John Lennon Coudn’t Imagine This
The day I drove away from George Floyd
Illustration by the author
©2020
You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
-Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Virus
My eleven year old son tumbles into the Subaru, slams the door, and blurts out,
“You know what drives my enemies crazy?” His white face is pink from playing.
I don’t answer him.
Also, we’re not in that car right now. I’m just remembering it. Right now, I’m three months into the pandemic, in my hot kitchen, in this isolated, social experiment swirling in a stew of virtual, homeschooling backwater. Right now, I’m slamming his laptop closed. He lunges.
I’m shouting,
“Homeschooling ends today! Screen time ends too. You can’t even play Minecraft on Skype. It’s making you crazy! And I can’t stand watching you just scroll through Google Classroom, clicking! scrolling! spiraling down!…”
I’m spiraling down.
I am under his spell, trapped in our pettiness—what is fair or not fair—like all of our ancestors before us.
I am under his spell, trapped in our pettiness—what is fair or not fair—like all of our ancestors before us.
He follows me to the refrigerator and asks, “What are we talking here? How long are you taking away screens? What do I get out of this?” I bang down the sunbutter hard on the counter.
“You get to be done with school a week early! You hate it anyway! And in exchange, I get to stop watching you count kills and chew the neckline off your T-shirt!”
“ALEXA! Play Billie Eilish.” He says, and walks to the living room couch.
I walk to the living room through a different door to find my daughter, six, cuddled onto the big chair with Bunny Bun Bun, dictating her assignment into my iPad.
“...amphibians breathe through their skin in the water, and through their nose on land, amphibian means having two modes of existence...explanation mark!”
“Great timing,” I think to myself. Explanation mark.
"We’re ending school a week early.”
“But?” Her voice cracks.
“Could I do just one more activity?”
My god.
“Of course, my love. Then we’re going on a picnic to the white sands beach.”
I touch her cheek. I barely ever touch my son’s cheek.
He longs for it, but he cannot tolerate it. He even used to squirm away as a toddler when I tried to hold him too long, even bit my arm till it bled once, just so he could be put back down.
“Boys,” they would say. Everyone tried to normalize it. I wasn’t like this as a kid, though. I can remember myself at four, singing Sunshine on my Shoulders, watching the rain slow to a stop, watching the clouds part outside my window.
I wonder if I’m the wrong father for him.
“ALEXA, CANCEL!” He yells at her. A feminist dies somewhere.
He approaches the kitchen island. He has decided to accept a week off of screen time,
“Under one condition! Unlimited screen time on our drive up north in two days.”
Whatever.
Screen time might be a reroute from the pandemic, but I think the coordinates lead to hell.
Screen time might be a reroute from the pandemic, but I think the coordinates lead to hell.
We put on our scooter helmets and mount our 50cc baby blue, scooter. My son flings his leg over it like a sand bag and hugs my back, his soft belly. My daughter slips gingerly onto the front. Her helmet the width of her shoulders. Badass.
Two days ago, I ostensibly paid an officer by way of my taxes to kneel on George Floyd’s neck.
Chauvin reported to the precinct three blocks away from my home—a white cop so sure he had the law behind him, his unflinching face is the most terrifying part of a video I hope I will never watch to the end. But I read the transcript.
It reads like a script.
*******
I drive the scooter to the river, I don’t know this happened yet. I haven’t checked the news in a week.
Instead, my kids and I head in the opposite direction to the white sands beach.
I stretch open my jaw as if I’m trying to release all the words I don’t have words for.
I stretch open my jaw as if I’m trying to release all the words I don’t have words for.
Nice
Minnesotans are teased for being Minnesota Nice—scared of conflict. No. Scared of truth.
Born in suburban Wisconsin in the seventies, I would run around the playground looking for fights, but only to break them up. I’m built for Minnesota nice, but long for truth.
For example.
Minnesota cops in North Minneapolis used to call their billy clubs “n****r knockers.” In July of 1967 cops assaulted a mostly black marching band, and the pent up rage against racist cops and housing policies lit Plymouth Avenue on fire.
For example.
The year before, The Way was a black community organization founded in 1966 to address the concerns that led to these protests in 1967. But it immediately became the subject of a grand jury investigation despite the organization having no ties to the violence. By making The Way the subject of investigation, it implied the connection to violence anyway. Today that building is the Fourth precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department. The Way didn’t move. The Way is gone.
Learning the true racism of my ancestors is like a blood transfusion. I want new blood. It hurts, but I want to live.
For example.
