Find me in the whirlwind.
Nevada, July 4, 1910. Jack Johnson looming over the prostrate contender knocked out in the fifteenth round. “Never saw it coming,” says the loser two hours later in the back room of the speakeasy where they take him to recuperate on whisky sours and French bourbon. And Johnson walking away with the belt in his hand and the woman on his arm and all over America the white riots begin.
Find me in the whirlwind.
Ocoee, Florida, 1920. The Black people want to vote, so the white people start shooting up the neighborhood and they hang Julius Perry on a lamppost to show what happens when Black people get uppity. And afterwards the coroner scratches his head and says, “This body is too heavy, heavier than what it should be.” And the mystery is solved when he realizes the white people pumped the body full of lead after the man died because that’s what people do when their hearts are full of hate.
Find me in the whirlwind.
1921. Tulsa, Black Wall Street burned down by white mobs. Two days of looting and murder, airplanes dropping grenades on their own soil, on their own people, on the progeny of the ones they brought over in shackles to do their dirty work, the progeny of the ones they whipped and punched and raped and hunted down with dogs and horses. They burn it to the ground and five-hundred souls ascend to heaven.
Find me in the whirlwind.
Old show tunes, jazz numbers on the jukebox, Satchmo growling. Billie Holliday opens her mouth and the whole of Harlem comes out and three-hundred and forty years of living hell and white supremacy. Baldwin’s head dipped over the typewriter, haloed in cigarette smoke, the ashtray overflowing in gauzy light, tells the white folks “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.”
Find me in the whirlwind.
1963, in the cool of the Alabama church where the little Black girls play and pray, dressed in their Sunday best these god-fearing children in the house of the Lord. Turns out it isn’t God they need to fear. Because the whites plant their dynamite and Carol and Denise and Cynthia and Addie May die in the blast and the flames, yes, say their names. And they fly straight to the bosom of the Lord they feared. And every stained glass window of that church shatters into pieces except one: the one showing Christ walking with children.
Find me in the whirlwind.
Toni Morrison staring down the interviewer who asks her when she’s going to tackle mainstream subjects as if Black people are not mainstream subjects, and Morrison not batting an eyelid, Morrison not losing her cool, Morrison not telling the interviewer to go fuck himself, Morrison perfectly coiffured in the eye of the storm folds her arms and begins to explain.
Find me in the whirlwind.
The breath in the ship’s hold. Prostrate and shackled to their kinsmen. Heat like a furnace. Surrounded by the dead. Here on the ship, time plays tricks. The wooden mast creaks. The ocean waves churn. The sky darkens and the sun dips down leaving its fire smeared above the horizon. The captives and the captors trapped together in history’s grip till the end of Time. Till the whirlwind slows and slows and there, you will find me.
