You must
always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, that graphs,
the charts, the regressions all land with great violence, upon the body.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates
New York Times bestselling author
This is my block.
That is my seat. Here is my
assigned area to do this or that. This
type of dialogue in a penitentiary setting is the repetitive torture of being
dead and alive to know it. A mind
without a body, a fighting spirit with no host to influence.
Some days I wonder why exercising is even on my agenda:
push-ups, leg lifts, and running the stairs.
For what? To maintain a physique
that belongs to someone other than myself?
The paradox of losing my body is a psychological monster.
The arrest warrant reveals that my body was
snatched on a cold December evening in 1995. But a deep introspection from a
death row prison cell 20 years later, leads me to believe that my body was lost
long before the date on the state’s document of ownership.
I spent my most formative years “reppin” Poplar Street. The violence that was played out up and down
Poplar Street felt like a natural existence as long as I kept waking up. My home girl, Eleanora Fagan (Billy Holiday) once
exhaled the truth in a song called, “Strange Fruit.”
She spoke of black bodies
staining the leaves of Poplar trees. And
here I am, claiming ownership of a street that bore the name of the same tree,
which showcased the decimation, brutalization and humiliation of black lives that
mattered.
At that time, North Philly was the only world that
mattered. For the longest it was all I
thought I needed to know.
I guess it’s
because I was ripe fruit rolling through those streets, a body that was lost.
Simply put; I was fruit for crows to pluck, except these scavengers made bodies
fly with gats and batons.
These were crows that would impede the progression of an ice
cream truck to do bodily harm to its driver.
Birds of prey that peck away at the psyche of a ten-year-old African
American boy forcibly placed in a jail cell beneath a sold out stadium.
This same body survived long enough to seek refuge in the
U.S. Navy. An anatomy suited for the
concrete and asphalt foundations of urban America, grew “sea legs” as a means of
navigating the mood swings of the Pacific Ocean. While on dry land, it desecrated itself with
alcohol, marijuana and countless twirls with heterosexual relations.
Yeah, my body was lost long before it was destined to
succumb to a syringe filled with poison; “great violence” upon a body that
hasn’t been mine for quite some time.
Every day gets more painful living without a body.
The memories of what was, can only keep you pain-free
for so long. Therefore, this throng of lost bodies – the body of death row –
has become a surrogate anatomy, in which my mind can flourish and my soul can
be nourished with the small increments of compassion.
This is the truth of a walking corpse becoming a
life-changing experience – standing between the world and me. I am no longer lost, only misplaced. I have found who I was meant to be.
100,
MannofStat
Copyright © 2015 by Leroy Elwood Mann
