Panther Baby/The Human Condition

I arrived at the party inspired, optimistic, and moved by revolutionary love. The gathering, however, was not what I hoped. It largely consisted of me shouting about the lecture I had just attended: a Columbia professor, and former Black Panther, speaking on the release of his new book documenting his coming of age with the black radical community-based organization.

I left the party fiending, unsatisfied, and alone. It was as if the entire evening I was searching for something that's time hadn't come. Quickly exhausting my options for a fix, I resigned myself to the fate of going home at 2 AM empty-handed.

Ahead was the public safety bus. At least I wouldn’t have to walk the short 12 blocks home. Accepting consolation in quick travel, I boarded the empty bus, greeted the driver, and took my seat.

Looking in her rear view mirror, she said, “Please flash your ID so I can see it.”

“Right on,” I said as I took out my ID from my wallet.

“Where are you going?”

“One-oh-six.”

“One-oh-six?”

“Right on.”

After some moments passed, she looked up and asked, “Are people saying that again?”

“What?”

“Is that something people are saying again? ‘Right on.’ Do a lot of people you know say it?”

“I mean, I say it all the time.”

“I know people from the ‘60s used to talk like that. I don’t hear people saying that anymore.”

I thought about what she said. I thought about what I had been shouting about all night –the need I felt to connect to the world around me. The fire I was trying to keep going in my own heart; the reminder that it was beating.

“Well you know, actually, I went to this event tonight,” I began. “I’ve been talking about it all night. You see, there’s a professor here and he just wrote this book. He was telling his story of how he joined the Panthers when he was 15 years old. After Dr. King was assassinated, sharing his grandmother’s tears. He spoke so beautifully about the struggle.”

She seemed to be listening. And I was just getting started. I continued on excitedly explaining the jewels of wisdom I had heard that evening. “There was an understanding of community and connection. It was about the breakfast programs and health clinics. In the face of infiltration and repression, the motivation was serving the needs of the people. It seemed so right –just before I graduate, to hear Jamal Joseph break it down tonight.”

She was silent. But by this point, I wasn’t expecting anything. After all, I had been telling the same story all night and except for a few friends, no one was really trying to hear me.
I stopped talking. She reached into her bag on the ground next to her and pulled out a book. There it was. The stories I heard and been trying to re-tell all evening. There in her hands I read the cover – Panther Baby.

“Were you there this evening?” I asked.

“No. I had to work,” she said.

As we sat there, parked in front of the gates of the University she asked, “How do you think you will translate what you heard tonight into your life?”

I talked about my student activist days and what the Ten Point Program meant to me when I was a teenager. How the journey that started somewhere with disrupting high school hallways took me to villages in India as a community organizer. I talked about how roots run deep.

And then, all of a sudden, I caught myself. All I had done the entire evening was rant and rave about human dignity and social justice and knowing history and where you are going. “What is your connection to all of this? Where does your interest lie?”

“The human condition,” she responded point-blankly as we drove down Amsterdam Avenue. “The way we choose to interact with each other.”

My stop had come. As we shook hands and exchanged contacts on ripped out pieces of magazine paper I realized what I had been searching for all evening had finally been willed into happening on a ten-minute bus ride.

Throughout our lives we attract certain people. Sometimes in order to reach out across the abyss of our alienation, to share the stories that were shared with us, we need the frustration, the struggle, the persistence to find what we are looking for. And when we have nearly given up, in the places we least expect to find it, there is a reminder of what it’s all about.

So What’ll You Do Now?

After 14 months in India, an intense year of service and discovery, and living and working in the most rural area I have ever been to, I have returned back to the United States of America (YOU-ES-AY). This has included returning to the beacon of light that is suburbia and to the constant questions of: “What are you going to do now? How does this all fit into your career?” Inevitably, the advice comes that enough is enough already, and it’s time to settle down…

It hasn’t always been easy having the same conversations, being asked the same questions, telling the same stories. It’s hard trying to express depths of emotion, by request. It’s not something that can be switched on and off. And there are times when I can’t really go there.

The challenge is getting it across in a way that isn’t regurgitating a myth I have created in my head, but more so being aware that I actually did this, and it has had a profound impact on me. It’s hard to be able to switch on something so enormous, and dynamic, especially when it’s something you are still processing. My answer has been to live in the present so completely. But what has grounded me these past two weeks is knowing what I have just done, where I am coming from, and where I want to go from here.

So what next? Beyond the clichéd answers of jobs, and GREs, and grad school applications. Beyond the compost pile out back and trying to live all the thoughts that perspective brings, the real answer is one that goes to the heart of the question. That is if you really wanna go there. So in the words of Bob:

I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

A Letter to India

When I came to you last year one of the things I asked of you was to grow me up. I’d always known you, a part of you at least, but never like this. You see, my parents left your shores, but never left you. And when I was born you were not there.

I had gotten to know you from afar, seen you through only a handful of lenses, never staying in your borders for more than a month or so. I knew so many stories about you. Stories about your past, stories about gods and heroes, stories about love and hate. They were sad stories, scary stories, stories I didn't always understand. But I was always proud to know you. And those stories never left me.

This year I got to know you in your home, in your neighborhoods, in your villages. I tasted your salt, wept underneath your sky, and played in your dirt. This year you kicked my ass. And I am so much better for it. It is the relationship people have with the soil. The love and affection people are so willing to give. It is life lived daily that has schooled me. These lives they are hard, no doubt, and I marvel at all the lives you have birthed. How are your children by the way? Do you know all their names? It’s amazing how sharp they are.

I wonder about all your wonders, the ones you hide away from passing cameras, cable TV networks and quick-fix development experts. There are so many different sides to you, you confuse me. I am still not able to reconcile all your different faces. Sometimes, you know, you make me sick. You make me angry in ways that make my blood boil. And we all worry about where you will take us.

There is too much to say, so I’ll guess I say, “Thanks,” though they tell me there is no thank-yous between family. Thank you for opening up to me, though really you were always there. It was just me who needed to come find you. Thanks for the cup of chai that was always surely waiting behind every open door and after every awkward moment. It has been real in the truest nature of the word. And it’s true, I don’t know you like that. But maybe one day I will. Maybe one day I can say I do really know you as if I had known you all along.