Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Here’s a perplexing childhood memory: one day, my baseball coach in the 10- to 12-year-old division told me and my friends that a local TV news crew was coming to film a special game against a team from across town. A human interest story about the Police Athletic League’s community involvement and racial harmony. He said to make sure our parents washed and pressed our baseball suits and to play our best, to represent our neighborhood, which implied our race.

My friend Gerald played catcher, and I pitched. We were an all-black team, and they were an all-white team. I threw for eight innings and gave up two runs before Coach substituted in Mitch, whom we nicknamed Stanky Lanky. He was tall and when he pitched, he contorted his body like he was dancing. It was entertainment for us and distraction for the other team and led to three batters striking out in succession. The cameras caught it all: the cheering, the sliding into bases, the ground balls, and all the swing batter batter batter.

We won by one point. We celebrated on the mound, then lined up and gave high-fives to the other team. Some even smiled and congratulated us.

In the stands, our parents were different and separate in all the ways you can imagine. Different cars. Different clothes. But they were the same in their wish for their kids to have a victory to celebrate on the drive home. I remember the looks of dejection and animosity on some of their parents’ faces, the slow walk to the parking lot.

That night, I was allowed to stay up late to watch the evening news. After stories about bank robberies, mobster hits, and the weather, finally, just as I was dozing off, the anchors began narrating the story about a kids’ baseball game. I sat rapt for the short—maybe two-minute—feature.

The perplexing part? We were cut out altogether, rendered invisible. The other team’s coach was interviewed. An action shot showed one of their runners crossing home plate and his teammates patting him on the back. That was it. Our joy, our play were literally erased. The newscaster didn’t even announce the score.

Today’s poem underscores the implied racial and class dynamics at the center of American life. How we are defined and claimed and rendered opponents; how the ongoing battles and struggles construct an “Us vs Them.” Even when it means abandoning an authentic selfhood separate from, yet a part of, the groups we get put into.

Context is all
by Erica Hunt

This me, not that me, that them, no, the other them, that we, or this
we, all we, both of them, and all of we, when there, not here, but me
then, before then, and before we, when we, how we, when we spoke
then, never spoke back to them, then. Silent we, resilient we, existed,
as an existential us, observing with restraint and bemusement
(terror), a noisy them, childish them, and if we over-spoke, we
spoke using our bodies to them, head tilted or hand back at them, or
facing them with all our backs, never breaking face, so masked to all
senses of them, all tenses of we, over-prepared.
We had better. We had better be better than them. We had better be
better beginning and end, early and fitful. We had better be better
beginning and in the middle, too. Be better between life and death,
better in the visible and sure better than them in the places they
overlooked, than them and their soundtrack. We had better be better
than them who draft and re-draft them-selves, “what destroyed me,
created them,” or so we thought mistaking the well off for well-
being, enough to be them, so some of us thought and thought better
of. We had better be better being draft selves than them even if it 
meant drowning in virtuous poison.

“Context is all” by Erica Hunt from JUMP THE CLOCK © 2020 Erica Hunt. Used by permission of Nightboat Books.