image by Jessica Felicio

There are so many Black men I love. My dad. My brother. Cousins and nephews. Friends and colleagues. Ancestors. Artists and philosophers I’ve never met but whose contributions are inimitable, indisputable (Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Coltrane, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). The tone and shades of my love are varied. Sometimes it’s the thicker-than-mud, essential love of family, and sometimes it’s the disciplined love of shared destiny, of community. Sometimes it’s the heart-busting leap and swirls of romantic love, and sometimes it’s a love built from distance, respect, and awe.

It’s a privilege to love. It is a privilege to love anybody and anything at all. Meaning, we who love are lucky — not everyone allows themselves to be so exposed, so raw. To open that red door of the heart, through which experiences both wonderful and terrible can pass.

It is also a joy to love — especially when you love Black men. I’m talking about joy as essayist Zadie Smith describes it. Which is to say, not the same thing as fun or feels good or pleasure but rather “a difficult emotion to manage,” a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.”

Delight! Because nobody makes me laugh as hard as my Black brother, both of us clutching our bellies, cheeks aching and eyes watering. Because I am my Black father’s daughter, and no matter what, come hell or high water, through life and death, we are, in our ongoing togetherness, the hope and the dream of the slaves from whom we descend. Because Basquiat and Coltrane and Mos Def and others stir my senses, the senses made lazy by algorithms: the fat slide of oil sticks under the weight of fingers, the limber notes of the saxophone, the staccato, deep-thinking vocals. Because M’s hand on my inner thigh heals me in a way no yoga pose or therapy session has — the way the color of my leg and the color of his palm is indistinguishable, the way that our joined touch carries the ineffable, thrilling spark of Black love even though this is not yet love, and probably never will be. Because Black men are the original men. Because Black men are misunderstood and it’s still all good. Because Black men and Black boys and Black baby boys make me smile.

But also, joy because of how they are tracked like prey, taken from us— joy as a thing that contains (is inseparable from, must include) terror and pain. Yes: Black women are killed, too. Black girls and baby girls, too. That must be said, and it must be heard. But today, on this cold, bright day, with the faces of Tyre Nichols and Keenan Anderson in my mind, I am remembering the faces of many other Black men, their faces in sunlight, in moonlight, in rain, in dirt, an ellipses of lives and of souls stretching farther than I can see or can be expressed in words. Maybe it can be expressed in the beat of a drum, or the beat of a heart. But not in words.

This January day, the “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight” is, for me, in knowing and caring about Black men. It’s in being their daughters and mothers and lovers and friends.

It’s in thinking about them waking up, washing up, getting dressed — looking at their own faces in the mirror — and heading into the world. I picture my brother driving to the grocery store, the post office, and I whisper to him, be safe. I picture my cousin walking after school, sneakers on stone, and I’m thinking please make it back to the house. I picture M unlocking his front door after a day counseling kids at work and thinking, as my shoulders drop, he’s home. Not that home is protection — but at least he’s not on the open road, the open range, a target moving in clear skies, visible to all. (I do not whisper thoughts of restraint and epiphany to the would-be perpetrators. My focus — all my love — must go, today, to the Black men and boys I know. Nobody else.)

These whispers (be safe) are really prayers, aren’t they?

I suppose I could whisper them to God. That might be more effective than whispering in my mind at the people I know. But I have trouble with God. It’s in part a question of theodicy — why do bad things keep happening to my people?

It’s more than the puzzle of good and evil, though. I approach the question of God’s existence and nature with curiosity, humility, instinct, faith, doubt, education, and an awareness of how my own fleshy body fits (or doesn’t fit) into any given formulation. Ultimately, my relationship to a higher power, or deeper power, has been and continues to be interrupted by the purposeful and relentless depiction of God as a white man. A white man’s body and mind ruling all? No. Too small a conception. Too unfounded a conception. Too troubling a conception. Too convenient a conception.

If anything, I’d like to offer up the ancient idea that God is a Black woman, and a mother to boot. Or that a Black woman is as much a part of God as a white man is. Or God, and the body of God (if there is such a thing), both contains and transcends the categories we lodge ourselves and others into. That’s what I believe, if I believe anything. Still, I struggle to hold onto my conviction (for lack of a better word) in the onslaught of messages to the contrary — words and pictures that try to tell me God is a white man and that’s that.

It makes it hard for me to pray, even when I want to.

But there is an old prayer I know that asks God to shield the joyous. In my love for Black people, and on this particular day for Black men, I come back to that phrase again and again. Sometimes calm and steady, sometimes buckled at my knees. Shield those of us grappling with the joy — the terror, pain, and delight — of loving Black people in a world that cuts us down with that ever-swinging blade of senseless hatred, in a world that won’t testify to our value even as it gobbles up all that we make and do. Please shield the joyous.

When I’m feeling bitter, I send up this thought: well, if you won’t protect them, our men and boys out in the world, then at least protect us, we who love them, and maybe the shield will be big enough for all. And when I’m feeling not so bitter, when I’m hopeful, I think: see our vulnerability and our fear, and like any mother walking with her child, stand guard between us and the world. Either way, if you are there, please shield the joyous. There are so many of us, and we love so deeply.