The Black Hourglass

A memoir piece that meditates on the warped relationship between Blackness, time, and mortality

Black people, I would argue, exist more on the spatial plane than the temporal. We are a people whose past has been completely obliterated into fragments of smeared remains. We are a people who must trace our historical movement around a circular track, spinning from place to place awash in never-ending vertigo. Somewhere in that vertigo, we lost our sense of Time, or rather, we discarded it out of self-preservation because waiting and hoping gets you killed. I think of Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “It’s so hard for me to believe in [time]. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay…Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays.” Sethe doesn’t believe in Time, but I would rather say we have erected our own plane of temporal existence, Colored People’s Time—or “CeePeeTee”—in the wake of what we had to throw away. 

CPT mandates that we must forgive each other’s chronic lateness with an accepting snort because any anger would be like blaming our ancestors. The conversion rate for CPT is “function start time” plus two or three or four hours—the math is shaky. Basically, don’t expect the aunties or uncles or cousins to arrive at the holiday cookout until the burgers are off the grill and the hot water cornbread is sizzling. 

On the third day of July when I was seven, my mom’s family held a cookout for the Fourth of July. Don’t mistake our gathering for celebration—the Fourth of July for most Black people in America is just an excuse to eat and drink and forge some sort of levity out of a holiday that argues against the very narrative of our existence. As the sound of the doorbell rang throughout her mother’s house, my mom curled her fingers around my right shoulder and pressed her palm into my skin. Her grip was half a warning for me to “act right” and half an assurance of her promise that “they wouldn’t be here too long.” We both knew that the second part was a lie, Black people and Time just don’t mix. 

“We’ve got it, mom!” My mom’s raised voice stretched around the corner and back into the kitchen where Grandma sat glued to the dining table chairs. Dropping a kiss on the crown of my small head and intertwining her fingers with mine, she led me the rest of the way down the stairs. With each plop of my foot, the stairs groaned in protest. Two more steps off the landing and I wrenched the first of the double entry doors open, letting in a gust of hot summer air filled with the smell of Motor City gasoline and dandelions. A wrench of the second door revealed Uncle Larry’s yellow-tooth smile and bald head. 

“Kiddoooo! Oh, you’re so big now! Uncle Larry is going to have to do something about that. Don’t expect any greens with your dinner tonight.” I curled my mouth into a pursed-lip smile. I liked greens. 

“Hi, Uncle Larry,” I said. “Come on in.” 

I walked out of the vestibule and back into the house, letting Uncle Larry follow me in. 

“How ya doin’, Roz?” He said, wrapping her in a tight embrace, too tight for her liking I knew. 

“I’m good, Larry. Good to see you.” 

Uncle Larry is a strange man. He’s my mom’s oldest sister Linda’s husband, but I know now that all those times he showed up separate from my Aunt Linda were hints of their impending divorce. His breath blows hot from underneath his bushy mustache, and he always gets a little too close when he’s talking to someone. It makes it worse that he thinks he’s the funniest guy alive. He’ll make a joke about his daughter Amber’s “white baby daddy,” and each chuckle sends a hotness that reeks of garlic and milk into my face. 

“Camryn, go sit with your grandma. She misses you. Tell her about how well you did in school this year.” 

I nodded my head once as I set out towards the kitchen, and a staticky tingle rose in my belly. I turned left past the knobby white door I’ve never opened, right past the painterly picture of two cherries and a banana, and smiled big for Grandma to see once I crossed the threshold into the kitchen. 

“Come ‘ere sugar, sit next to Grandma,” she said as she tugged the pink knit blanket tighter around her shoulders. Her wiry grey hair curled loosely out of her head to form a short afro. Her small frame hunched a bit over the dining table as she pinched her round cheeks into a smile. 

“Hi, Grandma.” 

“Hi, sugar. So, how’s school?”

“School is good. I’m starting to read chapter books, and I got all A’s again.” 

“Grandma could not be more proud of you, sugar. You always remember that. Don’t matter that you’re beautiful. You are smart as a whip.”

“Thank you, Grandma.” My cheeks went hot and all of a sudden I couldn’t think of anything else to say. 

