The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus

Author:Junauda Petrus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

AFUA

ANCESTOR SONG FOR THE BROKENHEARTED

As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. My mom, dad, brothers, and I used to go to the top of our apartment building on 143rd Street and look through a big telescope that my dad found at a pawnshop downtown. On a clear night, our family would take this telescope, our dinner, and a boom box up to the roof, and we would take turns looking at the stars and planets and moon while we listened to tapes by Smokey Robinson, Chaka Khan, Earth Wind & Fire, and John Coltrane and others. I used to love it so much, I never wanted to go back inside. I was so obsessed, my mom got me a book all about astronauts and space, planets and stars for my ninth birthday.

In the book, I was inspired seeing the women and men of NASA in orange jumpsuits hover in tight and orderly space. They would travel in space capsules and shuttles with dials, buttons, and levers that they knew how to use to command the travel of these vessels through the last frontier. They could watch our planet Earth, floating in the distance, suspended in an expanse of quiet blackness. Our planet seemed inherently gentle when viewed from space, a rounded, smooth and simple Eden, innocently hovering in galactic murkiness. Maybe, as a kid, I subconsciously thought distance would make the heart grow fonder of the life I had. The reality of our planet. My hood could get fuzzier and more tender, the more distant I got in my spaceship.

Home on Earth was Harlem, glory of creative Blackness and revolution that, in the 1970s and 1980s of my childhood, became depressed and embattled, transformed from a tight community of Black folks into a province of suffering under broken dreams and high unemployment. Many of our families were susceptible to the escape, violence, and enterprise of crack cocaine, and my dad devastatingly succumbed to this addiction. My mom, brothers, and I were drained in the mayhem of his jonesing. Stuff we loved, including the telescope, disappeared, and his gentle nature mutated into the anxiety of addiction. I saw my mom try to love and be united with a man who was shackled to his own destruction. My brothers and I all coped in our own way; I mainly escaped to the streets. And to my best friend James’s house.

But more than one thing can be true. In all of that heavy, I still remember times when my dad would be clean, and home was a place that was filled with the love of our parents, and the cacophony of our joy and laughter. I understood from an early age that people have many sides and aspects to them. And as I have grown older, I have been grateful for astrology in helping me love and see my dad and mom in their complexity and cosmology.

On death row, in some ways, I feel like I did become the astronaut of my childhood aspirations.

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