Family and personal pictures are soul things. Sharing them is a kind of double exposure; history and soul = memory . . . Your mom praying to Buddha and there you are, free. Like my mom praying to Buddha in public except that I was not free. [Here is] the time traveler in the guise of your five-year-old self teaching my seven-year-old self about freedom.
—From a correspondence from Robin
D. G. Kelley to the author, 2024
In Newark, New Jersey, in a Puerto Rican restaurant, I sit across from a historian and we speak of how we came of age by chasing love from our volatile and absent fathers. We ponder for a word in the colonial language for what it requires to end seven generations of violence in one breath. I tell him, my father’s fist left such a deep crater in my childhood; I could never see myself become a parent. I watch him map out the timeline of his life on an atlas, and place his forefinger on the day he chose to tenderly become a father—as in a devoted student of the lessons his daughter laid out before him. I tell him, my imposter’s syndrome is so heavy—each night I fall asleep on a thousand great ideas, and none of them survive by morning. I ask him: when I’m older, will it feel lighter? He smiles and tells me, yes. But these days, he says, all I feel is a sharp numbing pain in my left knee and wrist. I feel the pain travel across the table like smoke. I inhale and it reaches my lungs. It must be the grief, I tell him, for the children we never got to be. I pull out a Polaroid of my mother praying inside a Buddhist temple in our homeland, China. In the foreground, my five-year-old self grins for the camera flash and holds up two fingers pointing toward heaven. He studies the document and flips back to a page in his atlas: this was just four years after they forced Malcolm to leave the world, and Yuri soon joins the Republic of New Africa. He points to his seven-year-old self, shrinking in embarrassment, while watching his mother pray to Buddha on a Harlem sidewalk. My five-year-old self walks out from that Polaroid and joins them.
I approach you and say: follow me. Your mother with the maroon flower in her hair smiling, as we tell her: be right back. I take you through the crowd scrambling home after the long day’s work to W 125th Street, and we climb a fire escape five stories to the top of a building. Our feet dangle down the ledge. We spot the Panthers preparing for tomorrow’s Free Breakfast as young Asian Americans board the subway down to Chinatown for tonight’s Basement Workshop. I pass you a sprig of incense. You remove from your pocket the lighter you stole from your father the last time you ran away from him. You teach me how to put my finger on the flint barrel. We watch the smoke snake into the Harlem sunset as we light another—one for each of our dads—the fathers they failed to be, and the untameable wounds they became instead—forest fires always running from home; never toward it; even if it meant destroying everything in their path. We watch the police stations burn. You ask me, will it always be this hard? I answer: it will only get harder, but like the rings of a tree trunk, your skin will learn how to grow around the wound. Above our heads, flocks of New York street pigeons take off from the branches. We watch them disperse and come together again and again and form the shape of a lost dragon. But one day, I tell you, you will build a better home in the study of struggles toward utopia, and I will build a better home in the art that will guide us there. I point out the dragon’s tail as it vanishes below the crimson horizon; there, we will meet again. Above us, a bolt of lightning from god’s analog camera ripples the surface of the Hudson River and illuminates our skin.
When the flash subsides, your adult self glances back at me from across the table. When I finally saw myself through your eyes, I noticed the imposter’s syndrome imprisoned in my chest for thirty-two years had finally disappeared.
