A Life-Changing Event Remembered

This is an open letter to my brothers:

Has it already been a year? Has it been that long since we stood on the Mall under that weak October sun, a million men marching, no matter how many the National Park Service said were there?

That day is a blurry place in my mind now, and I find it hard to remember much. I don’t recall a lot of what the Rev. Jesse Jackson said; I have trouble recollecting poet Maya Angelou’s stirring words and Louis Farrakhan’s rambling oratory.

But I remember you.

I remember the readiness of your posture, the anticipation of your eyes, as you rode the Metro into Washington. I remember the way you mounted the stairs at a trot and strode forward with a purpose, as if pushed by need and beckoned by destiny. I remember the way you linked arms and chanted an African chant as someone thumped rhythm on a drum.

I remember how proud I was.

And, oh, I remember you.

You were so old, man, salt-and-pepper hair over weathered eyes which had seen a lot of living - but never before anything like this.

You were young, too, swaggering as they do on the hard streets around the way. But attitude was ebbing from your face a little, eyes softening like a fortress opening for the first time to wonder.

You were there with your sons, you had an arm around your wife, you carried signs, you high-fived everybody you saw, you laughed boisterously, you walked without fear for the first time or you just stood there with folded arms and nodded, smiling.

I remember you. Till my last day, I remember you.

And I remember what we felt, a thing perhaps only we can understand.

We don’t hear too many good things about ourselves, do we? We hear only about the problems we cause, the failure we embody, the burden we place on the nation. We receive censure we deserve and censure we don’t, and it all masses together into this … thing, this crushing, onerous weight we carry with us through all our waking days.

It hurts.

We pretend it doesn’t, but it does.

And the weight contorts us, changes the way we are with women and with whites and on the job and in the street and with one another and, in the darkness at day’s end, with ourselves. Hell, we wouldn’t know ourselves without that weight - we’ve borne it so long it’s become a part of us.

But Oct. 16 was a weightless day.

The first and probably the last. But we had it. No one ever can take that away.

And we heard straight talk that day, didn’t we? About how our community has grown disconnected, fractured, separated over the years, like a sidewalk where the concrete lies in jagged sections and weeds sprout up through the cracks.

That disconnection is us. It’s the shame, humiliation, pride, arrogance, weakness that moved us from where we are needed, even if the only thing we have to offer is tears. Physically and emotionally, we have disconnected from the embrace of children and women, and they’ve been reaching for us ever since.

That day, we reached back.

I hope you’re still reaching. I hope you didn’t discard what we felt out there that day like some New Year’s resolution, like a promise you made only because you were drunk with possibility. I hope what you felt transfigured your life.

It did mine.

Just the other day, I contacted Big Brothers of America and got the papers I need to sign up and mentor a young man without a father in his life. I went to my own children and told them I wanted to do this and asked if they would mind if I spent some time with some other child.

My boys were cool, but my little girl wasn’t having it, so I almost talked myself into backing out. But I’m going ahead. When the time comes, I’ll just have to make my daughter understand.

Because nobody can do this but me.

And you.

And I remember you.

You looked so fatigued that night as the Metro rushed through the darkness, leaving the Mall. But you seemed at peace, too. Your eyes were deep and proud and satisfied with what they had seen.

I loved you so much in that moment.

And I slept without weight that night.

xxxx