February 2002 Issue - Essay # 14
Soul
Brother Number One
By L. David
Ryals
| I have been black all the days of my life. It's less about skin color and more about a mindset and a way of life. It's about fried chicken, collard greens and slab bacon, chitlins, black-eyed peas, and rice. It's about the sounds of the inner city: Marvin Gaye's Inner City Blues, The Supremes and The Jackson 5. It's about the Four train and the D train and Harlem. It's about how newly laid black tar seduces your nose and how you find thousands of meaningful ways of writing your name in drying cement. It's about stick ball and crate basketball. Blackness is about listening to your parents as they tell you not to give the police any trouble if they stop you; about holding your tongue as they rifle through your pockets or shine a flashlight in your eyes. Blackness is about Kool Aid and Carolina rice with butter or sugar sandwiches, Red Devil hot sauce, and buying that Dream Book for your grandmother. It's about watching the men on the corner play dice and drink Thunderbird; or buying Colt-45 like Billy Dee Williams said and wondering why no women showed up like they did in the commercial. Blackness is about the pyramids of Egypt and the Stock Exchange of Wall Street; about education, articulation, denigration and oftentimes, emasculation. It's about coming to a country as a slave and literally, building it into a world power. The soul, the essences of blackness is about double dutch and hopscotch, George Washington Carver and Langston Hughes, DuBois and Booker T. Washington, about Ralph Ellison and living as an "Invisible Man." It's about "friendship being essential to the soul" and solitude being equally as vital. It's about climbing trees and the laughter of children and trying to understand the language of that laughter. There are no boundaries to this blackness. You can be as pale as the passing clouds and still embrace it. If you can understand these images on any level, then you're as black as I am.
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Author's Biography L. David Ryals is a New York writer, poet, and teacher--and Seven Seas' voluntary essay reviewer. He holds a BA in Writing and Literature and an MFA in English and Writing from Long Island University. He currently teaches high school English in New York City. E-mail David at ldavidryals@yahoo.com
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