BY ALLEN M. PRICE
On my forty-seventh birthday, July 10, 2020, one month and fifteen days after four Minnesota police officers murdered George Floyd, I pulled off the road and sat on a stone wall in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Looking out at the Bay I asked myself why for so long did I hate my blackness? I had been endeavoring in vain to answer this question since I was a wee young man. But there was nature setting: a bright aurora descending in the vaulted mauve sky, darting her dying rays on the shady sycamore groves I sat under. A gentle zephyr lent aid to a small fleet of red-winged blackbirds waving at the glittering spring tides, breathing a serene melody on the bosom of the Bay and blossoming flowers. Every undulating and rippling leaf on the trees was as harmonious as those feathered wings. The tall grass danced to the music. The lucid moon discoursed with the sun as it appeared on the horizon. The coat of the briny mixed the elements and modulated the air with the most imperious magic.
I stood up and watched the dying rays color the water with bright tints of gold, which faded one into another, and when the sun had sunk below the horizon, the ocean changed first to a delicate purple, and then to a deep blue before becoming moonlight black. Over this dark abode the blackbirds took flight to ethereal light safely landing in the trees billowing free. These birds flew high and mighty, yet there I was ashamed of my blackness for most of my life wishing I was white. Having sailed through life’s tempestuous sea I wondered what was wrong with me, why did I have such contempt, lack affinity for my African ancestry? I spent my adolescent years praying it away. Dear God, free your beloved from the cage you birthed me. Every day through crowds of white I winged my flight, only to find myself crying in the dead of night knowing I could never fully fly with broken wings. I tried to walk through the pain by pretending to be white, scratching to stay alive in a state where my raven race is viewed as an inhuman disgrace. But gleams of hope beamed on my benighted soul for more than a quarter of a century waiting for the day blacks would fly high in nature's sky, higher than the American white sky.
I gazed up at the moonlight shining with silvery brightness out of the starry black sky onto the curling waves. Misty vapors appeared in the vale as the birds mingled and music floated into the light and shades of night. Some birds preened other’s feathers, and when finished spread their dusky pinions to the heavens. In their sockets, black meteorites glowed bright with the intensity of a thousand beautiful destinies.
These birds felt more like siblings than strangers—having the same bloodline, but pushing toward a world rid of color lines. Because of ominous, superstitious stereotypes created by those that for centuries have pushed to keep racism alive they’re overlooked, stigmatized, demonized, and persecuted. Yet, they and their kin are the most intelligent things on earth with feathers and wings. They’re able to look over the world and see with their sharp eyes the injustice in nature even when the night sky has dimmed the aurora. They have an uncanny memory for human faces—and can remember if that particular person is a threat. They know that every person is different and needs to be approached differently. They endure as a meditation on the fight for blacks’ rights. Because being born into a world where blacks and blackbirds are raced is a human diabolic deed. Trying to comprehend why it took me so long to see this, tears at my inner being.
The moon forsook the eastern half of the coastline where gentler and gentler purl the rolling ocean. I sat back down on the rock wall, letting night’s leaden scepter seal my thoughts and my drowsy eyelids. But out of the welkin came a note softly whispering these fiery flowing syllables, you were born for this reason. I inhaled the words that sailed to me on the zephyr’s wings. A quiet graciousness warmed my body. I exhaled the incense of the breathing mead into the suddenly still atmosphere that had stepped forward and surrounded the vale. The pause of stillness that followed the “tongues in trees” sightings of the air among the birds perched on the swaying branches was a sound of its own—calm, tranquil, uncertain. I could have fancied it to have been the murmur of one who in his mortal state had lived, but now haunted the place he once reveled, or suffered. A voice uttering a prophecy, telling the changes coming to end the pain of the oppressed.
This odd but peacefully, unearthly whisper soothed this black man’s sorrows in that sad midnight hour. I stretched out on the rock wall thinking—what was it in the contemplation of nature that gave me so much solace? As I pondered in silence, lingering long, I looked with a kindling glance upon the liquid plain and saw a blackbird with a delighted mien descending from the trees. The augury bird sat on my chest, and I unexpectedly felt this vibration penetrating my body. I could feel my strength building. A midnight daydream I must’ve been having because when I peered into its eyes I saw victory deferred and wavering. I saw myself in a soldier’s uniform fighting on the battlefield of humanity for the souls of black folk, our cause advancing. The stillness of the air stirred with rapture. Vanished joy of years in bondage recaptured. And our victory the triumph of the spirit over matter.
When the unbounded vista ended, I jumped up because the energy was so intense. I thought I was draining the life of the feathered warbler who was now flying far off in the distance. I felt this intense feeling of aliveness, this awakening of my black consciousness, connecting, reconnecting, reuniting, mergence with my black body. This soul-shaking moment showed me how I had enslaved my African spirit, and slipped in and out of blackness. I had been so focused on fitting, excelling, persevering in white caste society, I couldn’t see through the lens of my own race that I had put a knee on the neck of my black consciousness, of nature’s consciousness, because like the birds, the ocean, the trees, I now see that I, too, am nature, impossible from to be separated.
Nature’s more than sylvan covered with massy foliage cleaning the air on this celestial sphere. It’s more than boundless blue oceans swimming in the pools of earth’s eyes. Nature’s a mirror of the heavens, birds reflecting the angels, and trees reflecting the humans. In its highest boughs the world rustles, and where the manes of man once lived, its roots forever nestle. Nature’s the lifeblood of the planet, running deeper than the farthest galaxy. Nature doesn’t preach precepts. Nature doesn’t lose itself. Nature doesn’t play favorites. It pushes to live the laws of the universe. Nothing’s holier, nothing’s more exemplary, enlightening, more pulchritudinous than nature in its natural color.
Allen M. Price is a writer from Rhode Island. He has an MA in journalism from Emerson College. His fiction and nonfiction work appears or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, Hobart, The Masters Review, upstreet, Zone 3, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Entropy, Juked, Bayou, River Teeth, The Fourth River Tributaries (chosen by guest editor Ira Sukrungruang), Jellyfish Review, Sou’wester, Cosmonauts Avenue, Gertrude Press, The Adirondack Review, The Saturday Evening Post, among others. An excerpt of his screenplay ‘Dark Ocean Night’ appears in The Louisville Review. His chapbook ‘The Unintended Consequences of Haitian Reparation’ appears in Hawai’i Review.
Process Note: Sitting out in nature is how I write. The winnowing breeze, the trilling birds, the sun setting over the main are tools I use.