The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

by Junauda Petrus

  Thank you.

  INTRODUCTION

  Incarceration is a sustained, lifetime lynching, meant to discard your soul and make a shell of you in plain life. Make you into your monster self, the beast that comes out when you are forced to survive in the absence of love and safety. Never mind that most of us come broken and traumatized, we still are no longer worth our own humanity.

  We are a criminal.

  We need punishment and to be rehabilitated.

  We need shame and exclusion.

  We are not worthy of control of our own lives; we are hopeless and evil.

  We are not individuals or of a womb or a family.

  We are not absent from anywhere else; because we are here, we simply non-exist.

  The world is better without us.

  In this society we are taught our crimes are the summations of our lives and define the limits of our possibility. Our only potential is to harm and destroy.

  But I was a boy once.

  And to be honest, I can’t help but hold and carry him inside of me. Most of us in here is holding and carrying a scared and lonely little child in us. How could we not? I write this story for the little Afua in me that needs to know he is okay and worthy of life, even if my whole existence is a reminder that my breath will one day be taken away at a predetermined time by an executioner, whose house I live in. I protect that young boy’s soul by reminding him he is infinite, like the stars and the blackness between them.

  AFUA

  FULL MOON

  In 1989, my best friend, James, was in college in Philadelphia to be a lawyer. We were both from the same block in Harlem. I was my mama’s oldest of three sons and he was an only child. James was two years older than me. Outspoken, smart, and helped me in school.

  You ever know anyone who was everything you wanted to be?

  That was James to me. His mom, Ms. Valerie, was a literature professor at City College, and James went everywhere with her. She was a very creative and intelligent woman, who would take me along with her and James to experience the city when we were around twelve and fourteen. His mom would take us to see free music in Central Park or all the way downtown to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and get ice cream and look at the Statue of Liberty lighted up. I remember once she took us to see Alvin Ailey Dance Company in Midtown and I still remember it vividly. I had never seen Black people look so free. I remember the feeling of seeing brothers like me move with grace and control, flying through the air like demigods, half heavenly and half terrestrial. It was a thing that I didn’t know we were allowed to do, and it gave me a possibility for my spirit that I didn’t know could be. Seeing them made me imagine myself airborne and carefree.

  I, on the other hand, was afraid of the world and learning that the world was afraid of me. I was shy, a quiet dude, who liked to blend in so I could observe the world. But as a tall and kinda chubby Black kid, I never really blended in, and standing out made me feel like a target of people’s assumptions of me, whether it was police or a woman crossing to avoid me. Hanging with James, though, I always felt free, and when we got older we would go on adventures all over the city, wandering around the Museum of Natural History or watching folks play ball in the Village.

  When James went to college, he was ready to leave New York and expand himself as a scholar. I was seventeen at the time, and he would invite me to campus for the events that the Black Student Union would put together. I would ride the Greyhound from the Port Authority to visit my friend in his new digs and new life. James introduced me as his “little brother from the hood” to his friends from school, many of whom were young Black activists on campus that James was getting tight with. What James discovered when he went to college to learn how to survive professionally in this world was that, instead, he needed spiritual and cultural knowledge of himself as a Black man. James would kick it in Uhuru Books, this Black bookstore and café near campus, and get schooled by older cats who put him onto all kinds of new ideas and books from Kemetic spirituality, I Ching, Yoruba, and Dogon cosmology. Everything he learned he would share with me too.

  “The Blackness between the stars is the melanin in your skin,” he said one night when we were hanging out in the middle of the quad, lying out on blankets, looking at the sky on a crisp and restless night.

  “I read it in a book. I take it to mean that as Black folks we are limitless. That, maybe, our blackness holds our ancient cosmic memory. What if our wisdom can come from our dreams, not just churches and Bibles?” he asked, looking away from the stars and looking at me, and I could tell he was serious.

  “I always loved the stars,” I said. I looked at the ink sky and the silver scatter of stars above us. After that I started to pay attention to the stars and if they held messages for me.

  After that, I would repeat those words to myself, “The stars and the blackness between them is the melanin in my skin,” when I was on the block and think of the stars above me, the few I saw and the millions I couldn’t.

  James said I was smart and limitless and helped me study when I kept getting bad grades, because I was babysitting, selling weed to make some money, and not doing well in school. He fell in love with a dude, and he was happy and confused. He told me about it and I told him that he was my brother and nothing would change between us, that he deserved to be happy and in love. I told him I loved him, and we hugged. He gave me books, and I started saving up for college; he told me I should save up and go to Africa first. I started researching and decided I wanted to go to Senegal and see the castles they put my ancestors in when they decrowned them of their own lives. I also started reading my horoscope every day too to see if I could anticipate weed business and the moods of people in the streets.

  One day, I was going to a Stop Police Brutality rally with James on campus and sliding nickel bags around. The night was hot and electric, filled with the voices of conscious sisters with Afros and nose piercings on the mic calling for justice, as well as brothers in dashikis and dreadlocks getting folks signed up for cop watches. James was a junior at this time and one of the event’s main organizers. That night, he looked with pride at how well things had turned out, despite the anonymous threats the organizers had been receiving. James wasn’t scared though. In that moment, his smile was humble and hopeful and I will never forget it.

