Survivor Files

WE ARE SURVIVORS: we the descendants of the Africans who endured the wretched march to the west coast of their continent, brutal confinement, and cruel transatlantic passage, to reach alive—somehow alive—the shores of a new world. Among the future generations of those captured humans are the men featured here, all of whom are my kin, each of whom I photographed and asked the same question: What's the toughest thing you've survived? In an effort to encourage readers to imagine themselves as the protagonist of each story, I wrote their responses as second-person narratives. The narratives of my family members are one with the story of black Americans. We are all-American, which is to say, our stories of survival are inseparable from the ever-fraught history of America. After all, what's a national history but personal histories writ large?

File 1

You're a junior high superjock who believes the rules at most half apply to you, and therefore swank into the locker room insouciant as shit about your lateness. Dressing down, you hear the coach holler your last name. "You're late," he says. "You're running a jaunt." You scope the room, eye teammates in various stages of undressing, and decline the honor. "You're running the jaunt or you won't be on this team," the coach says. "Fuck that," you say. "I ain't runnin'." You snatch off your pads, slam yourself back into your clothes, boom your locker shut, and stomp outside and into the stands, where you try to console yourself with the prospect that, though a reprimand is damn near assured, the coach is certain to let you back on the team. Practice ends and you bop out of the bleachers to the edge of the field, where you dap your boys as they slog off. In the midst of this, the coach marches over to you. "I told you you're off the team. Get your shit and go!" he says, blitzing your pride. "Fuck you!" you say. The coach yells, "Fuck you! You ain't gonna be shit, just like your brother." And why oh why oh why in all the world did he say that? You call him a "Faggot!" A "Punk muthafucka!" You say, "Don't say shit about my brother!" and berserk for him, but one of your boys catches a handful of your shirt. "Chill, bro, chill. It ain't worth it. Just leave," he says. "Yeah. Get the hell outta here!" the coach taunts, and turns what was a blitz into a siege. "Fuck you! Fuck you! My brother just got out, and me and him gon' come up here and fuck you up!" you say. "On everything I love, we gon' come back up here and fuck your punkass up!" Your boys urge you off the field and around to the front of the school, where you wait with your adolescent heart doing high-knee kicks. One of the first boys out of the school is a kid who ain't a friend but who also ain't heretofore been an enemy. "Why you quit? That was some bitch shit," the kid says, and summons the whisper of your father's gospel: Son, you wanna solve a problem quick, sock a motherfucka in his jaw. You smash your chest to the kid's chest. "Bitch. Who you callin' a bitch?" you say. "You's a bitch. We can scrap right here, right now." The coach's daughter sends you a look from her ambit of friends and you grant the kid a pass. You menace minutes longer outside the school and head home to the apartment you share with your mother and the brother your punkass coach damned as a forever also-ran. You don't mention a word about the trouble to your mom. Instead, you count all the times you've seen fracas at school, the times students have been caught carrying a knife on campus, the number of squabbles you've...