Do You Have a Rope?

“Do you have a rope?”

The man was smiling when he said it.

My nephew Xavier and I were floating past him on the Chattahoochee in an inflatable kayak I had bought earlier that day at the Sharper Image in Lenox Square. Xavier was about eight years old, and I had gone looking for him because I figured he was probably the only person in my family I could convince to join me.

It was probably October. I had never owned a kayak, never owned a wetsuit and had no particular reason to be thinking about either one when I walked into the Sharper Image that day. But I saw this heavy duty inflatable kayak and decided immediately that I needed it.

The problem came after I bought it. Driving home with the unopened box, I could already see it sitting in my garage for the next five years while I stepped around it and periodically asked myself why I had bought a kayak I had never used. I knew myself well enough to know that if I did not put it in the water that day, there was a good chance I never would. So I needed somebody who would go along with an idea that had been created only a few hours earlier, and Xavier was the first person who came to mind.

I went and found him.

“Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“The river.”

“What are we doing at the river?”

“I bought a kayak.”

He looked outside and then back at me. “It’s cold.”

“I know. We need wetsuits.”

Neither of us had ever worn one. I had never even put one on, but once I had decided we were going, the absence of wetsuits became a problem to solve rather than a reason not to go. We found some, figured out how to get ourselves into them, inflated the kayak, and a few hours after I had walked into the Sharper Image without any intention of buying watercraft, my eight year old nephew and I were on the Chattahoochee River.

Because it was cold, almost nobody else was out there. That was unusual for me. I had first discovered the river when I was a teenager, and nearly all my memories of shooting the Hooch were summer memories. On a hot Atlanta day there could be rafts everywhere, sometimes ten or twenty tied together, music playing, coolers floating alongside people, everybody talking and laughing while the river slowly carried us downstream. In places the water was so shallow that you could get out and stand in it for a while.

My first trip had been at the end of my sophomore year at the Lovett School. Some guys from the football team and some guys in our grade told me they were going to shoot the Hooch.

“What does that mean?”

“We get some rafts and float down the river.”

“How long are we going to be out there?”

“About four hours.”

Four hours meant food to me, so I went home and made sandwiches. I packed soft drinks and showed up with a backpack. I think I had three sandwiches because if you told me I was going to be somewhere for four hours, I assumed at some point I was going to want something to eat.

When I got there, there must have been twenty rafts tied together, and one whole raft was filled with beer.

One of the guys looked at my backpack. “What you got in there, Hakim?”

“Food.”

“What kind of food?”

“Sandwiches.”

“Sandwiches?”

“Yes, sandwiches. You said we were going to be out here four hours.”

Everybody started laughing. One of the guys asked me for one, so I handed him a sandwich. He unwrapped it, took one bite and threw the rest into the Chattahoochee.

“Man, what the hell?”

Everybody lost it.

I watched a perfectly good sandwich floating away and laughed with them, but I understand that moment differently now. In some ways, those sandwiches represented a lot of my early years in Georgia. I kept walking into places believing I understood what was happening and then discovering that everybody else seemed to have received some set of cultural instructions that had never made it to my house.

I had grown up in South San Francisco.

I was born in Liberia, the only one of my siblings born there, but I was too young to carry memories of Liberia the way Ace, Robi and Trish could. Much of what I know about those earliest years came to me through my parents and siblings. They remembered things for me until I was old enough to understand what those memories meant.

South City was different. South City I knew.

We lived in Westborough, and I have to be careful when I talk about that community now, particularly when I talk about race, because I do not want to make it sound like I was some little kid walking around taking notes on multicultural America. I was not paying attention to the racial composition of my neighborhood. I was trying to find my friends.

Bryan was my first friend. He lived four or five houses down from us and was there when we moved into the neighborhood. There were afternoons when Bryan and I would get home from school and nobody else would be there yet. We would go into the kitchen, fry some bologna, sit in front of the television and wait for somebody to come home. His parents knew where he was. My parents knew where I was when I was at his house. He had a brother and a sister and both of his parents there, and I knew his family because our families trusted one another with their children.

If somebody asked me today to describe Bryan racially, I would say he is White because that is probably how he would describe himself if somebody asked him directly. But White was not the way I experienced Bryan. He was Bryan.

There was Darrell. Reggie would come through our front door on the weekends without knocking, walk into my room and wake me up because apparently I had slept long enough and he had decided we needed to go do something. There was Michael, Tony, Marcus, Greg, Joey and all these other kids who made up the geography of my childhood. Ace, Robi and Trish were there too.

Of course we knew we were different. I knew when I went to Michael’s house that I took off my shoes. I knew different houses meant different food. I knew lumpia and egg rolls.