  And the moments that change your life forever are indeed only a moment.

  At the end of that night two men were dead. One a policeman, Officer Travis McConnell, and the other was my best friend, James. The events of that night were vivid as well as a whirlwind of trauma and violence that I hate to remember. However, there are two things about that night, I will always remember intensely and with certainty: I had borrowed Jordans on and the moon was full.

  AUDRE

  IT ALL STARTED WHEN I WAS NINE and had all of these dreams. These nightmares.

  I killing in my sleep, swinging machetes and running.

  I tied to a trunk, I is screaming blood out of me, blinded and choking on smoke, and fire is a lake of hatred I drowning in.

  I running wild through the woods, then by the water, then into a mountain.

  I jumping off ships, bleeding from between my legs and plunging into ice water and darkness.

  I pulled into the air by a rope swinging from a high branch, and I see the tops of green trees, fire, smoke, and a river with blood.

  I can’t scream, because I already feel the night won’t hear my prayers.

  I wake up crying and running out of myself. My mom comes into my room with she Bible and has me recite passages to cast out the devil. She tell me a demon has got me and Jesus can help me. It ain’t work.

  * * *

  • • •

  One Saturday when Queenie was taking me to the beach, my mother tell she what is going on with my dreams. Queenie was quiet, listening, and then said I can stay by she, away from Laven
tille, for a little while until school start back up. Where Queenie lives is more country and closer to the sea. She said that the feeling of being by the water would help soothe my sleep and clear the dreams, and it would give my mom a chance to rest.

  My whole life, I always loved my grandma’s house. She lives on top a hill away from the action of Port of Spain. It’s the house Queenie grandma lived in, a brown brick-and-cement structure that used to be just one room when Queenie was little, but she added rooms over the years. In her house, everywhere you lay your eyes, you see beauty. In her bedroom she has a big window that look over the hills of Saint Ingrid’s Bay. Each wall is painted in multiple shades of purple. “One day I woke up and wanted my room to feel like an amethyst,” she told me.

  Her bed takes up most of her room. It’s a canopy that she built from driftwood, discarded rope, and sheer, white mosquito netting. She soaked the netting in the ocean and let it dry in the sun all day and all night in the full moon. When I sleep in her bed, I feel suspended in sea foam. Her bed is my favorite place on the planet; it smells like her skin and her dreams.

  She living room is all white except one wall, which she calls her “living installation.” It could be covered in gold, with a haze of thin white lines, streaks of black, and clouds of blue. Or dark green splatters that have slunk down to the ground in long wet drips.

  In she home, everything has a story. A statue carved by a brother she used to dance with in Harlem, a mask a teacher from Mali gave her when she returned to Trinidad. An ornate weaving of raw yarns, hand dyed, with rocks, sticks, and beads made by Mahal, whom she loved “and who was a shaman of my heart.” Mahal could wield and understand dream medicine better than anyone Queenie ever met. They used to live in the same building in Brooklyn, and became friends when she knocked on Queenie’s door, curious about the aroma of curry chicken coming from the other side. Queenie say she believe I, like she own grandma and like Mahal, was born with dream medicine in me.

  On the wall of Queenie’s mango-yellow kitchen is a picture of my mother as a girl wearing a gray-plaid school uniform with pink ribbons in she hair. My mom was raised first in Trinidad with her grandparents and her father, and then in Brooklyn with Queenie, who spent years living in the States as a dancer.

  One corner of she living space is devoted to her massive record collection and her record player. But on nearly every wall throughout the house, there are pictures from Queenie’s performances all over the world, in all kinds of costumes—headdresses and Afros and cornrows and lashes and feathers and leathers. She has posters from concerts of Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Chaka Khan, Fela Kuti, Prince (looking too sexy, bare-chested and in black panties), and all kind of people whose records I have heard all my life. She also has photos of Sparrow and Kitchener, who Queenie listen to as a kid, and who she still love to wine up to when she got rum in she cup.

  Then there is Queenie’s African cloud. It’s a big, stuffy chair with an ottoman that she upholstered in mud cloth. “I got this Bògòlanfini from a fine Senegalese brother on 125th Street.” He had a crush on her, according to the story she often told. According to my mother, Queenie think everyone is attracted to her. I think Queenie probably right though. She does her sketching and daydreaming in this chair. My favorite picture in the house is next to this chair. The picture of Queenie, my mother, and me at the beach when I was a baby. My mom and me had just moved back from the States to live in Trinidad. She had three-quarters of a college degree and a full baby girl. In the picture, my grandma has a big floppy hat and a bathing suit that consisted of three white triangles that cover her nipples and pum-pum. Barely. She is looking seductive and elegant, staring straight into the camera. My mum is next to her, hair cut short and sleek, like Toni Braxton back in the day, wearing a black swimsuit. They look more like sisters than mother and daughter. My mom is smiling big at me as I, butt naked and half out of the frame, begin to run away from them toward the water. My love for the ocean was instant, according to Queenie.

