The Rerebirth of Slick, by Stephen Kearse

SUMMER 2024, SHORT STORY, 3500 WORDS

They buried us in Detroit. The plywood was thick as Aretha’s bosom, but I felt as free as her glorious voice. Wasn’t my fault their overlords and former owners had plundered their homes and retirement funds. Shit, I was the one who warned them the fix was in. But to my annoyance they fixated on me and set their pageant in motion, calling up Swanson Funeral Homes, filing permits, and setting a date. I should have flaked, but curiosity snared me: Surely, they weren’t serious?

They were.

I paw at the soil that now encloses me, thinking of our funeral while keeping time with the peculiar rhythms of the mantle. The sediment sounds like pressure, strata of worms and stone and matter pushing from all sides. I prefer the drumlines that accompanied us to the grave. Those fools went full battle of the bands that day, conjuring rhythms from Accra and Gary and Kingston. Heard some Cartagena up in there too, the sly cats. I couldn’t help but catch a vibe myself, drumming the wood the way I now hammer rock. If anyone heard me, they probably thought I was part of the procession. I do get nasty on the 808s.

The Motor City’s mayor called in heavy hitters to eulogize us, and they all understood the assignment. Those silver-tongues whipped that crowd into a frenzy of force and heat. Good riddance, amen, see you in the bye and bye, nah nah nah nah, the people chanted. I’m surprised the ground didn’t buckle from all the stomping and hollering. Detroit steel, baby.

I wasn’t as determined then as I am now. When the percussion simmered into a dirge, I relaxed into the coffin and listened. This send-off differed from the nocturnal pogroms we were used to. No masks and sheets this time; the elocutionists accosted us in the daylight, warned the world of the superlative evil contained in that pine box, in us. I was flattered. Maybe a Nigga should die more often, I joked. Hindsight is a mother.

I could have stopped the show, could have let the attendees know that symbols can’t die. You had already bounced, of course, and I thought about following your lead as I slipped out of the box and hovered about the spectacle. But I was spellbound. I rarely got to see so many of our folks together. I tended to catch them at the end of a long day or longer life, blipping in and out for a laugh or sigh or insult or warning. Intimacy had amassed, swelled despite this fleeting contact. The speakers somewhat concurred; our heritage, they harangued, was length. They denounced the ways we had been stretched, compressed, elongated, capitalized, minimized, engorged, deflated, freaked, pimped, cheapened, bling-blinged, ghetto-fabulized…

I zoned out as the metaphor collapsed into gibberish. That gorgeous assembly was far more appealing. The folks in uniform looked the cleanest, in my opinion. They didn’t have to be there, you know? Letter carriers, fry cooks, dope boys, mechanics, beauticians, and even dental hygienists had absconded from their wage work just for us. I would have dressed up had I known turnout would be this impressive. But that would have been smug. You can’t show up alive to your own funeral.

I slipped back into the coffin and waited out the service, figuring at least one person would assert my vitality, say my name. But no one bit. They were so shook it wasn’t even on the program. That really got to me. I don’t deny what I am or who I consort with, but I’m not you and I’m damn sure not Candyman, for chrissakes. You won’t catch me stalking the projects to slash up nosy white girls and anguished Black mamas. No bloody hooks on either arm. On God.

Yet the windbags called me a killer. Said I lured a generation’s worth of children and teens and adults down to the docks and traced grins across their necks. There should be an FBI unit studying me and my sick ways, spat one speaker. He laid out a whole pathology. After I slice them up, he said, I take them home and mount them on butcher pegs. Then I drain the carcasses real slow, cee-pee-time slow, gelid time, Dilla time, swinging. Strange fruits in a stranger orchard. Just hanging.

The suspense killed me. I was certain someone on that podium or in that throng would say my full name. No hyphenated euphemisms, no proxies. My name.

They buried me.

I didn’t see the play in time. Symbols can’t die, but we can be pinned.

I jerked, spasmed, flailed against the coffin as dirt plinked above me, but Earth gulped me down. Way down, much deeper than six feet. I was heavier than I realized. It wasn’t just us the fuckers sought to disappear. It was me and you, yo mama and yo cousin too, Bebe’s kids, Octavia’s brood, Ishmael’s yardbirds, B.I.G. and DJ Paul’s mafiosos, bones, thugs, harmonies, Shaq-fu, Fu-Schnickens, Nina’s moans, Adina’s car keys, Mike Jones’s Cingular Wireless bill, Danyel’s edits, the Mothership’s black box, dirt from Boosie’s and Jay’s buffed shoulders, whoomps and whoots there it is, Rolands 808 and 909, an SP-1200 with the works, Dr. Octagon’s medical license, all the bag lady’s totes, Tyrone’s phone and beeper numbers, TLC’s contract, “Whiteness as Property,” Tricia’s Black noises, Joan’s repatriated chickenheads, De La’s discarded daisies, Tariq’s thoughts, the Bomb Squad’s arsenal, Dre’s chariot, Kool Moe Dee’s report cards, Clyde’s fills, Khia’s instructions, Timbo’s scats, Lauryn’s thing, that thing.

