15 Years a Black Immigrant

Art by Leo Hendrixx

I can still hear my grandmother’s feet coming around the corner to my room and feel the wrinkled confusion on my fifteen-year-old face as I opened my bedroom door to her crying face. I quickly realized they were tears of joy as she grabbed my face, smiled, and jumped. Barack Obama had just been elected. She ran back around the corner to call everyone she knew to celebrate, but my confusion didn’t leave with her.

We were from The Bahamas, where the Black in our flag represents the people, where every Prime Minister and authority figure I’d ever known was Black. I wondered quietly why my grandmother, a woman who didn’t even like America, was crying over the results of their election. Why was she praise stomping on the American soil she had begged me not to relocate to just months earlier because “something in the water over there Olayemi.”

As I followed my grandmother around the apartment, I stared at her curiously hoping to understand, but I never saw the elderly Black woman born in Acklins, an island that hasn’t had as many as 1000 inhabitants since Loyalists enslaved the more than 1000 Lucayans living there at the time. All I saw was the woman who’d protected me my entire life, who had taught me to be formidable, who’d empowered me to think I could be successful in a country I wasn’t even from. I couldn’t see that what I was seeing was someone who needed to believe in hope.   

I turned 30 in July. In the weeks leading up to my birthday, I was the target of several hate campaigns inundating me with racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. I was frustrated with being expected to perform for the white gaze, being dehumanized, picked apart for their consumption, and spoken to like an unwanted guest in the country I’ve spent half my life, that I’ve lived in longer than my own, where I’m simultaneously an “officer of the court” defending Americans constitutional rights while having very few of my own and no citizenship or path to it to show for it. I ruminated on what I believed freedom truly was and all the ways I felt it evaded me.

Then I went to Beyonce’s concert.

I entered the Soldier Field Stadium in Chicago ready to be in awe of Beyonce, but what I hadn’t anticipated was how entranced I’d be as I stared out at the glittering sea of more than 60,000 people. I found myself unable to turn away from the crowd as my eyes tried to process just how many people filled that stadium whenever the light flashed across us, revealing more and more people each time. Before that moment, I never considered that I had never seen that many people in one place. I internalized just how many people 60,000 really was and I stood in awe of one person commanding that much attention before it dawned on me that across platforms, I have more than 200,000 followers.

When you amass a following online, you don’t get the benefit of seeing those individual people, so you never truly feel the size of that reach and you can’t quite appreciate just how many people are able to see your content and are choosing to consume your content and support you. It’s mostly just a number on the screen. In fact, the more followers you amass the more insignificant the numbers seem and the easier it becomes to diminish just how many people you are reaching. The visual of that sea of people helped me finally process just how many people support me and how insignificant the number of haters, albeit thousands, looked in comparison. Beyonce’s Renaissance had already gone 10x platinum in my house a year ago but dancing in that stadium with that gift of clarity made me feel like freedom couldn’t evade me. And as I looked out at the crowd that night, what I saw was thousands of people who seemed to be feeling the same freedom high I did.

I’ve never told anyone this but when I was a little girl, I secretly wanted to be an actress. Secretly because doctor and lawyer were the only available career choices in my Nigerian father’s eyes. I can’t act to save my life, so I lost that secret desire during my seventh-grade play, but I never stopped daydreaming and romanticizing my life like a movie internally. Which is a large part of why I love New York City.  There’s something I find endlessly fascinating about this many people living in the same city in entirely different worlds. I love walking around playing out the movie in my head to the soundtrack in my air pods, knowing that if I start walking in any given direction and just keep going, I will end up somewhere entirely different with a whole new setting and energy for that scene in the movie that is my life. That feels like freedom to me.

Or at least it did. Until the thoughts of O’Shae Sibley interrupted the movie in my mind. As I walk around Flatbush, romanticization is destroyed by reality. The reality that in this same borough where I walk around carefree, O’Shae and his friends left a Beyonce concert likely feeling the same freedom high we all did, dancing in his own movie about Black queer joy, entirely unaware of the tragedy his would-be killer had cast him in. As I struggle to reconcile why a 28-year-old is dead for being gay and dancing to music millions of people, including myself, dance to freely, I think back to the crowd that night, to the thousands of people who seemed to be feeling the same freedom high I did, and I wonder whether what I was actually seeing, were thousands of queer people who needed to believe in hope like my grandmother did. The hope that freedom couldn’t evade them.

As I think about O’Shae, I wonder whether for Black people, for queer people, for Black queer people, feeling free is just that…a feeling. A feeling that can be interrupted by reality at any moment.

I remember being warned as a child not to touch the stove because it was hot, doing it anyway, getting burned, and never doing it again. What that taught me is that while fear can sometimes be paralyzing, it’s sometimes what keeps you from being burned.

While some people bemoan that the American public is being fearmongered into fearing the hatred being mobilized by the right, I wager that we’re not afraid enough. Although, if I look at the evidence in the light most favorable to America, how could you fear being burned when you are already on fire, as the Maui death toll climbs to 115 while more than 300 people remain missing, and as California fires rage while experiencing the first tropical storm since 1949.

Someone suggested to a friend of mine that he become a teacher, and he and I both responded “nah, that’s dangerous.” Without a hint of sarcasm, hyperbole, or comedic wrapping, danger is the first thing we thought of when we pictured a classroom, a place that would definitely appear on the Family Feud scoreboard if you were asked to name a place you’re likely to get shot in America.

I still remember when my best friend David told me he was becoming a teacher in 2015. The only concern I had then was the stress of dealing with children for very little pay. Less than ten years later, my concern would be the stress of dealing with children and the potential of getting shot and killed for very little pay. And a thought like that seems legitimate when we’ve had 27 school shootings this year alone. When the last one was just days ago. 

I worry that the world doesn’t slow down long enough for us to grasp how quickly we’re spinning out of control.

James Baldwin once said that “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” He was speaking to the reality Audre Lorde recognized when she informed us that “there are no new pains,” because everything we are experiencing, as tragic and hard to believe as it may be, has happened before. The tragedies that plague our communities are not natural disasters, though they often feel just as insurmountable and catastrophic, but rather the predictable results of institutional and systemic oppression that is reinforced by the bigotry we keep dismissing as hurt feelings, political correctness, cancel culture, and other nonsense.

Baldwin’s words used to comfort me, but recently the same words I’ve used repeatedly to cover me when I felt under siege by the fear that we were being confronted by new dangers we didn’t know how to face, now startle me as I ponder what happens when you don’t have to read history to realize that your pain and heartbreak are precedented because it’s always happening?

When we don’t need to revisit Columbine to fathom that a school shooting could happen because there’s been 356 school shootings since. When we don’t need to read about when the police shot and killed 10-year-old Clifford Grover in 1973 to know police kill Black children because they killed Tamir Rice in our lifetime. When we no longer reference Rodney King to prove police brutalize Black men because we have 20 years of beatings just like it to pull from—when Tyre Nichols was beat to death this year.

At 15, having just moved to America a few months prior, I couldn’t see that my grandmother was someone who needed hope. At 30, I find myself wondering where we can all search for it.