Waiting

Yesterday

Today

Tomorrow

The lines blur

And I wait

For things to come into focus

There is a spiritual that contains the words, “There is trouble all over this world.”

Trouble broke out at airports all over the country today because of the President’s executive order that effectively bans the entry of individuals from seven Muslim countries. Purportedly, people were either detained at airports, or were denied entry and sent back home.

As I read through the thread of a Facebook friend, I saw a comment about how people, in their frustration, were destroying their own cities.

The words of a Gary Byrd song came to me: “Every brother ain’t a brother…” In other words, those who appear to be in step with me sometimes have their own agenda.

Then this came to me:

·anarchy
ˈanərkē/
noun
a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority.

Make sure you know all the players on your team. Not all perceived “chaos” is spontaneous. Sometimes it’s opportunity waiting for the right moment.

Stay Woke!

From my perspective, the movie “Fences” is staged like a play, which is fine with me though it was a little offputting to others.

“Fences” is an ensemble of characters but the spotlight is on Troy Maxson, the teller of tall tales and the holder of unrequited dreams.

Everyone is fenced in by something, but there also fences that separate them from some things and some people. In the character Bono’s words, “Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in.”

Troy wonders why his wife Rose wants a fence, ‘What is she keeping out?” Bono speculates that perhaps she is trying to hold on to him, to keep him in.

Bono later wonders out loud to Troy why he chose hardwood to build that fence when softwood would have been so much easier to handle. Troy has only known the hardwood of life. Even his favorite game, baseball, is about hardball.  We learn throughout the movie that Troy’s life has never been soft.

Movies often require the viewer to suspend disbelief. This movie presents a reality to which many African Americans, a few generations back, can relate. No need for them to suspend disbelief because the movie grabs you by the cultural throat right out the gate and it won’t let go.

The movie opens with two men hanging on the back of a garbage truck. They are garbage men (whom we later learn are Troy and Bono), men who spend their days picking up and dumping the refuse of others of which some residue surely settles on them. Life has not been a bed of roses for them. Life has dumped its garbage of hate and denial and exclusion on them and they have learned how to ignore the stench.

‘Fences” is more than the movie title; it is the thematic thread that slowly unravels in the movie.

This is Troy’s story. The influence of the wife is sensed more that stated. Still, her interjected comments as he tells his tall tales remind us that she does have a voice, a part in their story. She, Rose, appears to be periperal but near the end of the movie we see that she has been the linchpin that held everything together inside the fence of their marriage.

Everyone is in survivor mode.

Troy is fenced in by his marriage to Rose, yet there is a fence that separates Troy and Rose in the marriage. It is the fence of loss, the loss of a father who should have loved him; the loss of a dream of playing baseball in a time that “never should have been too early;” it is the loss of the innocence of youth at fourteen when he became responsbile for the rest of his life.

He loves his wife. He brings his paycheck home to her every payday. He laughs and flirts with her in front of his friend. He loves his wife, supports his family, but loss keeps that fence in place between what he has and what he wants and what Rose thinks is in place.

Troy feels burdened by the responsibilities of the marriage while Rose believes she has given up all that she is for the marriage.

It all comes to a head when Troy confesses his infidelity to Rose and tries to explain why he has found freedom in another woman’s arms: “It’s just [Alberta] gives me a different idea, a different understanding about myself.  I can step out of this house [this fence].  I can be a part of myself I ain’t never been. I can sit up in her house and laugh; I can laugh out loud. I can forget about myself!”

Troy states, in his own frustrating way, that the other woman allows him to be a different man. He sees himself in a holding pattern, responsible for his family but along the way he forgot about imself: “I done locked myself into a pattern trying to take care of you all that I forgot about myself.”.

Rose realizes in this agonizing gut punched moment of Troy’s revelation of not only infidelity but also an impending birth, she realizes that she has placed all her feelings, all her wants and needs inside of Troy. While he has wrestled with the realization that he has been standing in the same spot for eighteen years, she also has stood in that same spot with him. He repays her giving up of herself with his unfaithfulness. Rose does her best to explain her own hopes and dreams, how she buried all her feelings in him and held on to him even through her darkest times. She lets Troy know that, yes, he gives to them, but he has also taken from them as well.