My sisters learned how to make lumpia from their Filipino friends and got so good at it that eventually it was simply something they made. I knew whose mother cooked what, what families did things differently from mine, what was normal at one house that would have been unusual at another.

The differences were not things I tolerated. I depended on them.

I did not know that then. I only understood how much I depended on them after we left.

There is a photograph of my mother from when she ran for the South San Francisco school board. It was taken on the playground behind Fox Ridge Elementary School, where Ace, Robi, Trish and I all went to school. My mother is surrounded by Black kids, White kids, Asian kids and Filipino kids. If you saw that picture today, you might assume somebody assembled those children around her because a campaign needed to demonstrate diversity.

Nobody did.

I can look at the photograph and name people. That is Reggie. That is Mo. That is Trish.

That is Marcus. Darrel

l and Bryan are not in the photograph, but they could have been.

These were kids from the neighborhood, kids I played sports with, kids whose parents knew my parents.

The photograph was posed. The community was not.

Race mattered. Race has always mattered in America, and I am not trying to turn South San Francisco into some racial paradise where prejudice did not exist. Other people who grew up there may have experienced things very differently. I can only tell you what it felt like to me. I knew difference, but difference did not govern who I could be around. I never felt that spending time with one person was a declaration against somebody else.

Then we moved to Georgia, and suddenly race seemed to carry instructions.

When I first got to Briarwood High School, somebody told me one day, “You sound like a news reporter.”

I looked at him. “What does that mean?”

“It’s just the way you talk.”

I had never thought there was anything remarkable about the way I spoke. I sounded like myself. But in Georgia I began to understand that things about me carried meanings for other people that I had never assigned to them.

The Black kids were cool with me and the White kids were cool with me. That was not really the problem. What confused me was the feeling that socially I was eventually supposed to choose. Who did I sit with? Who did I hang out with? Who were my people?

I already had people. That was what I could not understand.

In California, being with Bryan did not require me to make a statement about Reggie.

Being with Reggie did not mean I had chosen against Michael. They were simply people in my life. In Georgia, there seemed to be Black spaces and White spaces, and everybody else understood the rules for moving between them better than I did.

Later my parents sent me to Lovett for the tenth grade. I was the only one of their four children to attend private school, and around the same time Ace, Robi and Trish were leaving home. For the first time in my life I was becoming an only child without ever having been born one. My siblings had always been ahead of me, and whether I understood it or not, they had provided a kind of protection. They had encountered some parts of the world before I had to.

Now I was walking into a completely new environment without them.

I remember looking at the Lovett brochure and seeing mostly White kids with a few Black kids mixed in.

I thought, I know this. This looks like California.

I was wrong.

White people were not new to me. Wealth was.

Kids my age were driving their own sports cars to school. For the three years I was at Lovett, I carpooled with Sean and Kelly and Shelly. We borrowed our parents’ cars and figured out who had a ride on which day. Meanwhile, somebody in the tenth grade would pull into the parking lot in a sports car that I could not imagine anybody handing to a sixteen year old.

At Lovett I began to understand that money was not only about what somebody owned.

Money could create a culture. It influenced what people expected from the world, what colleges seemed natural to them, what kinds of professions they imagined for themselves, where they had traveled, who their parents knew, and how comfortably they moved through institutions that I was still learning to understand.

Race worked differently there too.

Without anybody officially appointing me, I became something like a spokesman for Black people. A question would come up and people would turn toward me.

“Hakim, do Black people do this?”

“Is it true that Black people do that?”

I would sit there thinking, How the hell would I know?

Most of the questions were not mean spirited. That mattered. Much of it was genuine curiosity, and after a while I became fascinated by the things some of my classmates simply had never experienced.

I remember sitting in a history classroom when the teacher was talking about human evolution and adaptation. She explained melanin and how pigmentation developed over generations in response to different climates. More melanin protected people living in places with stronger exposure to the sun, while populations that developed in colder regions generally had less.

It was an interesting lesson.

Then she looked at me, the only Black student in the room.

“Hakim, are you cold today?”

Everybody laughed.

I laughed too.

By then I had begun to understand that there was something missing in the experience of some people who otherwise had almost every educational advantage available to them. The teacher could give us a lesson about melanin and human adaptation and still, at the end of it, look at the one Black person in the room as though I might provide some additional evidence.

Kids wanted to touch my hair because they had never felt hair like mine.

“Can I touch it?”

I would look at them. “Why?”

“I just want to see what it feels like.”

Sometimes I let them.

One kid said to me, “You must have been the smartest kid at your old school.”

“No, I’m not.”

“But you’re here.”

“I’m probably somewhere in the middle of the pack. I have close friends who are a lot smarter than me.”

He looked confused.