Two weeks ago, a black man in a black face mask came to my front door offering to cut my lawn. He stood down the steps an easy six feet away. He said,
“My son and I—sorry, hang on, he just went around the corner to our car for a second—” He looked around the corner. He said, “—anyway, you know kids. They’re never where you think they’ll be. Am I right?” He saw my son who had come to the door with me. We laughed politely, and he asked me to name my price, I agreed to $25. My wife popped up and asked him a bit about his son. He obliged her cheerfully. She went back inside appeased.
As the man mowed, I pushed my son on our tree swing that hangs from our massive elm tree, and said to him,
“A black man with a good working son is a nice story, you know?”
“Um. What?” He says as he swings toward me. He swings away. He swings back. I say,
“America is a white stage…” He swings away. He swings back,
“…and there is always a black audition…” away and back. “…This man was already cast as a lesser man…the day he was born…But if we think he's teaching his son how to work…wearing a mask…You know…He gets the part.”
“Who are we?”
“We’re doing the casting.”
The man finished the lawn. By the time he packed up and left, it was clear his son was nowhere.
“He didn't have a son, did he? He scammed you?!” My son says.
“I mean, I don’t know who scammed who. It’s all a stage. It’s racism. He got the part of a good, black dad who mows lawns, and the lawn looks great.”
“So what do we do?”
“We gotta stop selling tickets.”
“You mean, you gotta mow your own lawn.” My son laughs at me.
“No, you gotta mow it!” I laugh, and he smiles and rolls his eyes.
*******
My kids and I drive the scooter through the neighborhood past CarX whose client cars will all be stolen before midnight when rioters break in and steal the keys. My kids always joke about how they actually own CarX.
How they’re so rich.
When I look out my window tonight at that same hour, the street will be alive with mostly people of color in a mostly white neighborhood. I will hear an explosion.
We scoot past Walgreens which will be burned to the ground two days later. The kids will be heartbroken about the loss of their source of Nerd candy ropes.
We drive all the way down Lake Street which will be boarded up entirely the day after that, covered in rainbows of artwork on chip board, memorializing George Floyd, protecting windows from bricks. In one week, my son and I will bike to the corner of 38th and Chicago with flowers we picked from our garden. The memorial will be part celebration, part protest. People of color will feed us free food. Someone sprays water on the flowers, perhaps to keep them beautiful, perhaps so no one lights it all on fire.
*******
For example.
Last summer, I stood by my white son as he painted our white privacy fence as a black man walked by. After a beat, I said,
“I’m paying him, I promise.” He laughed and turned back, spread open his arms in a shrug, and smiled. He said,
“He’s gotta learn it somewhere!” I laughed and said,
“I mean he’s not a slave!”
Imagine
Ta-Nehisi Coates tells his son the story about a white journalist who asked him “…what it meant to lose [his] body.” This is the opening of Coates book, Between the World and Me.
“It was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream.”
He couldn’t explain the experience of being born into a black body to a journalist born into a white one.
Nice is the gorgeous, white dream.
Nice is a nightmare where the porcelain doll comes to life.
Nice is the gorgeous, white dream.
Nice is a nightmare where the porcelain doll comes to life.
As a child, I had a recurring dream of my mother pulling our station wagon up a smooth, asphalt driveway to a sunny, glass house filled with gorgeous spider plants. My white church choir director comes out of the house smiling to greet my mother, but then headlocks my mother and pulls her head off bloodlessly, like the head off a doll.
Nice means I stay in the car, unable to save my own mother. This means the end of my bloodline. I am from no one.
*******
Claudia Rankine writes,
Because white men can’t
police their imagination
black people are dying.
Now John Lennon's, Imagine, is the uncontested, redemptive theme song of the pandemic. If you watch the music video, you will see it begin behind John and Yoko in silhouette, strolling, crunching along a gravel road cradled between rows of well tended, dark topiary. The music kicks in as the frame widens and the topiary ends. Light from the sky reveals the couple walking arm in arm as they approach a colossal, white, colonial estate where they enter past knee-high, white, marble busts of men. Lennon joins the band on a massive, white, grand piano in an almost empty white room carpeted in plush, white carpet. Yoko spends the majority of the song opening white shutters to let in the white light.
John Lennon ends the song with Yoko sitting in a gauzy, white gown beside him. Wordlessly, they pause and look at each other. Then they burst out laughing at an inside joke.
*******
We are indebted to John Lennon and Yoko Ono for their genius, their compassion, and the precedent they set for how to personify these ideas in celebrity art and relationship. It is impossible to imagine they had any intention of using the symbol of whiteness to imply white supremacy. But I’ve been taught for too much of my life to defend old symbols, even when they’re created by heroes of mine as great as John and Yoko.
It is useful to see how deeply white bias digs.
Martin Luther King Junior imagined, “…my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But imagine if I were to sit inside the room where John Lennon once sang Imagine, and an all-white jury were to judge me and MLK’s anonymous children for the content of our characters.
