Prayer For A Random Black Man

Prayer For A Random Black Man
the search for-- and loss of -- a birthright
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
By William Jelani Cobb

I have been high on Obama for the last month, rambling on about new eras and dividing lines of history. And these are intoxicating times, days when hopes we were afraid to harbor have come so close to harvest.

But I crashed hard last week the day I was told that a student I knew, a brilliant, beautifully gifted young Morehouse brother was dead, the victim of a gunshot wound that resembled a suicide. Two days later I learned that my first cousin, a member of the Bloods, had been shot dead in his home and the house set ablaze. It was then that I remembered that the world is not so well choreographed, that we drag fragments of awful into our dreams and the bitter past is always, always with us. This is the second time I've had to pick up my pen to exorcise the grief of two black men killed in the same week. Forgive me if I repeat myself.

These are the moments that make our contradictions apparent, like what it means to come closer than we ever dared imagine to fulfilling the dream while one million of us languish behind bars and forty percent of our children live in poverty.

There were other unruly contradictions: one black man gone, leaving a body of mournful students in his wake. Another lived such a life that his eulogy would be gunspray and homicide and malt liquor libation. And they were both lives that were reaped before they ripened. I find myself asking open-ended questions: What does a prayer weigh and does it have an expiration date? Do they bear fruit in the summer and turn brittle in the winter night? And what is your debt to those who have prayed for you?

These days when people ask my religion I tell them I'm an apostle of history and they wonder if I am cracking a joke that they didn't get. But I know that history cannot be revoked and we have 389 years of it on these shores. I also know that before law or statute or judicial decree, integration in America began when the first African's bones were laid to rest in this hostile soil. We have only gained ancestral momentum since then.

I did not have the foresight to offer this sermon to my student or my kin and I will write it now as a psalm or an editorial prayer or a sad rambling for whoever finds use in it. Were I a wiser man, I would have told them this:

My own history has taught me that the devil is a black dog named despair; he stays on your trail like the slave hounds after a fugitive. The old spiritual tells us to Wade in the Water; I am sure this was meant in hopes that the dogs would lose the scent.

I would have said with all certainty: your life is not your own, it is a culmination of prayers and longings voiced before your grandmother was born. You fulfill this debt not by what you do for us, but by how you live your life and what you bequeath to those yet unborn. Your laughter is the deferred joy of your ancestors and your sorrows are a leftover from the even greater trials buried in the past.

I once read that a woman never stops carrying her children, that residual cells from each life she brings into this world remain inside her for life; I wondered if history worked the same way, that part of your life remains embedded within us and binds you to us. We give you the best of our flawed selves and this is the only real inheritance you will ever gain. Your task is to take that and make of it what your talents tell you. This is the meaning of tradition and it is the only way we know to bring the black dogs to heel.

I know of what I speak. I am a black man with a Ph.D. raised by a black man with a third-grade education. I took the backwater Georgia wisdom he left me and used it to write books. And in turn I leave those who come after a legacy of folk knowledge and book knowledge as raw material for their own doings.

We are nineteen generations deep in America and there is a generation of us that rests beneath the Atlantic Ocean. The could tell us that the obstacles behind us loom much larger than those in front of us. And that the only way those dogs ever catch you is if you stop moving forward.

William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at Spelman College. His third book, now available from NYU Press: To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic