1/712019 A Poet's Boyhood at the Buming Crossroads - The New York Times

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A Poet's Boyhood at the Burning CrossroadsBy Saeed Jones January 19, 2015 5•.54 pm

The year I started writing poems, I dreamed about chains dragging along a dusty country

road. It was June 1998, six months before my 13th birthday. Earlier that evening, my mother

\ and I watched, encased in a heaw silence, as the local news station reported on the murder of

James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Tex.

Byrd, a black man, had accepted a ride home from three white men. They later beat him,

chained him to the back of their truck and dragged him three miles. The word

"dismembered" entered my vocabulary that night, lodging itself in my throat. Jasper is just a

four-hour drive from Lewisville, where we lived. After the report, the newscaster moved on to

the next story, but I could not. How old were you when Arnerica taught you that being who you

are could get you Idlled? qju.Z%

I was the kind of boy who collected semiprecious stones and kept a telescope by my

bedroom window. A book of Greek mytholog y "for children" was always just an arm's reachfrom my bed, next to a notebook of, well, not poems exactly, just stray phrases I'd jot downwhen I was tired of repeating them to myself. The night of the news report, instead of going tomy notebook, I dug through my rock collection until I found m piece of jasper. stone wassmooth to the touch and rust red, the color of dried blood.

The pages of that blue notebook are most telling in the silences. I didn't write abo t Byrdbecause a sense of peril had turned my thoughts in invisible ink. \vV'M

ThAOctober mother and I wa ed a news report about a young gay man who hadbeen be%en, tied a fence d left for ad in laramie, Wyo. In the way that anyone in thecloset recognizes sharås oftheir self reflected in the lives of other gay people, I knew MatthewShepard without knowing him. For as long as I could remember, the word "si2" had chasedme, hissing.

This time. though. I felt aloneinawavIhadn'twhenIhadlearnedaboutJamesBvrdJr.

117/2019 A Poet's Boyhood at the Buming Crossroads - The New York Times

out of the room as if I bored. Even then, I had refined the art of

distancing myself from myself.

I went to my room that night and grabbed my notebook. There was no one moment in

which I was suddenly able to shatter silence into language. That night, like so many nights that

have followed, was about the attempt — in spite of all of my fears — to try again anyway.

With time, thtiEey lines I V-vTgte began to collect like raindrops forming small bodies of

water. Soon theyiecame poems. Sad, rough little poems written in the voices of lonely, mythic

people. I was drawn to my'th, I think, because it seemed so distant from the reality of my life

and anxieties. No scrawled poems about the boys I dreamed of kissing and holding. Rather than

writing in my own voice, I mostly chose to wite poems in the voices of characters. AsMedusa, I

about refusing to look at myself in the mirror, lest my self-portrait become a suicide in

stone. As Penelope, I wrote abo t dreaming of y husband's body, years crashing between us

like waves.

I didn't have to be afraid of my yearning on the page because I could tell myself, the poem

wasn't really about me. Any voice but my o y place but here.

In retrospect, it's easy for me to pick up on echoes f my v •ce in

poems were almost knot ofg er,s and

beautiful girl. Occasionally, I'd write a poem in the second person.

e women's voices. The

e. How telling that, at

felt like playing

fire, but "I" felt like staring at the sun its glaring for me to 100k at directly.

The process of writing poems felt like a reprieve. Concentrating so intensely on one word

and then another and another took me awa ; o far away, in fact, that sometimes after I

finished a poem, I'd sit up at my desk, a bit . It'd been a blur. W'hat a gif€being able to

disappear without going anywhere at all.

A couple of years later, the high school theater department performed "The Laramie

Project" for the entire school during a midday assembly. I sat in the audience, rigid and

my classmates. The play about the aftermath of Shepard's murder unfolded

one heart-Shattering monologue at a time. A few girls cried during the play. I envied them and

how easily they breathed.

I wanted to be on that stage, speaking words I still didn't feel safe enough to say on my

James Byrd Jr. had *ed, blu*d and into a cautionary tale replaying on a loop in my

min : eing black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is

practically a death wish. The thought was as exhausting as it was unrelenting. I'd started

having panic attacks, usually at home in my room. Once, my mother found me rocking back and

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It would be some time before I read or understood the concept of the persona

being political, but when your identity is stretched across the burning crossroads, I

suppose in a wav you always know. Stumbling through the process of writing those

poems in my notebooks, I was just trying to breathe with both lungs, but the

journey was political all the same.

It can't be a coincidence that I started — bad ones, to my mind,

but poems nonetheless — in the Irst perso same year I started coming out to

close friends. Maybe every poem I have ever written has been a way of saying "I am

here." I kept reading, and eventually found my way to the work of other gay black

men who were also writing their way into the world. I am here because James

Baldwin, Essex Hemphill and Reginald Shepherd have been here. I am here

because E. Patrick Johnson, Jericho Brown and Rickey Laurentiis are here still.

When I first read Toni Morrison's Nobel address and came across the

following sentence, I exhaled and copied it into my notebook for safekeepin

"What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company." The edge is

where Byrd and Shepard lived and die+he edge is where so many of us continue

to live and ness and stru le onward.

I co inue to write about life on that crossroads, the al eyways, the

underground rivers. Poetry has become a terrain on which I feel brave enough to

witness history and fashion words and images into a response. Sometimes I have

more questions than answers, but, at least now, I always have my words. Without

fail, after I've finished a poem (or when a poem has decided it is finished with me),

I feel just a little more fully realize@a man coming into complete and vivid focus.

Saeed Jones, a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and the editor ofBuzzFeed

LGBT, is the author of the poetry collection "Prelude to Bruise. "