From the time you were little, I have made up absurd stories. Some of them involve the personage Mephistopheles. He is a bumbling character whose name is pronounced as though he were a wacky cartoon sea lion wearing a bow tie.
You outwit his antics, and they are goofy. Things like trying to ski on the top of a skyscraper or eat all the plums in the world. In these stories, he isn’t evil, like in the Faustian ones, although he is unwittingly snared into things that don’t make sense by his own misperceptions.
It is funny, but it is also a warning. Things that are completely absurd, that make you laugh, can on a dime turn to harrowing. At one of my high schools the one rule, they used to say, was don’t roller-skate in the hallways, which basically meant “Don’t be a jackass.” Don’t be a jackass. Of course, we sometimes are.
Things that are completely absurd, that make you laugh, can on a dime turn to harrowing.
But we have to try to minimize it all. Because as human as we are, something divine is required for us to make it over. Our wings get tattered. We sometimes thrash. Or bruise.
Purple marks that remind us of our aching hearts. We are treated in ugly ways; they penetrate and shape us, but the struggle is more than beautiful. The fight in the face of it makes a jolie laide life. Reckonings are our lifestyle. What to make of this juxtaposition, this double consciousness, this doing and being and feeling and, yes, becoming.
The two of you remind me of my values. For instance, there was the time, Freeman, that I suggested you change your outfit for the anti-violence protest downtown. I wanted you to put on something a bit sharper. You reminded me that looking cute wasn’t the point. Sometimes when I impose my rules of decorum and presentation, Southern working-class rules, you remind me that I can put too much emphasis on appearance.
That might be true. But I believe that some of these ways of doing and being matter only because they are an example of self-regard, a claim of your own value, no matter what the national messages have been about our undeservedness and inadequacy.
You agree. I know you do. You each take pleasure in your self-fashioning. You like being fly. Brilliant hoodies and distinctive sneakers. Hair that is at once styled and wild. You appraise yourself in the mirror with appreciation. I love that. It is like that—knowing what feels good, what matters, what really matters, what sometimes matters—is what helps you make it through, what reminds you who you are.
We were on the Peter Pan bus this time, going up to Woods Hole, on the coast of Cape Cod. I don’t know why. Maybe cars were in the shop, maybe the cash was low. This was before you were born. This was when I went everywhere I could with my friends. This was when you could get a car onto the island ferry going standby. When Martha’s Vineyard was a New England thing and a black thing but not publicly a presidential super-elite thing. Omar was entertaining the bus with jokes. One was about his cousin Naomi.
“We woulda been there by now if Naomi was driving. Naomi be flying.” It was repeated at least four times: “Word. Naomi be flying.” “True, Naomi be flying.” Smiles and shaking heads.
Driving fast. Like you can outpace every burden, every weight upon your shoulders, every fear, and every danger. It is exhilarating when you are young. And terribly dangerous. A reckless sense of freedom, a sign of failed judgment, and a yearning. Let me be supremely reckless. I am your mother and so I never want you to be reckless at all.
And yet, I know that thrill. I remember it as part of the sweetness of youth. I would prefer you satisfy it not with fast cars or hard drinking, but with laughing and dancing all night and oversleeping and taking unexpected road trips to places where you discover things, inside yourself, that you hadn’t even speculated.
I want to hold you safe. I also want you to fly.
From Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, by Imani Perry. Excerpted with permission from Beacon Press. Perry is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She wrote an original essay, “Striking Steel,” for The Progressive’s February/March 2019 issue.