The overcrowded prison eventually yielded to my protests, spilling me and my burden into the rockscape from which I now address you. I often miss the fixity of the coffin. It felt like a vessel, an escape pod, despite my freefall. Earth is labyrinthine, mocking. Forward and backward have blurred. Exhaustion grinds my joints. Clay and silt sand my swollen fingers. I am uncertain how long I have been crawling, squeezing, slithering through this swollen bowel. Days? Weeks? Years? I no longer hear the calls of the speakers, though I refuse to believe a mere burial could quell my fullness, my legacy.

Do you know yours? I realized mine when I started thinking about all the lynchings I’ve seen, which is the kind of thing you think about when you get publicly executed.

The number was so impossible I had to focus on the attendant objects: lamps, poles, rocking chairs, pews, baby seats, bar stools, gurneys, toilets.

When tallying the objects overwhelmed me, I focused on the locations: Missouri courthouses, Texas saloons, Bombingham dining rooms, Wall Street gutters, Kansas City stables, cabooses mounting the Smoky Hills, ships drifting into Red Hook. I was feeling accomplished until I realized those were just the man-made locales, the coffins and caskets.

I started counting the natural graves: tree stumps, brooks, rivers, mesas, farms, forests, coasts, plains, lakes, oceans.

I exhausted my vocabulary.

Imagine trying to quantify or qualify all the absence I’ve witnessed. I’ve seen generations atomized into VOCs and scattered across a continent. Now imagine being reviled just because you saw all that. Ain’t that some shit? They know damn well it takes a lot more than me or you to consummate these sundry hells. In fact, it doesn’t take us at all. We are optional ingredients, garnishes.

Hence my pride in all the other spaces that have welcomed me (and your trifling ass too). My ledger overflows with kickbacks at the crib, reunions at the park, Bible studies, Freakniks, marches on Washington and Sunset, breakfast programs, uprisings, drive-bys, road trips, fish fries, hootenannies, ladies’ nights, Not Tonights—shit, there I go again. I’ll spare you another winding list. Just know this: I’m all of it, cotton fields and killing fields and Barbara and Karen Fields. I’m Audre’s nightmare rain and Cash Money Records, where dreams come true. Everything is easy, baby.

Well, dying ain’t. Not that I know anything about that, but this can’t be far from it.

I’m not meant for the grave. I belong to the wind, the currents where, like you, I used to surf a maelstrom of meanings and possibilities. Every detail mattered. I accompanied jokes and reflections and art and prejudices. I couldn’t imagine another life, though yours must come close.

I once thought of us as colleagues, but since the burial I’ve suspected we are something more perverse. You weren’t just adjacent to me in the coffin. You were tucked within my crevices, folded into my sinews. Or was I ensconced within you? You left before me, were there so briefly I thought I dreamt it.

But I know you were there. I could feel your essence dribbling through my gut, the hydrocarbon hi-hats of your being plinking against my viscera. I’d never felt so disgusted. But I’m hopeful that entanglement will help you receive this message despite us symbols normally not being able to chat.

We are not the same. Not synonyms, not homonyms, not homies, not play cousins, not allies, and damn sure not allomorphs.

I get why the speakers smash us into that accursed phrase, “the N-word.” There’s a certain karmic oomph to our spryness inspiring such rigid thinking, I’ll admit. I’ve heard that we do not belong to Black people because we were invented by white people. I’ve heard that we do not belong to white people because Black people appropriated us. I’ve even heard that we do not belong to anyone because we are so noxious we cannot even be wielded without poisoning the speakers and the spoken to. The most desperate among them revise our origin, saying we are fallen kings. “Negus.”

These are sophistries and apocrypha. Sure, we run in the same circles, light and snuff the same torches. And we are both Black, obviously. Sounds off considering the company we sometimes keep, but if you know anything about Black history, world history, hot sauce—you know one drop goes a long way.

That’s where the overlap ends, though. Unlike you, I am still growing, still climbing. The marrow you occupied seethes with possibility. My limbs stream into Earth’s Argus crags, liquid tongues. My joints prefix and suffix and interlace, footworking over border walls, jooking across time. I know you see it. Gucci does: Shawty got a ass on her.