White people cannot judge black people by the content of their character alone, if the color white people imagine when they imagine peace, is white.
White people cannot judge black people by the content of their character alone, if the color white people imagine when they imagine peace, is white.
Privilege is to never have to come face to face with the content of my character. Or. Privilege is to never have to trust my character enough to rely on it alone.
Not knowing or trusting my character is the root of my shame—Baldwin’s white guilt, Diangelo's white fragility—that leads me to get defensive if I’m called a racist.
But this shame is not toxic, it is corrective. It is calling out a flaw in our society, not in my personal nature. It is wrong to live in this skin because my skin has been wrongly named.
This shame gets worse for two reasons only.
I do nothing.
I think I can do everything.
Shame gets worse if all I try to be is nice.
*******
My son holds me from behind on the scooter, and I hold my daughter in front of me. The wind is in our faces as we drive to the white sands beach.
If I knew where to take them, I would take them there instead.
Rewards
We park the scooter, descend the limestone stairs, avoid the railing. We hike through the woods, through mud and sticks until we see the clearing to the beach.
We walk into the sun. My son and daughter are overjoyed that they see no one, that the beach is theirs alone.
I explain that the helicopter flying over the river is a traffic helicopter, but I wonder.
We suck down our lunch happily on the sand, in the shade. We wipe the tzatziki and sunbutter off our faces and little by little, we begin to build a sand castle. This is all I wanted after months of failed homeschooling. Just to build a sand castle with our actual hands, where we can smell the stink of the forest, feel the oil of our skin in the heat as the breeze pops open our pores.
I think, "Fuck Minecraft.”
Fuck video game designers for rewarding my children too fast, too often, and too much for doing too little; for teaching my kids to resent me for trying to thwart their entitlement.
Fuck video game designers for rewarding my children too fast, too often, and too much for doing too little; for teaching my kids to resent me for trying to thwart their entitlement.
Under the thwacking blades of the chopper, I try to slow everything down a bit. I try to curate time so it produces only the sound of our hands crunching sand, the cool of it under foot, the scrape of our bucket scooping under the dry, white fluff to the packed stuff from last night’s storm. We play to the rhythm of the chopper.
Fuck Jefferson.
Fuck the white founders of this country for trying to reward me too fast, too often, and too much for doing too little, for locking privilege to my skin and my body so I can never know love that is not potentially resented by people of color. That they can never receive mine without a layer of caution. That I cannot even offer it without a layer of self doubt.
I write with my fingers in the dark, feeling for letters and keys that will peel open my eyelids from the dream, police my imagination, and crack open my heart to act. Coates tells his son,
“The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again.”
I want to be something else again. And then, I want to know what I was. And then, maybe I can be who I am.
Cast
I pack a bucket full of sand and flip it over, I repeat this four times, casting the corners of a square with these packed turrets. In my mind the corners do not define the edges of a castle, but the four corners of a walled city with a palace in the center.
My son stands on his knees, only one minute into our construction,
“This is stupid! We suck!” His tragic refrain when working with his hands, and indeed, the packed turrets begin to crumble. I scramble to replace them, under his siege. My daughter knows the drill,
“It’s okay, we’ll make it work, Eli.” That way she patiently holds the long vowels of his name.
I want to be something else again. And then, I want to know what I was. And then, maybe I can be who I am.
I render a few small, detailed houses in one corner of the city with tiny windows. I scrape sideways with the flat of the plastic shovel to make the roofs slant down.
My son sits back on his heels, scowling. In my world, this is a sign of progress. The castle will hold.
My daughter pinches sand into the corners, her fingers are confident. She knows the language of her brother’s body already. His fit of rage has passed. I stamp a checkered pattern into the tiny roofs with sticks to fake shingles. I even border the huts with tiny staircases, narrow alleys, and cobblestone streets.
Now my son does an emotional reversal and takes credit for the whole castle. He has learned the arrogance of appropriation already. A dam breaks in my gut, releasing a river of nausea, as I recognize the same arrogance I once adopted to puff up against the critique of my childhood music directors.
*******
At fourteen, I became the youngest singer and dancer in the esteemed Kids from Wisconsin. Along with the typical Broadway revue, thirty high school kids—two of them black—sang Neil Diamond’s Proud to be an American over one hundred times in ninety days selling one dollar buttons during intermission that said, “Kids a family of [heart].”
