forgive it now.

What I learned most through my son and through all the stories I have in my mind and in my journals about these men I roll my eyes at and admire and kind of worship but also run from — is that love is a daily practice and it’s never perfected. It’s never achieved. It’s simply something you consciously strive for. It’s allowing yourself to see good things through a wall when there is no window. Essentially love is acceptance which is the root of happiness. If you are not love — you cannot give love.

Black love, loving a Black man — it’s all about submission. Me and my fellow sisters have been taught not to submit. To not let a man’s words tickle us too much. Not to open up too quickly or we may run the risk of giving away too much of ourselves to a man who was not deserving of it. But I look at my son — this child, this small person who is inherantly happy and satisfied and curious and kind. I realize that this is where we all begin. All of us — every gender, every creed, every race. But Black men are systematically beaten down. The images of themselves, the lack of father figures they may have, the assumptions thrown on them by people unwilling to look at them for longer than two seconds. And yet, they are someone’s son and once they were Orion.

So I accept that loving a Black man means loving something powerful and dangerous and delicate enough to break and I accept that they need us.That we hold their hearts and whisper words into their subconciousness (if we get close enough) that stay with them. That the wrong one can devastate you but the right one will love you fiercely and indefinitely. That pain is part of the process and allowing yourself to feel it when neccesary will ready you for the next battle. Whether it’s the end of a marriage or watching your son grow up to face a world that wants to kill him. I accept all of these things.

Dear Black Men,

This is what you have taught me. I see the complexity in your plight, your birth, your sin, your ignorance, your incredible minds, the tradgedy that reflects my own. How when you rise, we rise.

And even those of you who have hurt me are Kings.