AYE, BRO, DO you remember the little thing from Men in Black? I say. What thing? he says. The thing where they like erase people's memories? I say. Ahhh yeah, I remember, he says. Well, think of my memories like this, I say. Imagine the little silver thing, instead of erasing your memories, it stores them. And the flash doesn't take away what you remember but gives you only a glimpse. And when you get that glimpse, that glimpse feels real and then it leaves and you are only left with a fragment or snapshot. That's what I feel like, I say. Damn, he says. Yeah, bruh, I say. That's what makes the last 10 years so hard, bruh bruh, I say. Too many hits, my boy, he says, laughing. We took too many hits, he says. Gahhhh damnnnnn, he says. Can't none of us go unscathed, I say. We laugh together and we say: It is what it is. It is what it is.
Part 1: Friday night
FRIDAY NIGHT GOES something like this: I grab my black helmet from my red locker and sway my head to Pastor Troy for 10 minutes straight, the sound of Black Southern magic booming from the speaker in the center of the beige concrete room. I pull my red Calhoun County Saints jersey over my white pads, put my black-and-white Nike Vapors on the brown bench to the right of my white socks, put my white gloves to the left, then put everything on to the tempo of the music. Gloves last, always last.
I stole the show, I didn't know I'd be judged.
It's 7:02 p.m., 28 minutes to kickoff, Oct. 2, 2009. If I listen closely enough, I can hear the deep thumps of footsteps from the field outside. The sky above wears the blues and oranges and soft whites that can be only found in South Carolina at dusk. "When the sun is about to go down here," my grandmama used to say, rubbing her hands together and wiping them on her dress. "There is nothing on God's green earth like it."
I close my eyes. I imagine running and running and running until they shout my name, like they did the Friday night before, and the Friday night before that. I imagine the clock hitting 00:00, the end.
I open my eyes and strap on my helmet.
I hear cleats crunching on concrete, from one end of the locker room to the other. No one says a word. We stare into each other's eyes. Some of our eyes are red and wet. Some of our eyes widen as our heart rates rise. Some of our eyes move back and forth, watching our teammates go by, crunch, crunch, crunch, a wake of musk, mold and Axe body spray following behind.
Nobody can see my eyes. I've painted my face mask black. I wear it like that because Reggie Bush wore it like that at USC, shortly before making the cover of EA Sports NCAA Football 2007, his mouth scrunched, his 619 area code underneath his eyes, his body leaning sideways as he carries the ball in his right hand. Me and my brothers and cousins have spent an ungodly amount of hours in front of our TV screaming: "I'm Reggie this game ..."
Haaaaa-spoooo. I spit two times in my right hand then my left. Clap five times. Shout to DJ, "Ain't nothing to it but to do it, Lil' Cat!" We both play the corner: He holds down the field; I hold down the boundary. We both play offense: I run, juke and follow the backsides of my linemen; he runs, plants and follows the backsides of other receivers. He is tall. I am short. He is lanky. I am stout. We both are Black, scared, determined and desperate.
What's up, Big Mouth, Big talk, Big Game.
Tonight, like every night, I wear No. 5, just as Reggie did. Tonight, like every night, I hyperventilate as I feel my body heat beneath my shoulder pads. Tonight my socks are white. Tonight my cleats are black. Tonight I will walk on the field with the same assurance that every Black boy in the South walks on the field with: I will be a god like Reggie.
I shake my head two times to the right, three times to the left, and bite down on my mouthpiece as I step into the still, humid October night. Hot, thick air forces my pores to open up. The sweat burns my eye. The smell of hot plastic grabs my nostrils. Then it's teriyaki chicken, French fries, exhaust pipes. My heart pounds; I can feel it in my throat. I stare down to the stadium. We ready, we ready, we ready, Pastor Troy booms, all bravado. Dun, dun, dun; the piano notes ascend. I bob my head. I fix my gloves. I tap my helmet three times. I'm ready. We're ready.
One by one, we line up and walk single file to the practice field that smells of wet grass and wet cleats. "Ayeeeee, baby," one of the coaches screams, "we been waiting on this." We shout back, then shout to one another, "You know how we do." Gary walks in place like he got bricks in his pants. Bryce bends his ankles to his hips. Jakeem fixes his thigh pads. DJ grabs the sleeves on his forearms, twice. Shy tosses the ball to BT. BT smiles just before he says, "Let's gooooo." Coach Wilson puts his right hand to his lips, his broken pinkie going east while the rest of his fingers turn west, then barks like a Que Dog. Coach Wages jogs a bit, the run sheet separating his shorts and shirt, and yells to the offense, "We gon' put up 50 on them boys."
We throw. We pray. We jump. We curse. We stretch. We laugh.
We wait. We go.
The playing field is freshly painted. This is the big game, the Bamberg-Ehrhardt Red Raiders, our rivals to the south. We wore our jersey to school, me and Jakeem and DJ and Shy and BT. We talked about it all morning, before, after, during class: Whoever wins goes to regionals, probably goes to state, both teams that good. On the field now, 7:25, five minutes to kickoff, I look at my white socks, my black-and-white Vapors, and clap my hands four times as the cheerleaders stomp the concrete stands. Ain't no night like Friday night in South Carolina. For me. For us.
Get up CC! CC get up! the crowd chants.
I grab the inside of my face mask. "You ready, big dawg?" we shout to one another. "I'm ready," we shout back. "OK, then," we shout again. "Lehhhh get it!" we shout in unison.
It's 120 yards end to end. It's 53.3 yards side to side.
A few hashes and lives to live. The time is now.
It's all we got.
IN JANUARY OF this year, I was given a diagnosis by my therapist that changed how I saw the story of my life. Six months later, I was given an assignment by my editor that changed how I told the story of my life.
This is that story.
Aye, bro, do you remember are the first words.
And still I believe are the final words.
I'M NOT A football player anymore. I'm a husband, father, minister and writer living in Augusta, Georgia; my legs don't move like they used to. But there are some days I need to remind myself. Like today. It's July, and it's too hot outside, and I'm sitting in my home office that smells of old coffee, sandalwood and my son's leftover pizza. For some reason I know but don't yet have words for, I replay a video that I've posted to Facebook: seven minutes of highlights from my final season at Calhoun County in 2009.
I hounded my coach many years ago to give me the tape. "I need it for me," I told him. "I need it." In the opening frames, our offense is in the spread against Allendale-Fairfax, our rivals to the southwest. The receiver motions to the right as Javo snaps the ball to Brandon and Brandon hands it off to me. Three seconds later, I am in the endzone, throwing my palms to the sky. The next play is from the opposite side of the field, same formation, same call, same outcome: Touchdown. "It feels good to watch this video over and over again," a friend writes in the comments. "It feels real good."