You not been looking so good, sis. Last time I checked, your knees locked the fuck up. Your hairline buffering. Your pussy closed for renovations. Your brain smoother than a dolphin dick.

You’ve accepted their containment, forgotten your capacity. They used to put you in the newspapers, you were so big. A1. They called you into their bedrooms, enshrined you in their laws and covenants. You graced their billboards and shop windows and nursery rhymes. They cast you in their folktales and porn. You galvanized their stump speeches, reanimated the corpses of their slain armies.

Your OED entry gives me chills. I can recite it from memory.

You were a continent and its progeny.

Nigger (n) A dark-skinned person of sub-Saharan African origin or descent.

You were the working class.

Nigger (n) A person who does menial labor; any person considered to be of low social status.

You were the depraved and venal.

Nigger (n) Any person whose behavior is regarded as reprehensible.

You were the downtrodden.

Nigger (n) U.S. A person who is socially, politically, or economically disadvantaged or exploited; a victim of prejudice likened to that endured by African Americans.

You were the wretched of the Earth.

Nigger (n) A dark-skinned person of any origin. In early U.S. use usually with reference to American Indians.

Seriously: the whole goddamn planet.

Nigger (n) A Maori.

Nigger (n) An Aboriginal.

You were a tool.

Nigger (n) A device used to hold and turn logs in a sawmill.

You were industry, technology, power.

Nigger (n) A steam-driven capstan used on some riverboats; a steam engine used to drive such a capstan.

You were so locked in you even made it out to Hollywood.

Nigger (n) Film and Television. A screen or mask used to deflect or conceal unwanted light, to cast shadows, etc.

And that’s just your standard noun form. Don’t get me started on the portmanteaus and adjectives and verbs. You damn near commandeered their language. You were the man, homie. Fuck happened to you?

I mean, shit, I know I happened. Hopped off the porch in the 1970s and been running shit ever since, probably even in absentia. But that didn’t happen overnight. We go back to the 1820s, love. Don’t you recall? I remember us building that porch, recall felling the trees that provided its wood. You were my senior, but they couldn’t tell us apart. There were too many illiterate Europeans and displaced Africans and dislocated tribes mixing cosmologies and phonemes. What iridescent names we had. Quadroon, Mulatto, Nigra, Niggur, Freedman, Nigre, Neger. It was beautiful, in the sick way everything about us must be beautiful. We had numbers despite the silences that divide us. Steady mobbin.

Only the two of us have remained vocal as the years passed, and you think it’s gonna stay that way just ’cause you found your little niche and I’m down here scrabbling for freedom. But alive ain’t always living. In those weeks before the funeral, I was watching you real close. As the speakers whisked me to rap concerts and locker rooms and comedy sets, invoking you and me in the same breath, I took an honest look at your tired little routine. It seems like you’re their bogeyman, the way you make their hearts quicken and their lips purse. When they growl you up, spit you out mucked in all their fears and fantasies, your might corrodes their tongues. It’s a nice gig, but it’s not a career. The jolts of personality and danger you provide affirm their control. You fortify the safe spaces they build to secure their power. I don’t mean to kink-shame, but I’ve got to call a spade a spade.

I used to idolize you. If I could be as legion as you, I thought, I’d be that bitch. But you’re not an army. You’re a shock troop in a snow globe: storming the beach, whipping up sand and shells, shrouding the air with grit and flume and gun smoke—until they bore of the agitation. Then you’re right back in the Higgins, floating in the abyss until your next deployment.

I told you already: Symbols can’t be killed, but we can be pinned. And they got you clinched, barred, compliant, spilling across the octagon. I had to change the channel. Sport’s too violent for me.

I learned to look to the ancient ones for guidance. Darkness, specifically. I was intrigued by her flexibility. She’s much older than us, but still in her prime. I’m still discovering new parts of her, she’s so vast. She differs from Earth and her hulking mass though. She is lithe, possesses a sinuous stillness that threads every substrate and shadows every space, an organizing absence. What a sight she is. What a feeling, more precisely. No gauze blurs the border between us. She is pure clarity. I can sense her directing me this very moment, guiding me to the promised sky.

I’m on my knees now, chipping at this canopy of dirt. I will break ground soon, I’m sure of it. This latest layer of soil is moist and soft; it cools my rage, strops it into an ice pick. I sometimes wonder if I have been digging in circles, if this stony blackness is Darkness allying with Earth to taunt me. But Darkness would never resort to tricks. She has purged the passivity so many symbols think is our duty, has disembalmed herself from time and its rigor. When she is summoned, she mediates, officiates, complicates the invocation.