After ten grueling days of rehearsal before the kick off of the tour, a senior dancer took me aside, took a deep breath, and looked at me with her mascara eyes. She said,
“I’m only telling you this because I care about you, but the others think you act way too cocky for how good you are.” They made me the summer water-boy. I had to pack a ten gallon McDonalds thermos dispenser with water and ice for every bus ride and showtime or get fined one-hundred dollars—my stipend for the week. I hated this family of [heart], but even so, they were all better singers and dancers. I basically got cast for a big smile, a voice that could hit the high notes, and a certain brand of Sunshine on my Shoulders white boy that Wisconsin loves.
The real truth is that the two black singer-dancers stole the show. The other twenty-eight of us were just selling buttons and taking equal credit. The other white kids were pissed I might blow their cover by being too obvious about it.
*******
My kids and I will not be looting Target tonight three blocks from our house. I hate the place, and my kids act as if we already own it.
My kids and I will not be looting Target tonight three blocks from our house. I hate the place, and my kids act as if we already own it.
We will smell the Auto Zone on fire. We will turn up the white-noise machine my wife uses during the day to keep us from overhearing the therapy sessions she offers during the pandemic from my son’s bedroom. That machine tonight will strain to keep our children dreaming.
*******
By making the houses around it tiny, I made the sand castle seem bigger, and my kids rejoice. I am making their dreams more beautiful still.
“Castles made of sand melt into the sea…” I say, “…eventually.” They miss the reference.
I change the topic, try to keep it nice.
"Try to find some small plants in the forest to make palm trees!” They cheer, start running to the woods, and a dog bounds off-leash toward them.
I Inhale through my teeth.
The dog rushes to their feet, the kids run back to the castle away from her. She beats them there and drops her frisbee at my feet. She wants us to pick it up. She wants us to throw it. A middle-aged, red-haired owner, wearing a fanny pack with little, blue, dog-poop bags, scolds the dog.
Then she shades her eyes to look up at the helicopter.
“What is this helicopter all about?”
“I was thinking it might be a news helicopter,” I say. She sighs, frowns, and says to my children,
“That’s usually never a good sign when the helicopters fly over the river like that.”
“Yeah,” I say, “Maybe something happened, like maybe someone has drowned?” My daughter looks up from her miniature palm tree, she walks over next to me and looks up.
“Someone drowned?” She slips her hand into mine. She says,
“Amphibians breathe through their skin in the water, you know. They have two modes of existence.”
I squeeze her hand. The dog barks so loudly my knees buckle, so I turn and in a firm voice, I say,
"We can’t play with your frisbee, silly dog.” The owner throws the frisbee so the dog runs off. Within moments, the dog runs back and leaves the frisbee at my feet. The dog wants us to notice. We want to build our city and keep our distance.
To get away from the dog, the kids head to the river. They take off their shirts, wade knee deep into the brown water. My son demonstrates a game.
“Just grab wads of wet sand like this, and then you pretend you’re being shot.” He slams the wads against his pale chest and collapses backward into the river. A soda cup floats by. My daughter immediately joins him. They do this over and over. I take some pictures, but can’t quite capture the fall. They just look like pale, wet kids covered in dark sand.
I think about the quiet we had only moments before.
The chopper is overhead. My children scream and fall.
Then the dog runs at me full gait. I don’t see the frisbee this time. In its mouth, I only see teeth. It is smiling or it is growling. The owner is chasing after it. I can’t hear what she is saying. I inhale. I root myself to the ground. I look to my children, out of reach, knee deep in the Mississippi. They are so pale, they’re almost blue, clutching their arms shivering, stopping to see what I will do. Time slows down as if a dream.
I remember what my son said to me that day when he tumbled into the backseat after hours of playground time and says,
“…It drives my enemies crazy when I act as if nothing bothers me. There’s just nothing they can do.”
The sand is not white. It was never white. The chopper dips low over the Lake Street bridge. I am shaking. The wind is at my face. The dog is charging.
I have two modes of existence.
I do nothing.
I think I can do everything.
Myself and this woman, we are the enemy.
We trained this dog to charge.
I should be able to stop the dog at anytime.
The children are watching to see what we will do.
We do nothing.
Tonight, the sky will light on fire.
References:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York, NY: One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2015).
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: an American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014).
Nancy Rosenbaum and Thomasina Petrus, “'A Fiery Unrest: Why Plymouth Avenue Burned',” MPR News (MPR News, July 22, 2019), https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/07/19/documentary-a-fiery-unrest.
Rolland Robinson, For a Moment We Had The Way: the Story of The Way, 1966-1970: a Nearly Forgotten History of a Community Organization That Almost Turned Minneapolis Upside Down (Andover, MN: Expert Pub., 2006). Amazon LIsting
John Lennon, “Imagine - John Lennon & The Plastic Ono Band (w ... - YouTube,” Imagine: John Lennon & The Plastic Ono Band, with the Flux Fiddlers, official music video HD long , December 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkgkThdzX-8.
