What it's Like to Be a Black Person in America

A True Story

November, 2024. Trump has just won the election. Treva and I leave Nicaragua in seeming exile, seemingly on a dime (though as with every snap decision there are a million swivels and alternate routes taken to arrive at the pivot point…)

*

In Dallas, we miss our connecting flight, and although we all know by now that drama and chaos and sudden enforced overnight layovers have become a certainty of air travel—part of the ritual—I am annoyed. These days I usually assume that a two-day journey by air will take four, and that at some point I will be running through an airport at speed, and that helps, a little, to soften the indignities of stooping to sprint which is, we know deep down, futile.

*

We do, in the end, relinquish all decorum and race down the main corridor of the Fort Worth central terminal, determined to prevail, only to arrive at gate A52 just a hair’s breadth after they close the doors and haughtily bar the stragglers from entry. The airline generously offers to put us up in one of their horrible staff hotels.

*

They do not, unfortunately, arrange to put us up at the Hyatt at the terminal itself—which would make so much sense and actually be enjoyable—but a truly awful 90s monstrosity a mere 27 minute drive into the hinterland of the airport’s industrial zone. The point, after all, is to punish us for our audacity, while keeping us slavishly in the thrall of the 12 dollar food vouchers which cover the cost of approximately half a stale bagel, no butter.

*

*

All of this should, of course, be factored in to the overall physical and emotional calculus of the rigamarole of voyaging in this end-stage techno-feudalist empire, I am well aware, but it’s late and we’re tired, and when Treva starts to whine, I snap at her, projecting like a pro, then I give her a short but obnoxious lecture about maintaining a positive attitude.

*

We stand on the tarmac in a state of mutual irritation for over 45 minutes before the promised shuttle finally lumbers around the bend. It’s almost midnight. But the driver decides to pull up to the sidewalk only to inform us that his bus is full, and we’ll have to wait another 45 minutes for the next one.

*

This sends the slight, 50-something woman standing next to us wearing a turquoise north face goretex jacket into a seemingly sudden fit of anger and despair. Don’t do this to me, she begs the driver, I can’t take it—I really can’t take it.

*

I hadn’t noticed her until now, but I believe her. The waver in her voice suggests she is teetering precariously on the edge of a steep emotional escarpment and I perceive the intimations of a threat in her otherwise deceptively soft voice. Bodily harm isn’t the risk so much as the assurance of psychic shrapnel wounds from the breakdown of which she is most certainly on the cusp, and which is immediately evident as her long-time calling card. The driver is unmoved.

I peg her as a woman who has spent a lifetime feeling diminished, ignored, and emotionally abandoned, which makes her desperation all the more palpable and pitiable, emphasizing the clear discrepancy between how she believes she comes across to others, and her real effectiveness in the world, which is evidently frustratingly small, dependent as it is on the soft tyranny of her upset.

*

But I also wonder if I might not like her, a little, underneath all these histrionics and her transparent trauma and sadness. I sense that she possesses an artistic temperament, poetic yearning, and a persistent thread of kindness and sensitivity, despite her self-absorption. Disconcertingly, she reminds me of my younger self when I was at my very worst, and my own broken tendencies to flail when the world and other people failed to accommodate my preferences, and I feel a slight frisson of concern that perhaps I’m less evolved than I like to think I am. There but for the grace of God go I, etc. For this reason and others I somehow feel both obliged and committed to assume the very best of her. Let’s show her some compassion, shall we? I whisper. Treva rolls her eyes.

*

I step forward and touch the woman gently on the sleeve. Would you like to share a cab with me and my daughter? I’ve had enough of this too, I say, reflexively summoning some tenderness and donning the mantle of my loving midwife self: calm, reassuring, validating, the perfect counterpoint to this woman’s disheveled hysteria.

*

She turns to me, and I can see she is bolstered to be noticed with softness, but I also register in that moment that I’ve now granted her a kind of ingress into my sphere—permission to her rising madness. Now she suddenly bursts into tears, wailing, I’ve just had the most horrible day, and I’ve been so mistreated, and I just can’t handle it anymore.

*

Goodness, I say, sincerely. I am truly so sorry to hear you’ve been having such a hard time. This could get out of hand quickly, I see, so I need to redirect her towards our now-shared goal. I get it, I’ve been there. Let’s go find a cab and we’ll be at the hotel in no time.

*

Ok, she sniffs, child-like, subdued.

*

Treva and I begin to walk towards the lineup, and the woman follows for a few strides when I notice that a man is also walking alongside us. When we reach the cab area, I’m startled to see that the man attempts to put his arm around the woman’s shoulder.

*

My concerns vanish, however, when she shrugs him off in a way that is imbued with the kind of unvarnished loathing that only women who feel fundamentally safe in their relationships with truly gentle men whom they have spent years emasculating are able to display. He immediately cowers, chastised but unsurprised by her response. But she has already become incensed by the temerity of his attempt to appease her and she turns on him, seething, contemptuous, and says I told you I don’t want to be touched. Can’t you listen?