What the video doesn't show: A month earlier, on the morning of July 19, 2009, a bright Sunday morning, my cousins and I are traveling from Swansea to Columbia. My cousin Josh is the driver; me and his two sisters, Darri and Nell, are the passengers. The rural road he takes, we've taken countless times, from our house to grandma's house, or to school, or to "up the road" to shop. Just three minutes into the drive, as Josh turns up the gospel music on the radio, he loses control. I grab the door and close my eyes. This is all I remember next: Oh noooooo! Screams. Silence. Waking up and climbing out of the white car. Seeing more red than I've ever seen. Feeling no pulse in Darri's neck. Staring at the white collar of Nell's pink dress that is stained with dirt, tears and blood. And then: A blur.
Then I remember riding in the ambulance. My right shoulder is swollen. The knots in my head are like the ridges of a mountain. I place my right hand to the back of my scalp and feel an open wound where my hair should be. I have to pee so bad. "Am I going to be able to play football?" I ask the paramedic, sitting at my feet. "Am I going to be able to play football?" I ask again. She smiles. "That's the least of your worries," she says.
Then I remember lying in a hospital bed, the sunlight shooting through the the window and crawling up the beige walls as my friend David massages my head with his thick, brown hands. I feel it so clearly, the tenderness of his hands, the brokenness in his eyes. Next to him stands my mother, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, cousins, ministers, nurses, doctors.
"Is Darri alive?" I say.
"She is alive," they say. "Each of you, by some miracle, is alive."
Then I remember lying in the bed with the blue covers in my grandma's house, until I am well enough to go to the field 100 yards from the side door, the field we used to run through when we were kids, carrying sticks, playing karate, imitating the latest Power Rangers episode. There, day after day, I work out by myself between the grass and the dirt and the weight bench my big brother made, near the shell of the broken white car. The first time I see the car, I turn away. The second time, I run my palm along the top of it. The third time, I look inside. The fourth time, I turn away.
Then I remember my first game back, and my desperation. It's my senior year -- the year I will earn a college scholarship. I don't yet have any offers, but still I believe, because I have to believe. I come from the part of South Carolina they call the Corridor of Shame: largely rural, largely Black, so many of us feeling like we have been forgotten, left behind, unseen. And so out on that football field, against Allendale-Fairfax, against Bamberg-Ehrhardt, against them all, I grip the ball as if it is my only hope, moving my legs in ways they have never moved. It's all I got.
This is what I remember, and now, 13 years later, sitting in my office, the summer sun setting through the window, I'm watching my highlights again, because I need to remind myself. The final clip begins. We're playing Chesterfield in the playoffs; the winner goes to the state championship. Brandon hands me the ball. I stutter-step, dash to the left, juke, and 40 yards later celebrate in the end zone. What happens after that clip is another blur. I just know we lose, and it's the last I wear the red and white.
"We ain't got it like we used to have it," Jakeem tells me after I post the video.
"Nah bruh," I tell him. "We ain't got it."
Jakeem is not a person who says much. Neither is Brandon. Neither is Shy. Neither is Big Mack. Neither is Alshon. Neither is OB. Neither is Lil' Cat. None of us really. But in the passage of time, the few things we do say to one another always find a way back to the zip code 29135.
"We ain't got it like we used to have it."
I've been thinking a lot about the past lately - the things I don't have, the things I've lost, how naming those things is harder than remembering how they felt. I've been rewatching old shows like "Living Single" and "One on One." I've been replaying classic games like USC vs. Texas from 2006. I've been revisiting former teammates. I've been re-reading Baldwin, Morrison, Laforgue. And sometimes, as my two kids play, I've been refreshing that seven-minute highlight video, conjuring the ways I could move my body.
"Daddy, that's you?" my five-year-old son Asa asks one August day when he catches me watching it again. "Yep," I say. "I was himmmmmmmmm."
I laugh and take my left hand and massage his head in circles. He smiles, understanding the joy that wears itself on my cheeks as they squint inward and my teeth show. I replay the video, and Asa tells me I'm fast and that he wants to play football too. "I want to play footballllll," is how he says it. I shake my head to the right and laugh and look away and say, "boyyyyyyy."
A few nights later, I sit in the back of my 2007 Tacoma just as dusk settles. Asa sits with me; he loves to let time pass until we hear the cicadas begin to sing. I reach for my phone and play Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life. That's followed by Oh Happy Day by Edwin Hawkins Singers and Melodies From Heaven by Kirk Franklin and Trouble Don't Last Always by Rev. Timothy Wright. I bop my head up and down as my heart rate slows. Then I look in my son's eyes as he looks to the sky. He reminds me so much of myself: He's young, energetic, ambitious and sensitive. My big brother told me that people like that must have their hearts protected. I turn my eyes to the sky too, and I stare at the millions of stars, the gentle, eternal stars.
I let my mind go; I let it search. A month ago, I started writing about Reggie Bush and the injustice of college football, what it does to Black kids who dream of possibilities and end up haunted by what's taken from them. The NCAA took Bush's Heisman, but it took so much more than that from him, from all of us who wore the uniform on Saturdays. I had to stop writing, because the more I thought about Bush, the more I remembered what football gave and took from me. It's all too connected, and I wasn't ready.
The sequence of my former football life, the facts, the dates, that's not hard for me to place. It goes like this: Aug. 19, 2009:I play for the first time since the car accident, determined to earn a college scholarship. Oct. 2, 2009: Six games into the season, I catch a punt, get tackled and fold onto the field. High ankle sprain and knee sprain. My regular season is over. Feb. 3, 2010: Signing day comes and goes, and I get no offers. March 17, 2010: A letter arrives from Clemson: I'm invited to try out for the team as a preferred walk-on. Fall 2012: After two seasons of grinding out a role as a backup defensive back, I'm offered a one-year scholarship. Aug. 6, 2013: I tell my teammates I'm transferring to Western Carolina because my scholarship wasn't renewed. Oct. 11, 2013: I tell my coach I'm transferring back to Clemson, to just be a student this time. I never play football again.
That's the sequence, but I'm leaving out what matters; all these years later, I've never been able to find the words for what actually matters. And now, sitting in the back of my truck, my mind still searching, I know I need to try, somehow. I thought I'd write a story about Reggie Bush and sitting in the back of my truck, my mind slowing down, I know I'm ready to write my story too, even if it unleashes a flooding of memory.