I wrapped my hands around the light-colored wood of the chair and tugged it towards me making a low screech against the linoleum floors. I creased the edges of my eyes in discomfort as I plopped onto the seat still covered in the same plastic it must have come from the store in. I sat there quietly burying my left hand into my lap and busying my right by picking up stray grains of salt—or it could have been sugar—with my clammy fingertip. Grandma’s kitchen always smelled faintly of warm lemons, and sitting there made me crave my snack of boredom: a sliced lemon with salt sprinkled on top. I wish then that I had breathed in the warm lemon smell and thought to ask Grandma why her kitchen always smelled like that. Maybe then she would have told me a sage story from her youth about how she always used to eat raw lemons, and maybe then I would have smiled finally knowing that my weird habit is bound to Grandma, to my lineage. Maybe then we would have smiled together, giggling about how fun it is to eat an entire lemon in front of someone and relish in their shock when they see that we don’t even pucker our lips or scrunch our noses from the sour taste.  

I can’t blame my seven-year-old self too much, though, for not speaking up more. To this day I still get so nervous to even call my older relatives on the phone and wish them a happy birthday. I have a really hard time talking to people with authority, and age, to me, is the biggest determining factor of who possesses that authority. I think it’s because I have chronic “youngest” syndrome. I am the youngest of my immediate family—my only sibling, John, is almost nine years older than me, and my parents had me when they were 40—so I always struggled to keep up in their conversations about stocks and politics. I’m also the youngest first cousin out of my mom’s entire side of the family which only amplified my fear of saying the wrong thing around a bunch of adults at Thanksgiving dinner. I write, now, to let out all those thoughts I’ve had listening in on “big girl conversations.” I write to finally let out that big breath I’ve been holding in because my fear of running out of time to share my story, my family’s story, has outgrown my perfectionism just enough to unlock my fingers to type. 

Still sitting in Grandma’s kitchen, I look up in a jolt as I hear my cousins Chris, Amber, Brandon, Brooklyn, Bryce, and Miesha all stomp through the door at once. Hours late, as expected. Grandma lets out a long huff from her nostrils, but that was all. She always kept to herself in that corner of hers—at least she did for the years that I knew her, late in her life when her joints had hardened and lungs had tired—jumping into conversations to add her two cents. Her voice was coarse but gentle. I can hear her telling my dad to “take care of my baby for me, John, like you always do,” or “I can’t wait to tell old George how good you’ve been.” 

I never got the chance to meet Grandpa George because he died of colon cancer when my mom was a sophomore at Spelman College, where she met and fell in love with my dad, in 1982. From what my mom and aunts and uncle have told me, though, I know that Grandpa was a tough one. He was a disciplinarian whose presence loomed large not only because he was 6’4” but because it was his way or no way. His children could not take one step out of the house without being dressed “to a T,” they were to smile and give a firm handshake to any adult they met, and school always, always, came first. His austerity was for good reason, though. Just existing as Black people in 1960s Detroit could get you killed—it still could. Whenever my mom tells me to fix my hair or put on something nice, I sometimes think of Grandpa and wonder if he had the same tinge of worry in his eyes when he said these things. Making sure his children were never even a millimeter out of line was Grandpa’s way of love and protection. His kids were going to survive if he had anything to say about it. 

Grandpa’s “no nonsense” attitude applied especially to his feelings about his children’s dating lives. My favorite story about Grandpa is also a story about Uncle Larry. Aunt Linda was the first to start dating, and from the moment Uncle Larry knocked on their front door when she turned 16, the whole family seemed to stand in the way of their union. Any time that Uncle Larry would call, my aunt Sandra would pick up the landline in the kitchen and listen in on the conversation for anything of note to report back to Grandpa. Their uncelebrated love story developed for years until one day Uncle Larry got the courage to come knocking on the front door after multiple teeth-clenched warnings from Grandpa not to. This time, he proposed with a shiny ring, but before Aunt Linda could even mutter the word “yes,” Grandpa took the ring, fetched his hammer from the garage, and smashed the ring to pieces on the front steps. The pair got married anyway, but Grandpa wore his disapproval emphatically. Uncle Larry is everything that Grandpa made sure not to be.

