Dear Daddy

Dear Dad,

I find myself thinking about you more and more the further removed I am from your death. You are in my thoughts in particular ways most of which, right now, seem to be from the perspective of others. I get a lot of people dropping me lines asking me if I am your daughter. They stop to tell me they performed with Mississippi Delta or knew you in some way. Many tell me that they are mad in love with your recordings.

Your work has been catalogued in Germany and is actively rejoiced in Japan. YouTube has you sprouting up all over with young people sharing your music. I wish that part of you had been more recognized in your life but I'm glad to be telling you now that your legacy lives on.

I wish I had known you better. I wish things had been different, but you should know that I understand. What may have been limited towards me was a fulfillment for you. I miss our many phone conversations. I liked that they were always late at night and when you were on a phone call jag; calling people all over the world to say hello. 

I like meeting people who knew you but who have no emotional attachment to you. They don't greet me at the door with any emotional baggage or drama. They just liked you and as your daughter that's all I really want too. Just to know you like regular folks. 

These days since you died are ugly days. I wish we could figure it all out together. I remember so vividly a conversation we had years ago while I was an undergraduate. I think I was reading Wright or Baldwin and you became silent and I could hear reflection in your voice when you said: Sometimes I just don't think we are going to make it. I was surprised then but today, I am the one that has to wonder if we are going to make it.

I wonder if you might have been shot today had you wandered from your home yesterday all confused from the Alzheimer's. Would everyone on the Palo Alto police force have believed such a man truly lived there and just needed to be gently taken home. What if you had put up a fuss? I shudder at the thoughts I have sometimes. They are on a war path daddy and they are killing black men for sport now. Everyday in the news is another black body sprawled on the ground or slumped over somewhere dead. Dead for nothing. Dead because the colour of our skin incites a terror I can't conceive of. I don't know what white people see when they look at us daddy. I don't know but it must be on the scale of dinosaurs and monsters because overkill is the only thing they can think of when they end our lives. They must see monsters because if I saw a monster coming towards me I'd feel scared too and if I had a gun and talking didn't work maybe I too would pull the trigger until all the bullets were gone. But we are not monsters daddy. How do I get them to see me as human?

Your four sons are full grown and you got to die first as things should be but I worry about my brothers. I worry about my nephews. Why do we have so many men in this family?

I saw a video yesterday that deconstructed, is horrifying. A woman in a car live streamed her boyfriend being shot and killed in the seat next to her. He had been pulled over for a traffic stop, I think the light was out on the tailgate. He was asked for his license and registration and when he went to get it, he was shot multiple times. A small child was in the backseat. You could palpitate the woman's terror as she recorded and you could tell she thought she was next. She wanted a witness to her death. She posted live to Facebook in hopes that someone, anyone might save her. In one car father, mother, and next generation were all potentially about to disappear. If I could capture for just one moment, get it on camera, draw a picture maybe, of the second irrational fear takes over I would take that picture and show it to everyone I knew. I want to have documented evidence that white people turn a corner sometimes and develop a fear and see things that are not really there. 

Black bodies bleeding and lifeless has become an image that sells papers. We are no longer able to show caskets returning from war lest we upset the polite public. We can't show graphic be-headings because they are too disturbing, we cant show the injuries inflicted during war, but dead black bodies spread across the news is standard issue. We are not even allowed the courtesy of a white sheet to give some respect to our death's. 

The violence is so open and out of control and it feels like people are giddy in their hate. There is an episode in the Ken Burns' American West documentary that tells of a time when settlers reigned with no impunity. They literally ran around shooting people, getting drunk and making up their own retributions. The Chinese, First Nations and African Americans were chased around at gunpoint while drunk raging white people inflicted terror wherever they went. 

I write often about lynching postcards and no one seems to make the connection between those postcards and The New York Daily News covers, (or any newspaper that runs dead bodies on the front page), showing black people dead and lifeless. If we had had cell phones in 1910 what sounds might be heard as people gathered for the afternoon lynching? For the most part only black voices are heard on the recordings of today as they stand nearby helplessly watching in horror. White voices are oddly silent and you watch the white men and women mill around the dead bodies without any visible expression of regret. No effort made to made the horrible less horrible. No attempts made for resuscitation.

When I later read that the offending officers get set free in an 'all in the line of duty' fashion it is then that I imagine a portrait begins to grow in their basements or attics. There, under draped cloth, begins the disfigurement of their present robust self portraits. It is from this day, the day they accepted and denied any wrongdoings, that their portraits begin to fill with pus and it is only this portrait that tells the true story of what is kept hidden from view. 

I am sure that should I ever have cause to kill someone in the line of duty or by accident I would never be the same person ever, ever again. I would not be able to go out and hold a gun in my hand again without shaking like a leaf. I would second guess myself until I was shot first. I am sure of this. But yet these men and women go back out, trained they claim, and continue to hold guns to heads. I'd imagine that the second time around, having received permission and a pat on the back, one might be kind of psyched up and hoping for a next time. 

But here is the thing daddy, I don't know if I am going to make it. I remember when mom took me to the German Pavillion at Expo '67. The exhibition rolled footage of Jewish people naked with pelvic bones protruding, limbs akimbo and haphazard, genitals shamelessly exposed with indecent fly's crawling over mouths and eyes in search of decay.  And added to that mayhem where bulldozers (fucking bulldozers) shoveling that atrocity into huge pits.  I just cried like a baby. It was the most heinous spectacle on film known to man. Human bodies, too many to count, too many to bury with dignity, being laid to rest with machinery en masse! And that is how I feel today. I cry like a baby. I look at those dead men and see their living faces and I know them. I've talked to young men just like these men. I know their spirits and what they want. I've shared laughs with them. They are my cousins. They had hopes and dreams just like everyone else.

I feel angry and overwhelmingly depressed. I feel as though I am in mourning. Like something has died. It is a systematic destruction of African Americans. It is the destruction of the family. It is the murder of the few remaining non incarcerated black men and women who leave behind broken families already on the fringe. It is a president wannabe who advocates mayhem against women, and the brown. It is a step so far backwards it predates your life. I fear returning to the United States. I fear for my brothers because all of my education, all the priviledges that I have had suddenly no longer seem like a barrier between me and crazy. I have been reduced to just a brown person on someone's shit list somewhere.

I miss you.