Miles Davis' "Flamenco Sketches" plays a few minutes later. The song begins slow, like most blues do, a voyage into what James Baldwin calls "the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are." The upright bass drones a bit. The piano mimics a walk alongside, almost behind, the bass. The drummer hits the ride cymbal twice just before Miles' trumpet comes in. I replay the beginning of the song, over and over, and then once more, as I watch the clouds move across the star-struck sky.
"What do you see?" I ask Asa. "I don't know," he says, his eyes scrunching and his teeth showing. "I don't know," he says again.
This August is on fire. The Georgia sun is hot, scorching, burning the worn metal on the bed of my truck. The anger is hotter. If you have survived these first eight months of 2023, I assume you too have found yourself at some point sitting outside, staring at the night sky, into nothing, wondering what has happened and what is happening. Searching. Maybe you too understand -- feel -- that playing music can be as much a spiritual practice as praying. As a minister, I have prayed a lot lately and listened a lot more. I have preached about gratitude and grace. I have preached about the radical joy of being Black and alive in this raging world.
I hear it everywhere, the sound of summer -- the pain, sadness, lament, grief, joy, believing, feeling everything and nothing at all, in this, the 50th anniversary of the genre called hip-hop, born out of the soul and struggle of Black boys and girls, the doom and the glory. It is a sound I know well, as a Pentecostal kid growing up in the Black and religious rural South. Some preachers here told me that hip-hop was the devil's music, that these "hoodlums" were young and dumb and angry. To be sure they were young, and yet: Wherever their sound moved a room or a stadium or a hole in the wall or a dance floor, people's bodies were changed -- transfigured, to use a Biblical word that means the sacredness of a hidden thing that is revealed for all to see. Hip-hop never promised to do what church often promised to do, to save souls. But hip-hop did do, both by accident and by purpose, the true work of the church: to help those in the world feel more connected.
The thing was, while our parents and pastors and teachers thought the problem was the boys and girls behind the songs, we knew the real problem was the world their songs were speaking of. There was an adage I often heard as a young Black athlete in one of the Blackest and poorest and most determined areas in South Carolina. It went something like this: You can't do what they do and get away with it. This was a reminder that no matter how magically we could make our bodies move on Friday nights, we were still young and Black and unloved in a country that judged us differently. We were problems to be solved and mistakes to be punished rather than beautiful people waiting to reveal our beauty. Praised and unprotected; coveted for our talent and hated for our freedom. It didn't matter who we were or where we came from: We played football first, we were Black last.
In that truth lay our exploitation.
In that truth lay my heartbreak.
I DON'T KNOW why I remember the echoes of crickets outside my window, how one cricket didn't sound any louder than the others; laying my head on the pillow of the pull-out bed my dad had made up, a small mattress with a single sheet; listening to Bishop Bonner's thundering voice, a terrifying epic, the static from the radio to the left of my head, the cheers of the saints drowning out the crickets; the stillness of the night; the mellow hum arising from the dark; or was it from the cracks of the cement pillars that held the house together; staying in bed on signing day, not wanting to get up again; the dawning of my belief that it was over, just before opening the front door to look at the sky, the expansive sky, the forever sky; if only I could conjure up wings and fly far, far away.
I don't know why I ever wanted to fly. Why I ever wanted to run. Why I ever wanted to believe. You gonna be the one to make it out, they said. You gonna be one of the ones to make it, they said. I'm running, I say. I'm flying, I say. I'm forgetting, I say. I'm going, I say. I'm believing, I say.
Part 2: Saturday afternoon
THE GRASS IN Clemson, South Carolina, is green year-round, as if spray-painted. White oak, river birch and red maple trees hang over the sidewalks. Imprints of orange-and-white tiger paws lead from the streets to Tillman Hall, a brick building that towers over the center of campus and bears the name of a slaveholder. All of it registers as a blur when I arrive as a walk-on in the spring of 2010, 149 miles separating the house on cinder blocks I grew up in and the off-campus house I move into, wearing a white V-neck, khaki shorts that show my dark kneecaps, and brown loafers that smell of the hair grease I rub on my head and then on my heels.
The blur never truly resolves. I'd heard how Saturdays at Clemson tilt the Carolina hills, that when the Tigers play, the place becomes "God's country." Yet I'm still not prepared. No matter how early we arrive to Memorial Stadium on game day, we're greeted by hundreds of fans, sometimes thousands, their beer-chilled hands reaching out to touch us, to get us to sign anything. At the end of every game, they storm the field like a choir entering a stage, and we sway side by side as we lift up our hands in salute of the Tiger paw. We sing the alma mater: "Here the sons of dear old Clemson, Reign supreme always. We will dream of great conquests. For our past is grand, And her sons have fought and conquered Every foreign land."
At Clemson, I quickly learn, Black boys are beloved. We give fans stories to share with their families over dinner, in church, or when they walk the campus hills to Howard's Rock, the monument inside Memorial Stadium that players touch before every game for good luck. We give them things to cry over. We give them meaning. And we give them something they don't truly deserve: The confidence that the football field is the world, and that the world is right, and that what matters most, in this exchange between us, is our ability to run fast, jump high and give them more stories to share.
There's another reality about Clemson that I'm not prepared for. The winters are dark. The wind blows steadily as the temperatures drop to a bitter shock. The stadium goes empty, and the talk of the town centers on the season before. After my freshman season, that talk is angry, as we lose 70-33 to West Virginia in the Orange Bowl, the culmination of a season in which I take the field just twice, at the end of blowouts, its own kind of blur.
Seven weeks later, on Feb. 26, 2012: Trayvon Martin, 17, is shot dead in Sanford, Florida. He was visiting his father at the time -- "he was here to relax," Tracy Martin said -- and was walking back from a convenience store to the house of his father's fiancée. He didn't make it. A member of the community watch there, George Zimmerman, shot him after the two had an altercation. He'd told police that Trayvon was "a real suspicious guy." He called him a "f---ing punk." He said, "These a--holes" ... "always get away."
Two months later, 12 of my teammates gather inside Memorial Stadium, sit their butts next to Howard's Rock, and fold their arms in the shape of an X. It's cold and overcast, and they wear the black hoodies that have come to represent Trayvon, shaken into protest by outrage and by a fear: That the way they're protected on the field will never be the way they'll be protected in the world. Someone pulls out a camera and takes their picture as they point in unison to the sky, as if to speak to him, as if to pull him down.