*

It’s not quite that she’s giving a performance, not consciously, but her flailing inner child is certainly acting out the script of a grotesque distortion of what she has come to believe power looks like, over a lifetime of delusion—it’s a show of “boundaries,” from someone who isn’t yet remotely equipped with what precedes truly healthy boundaries (fundamental self-containment) and who is desperate for connection, but equally desperate to collect the evidence to prove her most cherished story: that she’ll never actually deserve the love and connection she is offered, and that anyone who is stupid enough to offer it, has, through the offering itself, proven themselves unworthy, or at least too dumb to trust with love, precisely because they love her, which provides the very evidence of their incompetence, given that her deepest belief is that she is fundamentally unlovable. It’s the perfect set-up.

*

Except that this kind, numb, dissociated man—handsome and rugged at first glance, but evidently impotent--does love her. Or thinks he does, as much as loving (or thinking) is possible in someone who is so profoundly emotionally shut down that the only way he can even really feel a flicker of anything is to allow himself to be abused.

*

In any case, there is no way in hell he is going to say or do anything other than exactly what he thinks she wants him to say or do, which at this point in the arc of her rage, is to just take whatever comes and ride it out.

*

Treva looks at me, with an expression of disgust, raises an eyebrow, and I shrug. What can we do? We are indeed getting into a cab with these people, yes, I communicate with my eyes. It’ll be interesting, at the very least, my wink imparts. She rolls her eyes again.

*

Inside the cab the woman immediately finds a problem with the seating arrangements, so I maneuver myself to the back seat to give her space, not because I feel I have an obligation to do so, but because at this point, I am breathlessly curious to see what happens next, and more specifically, enthralled by the prospect of discovering if there is indeed the possibility that another more redeeming angle of this woman might emerge. I want to uncover a nugget of…heart? Truth? Intrigue? Something.

*

So, where are you guys off to? A holiday? I ask. “We’re going on a mindfulness retreat,” says the woman, flatly. For a brief moment, I wonder if she might be joking. And if so, it would be a very funny joke—in fact, such a joke would break any and all tension, and we could all relax, cut the crap, and be real for a moment—four strangers in all our naked (clothed, platonic) honesty…But no, she is horribly, tragically serious, and I can feel Treva vibrating with a suppressed guffaw,. Now I’m about to giggle uncontrollably as well, so I put my hand on my daughter’s knee and squeeze a silent “shut your mouth or else,” and I take a deep breath, and say, politely “Well that sounds very nice. In South America?”

*

The woman ignores me. She is pouting now, staring out the window, and I suspect she’s entering the stage in her rage where she’s beginning to realize how silly and childish her behaviour has been, and is feeling the uncomfortable seep of self-awareness, which means she now has a choice between softening, or doubling down. But there’s really no question of which direction she’ll take. The humility required for her to own her pettiness and emotional manipulation is beyond her reach.

*

It’s in Costa Rica, says the man. I turn to him now, and he’s smiling, hopeful—I can almost smell the optimism lifting off his skin like a pheromone. It’s the faint but palpable and seemingly attainable belief that her tantrum is over, and that everything is going to be ok. A town called…Um…But he can’t remember. And this, I suspect he realizes immediately, is a terrible mistake to make at this juncture.

*

She turns, a gleam in her eye, like a little hawk, triumphant at the predetermined outcome her impending dive for the kill. I know what’s coming.

*

You know what I find interesting? She ponders, sly and measured, working up to it. What I find interesting is how conspicuous it is that you just don’t give a shit, do you? You don’t actually care at all about this retreat. As far as you’re concerned, it could be anywhere. Nosara, Uvita, Palmares, Who cares. It’s all the same to you, isn’t it? You just don’t care, do you, Barry? She’s really getting into her flow.

*

You. Just. Don’t. Care. She’s chanting now. Of course, like any pet, Barry is, indeed, ultimately indifferent to the design of his enclosure. But Barry is also long-gone, at this point—a blank, now. He is surviving only thanks to his capacity to enact a complete split between his body, which sits in a dejected posture in this cramped cab while his harpy of a wife tears him into pieces, and the tatters of his fractured soul, flapping in the ether, of which he is only vaguely aware are being dissected like a specimen by another strange woman and her daughter….

*

I glance his way, and in Barry’s eyes I see the terror of his having to contain, simultaneously, The Truth (Yes, of course it’s all the same to him. No, of course he doesn’t actually care in the least about this retreat), and the nauseatingly familiar yet more nuanced understanding that to utter that truth would be suicidal…and then the outer layer of it all, which is that beyond the death of his miserable marriage if he were to ever be honest, lies liberation, which, at this point in Barry’s life, is the most terrifying prospect of all.

*

On some plane of his consciousness, Barry knows that emancipation is just a hair’s breadth away—just a word away, a gesture away, a mere, “Sir, please stop the car, I’m getting out now,” away, yet his domestication has been too successful. His entire identity as a good guy hinges on his worm-like obedience and acquiescence to her domination.