Tayari's Blog: Shot Up, Locked Up, or Somethin by Eisa Ulen
Posted by TayariJones on August 13, 2006 01:36 PM
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I sat on the steps of a Washington DC row-house one day back in the murder capital crack years of the 1980s, and I heard a young woman walking with her friend up the street past me say: “I’m just gonna go on and have his baby before he gets locked up or shot up or somethin.” I never lost that resignation – and eerie, twisted strength, the kind of strength that endures physical assault and survives, sort-of – in her voice. I never lost her. I wrote about this moment more explicitly in my “Letter to Angela Davis,” which has been anthologized and favorably reviewed. However, I needed to give that voice an entire world to occupy.
That’s why I wrote Crystelle Mourning. It’s not a story about that particular girl, it’s a story about all the nameless, countless, girls and women who watched, powerless, as the boys and men they loved most “got shot up or locked up or somethin.” How were their bodies responding to this destruction of Black male flesh? How were their souls?
I was teaching elementary school in Baltimore in the very earliest 1990s, and I would often have to stop class because one of the kids born addicted to crack had taken asthma medication that morning and was, literally, climbing the walls. “Go get the nearest male!” I’d tell the nearest child as I futilely tried to physically restrain the power of the nearest crack baby-- now age 9, with an almost man-like power. One of my students went to five funerals – all her cousins, all male, all teens – in one school year. She still managed to get low Bs. How did she? How did her mother remain so resilient and strong? What of the women who weren’t so strong? Were those many funerals connected to the long bout with pneumonia my student suffered that same year?
The title character of Crystelle Mourning tasted the Black-on-Black crime of the 1980s. She ingested it. Ultimately, however, she triumphs – as we all have.
Crystelle returns to her childhood home in West Philadelphia in order to realign her essential self. Crystelle grew up on Frazier Street – across from the boy who grew up with her, a best friend turned first love who, on a spring night just before high school graduation, is shot and killed. Since then she’s been receiving visitations. Jimmie’s spirit spirals through her dreams, shifting her closer to madness as his presence becomes more tangible, more real. Crystelle’s fractured life, the ache and loss, must be repaired. Jimmie’s soul must also shift – away from this world. And her.
My work builds on the storytelling legacy that has sustained generations of Black folk in this country. Characters whisper into my ear with the same rhythm and rhyme and measured repetition that the people I most love sing into my everlasting soul. Where I write, there is no such thing as time. Life spins. My lifebeat drummer never opens his eyes. The whirl of dust kicked along the dance clouds lines of demarcation. Future generations stretch fingertips years before conception, just to tickle their parents’ love jones. Ancestors bend back into the now. Crystelle lives in a timelessness as vast as the delicate light where the living, the mourned, and the babies still waiting to be born circle and swing. She faces the temporal realities of American violence and pain in a uniquely Black female way. She heals through a journey that crosses a cosmos without ever taking her out of her childhood home. I stitch the seamless garment cloaking then, now, and yet to be.
UPDATE-- Eisa on NPR!
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There are 3 comments on "Shot Up, Locked Up, or Somethin by Eisa Ulen". If you'd like to leave a comment, click here to jump down to the comments entry form.
Comment #1, by Tinesha ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.tayarijones.com/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
Wow! - I'm definitly going to check this book out because I can relate. Really really relate. I had my first real boyfriend at 15. What made him real was he was the first person I ever told my story to - (how I grew up poor with a crackhead father who often beat up my mother - in public). Until I told him this, my story - my childhood, had always been my shame.
What made him real was he was the person I gave my virginity to and at 15 I loved him and the thought of not being able to hold onto him too, (after beating up my mother really bad the last time - my dad was sentence to years in jail - I was 14)would take my breath away. Before he disappeared (shot up - locked up - something) I had to have his baby. To me it made perfect sense - through a baby I could forever capture his spirit. I would even have dreams about this. Night after night I would dream that he was gunned down in the middle of the street and I would run out and hurriedly collect his sperm (before it died too) and impregnate myself. I was determined that he would live on - through me someway, somehow.
Well the way this story turns out is I had a baby - his, when I was 16. If you ask me, I will tell you it was an accident - (the condom broke the first time we (I) had sex) but I look back now and wonder if it was a self-fulfilling prophesy. If the dreams I had - the urgency that time was running out that I felt got the best of me. I mean I always did have a way of willing things into being.
Today my son is 13 and his father - he's not dead but he is locked up...or something
August 13, 2006 08:47 PM
Comment #2, by Jennifer
I saw this book in Essence and wanted to read it immediately. I am currently reading it and it is a powerful story.
August 14, 2006 07:29 AM
Comment #3, by eisa nefertari ulen
hi, jennifer -
thank you so much for picking up my novel. i hope you post another comment when you finish it and that we can communicate on tayari's site about your responses to crystelle mourning. i can't wait to hear what you think! what makes the book powerful to you? is it the story? or the language? is it the friendship between crystelle and shelley? thanks again, jennifer.
dear tinesha,
wow, sis. your posting has truly blown me away. wow. i feel the power of your experience through your strong words of truth and emotion. you are the sister this story came through me for - you and countless others who will have personal responses to crystelle's story. thank you for sharing your own narrative.
i think it is so importnt that women like us bear witness to our own lives in sacred spaces like this one tayari has created. your dream, your willing life into being, your resilience - all are truly heroic. you are one of our community's sister-heroines. to survive the experience your father's addiction brought to your childhood home and the displacement of your son's father - your first love - and to still raise a boy into manhood after all that. this is what keeps us all together. women like you keep the community together.
peace and joy to you both -
eisa
August 14, 2006 10:30 AM