excerpt from Given in the Folding

“You slavers will know what it’s/ Like to be a slave/ Slave to your mind/ Slave to your race/ You won’t go to heaven/ You won’t go to hell/ You remain in your graves”

–Exuma, covered by Nina Simone

“love precedes us to the grave and follows us into it”

– Etel Adnan

It is 1994, or 95, sometime between Reginald Denny and George W. Bush, and I am driving to catch a view. I am poor, barely documented by the amnesty calculated into an immigration reform law, fatherless. I sleep in a small room in my mother’s mobile home, and she cries each time a doctor pushes free samples into her palm so she can save on prescriptions. I feel a sticky weirdness layer on our things on the rare occasion Americans visit our home. I know we aren’t right, and that derision I think is taste. I have some college credits, I’ve read some Pascal, some Duras; I have a copy of Elias Khoury’s Little Mountain in my bag. Most things outside my car—glass-front office parks, palm lined blocks, arching overpasses—look curated, and their habit of rolling off my windshield has me thinking it doesn’t matter I was never meant to be their audience because I’m still driving and I’m still looking.

And if I feel smug, if I should push my little Honda to lurch through a long turn, and if my stomach should lift and my eyes narrow, I’ll steer toward downtown Long Beach where Lindon lives in a building half gentrified into lofts, its upper floors still scaffolds and unfinished walls, missing windows. The light comes down honeyed through the methane and carbon monoxide. I can’t really know, but I want to be covered under a man’s more-than-human form. I can’t really say, but I want eyes that melt every white face they reach.

every place my breath doesn’t reach…

It is 2020, and this year I will be as old as Lindon Barrett was when he died. But when we were close, he was around 35 and I was 21. He was a professor at my school, and though I was never on his roster, he made me want to think my way out of what passed for life. We had sex but we weren’t lovers. We were friends but we weren’t equals. Years into our time together he took my asking about his exact age as the reason to stop speaking with me. I held on to that hurt for too long and then one day in 2008 he was dead.

Testimonials to Lindon’s life online and in print talk about his ideas, the ways he let critical theory and African-American studies talk with one another, and they say something about the joy he practiced in his classroom, in his studies, and in his dance parties, the respect and love with which he mentored students. Sometimes, those testifying allow themselves a nod to what they take for Lindon’s mercurial nature, but he was not volatile. He minded particular fault lines, the ones that threaten to shake the ground under categories and the stories they offer as shelters.

My people are Andean mestizos and white Christian Arabs from Syria. Before U.S. Americans learn my name, I’m taken for white, or white enough to think hard about how I write of a Black friend, one born in British Guyana and raised in Canada, about his body, his sex, his listening, and his death. My encounter with him is still happening in my body, in its sex, and in its listening. But I don’t know how much our bodies should be here. Lindon would have laughed. He made space for me to come into the body I’ve been given, to feel and to theorize there, and to not believe too much in any self that would claim that body by presenting a deed. But this is an essay, not the life to which he showed me...