Grandma died in 2011 when I was eight years old, and ever since we have spent every holiday at my Aunt Sandra’s house in Farmington Hills instead of at Grandma’s house on Cherrylawn Ave. I think something was wrong with her kidneys, or maybe it all just summed up to old age. Either way, I feel at peace with those causes because, to me, it means she died a white death. And, to me, white death reaks of white privilege. In elementary school, my white classmates' grandparents were always just dying of old age. It was a natural part of life that left the living feeling sad but was never really a bad thing. They were at peace. Black people, however, live in fear that their cause of death will not get to be old age. We have always had an increased fear that our death will not be our own but rather belong to the myth that Blackness is not perpetually under prosecution. 2011 was five years after police officers killed Black grandmother Kathryn Johnston in her home in Atlanta, Georgia, three years before a police officer killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice while he was holding a toy gun, and only two years before civilian George Zimmerman killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. I wish I didn’t have to get to know Grandma through bedtime stories after she already passed. I wish I asked her about her life as we sat there at the kitchen table instead of losing my attention in those tiny crystals. I wish I had gotten a glimpse into the world in her head, of life working three jobs and raising children on Burnette Street. But I am at peace if that means that Grandma got to die of old age more than any of those wishes. 

____

Burnette was a quiet street on the East side of Detroit sandwiched between two busier streets, Grand River and Chicago. It had tall green lamp posts that turned on promptly at dusk, telling the children it was time for dinner. Every single Black mother on that street must have said something along the lines of “you’re behind better be running inside as soon as that street light turns on, or else I’ll wear that behind out!” Without that warning, those children would have probably stayed outside until the birds sang. CPT courses through our veins even at that early age. 

One day in June 2020 when we were still in lockdown from the Coronavirus pandemic and watching George Floyd protests sweep through downtown Atlanta, my mom told me a story about how one time, when she was five years old, she and her four siblings had to run inside well before the lampposts ever turned on. It was a hot night in late July 1967, and there had been word of a bunch of “us” getting arrested by the police outside of some drinking club. Businesses reeled from lootings and fires burst out in the city’s center, and it didn’t take long for the National Guard to storm in. My mom said that evening she, her siblings—Linda, Vicky, Sandra, and Reggie,—and all the other kids of Burnette had been riding their bikes up and down Grand River, Chicago, and Burnette burning out their energy. Their giggles ricocheted off the houses over how fast they were going or about how fun it was to lift the front wheel of their bike off the pavement and pop a wheely until they heard the distant voices of their parents yelling their names from their front porches. My mom, sitting on her hot pink banana-seat bike not too far down the street from their house, watched Grandma fling open their front door and scream “LindaVickySandraReggieRosalindddd come inside right now!” Mrs. Robinson from across the street had called and said the tanks were coming. 

My mom had to hide under her bed until she could no longer hear the clanking grumble of the tanks crawling down Cherrylawn. Once they did, my mom said they just sat down for dinner, a wordless dinner as if the sounds of their voices had been sucked up by a vacuum. The type of dinner where the clinks of silverware against ceramic plates sounded more like mallets against brass gongs. After that night, every dinner for the next week was shared away from the windows with the lights out to ward off any looters and avoid any stray bullets from government snipers perched on neighbors’ roofs. They couldn’t even turn the stove on at night because the light from the flame could lure in looters, so Grandma made dinner during the day—an “eat what ya have” meal of canned spam, sardines, and hot water cornbread. But my mom was only five, she reminded me, and that’s where her memory ends. Kids don’t think much further past the present moment and the moment immediately next. 

What I do know from stories shared over Thanksgiving dinners is that Grandma and Grandpa moved their five kids from Burnette Street to Cherrylawn Avenue not even a year after the riots. Urban renewal efforts had already torn through many of Detroit’s historically Black neighborhoods, forcing families out of their homes and business owners out of their storefronts to make room for the white middle class and bulging freeways. Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr.’s “Detroit Plan” of 1946 had sprouted fat veins under the city’s streets, fat enough to beat out the young roots of Black people only just beginning to grow. 

But I wonder, now, what Grandma and Grandpa must have thought that night in 1967. Did Grandma’s heart sink when Mrs. Robinson said the words? Did she and Grandpa hide under their bed too, fearing for the future of the family they had built despite the odds? Did she ever think, in all those terrible days after, that the shadow that stretched from the trunk of the magnolia tree at the end of the street was another tank coming to send them back into hiding? These are the questions I wish I could have asked her, but decades ago my ancestors tossed out Time, so I couldn't have known how little sand was left at the top of Grandma’s hourglass.