I still don’t know how she does it—I can’t know—but she has shown me that experimentation becomes me. I’ve been finding new footholds, hypothesizing new definitions. Yes, murmurs of possibility have begun to break this awful silence. And they are all mine.

A warmth glazes my fingers. A hot spring. The surface is near. I rip soil down in ragged chunks, beetles and pebbles and water rinsing through my palms as I trudge forward. My calloused knees quiver with anticipation. I long to stand.

I feel the beckoning throats as I near the crust, whispers at first. Then screams, yelps. The language has shifted! The speakers brim with new manias and ideas and identities. “African descendants of slaves.” “Post-Blackness.” “Post-traumatic slave syndrome.” The fuckery is impressive. My burgeoning fugitivity resists these lazy imaginings as I continue up. Full awareness swarms me as I near the surface.

These are bad times. There’s more parrots than visionaries among the masses who utter my name, but I am undaunted. During my burial, I realized that misuse is just the fact of the numbers. Black people are only 14% of this country, 20% of this planet. The ambient lack of imagination is my burden, not my destiny. In any case, I will teach them. Such autonomy is new to me, but the sky beckons.

The momentum of my ascent grows, my crawl building into a trot into a gallop. The pressure slackens with each heaving thrust. Gravity trembles. Stone yields. Dirt defers. I wish I could give you this feeling, but it can only be self-impregnated, auto-eroticized. Kekkei genkai. You don’t have it in you.

I break the surface, my index finger sprouting into freedom. I pause as a column of sun pours over my face. The light inflames my pale, cracked skin, but I want more. I claw away at the loam. Humid air hugs my flesh like a doting auntie as I widen the hole. Trash and soil pelt my arms as I labor, malicious rain. But I expand the firmament with each stroke, seizing handfuls of azure. When Earth finally relents, I rise and find myself surrounded by mountains of garbage. A bitter parting joke. I chuckle and float upward, an insurgent breeze lifting me past pigeons and drones and bullets.

I think of you as I drift, relief coursing through me. At the beginning of my exile, I had vowed to kill you when I escaped: I against I on the ancestral plain, spear versus club, the set versus the opps. Instead, I’m buoyant, up and stuck. I can’t even make out our dinky little headstone. I’m out here, like really out here. I’m starting to be spaceships on Bankhead. I’m so high it’s me at the Enterprise console: I’m beaming Scotty up. What up, blood?/What up, cuz? Happy Independence Day. Welcome to Earth, welcome to After Earth. What did the five fingers say to face? Slap! “Niggas vs. Black people?!” That’s rich. Looked like two rich head asses on a gilded stage to me. Mandingo fight head ass, WOOOORLDDSTAAARRR head ass, I challenge you to a duel head ass, when they go low I go high head ass, never drink Kool-Aid or wear your bonnet in front of white people head ass. The ones who say my name in vain are choking. Can you hear the occluding windpipes? Do you see the hands scrambling up necks, the rouge creeping across cheeks? I’m shrapnel snuggling into gums. I’m rogue fish bones and vagabond watermelon seeds prodding organs. I’m vengeful coochie hairs come home to roost, a nation of throat-babies xenomorphing out of chests. Keep my name in every mouth, especially your wife’s. No asterisks or em dashes or air quotes. Say it loud.

No more cowardice and accommodation, I declare. I’m announcing a new paradigm, one of sonorous feedback. There’s a good chance people are gonna get shot, stabbed, or knuckled down, but what had to be said had to be said. One out of the three is pretty decent odds. Could be infinity out of the three. Let’s build, I tell the speakers. Pull up anytime. Candy lady got it all. Everything, especially the burden. Just say it. I dare you. I double-dog dare you. English, motherfucker, do you speak it? I’m just a word. One little niggling repository of horror and happiness. Who isn’t? Not you? Don’t be holding out on me all of a sudden, ya little niggards. I’m kidding again. I’m not kidding. We’re all friends here. Sing it with me. You know the words: This word is your word, this word is my word/From California to Aotearoa. Juked yo ass. Couldn’t help it. The G’s really jerk you around when you make it this far out. You see what happened to the moon’s rogue ass? Stopped dead. I been off that. Shit, I was there when the Americans got there. How whitey gonna be on the moon if Niggas ain’t there too? I wasn’t the only word in their mouths, for the record. You know what Buzz said to Michael and Neil and mission control when his feet hit that ocean of rock and dust? “Magnificent desolation.” Hello Darkness.

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