Death Where Is Your Sting?

As the world tossed and turned around me, I remained still.

“Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

The yelling and screaming. “Get his ass.”

The world is upside down. Feet where heads should be. The sky and ground have switched places. “Can you plant seeds in the clouds? If so, what kind of fruits do they bear?”

“Darkness can’t drive out darkness. Only LIGHT can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only LOVE can do that.”

I cannot hate them. If I do, I’ve done the job of the people who taught them to hate me. I have to love them through the punches, through the slaps, as I am falling after being slammed upside down into a tree by the one person I thought would at least stand back and just watch me get my ass beat without participating. Didn’t we make a connection in shop class? Obviously not, because he joined in.

And yet, something about it didn’t hurt. Maybe he could’ve slammed me harder. Maybe he was holding back and this was just a show. Was he just pretending to participate so that the others would back off? Maybe. Maybe he carried me upside down and laid me against the tree so that I would just roll in the ditch. It’s like WWF. He wanted it to look like he hurt me without really hurting me. Maybe. Maybe. Either way, for a moment, I was upside down.

Upside down. Upside down. Why is that familiar? Oh yeah. Peter was crucified upside down. Am I about to die? Is that why this is going through my head? Killed by the people who are afraid to die by the hands of the people who made us hate ourselves? But, if they kill me, it isn’t them killing me. It’s an idea of me that does not actually exist. They are possessed by a spirit of unworthiness. A lie they were taught. They see what they hate about themselves in me. They hate me because I don’t hate myself like I am supposed to. They have been made tools of White Supremacy trying to destroy me because in their minds, I am suspect. I am the tool. Funny name, foreign dad, white stepmom, so called proper grammar. I guess I’d suspect me too if I saw the world the way they did.

They say I “talk White.” I must want to be White. But, I don’t “talk White” as far as I know. I talk like my Black grandmother and her siblings, my mom and her siblings. My dad barely speaks English and my stepmom says “yourns” and “finna” instead of “yours” and “fixing to”. And “fixing to” is just another way of saying, “about to” or “going to”, which I am more inclined to say. But, not because I “talk White”. Rather, it is because I talk like my Black mother. My Black, educated, fierce, will tell you about yourself without batting an eye, mother who wouldn’t let me speak slang or what she called “incorrect grammar”. Maybe if they realized that I just talked like my mother we wouldn’t be in this situation right now. Maybe. But, it doesn’t matter now. I guess I am about to die.

What did Malcolm X say? “I live like a man who is dead already. That’s what I will do. I will die before they kill me. I’ve died. That’s it. Now they can’t kill me. I beat them to it. And now that I’m dead, there’s nothing else anyone can do to me. They can do whatever they want with this body. It was never mine anyway. If it was mine, I could have kept it from abuse. If our bodies were ours, my grandad could have decided not to have a heart attack and die. But, this thing has always been on its way out. They can have it. I’m out of here RIGHT NOW!”

This was the first time I was killed by White Supremacy.

Follow the rest of the story on The IDEALS Way Substack

While I will continue to post on The Roofless Church, I am migrating some content to Substack for a lot of reasons. I would love to see you there. I will be creating free content as well as member only content. On Substack, I will be offering content that this platform does not have the capacity to host. But, I will remain grateful for The Roofless Church as the platform where I learned how to express myself in all of my complexities.