“They just didn’t want to come out here.”

That was another part of my education. I began to understand how easy it was to confuse access with ability. From inside a place like Lovett, it might make perfect sense to assume that the Black kid who had arrived there must have been exceptional among the people he had left behind. But I knew the people I had left behind. I knew kids smarter than I was who had no interest in being at Lovett or whose families had made different choices.

Because people kept asking me questions about Black people that I could not answer, I started researching Black people myself. I would hear some claim and go home wondering whether it was true, where it came from and why somebody believed it.

There was something almost funny about being a Black kid learning about Black people because White people kept asking me questions about Black people that I did not know the answers to.

There were also moments that were less innocent. A couple of guys on the football team got under my skin enough that I eventually talked to my parents about it. I could feel myself becoming more defensive, more inclined to let the environment tell me what kind of person I needed to become in order to survive it.

My mother and father reminded me why they had sent me there. They had not sent me to Lovett to become somebody else’s definition of a Black boy. They believed there were opportunities there that could enlarge my life, and they expected me to take what was useful, learn what I could learn and still remain myself.

That stayed with me.

My father’s life work centered on Black and Brown children, their history, their education, their excellence and their right to be taught as though their potential was unlimited. His work never confused me because I had not grown up believing that advocating for one group of people meant having to diminish another. My sisters did not become less Liberian because somebody taught them how to make lumpia. Bryan did not have to become less White for us to spend afternoons in my kitchen eating fried bologna. I did not become less myself because I took off my shoes when I entered Michael’s house.

There was room.

That is probably why the way people talk about diversity has always fascinated me. The conversation is often framed as though diversity is primarily something being given to Black and Brown people, some opportunity they might not otherwise deserve, while everybody already inside the room is presumed to have received a complete education.

That was never how I understood it.

Lovett gave me extraordinary opportunities. I know that. It exposed me to people, resources and possibilities that changed my life. But I brought something with me too.

I knew what it was like for difference to be ordinary.

Not diversity represented in a brochure. Not sitting across a classroom from somebody different. I knew what it was like to go home with somebody, to know his parents and siblings, to eat whatever his mother cooked, to follow the rules of his house, to argue with him, compete with him, depend on him and discover who he actually was.

There are things you cannot learn about another human being from simply being in the same building. You have to get close enough for difference to stop being exotic.

I think that is why even now, when I have a party, especially the holiday parties I love having, I pay attention to who is in the room. I do not do that because I am trying to satisfy some diversity requirement inside my own house. I do it because a room filled with one kind of person has never felt complete to me. If I want to have a good time, I want a little bit of everybody around.

That still feels like home.

Years after Lovett, Atlanta had become home too, and the Chattahoochee had become part of my life. I had gone down that river many times. I had taken family there. So on that cold October day, being there with Xavier felt familiar even if the kayak and the wetsuits were brand new.

For most of the afternoon it was just the two of us. We talked, laughed and floated. The river moved slowly, and I was feeling pretty good about having turned an unnecessary purchase into a day with my nephew that neither of us would have had otherwise.

Then we came upon two White men.

Before they spoke, their being White was simply one fact about them. They were mostly notable because they were the first other people I remembered seeing on the river that day.

We drifted closer.

One of them looked at us and smiled.

“Do you have a rope?”

I answered without thinking.

“No, sorry.”

We kept moving.

It took only a few seconds before something about his smile made the question come back to me.

Do you have a rope?

I looked back.

A rope.

Two White men.

Me and my eight year old nephew.

Then I understood.

The rage came into me so quickly that it frightened me. I began to rise out of the kayak because sitting down I did not think those men realized how big I was. Suddenly it mattered to me that they see me.

I looked at the man who had spoken and wanted to get into his boat and beat the shit out of him.

I did not want to ask what he meant. I knew what he meant. I was not interested in an apology or in explaining the history of lynching to him. I did not want to educate him.

I wanted to hurt him.

The truth is uglier than that. For several seconds I wanted to kill him. I remember imagining putting my hands on him and tearing his head from his body.

I am not proud of that, but I am not going to make myself more civilized in the telling than I was in the moment. Something had been reached inside me that I did not know was capable of producing that much violence.

Then I became aware of Xavier sitting beside me.

He was eight years old.

The rage was still there, but suddenly consequences began arriving with it. I thought about my mother and father. I thought about Robi and Trish. I thought about Ace and something he had told me many times.

Do not make decisions you cannot take back.

I could see the police. I could see jail. Maybe one of those men had a weapon. Maybe I hurt somebody badly. Maybe I killed somebody. Maybe somebody killed me. I could see my parents getting a telephone call, and I could see Xavier spending the rest of his life

carrying the memory of the day he watched his uncle lose himself on the Chattahoochee.

