Admission by LaTanya McQueen

“I hate this song. It doesn’t make any sense.”

A friend of mine and I have just had dinner, having gotten together for the first time since she’s moved here to Missouri. We’re sitting in my parked car talking when I notice the song playing. “I paid for Sirius once I realized there weren’t any black stations. I got tired of listening to Taylor Swift all the time, but this isn’t much better. It’s not even a good rap song.”

“Kevin Gates,” she says, laughing. “His rap name even sucks! Santana is a better rap name and he isn’t even a rapper.” She pulls out her phone, searches for the lyrics. She recites them, jokingly imitating a poet persona for fun. After she finishes and both of us have quieted down from laughing, I change the subject.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” I say, wondering if she can hear my guilt. “After the protests on campus—I just decided I couldn’t be around anymore.”

“At least everything seems to be settling down for now,” she says.

“Have you seen—” I begin before stopping myself, unsure if I should ask.

“He asked about you,” she says, answering my question. It was not hard for her to guess who I was referring to since there are only a few of us here in this program.

“What did he say? I haven’t talked to him since the start of the semester, since before everything happened. I guess we got into it.”

“He just seemed concerned was all. I think he thought you were upset with him.”

“Yeah, well,” I say, then shrug.

I pause, thinking back to what happened. He was angry at the department’s lack of response. It doesn’t affect most of them so they don’t care, he’d told me. He was frustrated at my cohort, at their apathy. I’m the only one who has to worry about being shot as a black man, he’d said.

For a while he sent out emails forwarded to the entire department, calling on them to put action to their words. Email after email was blasted off, the effect of which causing increasing hostility in response. He eventually decided he wanted to do a boycott, sending out an email to the handful of us in the program.

You’ve got to stop this. I’d finally messaged. You’re just making everyone angry.

That’s a good thing, he’d quickly written back.

Why are you doing this? What about school?

This is important, he answered, then stopped responding to my messages.

His proposed boycott dissipated before it could start, most of us were too occupied with just making it through school to deal with anything else.

I’d thought a lot about his response since. He was so sure, so forceful in what he felt was the right thing to do, even at the risk of potential backlash. In contrast, I remembered my father’s response on the night I told him about the protests—you are there to work, remember? You are there to get your degree and get out, don’t lose sight of that goal. I thought of the ways I had spent my life attempting to erase markers of my blackness until I did not know who I was anymore. I thought of how, even still, the night of the threats I’d sat in my car afraid to start the engine, and I thought of how after, when for a moment the world had seemed to settle down, while walking down the street I was yelled a slur and even then my first instinct was to let it go, to bury it, to ignore the fact that it happened.

You can be good. You can be accommodating. You can make the world comfortable with your blackness as so many of us try to in our daily lives. You can straighten your hair, code-switch, be quiet instead of speaking out, and yet one day you may still find yourself confronted with a group of men, wild-eyed and in a frenzy, who will shout slurs at you, and you will be reminded in the end that in this world it doesn’t matter how good you are.

“I should probably get in touch with him,” I finally say. In the quiet I reach over and shift to a new station, this one plays D’Angelo. My friend laughs.

“Come on D’Angelo,” she says upon hearing the first few verses. “Calling yourself the Black Messiah, as if all of us have forgotten about the time when all anyone cared about was seeing your dick. No one forgot. I still remember.”

We both laugh. It’s nice sitting in the car with her, the two of us having this moment.

“You know, I feel responsible for encouraging you to come here,” I finally admit. “I’m sorry if you’ve had a hard time.”

“It’s okay. It hasn’t been that bad. I mean, up until now.”

“Have you been doing okay?”

She pauses, thinks about my question. “Yeah, someone called me a slur at the beginning of the semester but since then things have been fine.”

“It happens,” I say, and because I am nearing the end of my time here and she’s at the beginning, I don’t tell her I’ve been called slurs too, multiple times, and between the both of us it will most likely happen again.

“I’m used to it. Once in school the teacher read out loud Huck Finn and kept emphasizing all the slurs. He read them over and over while the rest of class just stared at me. Later, the teacher came up and was like, ‘oh, I didn’t realize, this didn’t bother you, did it?’”

“Seriously?”

“Must be nice to go through your life like that—offending people and not worrying about it until afterward,” she pauses. “It doesn’t matter, they’re just words. I tried telling my parents about it, what with it and then with the protests, and they didn’t understand.”

“I know what you mean. My father went to school the year after Wilmington Ten,” I say, remembering the story of what happened. In February of 1971 in Wilmington, NC tensions over school desegregation had reached a breaking point. Four days of violence rocked the town, resulting in two deaths and the firebombing of a white-owned store. The National Guard had to come in to restore the peace. The Wilmington Ten were a group of students convicted of arson and conspiracy to fire upon firemen and police officers. They were sentenced to 282 years in prison. After their sentence, a movement formed in the state demanding their freedom.

“So it’s like,” I say, continuing. “I call my father up sometimes and I’ll say—well, so and so said this, or this happened, and he’ll be like, ‘so what’s the problem? Your feelings were hurt? Is that why you’re calling?’”

“It’s the price of admission for being here,” she says, and I nod.

“You know, I’m thinking about writing about all this—a bunch of essays about race.” I then explain about my family, about their history. I tell her I’m thinking of going to Louisiana, of visiting the Whitney Museum, the first plantation dedicated to the memory of slavery. “My ancestors were all on tobacco plantations, not so much cotton or sugar like in the Deep South, but I still feel as if I have to go and see the ones there, especially the Whitney. Who knows if anything will come from it but I’m gonna go. The time’s there, better make use before it’s gone.”

“I went to a lot of them for my novel,” she tells me. “We went to one that had an intact slave cabin and it was so hot I almost passed out, but I thought—this was how it was, they were working in this heat, and so I pulled myself together.”

“Those plantations are something else.”

“I know, so many columns.”

“That Greek Revival architecture.”

“All built on the backs of slaves.”

“I’ve never talked about race before,” I suddenly say, thinking about this book and my hesitancy to write it. “I always thought if I avoided it maybe others wouldn’t see me as different.”

It has taken me years to get to this confession, it has taken me most of my life. Saying it out loud feels as if I am reaching closer, that I am slowly reclaiming back my sense of self.

“People are going to see you that way though. No matter what they want to pretend.”

She has already gotten to a place I am still struggling to reach. I don’t respond, don’t know how to, and for the first time during our evening we both have settled into silence.

“Oh, here we go.” I motion to the new song on the radio. Beyonce’s Formation has just started playing. “I used to be so critical of her, but now I don’t know what to think. What about you? Do you think she’s being authentic with this album? That her video is pandering?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure how much it matters though.”

I don’t know this answer either, but what I wonder is how I would have felt had I heard this when I was younger—to witness such an affirmation of blackness, and even though my heart skips a moment, a tinge of nervousness, of insecurity from others around us passing by, I roll the windows down anyway, and let the music fill the air.

LaTanya McQueen has most recently been published in Indiana Review, Passages North, Bennington Review, Ninth Letter, Carve Magazine, and Harpur Palate. She received her MFA from Emerson College and is finishing her PhD at the University of Missouri.