  In another corner of Queenie’s living room is her altar, a table with a white candle that is always lit. A tall glass of water. White shells. A vase with white lilies from the woods behind her house. Pictures of her parents and her grandparents in Trinidad from back in the day. A black-and-white image of my great-great-grandmother in her carnival costume, a headdress, a bodice covered in shells, a skirt with beaded tassels. Another picture is of my great-grandfather in a sepia silhouette, dark and chiseled cheekbones and as pretty as Queenie.

  Queenie has more magic than her walls can contain, so some of my favorite Queenieland things are in the huge yard surrounding the house. When I was having the nightmares as a kid, she would fill her outdoor claw-foot tub with water and let it sit under the moon and heat up under the sun. She’d add oils, dried flowers, and herbs. When I would get back from playing all day with my cousins and the kids from down the road, she would soak me in the water while she prayed, sang, and danced over me. She rubbed coconut oil we’d made together into my skin and hair.

  “When I is young, Audre, I feel I ain’t fit in nowhere on this earth. I always was different and I struggled with my existence,” she said one evening while we having tea in she yard, watching the moon glow on she garden and on the ocean. “I decide for myself that I going to just start talking to everything that speak Spirit back to me. I going to make a spirituality that loves me as Queenie. I going to be in conversations with Goddess, the universe, my ancestors, spirit, dance, and dirt and see the divine.”

  Queenie know every song and story of every leaf, grass, bush, pod, tree, bud, seed, fruit, and blossom that grow ’round she land and she said I must learn them too. Queenie gave me special teas to sip and prayers to sing to the sacred powers in all of existence, not just that in the Bible. She said, “Sing your prayers, Audre, before you sleep, so you have power in your dreams, in case they get scary.” The dreams mellowed out the more I took my special baths and prayed with Queenie.

  “Audre,” she explained to me, “I believe dreams hold the memory of all the places where a soul has traveled since the beginning of existence. So, my baby, you must listen to your dreams, that is where your work will happen. Listen to your intuition and the feelings you get when you are awake too. You will one day know how to bend them the way you need to.”

  After the ninth moonbath she gave me that rainy season, she and I had a ritual together. It was at night and the air warmed my skin until it humming. I bathing in the black dirt, lying out in Queenieland, on the hill amidst the dasheen bushes. We each had on white dresses that we had been sewing together the last couple of weeks whenever we went to the beach with Tanties Daphne and Pearl.

  “Audre, see how the moon fat and full? Ripe. That’s when it have the power of an old wild woman. The moon is a euphoric warrior now. Shining she light for we to witness our true self, eh.”

  My eyes were closed but I felt she come down low by me, smelling like only she do. Like soft and spicy and earth. She put she hands on my temples and start singing and humming.

  “Put that feeling inside you, right in your bones, follicles, heart, hips, and toes.”

  I felt Queenie dancing around me, burning a sweet, dirt-smelling bush. “Breathe in, baby. Be quiet and feel all of the sensations in your body. You paying attention to how you body is feeling, Audre?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “I feeling safe and free, Queenie.”

  “Take your feelings and hold them with softness, but also with power. And whenever you feel afraid, know you can ask your fear about itself.” And as she said this I felt the humming within me get stronger. “Why your fear know you and how it find you? What it want to heal? Who in yuh blood is arriving in this fear?” I opened my eyes and saw she was shaking the bush, with each question. She moved gracefully, and I saw light reflecting on her gap-toothed smile, bright like the old warrior moon.

  “Who ancestor
needs sweetness and love inside of you? In your skin, in your beautiful darkness?” she asked over me, breaking smoke over me and under the moon. I closed my eyes ’cause I feeling so alive with she words, she very voice is holding me. Then I felt a strange feeling between me and Queenie. Like the air was too easy to breathe, like I was floating, and like I was getting warm from within. I opened my eyes, and Queenie was dancing up high over the dasheen bushes and me, in a rapture of she own. I looked at my own body and I saw it glimmer, glowing like I was made of light. I believed my eyes and I believed my heart, because I was seeing what I have always felt:

  That Queenie is God.

  I started shaking, the feeling was so strong between me and Queenie. I felt as if I were up there with her. And I was, floating feet above the ground. I felt myself in my grandma’s body and she in mine. I closed my eyes and fell backwards into myself.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next thing that happen is that I woke up in Queenie’s sea-cloud bed and Peter Tosh was singing really loud. And the air was hot with the smell of saltfish and bake. I climbed out of she bed and walked out to the kitchen and there is a plate of cut-up mango and a pitcher of juice in her breakfast nook.

  “I thought you was going to leave me with this saltfish and bake to eat myself, sleepy gyal. Epi pass through looking for you to see if you want to go to the beach, and I tell him we would meet up with he later. Have some juice. It passion fruit and cherry.” I sat and watched my granny move about the kitchen, fixing me a plate.

  “Queenie?”

  “Audre?”

  “Are you God?” I was feeling so many feelings, including a tremble that become tears. Queenie started to giggle and came by me.

  “Oh, dahlin’. We all divine, remember I tell you? All of we. I just happen to give birth to your mother and what is more God then that? But don’t forget, eh? If I is God, we all are,” she say and sit down next to me.