I stayed in the kayak.

We kept moving until the river bent and the men disappeared behind us.

The rage did not disappear with them.

That is the part I have thought about for years.

I made a good decision that afternoon. I am grateful for that, but I have never wanted to tell myself some easy story in which I was simply the better man and therefore everything turned out the way it should have. I was the better man in what I chose to do, but I did not have to be. I know how close I came to doing something else.

That knowledge has made me think differently about rage, especially the rage that can collect inside Black people who spend years being treated as though other people have a license to diminish them.

Sometimes nobody asks you whether you have a rope. Nobody calls you a name. There may not be a single moment dramatic enough to repeat later as a story. Sometimes you walk into a room and people act as though you are not there. You speak and nobody responds, then somebody else says essentially the same thing and suddenly it matters.

You are underestimated before you have had a chance to demonstrate anything. You are watched in places where somebody else is welcomed. Your competence is treated as something requiring proof while someone else’s is assumed. You can be standing in plain sight and still be treated as though you are invisible.

Ralph Ellison understood something profound when he imagined a man who was invisible not because people literally could not see him, but because they refused to recognize what was standing in front of them.

There is a rage that can grow from living through that.

I understand it.

I have felt it.

And I do not want to join the chorus of people who look only at the final terrible decision somebody makes and begin the story there. We punish people for what they do, and sometimes we have to. If I had jumped into that raft and killed that man, the fact that he had provoked me would not have brought him back. My anger would not have erased what Xavier witnessed. My history would not have made my mother’s telephone ring any less painfully. I would still have made a decision I could not take back.

Understanding rage is not the same as excusing what rage does.

But refusing to understand it is its own kind of dishonesty.

One humiliation may pass. Another might pass too. Then another person dismisses you.

Another person looks through you. Another person decides who you are without knowing you. Somewhere all of that can collect in a place inside a human being that even he may not know is filling up. Then one day somebody who did not create all of that pain touches it.

Maybe he says five words on a river.

Do you have a rope?

And suddenly he receives more rage than he personally put there.

That does not make what happens next right. It means that if we care about what human beings eventually do, we should probably care about what human beings are repeatedly asked to absorb.

I was fortunate that afternoon because when the rage came up in me, it was not the only thing I could reach.

Ace was there in what he had taught me. My mother and father were there in what they had put inside me. Xavier was physically sitting beside me. Westborough was there too, although I would not have understood it that way at the time.

Those men looked at me and decided something about me before they knew anything about me.

For several seconds, I did the same thing to them.

They became two White men in a boat, and I wanted to destroy them.

That frightened me because I had been raised differently. Bryan had been Bryan before he was White. Michael had been Michael before he was Chinese. Reggie had been Reggie before he was Filipino. I knew difference. I NEEDED difference. What I had not learned was to make difference the entire person.

The world has taught me a great deal since then. I know more about race, history, class, power and inequality than the boy in Westborough ever knew. I know that personal relationships do not erase injustice and that systems do not disappear because two people manage to like one another. I know there are things worth being angry about and things we should never learn to tolerate.

I do not want innocence if innocence requires me not to see those things.

What I want is something harder. I want to see them clearly without allowing everything I have seen to determine everything I am capable of seeing.

For years I thought the most important thing that happened on the Chattahoochee was that I controlled myself. I do not think that anymore. The most important thing may be that in the middle of that rage I still had access to something beyond the rage.

Xavier was sitting beside me, and whatever I did next was going to become part of his life as surely as it became part of mine. I could not control what those men saw when they looked at us. I could not control what they believed they had permission to say. I could not undo the history that made five words about a rope mean what they meant.

But I could decide whether their failure to see me was going to become my failure to see myself.

I could decide whether the ugliest thing they awakened in me would get to make the next decision.

I do not remember much about the rest of our trip down the river. I do not remember what Xavier and I talked about after that or how long it took us to reach the place where we got out. I do not know the names of those men, and I would not recognize them today if they walked into the room. They may not remember us at all.

I remember them.

I remember because they showed me that there are moments when everything you know about yourself can be tested before you have time to prepare an answer.

Sometimes the difference between the life you have and the life you could have had is only a few seconds. Sometimes you have every reason in the world to be furious, and the reason does not make the consequence disappear.

I stayed in the kayak, not because I was above rage, but because I was full of it and something deeper still reached me.

Maybe that is what I have been trying to understand all these years. The heart does not ask us to deny what happened, pretend we were not wounded, excuse the people who wounded us or become blind to injustice. It asks something more difficult. It asks us to know exactly what happened, to feel what it did to us, and still refuse to hand another

person the power to decide what kind of human being we will become.

I guess that is the wisdom of the heart.