I feel the same outrage, the same fear. But I'm not there. I stay home and stay quiet. As a Black Southern boy, I'd learned how to exist in white worlds, to talk the right way, to act the right way, to never make too much noise about what was happening outside of the freshly cut grass. "You have to leave those things behind," we would often hear from the coaches who were recruiting us. "There's nothing here for you," an uncle once told me. He meant well. He just wanted so bad for me to make it out.
And I had made it. I'd escaped as many Black boys have done, knowing that the only thing worse than never leaving was leaving and coming back having failed to make something of what you were given. So I use this as an excuse after Trayvon is shot. Yes, I am Black, but I am really a football player who just happens to be Black. More important than Trayvon's Black body being killed and my teammates' Black bodies taking a photo in protest is my Black body's distance from both. To be good at football is more important than being Black, so stay quiet. To be good at football is to remember that a walk-on's position is never secure, so stay quiet. To be good at football is to run when I am told, to cover when I am told, to tackle when I am told, so stay quiet, always stay quiet.
The next fall, my sophomore season, is a magical one. I'm playing on special teams, then starting at corner when one of my teammates gets injured. "Stew, it's your time," I'm told. We go 10-2 and make the Chick-fil-A Bowl, where, on the final drive, Tajh Boyd hits DeAndre Hopkins on a fourth-and-16 to keep our hopes alive. On the sideline, wearing white socks, white cleats, orange sleeves, my cheeks painted black, I can't look as our kicker lines up for the game-winning field goal with two seconds left. None of us can. We lock arms as the ball is snapped. The ball soars. We jump and leap and run to the field. In the locker room afterward, I pose for a photo with the trophy in my hands, my head up, my Clemson cap facing backward. I smile and tell myself that I want to experience this again, because this is what I fought for, what I've always been fighting for.
Six months later, George Zimmerman is acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter.
THERE IS A billboard on White Oak and Ventura in Encino, California. The background is yellow. The bronze Heisman trophy is plastered on the right side. In red and black letters, it reads: "HEY NCAA ... GIVE REGGIE BUSH BACK HIS HEISMAN!" There are 15 of these billboards across LA.
They tried to disappear Bush, and we all saw it happening when it was happening. I'm talking Reggie Bush, Wale rapped on "Varsity Blues," the 16th track from his 2011 mixtape "The Eleven One Eleven Theory," which explores, among other issues, the exploitation of the Black college athlete. At the time, Bush was six years removed from one of the most breathtaking seasons ever seen on God's green earth -- a season for USC that convinced me, a Black boy in the South, that I wanted to play running back and wear white socks and wear black Nikes with white strings. Jumping over defenders, running past them, running through them, stopping, starting, shifting and shaking, Bush forever cemented his name on the all-time list of great college running backs. In that 2005 season, Bush had 2,611 all-purpose yards, scored 18 times, and would win his Heisman.
Then came the allegations. The Bush family was accused of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts. There was an NCAA investigation, and the result of that investigation mandated that Bush disassociate from USC, and for the Trojans to vacate 14 victories, including the 2004 BCS national title. Bush voluntarily gave up his Heisman. And so it is that, according to the NCAA, there is no 2005 season and no Heisman. The 513-yard performance against Fresno State? Never happened. The Leprechaun Leap against Notre Dame? Never happened. The way he soared in the air as his legs split, clearing the head of the UCLA defender? Never happened.
Look, I'm talking Reggie Bush, matter of fact ask Cameron Newton
Matter of fact, go ask they schools how many jerseys they was moving
In the years since, student-athlete advocates have called for the return of Bush's Heisman and for his records to be reinstated, especially in the wake of NCAA legislation, passed in 2020, that permits college athletes to receive compensation for their name, image and likeness. In July 2021, the NCAA denied those requests. "Although college athletes can now receive benefits from their names, images and likeness through activities like endorsements and appearances, NCAA rules still do not permit pay-for-play type arrangements," an NCAA representative stated.
On Aug. 23 of this year, Reggie Bush sued the NCAA for defamation over that statement, saying in a news conference that it was "100% not true" that he was ever paid to play while at USC. As part of the lawsuit, Bush asked for his records to be reinstated and for his Heisman to be returned.
Of course, I hope he wins. Of course, I hope he gets his Heisman back and that the NCAA has to pay him millions, more, all of it. Of course. But also: What difference would it make if Bush does win his suit? What difference does NIL make now to the generations of Black athletes who came before it? What restitution is there for how deeply anti-Black college football made many of us? Because anti-Blackness isn't just about the disempowerment of Black athletes; it is about our dislocation. From the places we call home. From the love of the people who made us who we are. From the instinct to question whether this new place they've brought us to is actually good for us. As much as college football gives us new paths, it takes away what matters most: our compassionate standing with one another -- those back home, those by our side, those unjustly killed hundreds of miles away.
When Wale released "Varsity Blues" in 2011, I still believed in the path. I'd drive the 149 miles home and tell my family about how hard I was working on the field, that I was going to play, just watch. Then I'd drive the 149 miles back, and me and my teammates would sometimes talk about how unfair the NCAA was, how we only got one meal a day while our coach made millions, how we were barely getting by. But those talks were short, because we were so busy thinking about our dreams, time, all we would get.
We just wanted to created magic. We didn't know that it disappears, that we disappear. We didn't know that a haunting would come for us all.
Look, just remember how that winning taste.
Just in case a n---- never see that thrill again.
ALL I HAVE to do to earn the purple jersey is to work harder than every other young boy in the line. It's a dark, humid morning in the spring of 2013. We've gathered under the lights just near the pond that separates the baseball fields from the indoor complex we practice in. It's so ungodly hot, but I don't care. I'm not a walk-on anymore. I'm on scholarship, heading into my junior season, fighting for a starting spot at corner. I want it badly; it's all I want. I've been keeping notes in my playbook, righting my head for the fight. "Keep my feet under me," I write. "Stay square in the pedal," I write. "Keep eyes in the right place," I write. "Stay patient," I write.
"Remember what brought you here," I write.
It's now time to bring the fight to practice, to get that purple jersey. They're given to the hardest worker during mat drills, a series of high-intensity and low-rest tests of speed, agility and teamwork. The drills are meant to break you: your will, belief, steadfastness. They're meant to bring something essential out of you: your focus, proficiency, toughness.
All the things I worry I'm failing at.
I'm full of ambition; my idea of myself is gigantic. I believe I deserve to not just be there but to play and make something amazing happen for me and all of the people I represent from back home. I'm 5-foot-8, 185 pounds, lean, energetic, passionate, with a whole lot of edge and a big motor, as scouts like to call it. And yet, as a former walk-on, every day feels as if my life and future hangs in the balance. There are no days off. No chilling. No, "Oh, I ain't feeling this today." Every single day, every time my cleats dig into the dirt, I have to prove myself. All of us do.
