There is a day in Black childhood when the world stops pretending.
For Marcus Garvey, the day came at fourteen. He and the girl next door had played in the same yard for as long as either of them could remember. Then her parents drew the color line. They put her on a ship to Edinburgh and told her she was never to write to him again, because he was Black (Garvey). That was the whole reason. The girl was Joyce Rerrie (“Look for Me in the Whirlwind”). He had led their games. The other children had looked up to him. Until that summer, he had not known he was supposed to be less than anyone.
“It was then that I found for the first time that there was some difference in humanity” (Garvey). The line had been running through that yard the whole time. He had only now been shown it.
That is the awakening, the first of the eight stages, and nothing else moves until it lands. The world hands you a name and steps back to watch. What you do with the name is the rest of your life. There are three things you can do.
You can believe it. You can take the weight they handed you, and let it sit in you and turn. Baldwin knew the temperature of this one: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.” The rage is accurate. They installed it in you. But rage with nowhere to go turns and feeds on the one carrying it, and you become the proof they were waiting for.
You can hide from it. You can spend your one life trying to outrun the name, filing your “accent” down, and learning the manners of the house that locked you out, until you reach the door wearing a face the house agrees to tolerate. Fanon gave a whole book to the men who chose this and called it Black Skin, White Masks. The title is the entire diagnosis. A man wears another man’s face over his own long enough that he forgets which one he was born with. The house may let him in. It never lets him forget what it charged at the door. Somewhere in the trade, the authentic life ends, quietly, with no one to mark the date.
Or you can refuse it. This was Garvey’s road, and it is the steepest, because no one hands it to you. You see how the line got drawn, and you stop being the one who keeps drawing it on yourself. Garvey said plainly what slavery actually is: “When a man is a slave, he has no liberty of action; no freedom of will, he is bound and controlled by the will and act of others.” Notice the path. Break that belief, and the rest comes loose.
That is the work the other seven stages are built to do, the slow construction of a mind no one else holds the keys to. It starts with a child who has just learned the price of the ground under his feet.
The only question the awakening leaves behind is what we hand to the child standing in it right now, watching to see whether we believed the name, whether we hid from it, or whether we did what Garvey did.
References
Baldwin, James, et al. “The Negro in American Culture.” CrossCurrents, vol. 11, no. 3, 1961.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, 1967.
Garvey, Marcus. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Edited by Amy Jacques Garvey, The Majority Press, 1986.
“Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind.” American Experience, directed by Stanley Nelson, PBS, 2001.
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