What is this thing? that continues to irk and mystify so very many people; all of them presumably and purportedly made in the Image and likeness of God Almighty.
What? does it mean to be Black!
Or for that matter, what does it mean to be the opposite of Black; that is to say, what? does it mean to be White!
What? is this Black Being?
What? is this White Being?
What I am trying to figure out is this "Being-Black Thing" and this Being-White" Thing.
All I now know is that in getting to know this thing, you have to negotiate a mass made of the purest ignorance.
What I am trying to suggest that there is also something cruel and something terribly wrong that happens to a person when person guzzles a witches brew of a concoction that leaves him in a zombified state of Being Ignorant.
So there we have today’s trinity of concepts: Being Black; Being White and Being Ignorant.
But before I illustrate the point I am trying to make, be reminded that this work that is mine happens to be dedicated to all those good, decent and law-abiding folks who together conspired to make me the man I am today.
Here my reference would be to Miss Sylvie and her line; that of my father-by-blood and his line; the Joseph-man who fathered me; my clutch of siblings of the half-blood and all those others whose bloodlines course through me and all of my ‘world-without-end’ children and grandchildren; including my aunt Ju’.
Be reminded that it was my Aunt Ju’ who thought that that the secret was in manners; that if you had enough of them, you would always have your fair share of fire and water.
Some others – like old Miss Strachan on Fowler Street – taught and thought that it was book-learning that would do the trick.
And for sure, I am not as ignorant today as I was when I was a child.
Seriously speaking: For quite some time now, I have worked, toiled and struggled in the College of The Bahamas.
As I have done so, I have toiled with the ignorance that is mine and much of the ignorance that belongs to students and my colleagues.
And believe you me, ignorance is heavy – sometimes as weighty as a ton of lead; or a ton of feathers, for all that it matters.
Just please believe me when I tell you that dealing with ignorance is surely hard work.
After all these years – some of them wasted, others lost – I am worn, tired and bone-weary.
But since this work is also quite a tonic, I put my self in the harness and off to work we go – in hot pursuit of that beast that is Ignorance.
Now understand that, some years ago – thanks to Miss Sylvie and Hubert Ingraham – I was privileged with the wonderful duty of representing my country as it should have been represented – as a United Nations observer of elections in a new South Africa.
While I am neither one of Hubert’s boys, nor one of Hubert’s anointed ones, I am proud to say that this beloved one made the absolutely right choice when he chose me.
Clearly, he could have chosen from among the others; but truth is I happened to one of the men he chose. And for sure, when you get to the right history book you would find that Africa – as birthplace of mankind – has a special place in the imagination of most human beings.
Here some would have you believe that Africa is all about Black people; that it is the so-called Dark Continent; that it is a place of unrelenting horror; and that it is a place where you can wake up and find yourself – quite literally speaking quite dead.
Here this is the picture of Africa as dead to itself and the rest of mankind.
Then there is that imagined Africa that belongs to mosquitoes, rats, and other vermin.
As the plane sped me and a host of other people to the real Africa, I wondered to myself how I would react to this land from which my forbears had been wrenched so very unceremoniously so very long ago.
And for sure, my wondering was soon to be no more.
Once disembarked, I was greeted by a sight of Africa that bore no relation to the dream-ridden vistas that had rested in my head, lo four hundred years of distance from the Motherland.
The Africa I saw was teeming with white people, black people and a kaleidoscope of other hues and shades of a humanity that is rainbow-tinted in its diversity.
But as I recall: there was a sore point; that one being the ignorant one that was carried by a colleague of mine – a white brother, if ever I did have a white brother – who prostrated himself on the tarmac of the airport in South Africa and declared [as if to the world] that a part of him had touched his Motherland.
Here he was referencing the fact that on the paternal side of his being he could recognize a Black grandfather; while on the maternal side, he could and did identify a near-infinity of white people; thus his idea that White was from Europe and that Black was synonymous with Africa.
As I recall, I remonstrated with him; and all the while as I remonstrated with this dude, I reminded him of the fact that – no matter how you cut it – Africa was the birth-place of Mankind; that there was only one genesis; and that God Almighty was and is Father Divine to us all.
And then, there was some other philosophical bull from him and some of the same philosophical stuff from me before we could get to the point where we could and would admit our shared membership in the only race that there is on God’s green earth, namely the Human Race.
In other words, there is a wonderful nothing to Being Black.
Similarly, there is a wonderful nothing to Being White.
Evidently, there is a massive amount of wrong that can be done when people allow themselves to a dose of that concoction that leads them to the place where Being Ignorant is the order of the order.
Put otherwise, humanity needs to reach that point where the only race that matters is the race for reason and excellence.
By way of another route, humanity needs to reach that point where it would be of no social consequence whether one of God’s creatures was red, yellow, black or white.
In other words, people who were Black happened to be some how and for some reason [perhaps known only to slave-masters] a cursed sub-species of humanity; but definitely not as ‘human’ as the good white folks on the maternal side of that dude’s family.
Evidently, Being Black in this messed up world brings with it the fact that you are obliged – day in and day out – to deal not only with the bull that you inherited about what it means to be black, but it also means that you get to be freighted down with much of the bull that is being carried by a host of other people.
In the case of the brother of mine, the blurt and the bull that happened to belong to him was the stuff that impelled him to exclaim that a part of the self that was his had landed in Africa.
I said to the fool, "Fool, what the hell are you talking about, the whole of you is home…"
Wow! Being Black sure isn’t easy.
And the Church said, Amen!
