I have a place I've looked at and applied for"
You have a plan?
You!
Why do I feel like a two-year old to this slightly younger woman? It's the way I feel when the manager doesn't bother to look up at me but keeps her eyes on the computer screen and her fingers on the keys, What is it you want?
If I can't help you, then I need to go.
And she's putting the papers away. Head down. Pissed? She's has been tasked to accomplish silence from me!
What a trip, we used to say. This is what white supremacy looks like. This is an authoritarian state's reach into the relations between the next door neighbor, the manager, other tenants fearful of "looters," Blacks from Chicago (as I am), Blacks with dreads. The realty, an institution that has done a number with Black lives in America.
I was here to help you! But you have a plan! You don't need my help!
She can't look at me.
As I write this, I know I'm supposed to have lost my mind. This neighbor was supposed to have driven me to insanity, so a psychological write up so much the plan for any Black who should dare to protest, to speak out, talk back! How long have I been faced with this town's attempt to silence me? The authoritarians at the university campuses have tried for years.
Now, she's asking about my cancer, but she doesn't listen and the answer never comes. She's talking about transportation now, and I don't need her help with transportation. But this is a distraction too.
I was thinking of those Haitian enslaved Blacks that Faulkner's character Thomas Sutpen brought back to the US, to his Mississippi plantation. The Haitians, described as "wild" terrified the other white owners because they saw in these Blacks the potential for mass uprisings of enslaved Blacks. The "tamed" Black, the quiet Blacks, so the US slaveholders wanted to believe, were nothing like those Haitians that seemed to be a bit freer to be visible. Loud.
Sometimes the "tamed" don't follow the plan. Sometimes they join the "wild" become loud.
I dare to refuse to submit to the man's plan! Woe, to me!
She doesn't give a damn about me! She represents people who don't give a damn about me and my life. How could they when I want an end to authoritarianism? To white supremacy? To capitalism?
Wouldn't the neighbor have deliberately listened in on that wall to all the Bernie Sander's interviews I listened or watched to on my computer? She would have received an earful of mornings of Democracy Now! Michael Moore's podcasts, Mike Malloy's podcasts. Useful Idiots , Jacobin , TLS, Star Talk . Whatever podcast andall too radical for the safety of tenants. But then there are these other tenants, white tenants. So I would have to be crushed so as to not provide any potential uprising of rebels within the building, deciding, on their own, to think, outside of what management tells them to think or suffer the consequences of a non-renewal.
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