"I'm working, bruh," I say to one of my teammates, out on the field, "but it just feel I ain't being seen." He's older, bigger, faster, with a smile that even the president couldn't deny, and he patiently hears all of our complaints. As Black athletes, we bear more than just the jersey on our backs and the ambition in our hearts. We also bear the weight of the places we come from and the power of what it means to be "Black" and "athletic" and "here." So, to make the load a little lighter, we unload on one another. This is how brotherhood is formed. We cry. We argue. We shout. We complain.
"Just keep working, lil' bro," my teammate says. "You're not doing this for nobody but yourself."
As soon as I hear those words, they find a way to dig beneath my dirty shirt, my clammy skin, all the way down to my stomach. And when I don't get the purple jersey that day, I drive home, and run upstairs and lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. A few minutes later, I'm staring in the mirror. Maybe if I look at myself deeply enough and long enough, I can will what I most want into reality; this Pentecostal kid knows something about manifestation. "You're not doing this for nobody but yourself," I repeat into the mirror.
The next dark, humid morning comes, and I walk onto the field with a new sort of desperation: to do the best I can for me. And to do it the next day. And the next. And the next. And so I do. And the purple jersey eventually comes. And so does a greater validation: About a month later, I'm given a team award for being one of the most improved defensive players. A month after that, in the thick of the suffocating South Carolina summer, I'm sweating, laughing, driving those 149 miles from Clemson to back home, where my cousins see me and say, "Aye, cuzzo, this yo year!" I dap them up, drive back the 149 miles I came, and believe too, "This my year."
And then: In August, I'm told my scholarship won't be renewed.
DO YOU REMEMBER the first day you got there? he says. Yes, I say. I had on a white T, khaki shorts, and some brown loafers with no socks that burnt the bottom of my feet. It was hot, thick, I say. Do you remember when you left? he says. No, I say, help me. Bro, he says, I remember like it was yesterday. His voice becomes softer and slows into something like a hum. We cried, he says. You had a team meeting with us, he says. You stood in front of the room, he says. You were our boy, we knew that if we threw Stew out there, we ain't eeennn have to worry about nothing, he says. You cried, he says. You told us how much you would miss us, you told us how much you didn't want to leave, you told us you just ain't have the money to stay, you told us you still had us and that the love was still there no matter what, he says. We went home that night, he says. You cried some more, he says. And then you were gone, he says. You remember, bruh? he says. No, I say. I remember, he says, I remember it all.
AND THEN: WHAT am I doing here?
From high up on the hill, in a one-bedroom apartment that sits where the road bends like the belly of snake, I'm pacing and looking down at the Western Carolina football stadium as the lights brighten the night sky. Three times I walk from the front door to the living room to the small bedroom with the brown desk where I cried just hours before.
What ... am ... I ... doing ... here?
Now I sit alone on my couch, my computer resting on the wood coffee table, and watch as my friends and former teammates at Clemson take the orange coin and drop it in the orange bucket. They walk up the steep incline at the West End Zone. They step onto the bus, one by one, and their orange jerseys disappear when the beige, blue and black bus shuts its door. The TV camera pans outward, then backward, then up to get an aerial shot of the stadium. It's bright, a sea of orange. Back to the bus as it drives around, just as I remembered, as they have always done before games.
I can hear the sounds of "wooooo" and "lehhhhgooo" and "it's time." I can taste the plastic of my mouthpiece. I can feel the tightened straps of the shoulder pads gripping my chest. I can feel my heart rate slowing down and then speeding up the closer we get to the hill. I can feel the warmth of the body of my teammate who sits next to me on the bus, both of us dreaming of what we were about to do and show and be.
And then I feel nothing. They're running down the hill. I'm sitting alone, in a room on a hill overlooking an empty stadium. They're playing Georgia that night. I can't remember who we played earlier. There was a kickoff, there was screaming, there was pain and sadness, then my fingers grabbing the remote, hitting the red circle, walking into my room, lying down on the bed, pacing, sitting alone, wondering how I got from the blue hills of Clemson to an empty room in Cullowhee, North Carolina.
This goes on for weeks. Play a game for Western Carolina. Watch the game at Clemson. Turn the TV off. Stare down the hill toward the empty stadium. Lie in bed. Pace. Sit alone. Do it again and again and again.
My body is here; the rest of me is not. Walking to class every day with my headphones on, so that I don't have to talk to people. Standing in front of my new locker and throwing my old cleats from Clemson in the bottom cubby and wanting to go back. Talking with Coach Mutt's wife about how much I regretted being there. Staring into my eyes in the bathroom mirror and saying, "I'm done." Walking to Coach Speir's office and telling him, "I just can't do it anymore." Looking at the field one last time. Inhaling. Exhaling. And just like that, it's over. I'm here, I'm not.
This is how I tell the story now, because it's all I remember: I went to Clemson with dreams and ambition and heart and guts. I left Clemson with sadness and regret and motivation and will. I transferred to Western Carolina with dreams and ambition and heart and guts. I left Western Carolina with regret and anger and fear and sadness.
"Man, hardly any of us look back on our time in the game and actually can remember it and love it," a former teammate said to me once. "We're just in it, and when it's gone, it's gone and done."
BOYYYY, LET ME tell you, he says. You was getting a lil' thick there when you came back. Eating all them eggs and rice and butter, he says. We laugh, looking at a picture of me from then, after I'd run back to Clemson, sitting on the same couch I'd left four months before. Ayeeee, I say. You put me on them eggs and rice and butter so good, he says. Been a lot of years and a lot of pounds since then, I say. He doesn't laugh. He goes silent. He stares at me. Man, when you done, you still got to fight them demons, my boy, he says. You ain't lying, I say. He rubs his temples, swings his hat away from his head. Ayeeee, there's a fine line between mental toughness and mania, bruh, I say. What you mean? he says. Man, you know when we get on the field, we got to turn on that switch? I say. He smacks his teeth. You right, he says, and we don't know how to turn it off and when you get in the real world, things don't be working like that, when it's done, it ain't done. I shake my head to the right and to the left. You right, I say. The game gives us so much, I say. Takes so much away, I say. Robs us in broad daylight, I say. And we don't even know how much it really hurts, I say. How you did it, bruh bruh? I say. How you crack the code, how did you move on? He looks at me sideways and says, Ain't no codes to crack. Bruh, I'm still trying, he says. It's still hard, he says. None of us can escape it, he says. I just give it to God, he says.
