Prince Shakur - When They Tell You to Be Good

Athens, Ohio, United States, 2014

I was nineteen years old and traveling cross-country when my mother told me that Id die soon, like a man lunging out of a car and away from attackers. I stood in the antique shop in Montana, frozen by the cracking sound in my chest. It was the second time in five years that my mother brandished my fathers murder, like a long and rusted machete. Is a mothers heartbreak worse than the heartbreak she gives her son?

Her words on that phone call rose a dark omen that said, Your exodus means you are doomed. The great duppy will come for you, will chew you up like it got him. I spent weeks of that summer refusing my mothers calls. I only called my mother when my best friend from high school, Nadia, let me know more news about her mother, Crystal.

Nadia and I met when I considered myself a bookish, too-shy freshman, which was a world away from the college student drinking malt liquor at house shows that Id become. We sat next to each other during our second year of high school, laughing on the phone after class as we watched yaoi anime on our laptops. Shortly after I came out at fifteen, my sobbing mother called Crystal for advice on how to grapple with having a gay son. It was Nadia and her familys acceptance of me that made living through the hell of my mothers homophobic reaction more bearable. At Nadias house, I could talk about crushes on boys, while at my own home I wouldnt dare.

Weeks after coming out, Nadia accompanied my mother to help me move into a two-week summer workshop for teen writers. I lost my dorm key before they left. My mother and Nadia helped me search. My mothers nose burned brighter shades of red as we searched for my key for an hour. Her eyes flickered across all the white faces. Her embarrassment reached a fever pitch when she screamed at me in a bookstore as I searched. Heads around us turned in surprise.

Nadia eyed me and understood the double meaning in my mothers outburst. She stepped forward, touched my mothers arm, and whispered, Ms. Shakur, were calm. Were not freaking out. Its okay.

Nadia and her family bearing witness to my familial turmoil, even if it was from the periphery, calmed some of my feelings of abandonment. Through our senior year, I helped Nadia cope with her parents divorce. We debated our college prospects after class, went to prom, and finalized our dorm packing lists together. While I skimmed by in classes and started to party, Nadia transferred universities and started to online date. Our collegiate phone calls became a needed check-in as we grappled with adulthood and how it changed the way we related to our parents.

I learned during the spring semester of my junior year that Crystal was battling stage 4 lung cancer. The mobile and cantankerous woman became bedridden and unable to eat many foods. My mother, a hairstylist who had cancer patients before, helped Crystal look for wigs, connected her with a local resource center for cancer patients, and even invited a priest to her bedside.

My mother, a very introverted woman, savored her role as Crystals caregiving friend. However proud I could be of my mothers tenderness from afar as I attended classes, it all perplexed methe many promises my mother made to Crystal to look out for her daughter, the piousness in my mothers voice whenever she brought up how God brought her to Crystal, and how all the pain solidified her belief in a forgiving God who could offer spiritual relief to people in their last days. A God that had been weaponized against me.

During my fall semester of my junior year, which was before I learned of Crystals cancer, my mother called and demanded to know how many people Id come out to. She eventually revealed that my cousin, Anthony, was spreading the news of my sexuality. When my mother told me that she confronted him, it hurt the most to know that shed said to him, You cant be saying these bad things about my son.

Her version of defending me bothered me so much that I called her after a week of avoiding her and sank to the basement floor of my college house in defeat. I asked if she would ever be willing to understand my sexuality. My mother replied, Its not in me. Thats something Ill never want to understand. It hurts my heart, makes it hard to sleep at night. You understand?

If even death couldnt sway my mother to love me more clearly, then what could shift the scales? What could bring us closer together as death, the only certain thing in life, inched closer and closer?

A year later during my fall semester as a senior, Nadia sent me a text while I was in a meetingMy mother died an hour ago. Reading the words that Crystal had died hollowed out an unexpected place in me. I stumbled into the hallway, tried to decide what to text her back, and called my mother.

What do I do? Should I buy a bus ticket home right now? Does she need my help?

My mother thought for a moment, Wait until the funeral is announced. Give her a little time to tell you what to do.

I hung up the phone, reached for my swelling throat, and started to cry. The kind of crying that tore through a stomach, sprinkled jagged glass there, and stitched it back together again. I couldnt get enough of the water out of my chest, so the coughing and near gagging began. At twenty years old, I was just starting my life and now death was framing it, moving in closer and closer.

In August 2014, a month before Crystal died in her hospital bed, a Black teenager was walking home with his friend. They stopped at a gas station and the tall Black teenager bought a few things from the store. As he and his friend jaywalked, a cop arrived and allegedly ordered them to leave the street. Michael Brown was shot six times. Hours later, his body lay still in the street and the nearby crowds grew larger. His murder and display was a harkening to Nina Simones Strange Fruit, a song that Nina Simone said was unappealing, in a certain sense, and whose namesake became the title of a 2017 documentary on Browns effective lynching. Black people, once again, had to choose how to deal with Americas torture and how to reclaim our dead.

The funeral home was small and not far from where my mother lived. We walked through the maze of cars in the parking lot to the open front door. My mother spent most of the morning and the night before on the phone, talking about Crystals decline to friends. I wanted to be supportive to her and listen, but it irked me when she said things like, I think God really wanted me to help. I learned a lot about myself through helping her.

My mother believed that God or the devil placed horrible things in your path to test your faith, which to me meant that Crystals sickness served some high power. Good people suffer to bring empathy to the world. This belief seemed like an easy way out of my mother being vulnerable enough to acknowledge the terror of Crystals demise to me. I wanted to scream that pain did not equal faith. Even in my anger, I buried my words because everything about the world was moving too fast. Knots collected in my stomach as I hugged Nadias brother and father. A few minutes before the service started, my mother leaned toward me.

Did I ever tell you about one of the last times I saw her?

Um... I sighed. No.

I visited her in the hospital. She started coughing and coughing. Then she started coughing up blood with things in it.

I tried to look ahead and not respond to my mother. A thousand things raced through my head: whether to tell her to shut up, whether to slap her across the face, or how to blink away the heat rushing to my eyes. I wanted the version of my mother that helped my brother make the miniature volcano for a science fair on the kitchen floor, who bought me McDonalds after nosebleeds in elementary school, and who stood between the world and my brother and me when I was twelve. Now my mother stared at me and kissed her teeth.