I Feel You Ta-Nehisi - In Some Ways

I saw the short TV interview Mr. Coates did with Chris Hayes on MSNBC 7-14-15. I understand his
claim that black bodies built the U.S. but I don't quite understand his non-grasp of freedom in the
human soul.
Our souls comforted us during slavery.
We are the survivors.
Some Africans did elect to be killed rather than succumb to slavers and plantation purveyors.
We are not likely their children.
The soul is the will to live and to love one another.
It can, and often does, transcend anything.
To witness transcendence in the power of the soul, one might choose to look at early documentaries
on the life of Dr. Stephen Hawking. No one was more full of the life of the body! And yet his mind
was larger than life as we then knew it. Dr. Hawking was to have died in his twenties, maybe thirties,
according to the provincial wisdom in medical science at that time. Yet Dr. Hawking is my age now,
or older, with children of his own, and I am most assuredly over 65.
I do know,however, that when a black man loses a friend, or brother, it many times tears at him, claws at him forever and ever.
Black men feel they are a race of people.
They feel themselves a beleaguered race of people small in number and weak in the power to
enforce policies and policy provisions that even they themselves have enacted or been forceful
in having enacted.
Black women, they feel, are simply a part of their bodies they may be able to take great care of
or may have to neglect.
So when you,Mr. Coates, express the anguish of the loss of Mr. Prince Jones, I felt you grieve at the loss of one of the best in the world, one of those who built the entire New World, and was slaughtered for thanks,
though already a part of an endangered few. I felt that in your delivery.
I have always been bitter that the police killed my aunt before I was born. The loss is a bit difficult to
convey because of the time warp I didn't endure so that I could get to know her. But one would have to be able to have looked in her sister's (my mother's) face when she told the story of begging the
doctor's not to let my auntie die, and the doctors' taking pity on her small broken heart when they
explained that even though she would take care of this, her beloved elder sibling, it could not help.
My mom's sister was dying from a billy club to the head, and mamma never recovered from the
horror of that loss.
Mom was maybe nine. Her sister was just eighteen.
My mom could have been bitter about it, as was her mom, my auntie's mother too, had she ever
had a chance to be angry. She seemed to have gone from disbelief straight to grief and depression.
And as regards the cauchemardesque* of it all, that is where she stayed until we lost her at age 77.
l know my aunt's body did not survive the policeman's attack. But the part of her soul that let my mom tell us about her did survive a bit. As her body lay buried, parts of her soul were still with her
little sister, and then given over to us to ponder and to understand what about it was love.
Her stories were in her little sister's family many times, years and years later.
The soul is that part of a human being which is so very free that it makes the saying true: 'The human
mind can make heaven out of hell or hell out of heaven.'
How else could I offer a man in dire need of heroin a room at the Ritz instead, and he double over
in misery and with rage. His body helps him into this mental posture at that moment, but dependent
upon how sick he actually is, only his soul may be free enough to reject my offer most fully.
In our recently deceased and martyred South Carolina Nine, their souls will live on in many, many
persons as their bodies are no longer so free to do.
Mr. Coates would love to have met my dad, who founded an organization in the fifties, asking
for reparations. I used to say 'Dad, there was no U.S. There were thirteen colonies. Who would
pay us- we built the entire thing! All the first thirteen colonies were built by our ancestors, and the
money funding the westward movement came from the too!' He'd still try to puzzle it out.
I generally avoid all the progressive whining done on MSNBC, especially since Joy Reid has no show now; but I am so glad I caught you last night.
I also hate to miss Lawrence O'Donnell, Ed Schultz, and Rev. Al- which is how my TV happened to be on at all.
Often the sound is off and I am out of the room!
I will Between The World and Me tonight. I know your writing because I read The Atlantic when I can.


*nightmarish ( for me, in an exquisite depiction)