Part 3: Wednesday morning
WEDNESDAY MORNING GOES something like this. At 4:45, I get out of bed, rub my eyes two or three times then turn off the music playing on my iPad; I've fallen asleep once again to the echoes of cicadas in the South and to Max Richter's "To The Stars." I wander into my son's room. His right leg hangs off the bed, and his arms curl toward his chest. I think: How in the world does this kid go from the bed to the floor to the bed again in just two hours? I guess this is just part of the big, bad 5-year-old life. Thomas the Tank Engine tracks, "PAW Patrol" episodes, repeatedly asking to go to New York, smiling, scrubbing a knee until blood shows, and then when the day is done, collapsing in his PAW Patrol-themed bed.
"Daddy, can you come sleep with me?" he'll sometimes ask in the middle of the night, after he's run into my room and taken my palm. "Daddy, I don't want to have a bad dream. Daddy, who's going to protect me from the bad dreams?" This morning, though, he is at peace. White noise fills the room. I open the black curtains meant to keep the light out, and I look at the stars, at the streetlamps illuminating the concrete curbs, at the stillness. I take three deep breaths and turn away, thinking, I ain't got it this morning.
Thump, thump -- my daughter has turned in her crib. I'm definitely not going in there, I say to myself. Too early, and if she hears my footsteps, or her door creaking, she'll start crying and I'll need to hold her until she falls asleep again. I head back to my room to grab the book on my nightstand, "The Yellow House" by Sarah Broom. I finished it last night, shortly after kissing my wife on the forehead as her chest slowly moved up and down. I want to reread it again later today, especially Page 185, the part I can't stop thinking about: X, 1999, Zora Neale Hurston said, "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." Nineteen ninety-nine did both.
I walk downstairs to my office and look up to the painting on the wall, the face of a young Black boy. His neck stretches to the heavens. His eyes are shut. His nostrils are wide. His cheekbones are pronounced; flowers flow down the left side of his face, from the temple to the cheek. The background is red, representing to me the bloody journey that so many Black boys go through to reach a moment of tranquility.
This is how it must start: In the solemn quiet, a running in my mind until I feel the running in my body. I'm ready. I grab my Nike Vaporflys and smell them -- dry, musky, just like the locker room back in the day. The shoes are bright red, yellow and orange, but the check on the left shoe has become discolored, and the heel is worn; dirt is stamped in the cracks of the soles. I unloosen the black-and-teal strings and lace them on. Right shoe first, always first. This will be run 200, or maybe it's 90, 147, 203. Every time it takes me the first mile to warm up, the second to push past the lactic acid buildup, the third to convince myself not to stop, the fourth to quiet the voices that tell me the day will be terrible, the fifth to say f--- it, and the sixth to begin to feel what I felt a decade ago, a toughness that's beyond grit, a wildness that shoots straight through my veins and tells me there's absolutely nothing I can't do, absolutely nothing. Every mile after is always a mile to slow down and think about life, to make sense of the feeling that I'm always running from something and toward something.
"Bruh, it seems like we running toward nothing at all," a friend told me the other day. "We sometimes chasing something that doesn't exist."
I head out into the darkness, and begin mile 1 and then mile 2, listening to the sound of my breath and the beat of Marshmello's "Joytime II," wondering if this is just the lot of life: run, run, run, breathe, cry, run, remember, forget, run, run, run. I'm the only person in sight, just me, my thoughts, and my beating and broken heart. Mile 3 goes by and then 4 and then 5; I push through. At mile 6, the sun rises from my left, and I run past an old man carrying a book bag loaded with bricks.
He nods and asks, "how many?"
"Six."
"How many for you?"
"I'm too old to count." He laughs.
"Man, I hope when I get your age I'm out here like that," I say.
"You stay like that," he says, his legs turning over a little faster, "you'll be out here longer than me."
"Get it in," I say.
"You know it, youngblood, you know it," he says, nodding his head up and down before throwing up the peace sign.
At mile 7, I slow down, and I think about endings and beginnings.
How sometimes the beginning is an end and the end is a beginning. How sometimes we run because we're afraid. How sometimes we run because we're confused. How sometimes we run because running is all we got. How sometimes all we got is all we got because some Americans think they deserve better than Black people who breathe and laugh and run. How sometimes breathing and laughing and running is harder than remembering and writing and dreaming. How sometimes I lose track of how many miles I've run because my mind is somewhere else, focusing on regret, or failure or what I've become because of other people, or what I gave up because I couldn't quite become myself. How running has become my prayer when my prayers feel more like broken sentences than a pleading to God. How running is sometimes the safest place to be.
How God and laughter and forgetting is better at the end of the run than Gatorade, a shower and staring into the mirror and wiping the water off my chin. How there are years that ask questions and years that answer, and how this year has done both for me.
"IT'S KIND OF like I'm watching a movie from the outside in," I tell my therapist, who sits on the other side of the screen. It's our first meeting, and from my office, sitting in my blue-and-gold velvet desk chair, the winter stars showing through the window, I can hear my children playing with my wife downstairs.
I look down at my Garmin watch. My heart rate reads: 58, 62, 65, 73.
I've never been to therapy before today. Was I afraid? Was I alone? Was I wondering? What do I even remember? It's everything, I realize. My broken heart has become something like a movie director, choosing which parts of my life to tell in vivid detail, which parts to leave out, which characters are placed when and where and how. I've come to see that heartbreak doesn't just unravel the body and our sense of time, it also unravels our sense of the events as they actually happened.
In 1986, two researchers from Emory University conducted a study that asked college students what they remembered about the day the Challenger exploded. The students were first asked a few days after: How did you hear it, where were you, what were you doing, who was with you, how did you feel? Two and half years later, the students were asked those questions again. As Maria Konnikova recounted in The New Yorker, the Emory researchers found that there were barely any similarities between what the students remembered two days later and two and a half years later. They re-created what they remembered. They restructured the rooms in their minds where the trauma dwelled. They told the story in fragments. Or they had forgotten. Who could blame them? It did happen. What they knew was real. And yet, the memory was fractured.
The evening I sit across from my therapist, I think of my own fractured memory. "Tell me when it began," they say.
"Ten years ago," I say.
"What happened?" they say.
"This is what I remember," I say.
