Cultural Humiliation (a Kids from Bayview microstory)

The first of many stories set in Bayview Hunters Point, as Jeremiah (and other Black and Brown young people) discover the supernatural embedded into everyday society, focused in on Bayview...

In the summer of 1995, I was 10 when Mama moved my older brother Isaiah and I across the country from Bow, New Hampshire to the southeast end of San Francisco. My earliest memory I could recall was of Isaiah in the car, rattling on about the injustice of leaving his life behind. Memories of Bow itself were lost in a thick hazy confusion, which meant his stories were all I could recall: we lived in the woods, on top of a hill, away from the white people, except for the police that often followed Mama, or Isaiah’s friends he talked about but never came over. “We need move,” Mama kept sayin on the drive. “Black people are literally less than one-percent of the population back there!”

That haze fully cleared when Mama’s noisy truck rolled up to our new house, wedged between two identical buildings, along the incline of Lane Street. The gawkers and onlookers watched and welcomed us from their balconies, smoke and judgment rising from their lips. Settling into the house was easy, but this neighborhood was unlike anything in New Hampshire. Little black boys and girls ran joyfully up in down the block, playing games like tag or tug-of-war, or water fights with their NERF guns and a light to their life I yearned to have. After near a week of watching from window by the door, neighbor kids spotted me and Mama pushed me out to join them in countless games. The rush and energy and life that I felt was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in New Hampshire.

So why then did Mama dropped me off in the preppiest of private schools that fall? These kids had parents on were movie stars, major corporation owners, or whose brothers, parents, and grandparents had all gone there. My classmates called me Black Jay (and yet, I’m Jeremiah), they would boing! my fro, or make fun of my clothes, even though they weren’t raggedy. “You need the right kind of education,” Mama consistently insisted. Though she loved the Bayview community, she declared that suitable education would not escape me. She told me to perk up, but she didn’t know the hazy confusion from Bow crept into my life at school, draining a little more each and every day.

“It’s a whitey spell—the haze.” It was the next summer, and our downstairs neighbor Janice (who would make us dinner on nights Mama worked late) was my camp counselor at a sleepaway camp with some nonsense name. “It’s a power they don’t even know they’re castin,” Janice explained, which meant when I return to my family at the end of the day or hung out in our neighborhood or was in with my cabin group of Black and Brown kids, I felt rejuvenated. The whiteys’ hate wasn’t saturating our own spaces. Janice supplied all the kids in the cabin with rose quartz necklaces for protection, and if an escape was ever needed, she gave of books by Black authors that was whisk us away.

On our fifth night of camp, I heard chanting and warbling coming from the fire pit, with shadows dancing around it. I crept outside, and saw Janice consoling the other counselor Tommy, who was violently shivering in the middle of the sweltering heat. That’s when I saw it was the White counselors dancing and hollering, wearing unusual garbs with feather headdresses—like kind Tommy had shown us his family wore for their personal ceremonies. Janice was whispering a pray again and again, with another crystal in hand that shimmered a purpleish glow. As her whispers escalated, I slowly repeated what I heard: “Fi ara rẹ han.”

There was no sixth night at camp—the counselors’ fire that night spark out of control, nearly destroying the camp. Janice, Tommy (who had made a complete recovery), and the other counselors got us all home safely. When Janice made us dinner that night, she asked me what I had seen. I mentioned the dancers, their costumes, and Tommy, who I realized looked like how I felt entrenched in the haze of white New Hampshire. When I asked what happened, and Janice asked back, “Ever heard of cultural appropriation?”

In 2003, Mama sent me to Hawthorn Harbor University (or HHU) for my Freshmen year. Before I left, Janice gave me a collection her favorite crystals. “It’s a liberal arts school—you’ll need these.” The whiteness of the students there was similar to my elementary upbringing, but at the university I kept hearing from white students that HHU had a commitment to inclusion, prioritized diversity initiatives, and were willing to have courageous conversations on race. And yet, the haze of racism was as pungent as ever before, with the few other Black and Brown students dragging themselves through this daze.

The third night there when I woke up shaking uncontrollably. In da Club was blaring on the floor above. Peeking out, into the hallway, I saw other Black students shivering as Tommy once had. When I got upstairs, I saw all the white students with red and blue bandanas on, gold foil on their teeth, big gawdy chains, and bronzer across their face. Though the haze swiftly thickened, I found the crystal that glowed with a purple hue that Janice once used in my room and repeated whispered, “Fi ara rẹ han.”

All the students in Thug Life costumes were hospitalized with symptoms presenting as smallpox. “When they steal our culture, their spell drains us,” Janice had explained, “to reclaim our energy, we ask this calls forth a true aspect of their own culture to reveal itself.” And as soon as their costumes were removed, so would the spell.

That next day, walking through campus, I stopped in front of a building, baring a moment of clarity, just like when Mama got us to Bayview. And inside was where I found the school’s Multiculturalism Center, where several of my dormmates were meeting, and the haze continued to lessen.