So I left the house today on someone else’s back, holding on to his neck like a little girl clutching her father’s horse. If only you could have seen the way people stared. Him so huge and me with my big old belly in between, whose growth I have paused. Neither the gawping or my weight fazed him in the least. He also held the dog’s leash in his right hand, the dog who kept pace with us and was ostensibly the only normal thing about us. Remember that Bernini sculpture? Of Aeneas when he escaped from Troy carrying his father on his shoulder, and his son beside, so tiny in comparison to that sort of fleshy spiral crowned by the old man’s head? That’s how I imagined others would see our little cluster. The tiny dog nearly invisible, me atop Irrational Number, in an attempt to escape a city in flames that only I could see. It’s a strange feeling to walk so high above everyone else. Not only could I observe the streets again after so long—the people, the cars—but I saw it all from a height way above what I would on my own two legs. Today I took it all in from Irrational Number’s height of nearly six feet nine. I’d never have imagined how much the sight of things changed from a foot’s difference in height. I didn’t see individuals so much as groups, multitudes. Irrational Number explained not long ago how he had to put up with his schoolmates teasing him and poking fun all the time, treating him like a heartless giant, but he didn’t remember the hilarity coming from one person or two, but as a single hoot from a multitude below. I don’t think he sees singularity, only collective behaviors that steal into one person the same as they could steal into another. That’s why the beating he gave that man that sent him to jail hadn’t been a personal thing, he said, but a beating meted out to a body that symbolized the many together who constitute racism.
Our neighborhood in Harlem is fairly dangerous. The people there don’t like white people, and for good reason. And that’s how we walked around the place, like a huge bundle that couldn’t possibly go unnoticed. They say that in moments of danger the last thing you should show is weakness, but I’m not so sure I agree. For me at least, it’s always been the other way around. I think the best self-defense is showing the other cheek, like the Christians are always going on about. In my case, mounted like that on his back, like an appendage of someone else’s body, not using my own legs for motion, I gave off an enormous sense of dereliction, same as that which emanated from our underprivileged neighborhood. So I didn’t feel out of place and nobody looked at me like a foreigner; it wasn’t the color of my skin but my fragility that made me similar to them, to people white society was trying to undermine.
I’m writing you from bed now, Jim, recovering from a bump on the head. Yesterday was Thanksgiving. I woke up especially cheerful. It was a day for hanging around the house, and socially it justified my not going out and being able to spend the next twenty-four hours amid these walls with all the sense of security they provide. Strangely, even though you think you don’t care what other people think or are used to being criticized, it’s still lovely to feel that you are part of the crowd the few times they let you feel as though you fit in.
That morning we heard an all-too-familiar story on the radio: how the police abuse and murder of the black population goes unpunished. That’s what happens in our neighborhood, where abuse of power is so entrenched in the system that protesting doesn’t make a dent in anything. But dissent and conflict need outlets, and those conduits include gang violence and hatred, robbery and muggings, which, though at times economically motivated, are inevitably amplified or justified by race. But yesterday something happened, the straw that broke the camel’s back. People poured into the streets in droves to protest. The last straw was the news that the (clearly) white policeman who riddled a (clearly) black man’s body with bullets six months ago won’t be put on trial. It’s just one more case that proves the utter impunity the police enjoy in the United States whenever the bull’s-eye happens to be black. In this case, an unarmed fifteen-year-old boy.
Irrational Number and I were cooking our Thanksgiving bird when we heard the news, now with a warning that disturbances were expected, and riots. Thanksgiving. You know I’ve always liked this holiday for a simple reason: because I like its name. Do you remember, Jim, how you always laughed at me when I said that? But it’s true that I’ve always taken advantage of the day to thank people whom I may have failed to appreciate properly in the rush of everyday life or because I was being insensitive or simply selfish. Yesterday I felt the tension in Irrational Number’s hands, the rage on his face when the news broke. The raw turkey, recently plucked, was atop the kitchen table, and I could see him eyeing the cavity emptied of offal. I asked what he was staring at so intently. He replied that he was trying to remember a recipe. I was tickled that he would follow my lead after coming up with that recipe on our first date at the movies. I responded saying all the ingredients were already there on the table: apples, bacon, corn, bread crumbs, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, chicken broth. But he said his recipe was for something else, and marched out of the apartment to pick up a few of the ingredients we were lacking. He returned a little while later and placed what he called the fixings on the table:
A glass bottle
A funnel
Gasoline
Motor oil
A rag
Insulating tape
A lighter
Hands atremble and anger visible in his every gesture, Irrational Number stuffed that turkey with his particular fixings, tied it with a string, and left part of the rag hanging out. And finally it dawned on me. The rag was exactly what it looked like—a wick—and the bird had been transformed into a Molotov cocktail. He taped it up, strapping the wick to the freshly plucked skin. He told me to put on some gloves, dark glasses, and a hat to protect me from his own peculiar turkey roast, and then he disguised himself too. I fell silent. I got it. But above all, I fell silent. That’s how the judicial system works when dealing with a black life. It falls silent. Not to perseverate over insignificant things. But above all, it falls silent, and that silence is what allows the grand jury to holler, to condemn. Not the criminal, but the victim, the person who is dead, the black person, the black father and mother of the black person, of that black person: the dead center of the bull’s-eye.
So yes, yesterday was Thanksgiving. We commemorated the day the Indians nourished the white settlers, thus saving their lives. The very Indians who are now all packed off and secluded in out-of-the-way reservations like animals on the brink of extinction. We heard shouting—the riots were under way. We went outside. Me, once again, on his back. I watched from on high as an enraged mob took to the streets. Their reactions were logical, violent. The police were also on the scene, shoring up the streets with barricades. Irrational Number carried his turkey in a bag. He’d have to use it soon to avoid blowing ourselves up. At one point he handed it up to me. I took hold of it, and keeping everything in mind he had told me when preparing the bird, I launched it at an angle that was between thirty degrees (so it would splatter as widely as possible) and forty-five (to gain distance). I felt a blow to my head. I’d been hit with a rock that was surely meant for the police. I was only semiconscious when I watched our stuffed turkey, the Molotov turkey, suspended in the air for a few seconds. It wasn’t falling.
Despite everything’s being in motion around me, I was able to pinpoint the image of the turkey. I heard the sound of its skin being pierced from within by the first ejected feather, with its quill, the central skeleton, all so clean and straight. Then I heard the rest of the quills being ejected like heads of wheat morphing into many-colored feathers, red ones, blue ones, green and yellow. It was dazzling to watch, suspended like that in midair, so richly hued. It wasn’t even a turkey anymore. It was a quetzal, the bird that dies if kept in captivity. It spread its wings, soaring gracefully, emptying the drippings of its belly over the multitude. I opened my mouth to catch a drop on my tongue. No death, only metamorphosis. A blend of white and black skins in a Dalmatian race. Both things at once now, white and black. The bird flew into the distance, voiding little drops like missiles that germinated a stunning race of mutts, a breed of humans with a thousand different bloods. Yesterday, on Thanksgiving, I witnessed that human amalgam as I fainted. When I came to, I wished so hard that the policeman treating my wound while we waited for the ambulance to arrive were black-and-white-skinned. I guess it’ll be a while yet before that happens, my love, and I suspect my time is nearly up. There’s barely enough time left even to dream about this race of the thousand purebloods.