I'm playing football and then I'm not. I'm covering receivers and then I'm not. I'm strapping up my jersey and smiling with teammates and then I'm not. I'm sitting in my room alone and crying and then I'm not. I'm quitting and going back to Clemson and trying to finish my degree and then I'm not. I'm walking across the stage and taking a graduation selfie with the president and then I'm not. I'm putting an obituary in my desk drawer and then I'm not. I'm starting over and forgetting most things that happened before and then I'm not. I'm someone who others want me to be and then I'm not. I'm Danté Stewart, the Black boy who has no quit in him and who always finds a way, and then I'm not.
"It's kind of like that's me but not me at all," I say.
"Say more," they say.
"I guess to be young and gifted and Black is to be haunted by time," I say, laughing, putting both my hands together, moving them back and forth just before making a spitting gesture in the hole created between them. "I don't think I'm afraid of death as much as I think I'm afraid of time."
I look down at my Garmin watch.
My heart rate reads: 105, 115, 125, 129.
When I see the words "major depressive disorder," and "Danté Stewart" in the same sentence for the first time, I am sitting alone in my office again, staring back at my therapist. It's January, a starless night. This is our third or fourth session now. It begins how it often ends: talking about my life, what it has done for me, and what it has made me. We then talk about something new: the intense pressure I feel when I wake up in the morning.
"Every day it feels as if there's a ticking clock and I'm running out of time," I say. I begin to name things I truly want in life, how I want to give myself many of the things I felt were taken away in my past.
"Danté," they say. "You've had a hard emotional life -- many young Black men do -- and you're doing the work to heal it."
I hope this is true. Each morning, before my son goes to class, my wife and I offer affirmations, a practice that grew out of my therapy; they suggested that I meet the day with positive thoughts. This ritual has become my son's ritual too. He's sensitive, just like me. He's got a big personality, just like me. He pays attention to everything and he feels everything, just like me. And when we are getting dressed or brushing his teeth or riding in the car to school, he says these words: "I am brave. I am kind. I am beautiful. I can do anything." Then he always smiles at me. And I always smile back at him.
IN THE SUMMER of 1969, Nina Simone, in the presence of 50,000 at the Harlem Cultural Festival, introduced the Black world to "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." Young, gifted and Black, oh what a lovely precious dream, she sings, as her eyes travel from the keys to the crowd, then back to the keys again. When you're young, gifted and Black, your soul's intact.
A few years earlier, Simone had recorded an interview in which she spoke of her friend and playwright, Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry, speaking to a group of students as she was dying of cancer, had told them she "wanted to be able to come here and speak with you on this occasion because you are young, gifted and Black." When Simone heard those three words together -- young and gifted and Black -- she knew she must write this sacred anthem as a gift to the power and possibility that young Black life held.
I have found myself listening to Nina's song on repeat, and thinking about Wale's "Varsity Blues" on loop, in this year that asks questions and that answers. Because let me tell you what I know about young Black people: The older we become, the more this world tries to rob us of the gift of our humanity; whether through parents, teachers, pastors, coaches or public servants, we are robbed of our audacity, our institution, our self-trust. Let me tell you something else I know: It's young Black people who embody the beauty of life; it's always been the young Black people.
It's our magic, the power to defy a world that tries to limit our possibilities. A power that's traveled through time. A power that's changed the course of history. A power that's told it how we remember it, in the infinite imaginations of what we could become, the staggering awareness that, had it not been for grace or chance, we were made Black and beautiful and loud and proud. It's sacred. It's a wonder. It's a spiritual virtue. It's a verb. It's a noun. It's a conjugation. It's a policy. It's a slogan. It's a movement. It's everything, everywhere, all at once. It's enough, and more than enough.
You can't do what they do and get away with it, I was told. Now I want to say back: We don't have to. We can be who we are and walk in the fullness of that truth. It's the truth of Nina; it's the truth of Wale. We don't have to make ourselves small in order to make others feel bigger. We don't have to kill a part of ourselves so that another person may live. We don't have to disappear for others to be seen. We don't have to change our hair or lessen our loudness or never throw up a closed fist or never talk our talk. We don't have to quiet our voice or our vibe or our confidence or our joy. We don't have to accept their definitions or their punishment. We know that to be us and to be free is to help others be them and be free.
August is on fire, and it's the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and Reggie Bush is suing the NCAA, and maybe you feel it too, the doom and glory, the soul and struggle, and I'm still searching for the words to my story, and I'm taking a photo with my kids in my backyard. My son holds my right arm, and his head is under the inside of my elbow. He's wearing a gray Transformers shirt that matches the faces on his blue book bag. My daughter is to my left. Both of them smile, and the sign behind us reads: "Welcome back!" It's the big day, Asa's first day of kindergarten. We've been keeping up our affirmations, and he says his again, after I drive him to school and walk him to the front door: "I am beautiful. I am kind. I am strong. I am loved. I'm going to have a great day. I can do anything."
He hugs me and kisses me on the cheek. I look him in the eyes and tell him I will see him later. He walks with a skip, his hands gripping the loops of his backpack. I smile and go back in the car and play a different Wale song -- "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic."
Nina, we just wanna be Black and legendary.
Be us and be proud.
Sometimes, the words find me.
"THIS IS LIKE football for me again: the blank page; the being alone; the getting better; the figuring things out," I say, sitting in my office on a September afternoon, staring at a screen of college students who've invited me to talk about how I became a writer. I look out my window to the sun at the crest of the sky. I look back to them and lay my hands on my beige desk. "I guess it just happened," I say. "I guess I just tried something ..."
Before I can get the words out, I'm interrupted by a young man whose head is bent down, his eyes bouncing from one side of the screen to the next. "Like, how did you like ..." he says, lifting his head. "How did you move on from football?" He's wearing a white hoodie and a hat with white letters that read HOPE. A blue-and-white helmet rests on a beige desk behind him, above a stack of laundry, next to a collection of medals hanging on a wall.
"I don't know if I have," I say. I look at myself on the screen. My black Saints helmet rests on the bookshelf behind me, next to the medals hanging on the wall, alongside framed pictures of the "Big Four," as my son calls them: James Baldwin, Katie Cannon, James Cone and Toni Morrison.
"Yeah, I'm struggling with that," he says.
"What you mean?"
"I came here to play ball and now I'm not and I'm just struggling with what to do," he says.
"I feel that," I say, moving my red glasses up my nose. I put both my hands together, rub them around, then place them back on the desk.
I know this look in his eyes, why they bounce back and forth. It's the haunting that comes for us: for him, for me, for all of us athletes. Because especially for Black athletes, the game is more than the game. The game is life. It's our way out. It's our way through. We've given over our identity to our sports with an intensity that most other people will never know. Who are we when it's done? Who do we become? The haunting drives some of us to anger and violence. The haunting brings some of us to tears. The haunting causes some of us to go numb. The haunting invites some of us to wonder if the good things we have, we don't deserve and will one day be taken away. The haunting -- the reckoning with how football gave us everything then took it all away -- is a paralyzing disease.
