Two Hells

Every time a Black boy or man is killed, I die too. I was not there, yet I was there, on that afternoon while basking in their white power, when a father called his son to go hunt down a Black boy. I was there but I was not there when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down from a hotel balcony. “I was not there, yet I was there,” are the words used by Ernest Gaines’s character Jefferson in A Lesson Before Dying. Jefferson’s words speak for all Black males who are forever navigating a racist existence. On April 4, 1968, fifty-seven years ago today, America’s greatest spiritual genius, Martin Luther King Jr., was murdered because, at worst, he was a Black man and, at best, because he wanted Black people to be free. And just like that, Ahmaud Arbery, also from Georgia, was slaughtered for sport because America will not claim Black males as humans. In America, like cherry pie contests, it is a cultural norm for white males to be predators with Black males as their prey.

As that spiritual sister Ella Baker has proclaimed, “Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons (and daughters), becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s sons (and daughters), we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens” Every waking moment in these un-united states of America is plagued by the disease of racism for males of the darker hue. Every second my son is not with me I am in some form of panic. When he leaves the house, when he goes to school, yes—when he goes for a jog, when he goes to the mailbox, when he goes around the house to the back door—I am afraid he will be slaughtered for sport. I don’t know how much more I can take it. I feel like a cat that has nine lives because I have died so many times. My son is 24 years old; unfortunately, he has been trying to plot a course amid this evil of white people since the day he scrutinized the news of Trayvon Martin’s death. I never had to inform him what it was like to be a Black male in America; instinctively he knew his life was disposable when Trayvon Martin was gunned down by a white man. Like Jefferson, my son was saying, “I was not there, yet I was there.”

Both Dr. King, Ahmaud Arbery, and Trayvon Martin were weaponless and slaughtered at a tender age, but of course they had already died multiple times because that is what happens to Black males who live under the threat of violence. My own father, at the age of 57, exhaled his last breath one cold winter night a week after retirement. The doctors say his troubled heart failed—that is absolutely an understatement. My father had endured a racist military, a racist employer (26 years as a postal worker), a racist educational system, and a racist healthcare system. Everything he encountered had Jim and Jane Crowism’s fingerprints upon it. That does not end the litany of assaults on his heart. He also took blows from divorce, two marriages, and the deaths of siblings and parents. Without ceasing, he was losing his breath. The night my father’s soul wrested itself free of his body in three heaving breaths, the little engine could not say “I can” anymore.

The late James Cone’s trumpet of justice can be heard once again: “Until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ Black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.” America’s original sin is forever sliding and slithering like it did in the garden of that white middle-class neighborhood when dad and son got into their pickup truck to “seek, kill and destroy” Ahmaud Arbery. Every time an unarmed Black male is gunned down, Christ is “recrucified.” You might want to accuse me of practicing ‘pie in the sky’ religion, but I do believe that God must give every person who has lived under the whip of white oppression an automatic resurrection. Why? Because it has not been proven that God gives one person two hells. Every time a Black male is gunned down, I die too. I was not there and yet I was there.

+ Rev. Darryl Aaron, Providence Baptist Church