Rose has allowed herself to be subsumed by Troy in order that together they might survive. Now she hears from him, after she has given up her freedom for his survival, that he had to step outside her fence to find respite with another woman. This a brutal slap in Rose’s face, made even more brutal by the fact that Troy now expects her to give him room to breathe that fine air of freedom because he has no intention of giving up Alberta.

In the final scenes of the movie, Rose defines her place in that fence of marriage to their son, Corey: “I wanted a house that I could sing in, and that’s what your daddy gave me. I didn’t know to keep up his strength I had to give up little pieces of me. … It was my choice. It was my life and I didn’t have to live it like that.but that’s what life offered me in the way of being a woman and I took it.”

Over the kitchen sink in the Maxson house hangs a picture of an European Jesus. The gospel song, “Jesus, Be A Fence All Around Me,” plays in one scene. Rose is almost always in the kitchen, cooking or cleaning. She offers food to every person who comes to the house. She is the nurturer, the sustainer of life within the fence of their marriage, giving of her own strength in order that her family might continue to survive.

Life continues to throw hardballs at Troy. Alberta dies in childbirth. Rose agrees to raise the innocent baby but Troy is now, in her own words, “womanless.” Gabe, his brother (for another blog) is now in an institution. Bono, his friend, plays dominoes with new friends. Rose has stepped into a new fence, the Church. Troy drinks alone in a bar.

The physical fence is complete but it is the only thing still intact. Nothing else is the same. Not Troy, not Rose, not the fence that once surrounded their marriage.

 

 

Most of us have felt it

That “Oh, no!” feeling in the pit of our stomach

We are running late

Dash out to the car

Keys in one hand

Everything else in the other

We hit the remote to open the car door

Jump inside

Shove key into the ignition

And

We get nothing

Except that sickening little “click, click, click”

Which screams at us

BATTERY DEAD!

Still it is your lucky day

You have roadside service

They ask, “Are you in a safe place?”

You respond, “Yes”

But sometimes the fates are not so nice

Sometimes your car quits on you

Gives up the ghost in the most unfriendly places

Like in the middle of an intersection

Or a city street

Are you safe?

You sure hope so

Hope that other drivers see you are stuck

In the middle of the road

And drive around you

Then they arrive

You breathe a sigh of relief

Hopeful for help

But you also hold your breath

Because

They are the police

Called to protect and serve

But they are also white

And

You are black

And

You are male

You raise your hands

And you pray

Just before that first shot

Just before the searing impact of bullet against flesh

Just before that last heartbeat

You pray

That you are safe

But

You were not

You bled out in that unfriendly place

And the morning after

The media blows smoke and screams

“Angelina Jolie Files For Divorce From Brad Pitt”

As the rest of us

Who are left behind

Who continue to hope and hold our breath

Whenever we see black and white

Human and inanimate

We are left behind

To

Contemplate strange fruit

That no longer hang from trees

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is a quiet invasion

Something akin to “The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers”

The movie classic about aliens who come to earth and duplicate humans

Plant pods that replicate the human when the human falls asleep

The duplicates look like the original but they can’t quite capture the persona or personality of the human whose body they have snatched

Yeah, exactly like that

The quiet invasion of which I speak

Begins one root at a time

Black strands no longer connect to the scalp

Instead insidious gray roots

Crawl in

Duplicates

Nothing like the original

Stubborn and wiry

Refuse  to be tamed

Refuse to hide

The goal, conquer all

Lulled into a false sense of security by Lady Clairol

You drop your guard

But one day

You look into the mirror

Just an innocent glance

Then a double take

In the reflection you spy the second wave

Your chin under Gray attack

Hair grows where it never grew before

The first wave of that second wave is black

Irritating but not easily spotted by outsiders

Don’t drop your guard

The Grays are on the way

You will lose the Battle of the Chin

A never ending battle

Long gray hairs sprout

Grow from an unwilling chin

Tweezers are your weapon of choice for a counter attack

But you must remain vigilant

Ever watchful

For the enemy does not rest

Until it has conquered all

Gray in unmentionable places

Clothes that cover the saving grace

Even so

You will eventually realize

The Grays are always victorious

The moment you begin to pluck at them in your eyebrows

Until you realize all that is left

Are remains of what once was

Forlorn patches of hair

That will never return to glory days

Hover over surprised eyes

No need for a white flag

The Grays have already raised it

DANG!