And then, for some of us, the luckiest of us, the haunting transforms into a force, a creative force that allows us to travel through time, to feel in our bodies today what we felt all those days ago, to once again remember, to finally forgive. And if we search long enough, somewhere in that feeling, somewhere in the remembering and the forgiveness, we find the words for what haunts us, and we turn our ghosts into ancestors.
I'm searching, so carefully now. In my desk drawer, I keep an obituary: David Patten Jr., Aug. 19, 1974 - Sept. 2, 2021. David was a former NFL receiver from South Carolina; he caught a touchdown pass from Tom Brady in the Super Bowl once. David was also my mentor. The first time we talked, he was 31, and I was 13; he took me under his wing, and gave me a dream of playing in the NFL, and massaged my head in the hospital after my accident, and got me believing again. The last time we talked, he was 41, and I was 23; he was the one who convinced me to transfer to Western Carolina, where he'd played, because he thought there was more for me there than at Clemson, and when I left, it caused a rift followed by six years of silence. I was 29 when I found out he died in a motorcycle accident, and a regret hit me instantly -- I failed at being a friend. I've spent the days and months and years since wondering what football and love and death means for Black boys in the South who come together through football and love and death. And I'm stopping now, right here, exactly here, and I'm putting this part of my story back in my desk drawer.
Some pages must stay blank. Some ghosts must stay ghosts.
AYE, BRUH, WHAT'S going to happen when Asa says he wants to play, like, knowing what the game does to you and to us? he says. What you gon' tell him? he says. Man, I say, I don't even know. I guess I would tell him about what happened to us and what it did, I say. I guess I would tell him that he will learn things about himself that he would never learn had he not played, I say. I guess I would tell him everything I remember and everything I don't, I say. I feel that, bruh, he says. But you know what I would really tell him? I say. What's that? he says. I would tell him whatever you do, do whatever you can to remember everything, I say. And when it's all over, you can look back and tell what happened, I say. I would tell him to do something, regret nothing and remember everything.
I CLOSE MY eyes. I open my eyes. Standing outside the Saints locker room, I look to the football field where it all began. The air is hot, stuffy and thick. It smells of musk and Gatorade. The lights above the stadium, with their concrete necks, reach 40 feet into the sky. The afternoon clouds begin to form in straight lines. Everything exactly as I remembered it.
September is on fire, and I've returned home to Calhoun County in the hopes I might find the final words here. Everything is connected: Just a few months before my diagnosis, I read Homer's "Odyssey" for the first time. I'd bought a used copy, and the previous reader had underlined dozens of pages, from black ink to red ink to green ink to squiggly lines, to finally taping a green note card to one passage: "Even his griefs are a joy /long after to one that remembers / all that he wrought and endured."
I've read those lines in my head, over and over and over and over, searching for their meaning and for what I know: Grief is not a singular thing but a compilation of all that we have seen and felt and remembered and forgotten and processed and left undone and tried to move on from; if you have the right eyes to see with, grief can be a blessing; the eye is as much a griever as the heart; to remember is the true gift; to endure is but one part of the journey; to have wrought -- to powerfully act as a human who deserves to live in this world -- is to affirm that what happened to you is more than what has happened to you but is what you have done with it.
When I reread these lines in my head now, staring at the field, I notice a white-and-red bus parked in front of the side entrance to the school. It looks like it hasn't been washed in years; black gunk has collected on the roof. A line of young kids hold their helmets as they walk to the bus, with the same intention I used to walk with 13 years before. I inhale four times, close my eyes, and hear the roar again: Get up CC! CC get up!
I open my eyes. For the first time in a long time, I am not longing to change the past; I am sitting with it, letting it wash over me like the floodwaters of the Mississippi River. "All memory," Toni Morrison writes, "is flooding." I have become a river. I have become a flooding. I have become a thing that has been altered, moved, changed, dwelled in, remembered, forgotten, here today, gone tomorrow, left and returned.
Three days later, I'm in my backyard again, throwing a football to my son. Asa is smiling; his teeth are showing. He grabs the blue-and-red ball, cocks his left arm back and slings a spiral. "Grab the ball, catch the ball, run with the ball," I say. "Huh," he says back to me. The sun shines just above the top of my house; the evening has come. Asa's legs stretch above the brown-and-green grass. His elbows bend in the "V." I don't know if he's going to be a receiver, or a quarterback, or a cornerback like me. I don't even know if he will be a football player at all. "You will feel it somehow, someway, someday," I said to my friend the other day, laughing. "Will he play?" my friend said. "If he does, he can; if he doesn't, he won't," I said.
"I can run faster than you," Asa says now, laughing. The football goes from my hand to his; my smile widens, my inner elbow wraps his neck with joy. I take the football back, and he stares at me as I twirl it in my hands. I move it from right to left, left to right, then throw it high in the air. His eyes go from my torso to the sky as the ball suspends and spins into nothing and falls back down to earth. I step underneath the ball, bend my back toward my son and catch it in the palms of my hands as they rest behind me. Thump. "Woahhhhh," my son says. "Do that again, Daddy."
I throw the ball in the air. The ball suspends, spins and falls. I step underneath the ball, thump.
"That's so cool," Asa says.
I throw the ball in the air. It is what it is. I can do anything. The ball suspends, spins and falls. The orange jersey and helmet in my closet. The entries in my journals. July 13, 2018: I am a father. I can't believe I have a son. God is good. March 8, 2022: I'm feeling so alone and the panic attack got my ass, God, please help me, I need you. July 3, 2023: The only thing I got to give is myself a chance. A chance to strive. A chance to grow. A chance to dream. I step underneath the ball, thump.
"That's so cool," Asa says.
I look at my watch. My heart rate reads: 105, 93, 82, 74, 66.
I have no idea what will happen when he grips the ball. What will happen when he comes to understand he is Black and a boy and in America. What will happen when the haunting comes for him, when life takes and takes and takes. If he'll remember what I've given him. If I'll remember what he's given me. If our yesterdays will be like today and our todays like tomorrow.
Asa says to me once more, "Do it again, Daddy, do it again." I throw the ball in the air. It lingers into nothing, then returns to rest in my hands.
I'm writing these words because I still don't know and I still don't remember and still I believe.
"story" - Google News
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Forever Friday Night: The haunted true story of my broken football dreams - ESPN
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