“What did I do to be so black and blue?”
Fats Waller “Black and Blue” 1929
“In this journey, you're the journal, I'm the journalist/ Am I eternal or an eternalist?”
Rakim “Follow the Leader” 1988
“I got numbers in my phone that'll never ring again
'Cause Allah done called 'em home, so until we sing again/ I got texts on my phone that'll never ping again
I screenshot 'em so I got 'em, I don't want this thing to end”
Jay-Z and Jay Electronica “A.P.I.D.T.A” 2020
When the playwright August Wilson was twenty-one he began frequenting a cigar store in his native Pittsburgh called Pat’s Place. The aspiring young writer became a regular at an establishment that catered to Pullman Porters, black men who traveled across America in service to railroad passengers. The white passengers uniformly called all these men “George,” not bothering to see them as individuals, but as faceless, white suited servants. But, as Wilson observed, off hours the sensibilities, attitudes and opinions of these men ran a wide gamut, yet were connected by a shared humanity. “I just loved to hang around those old guys,” Wilson told the Paris Review in 1999, "you got philosophy about life, what a man is, what his duties, his responsibilities are. Occasionally these guys would die and I would pay my respects.”
My Pat’s Place wasn’t any single location, but collection of backrooms, newspaper offices, hotel lobbies, backstage areas, restaurants, nightclubs and recording studios that I’ve traversed since college in the ‘70s. I was mostly reporting in black music then but whatever you labeled it – blues, jazz, disco, r&b, funk or hip hop – there were tales of creativity, hustle, racism, addiction, despair and ambition. The men I met became my teachers, my Uncles, my friends and my enemies. Most of them weren’t musicians but people drawn to the nightlife, the money, the relative self-sufficiency and freedom black music represented in a country that opened few doors to legal advancement.
So, in the manner of the great Wilson (but without his poetic skills), I’ve found in the lives and tales of these men a resource that’s informed the books, screenplays and documentaries I’ve created in my career. For decades I’ve been collecting stories about these characters and struggled with how to tell them until my father was diagnosed with Covid-19 in the plague spring of 2020. I wrote an essay about him for Medium and the response was overwhelming. People, mostly but not only men, opened up to me in emails, DM, texts and phone calls about their relationships with their fathers, telling me of the good, the bad and all the feelings in between. All the relationships differed in the details, but they shared a theme: there was something unknowable about their fathers and unresolved about their bond.
On April 25, my father died. Within a month of his passing, my longtime friend Andre Harrell died of a heart attack in May 7 and on May 19, Robert ‘Rocky’ Ford, a man I consider my mentor, died of natural causes. These deaths, so close together and in a summer defined by COVID-19 and protest against police violence against African-Americans, sent me into a writing frenzy as my memories of these eternally vibrant, physically gone men haunted my sleeping and waking hours. Names and memories popped into my head. Not just of these three but of so many others. I began revisiting men who were dead. Thoughts about manhood -- inchoate, sad, and vivid -– came over me.
While people marched in the street under the Black Lives Matter banner (in fact sometimes right outside my door) I was chained to my notebook, remembering deaths far outside the spotlight. These were men who could’ve been in the band in Wilson’s ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ or worked at the taxi stand in his ‘Jitney.’ I became obsessed with the inevitability of death, which didn’t feel morbid but as a way to better appreciate life. From the day you’re born you are racing towards death. A bunch of questions dogged me: Have I used the time wisely? What did the lives of the men I knew impacted me? How did I impact them?
A a black man in America, I think it is of paramount importance that our lives be depicted as completely as possible, escaping facile hero/villain, thug/victim narratives. Between heaven and hell most people toggle between desire, ambition, love, despair, insecurity, confusion, satisfaction, and so many more emotions as we move relentlessly towards death. For those who molded me and are now gone their absence is palpable. Many I didn’t see every day or even that often after certain periods in my life. But knowing they were walking the earth gave me comfort. Now they are my ghosts. I am haunted by the things they did and said. I remember my father, my friends, my acquaintances, my rivals and those who connected with me for just a season. Remembering them is recalling me.
So I’m writing about all of this, hoping one day all the threads come together.