The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America by D. Watkins

Author:D. Watkins
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Autobiography, Non-Fiction, Social Justice, Writing, Race, African American, Politics, Social Psychology, Essays, Memoir, Social Movements
ISBN: 9781510703407
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2015-09-07T14:00:00+00:00

Too Poor for Pop Culture

Miss Sheryl, Dontay, Bucket-Head, and I compiled our loose change for a fifth of vodka. I’m the only driver, so I went to get it. On the way back, I laughed at the local radio stations going on and on and on, still buzzing about Obama taking a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral.

Who cares?

No really, who? Especially since the funeral was weeks ago.

I arrived, fifth of Black Watch clenched close to me like a newborn with three red cold-cups covering the top. We play spades over at Miss Sheryl’s place in the Douglass Housing Projects every few weeks. (Actually, Miss Sheryl’s name isn’t really Miss Sheryl. But I changed some names here, because I’m not into embarrassing my friends.) Her court is semi-boarded up, third world, and looks like an old ad for The Wire. Even though her complex is disgustingly unfit, it’s still overpopulated with tilting dope fiends, barefoot children, pregnant smokers, grandmas with diabetes, tattoo-faced tenants, and a diverse collection of Zimmermans made up of street dudes and housing police, looking itchy to shoot anyone young and black and in Nike.

Two taps on the door, it opened, and the gang was all there—four disenfranchised African Americans posted up in a 9-by-11 prison-size tenement, one of those spots where you enter the front door, take a half-step and land in the yard. I call us disenfranchised, because Obama’s selfie with some random lady or the whole selfie movement in general is more important than we are and the conditions where we dwell.

Surprisingly, as tight as Miss Sheryl’s unit may be, it’s still more than enough space for us to receive affordable joy from a box of fifty-cent cards and a rail bottle.

“A yo, Michelle was gonna beat on Barack for taking dat selfie with dat chick at the Mandela wake! Whateva da fuck a selfie is! What’s a selfie, some type of bailout?” yelled Dontay from the kitchen, dumping Utz chips into a cracked, flowery bowl. I was placing cubes into all of our cups and equally distributing the vodka like, “Some for you and some for you . . .”

“What the fuck is a selfie?” said Miss Sheryl.

“When a stupid person with a smartphone flicks themselves and looks at it,” I said to the room.

She replied with a raised eyebrow, “Oh?”

It’s amazing how the news seems so instant to most from my generation—with our iPhones, Wi-Fi, tablets, and iPads—but actually it isn’t. The idea of information being class-based as well became evident to me when I watched my friends talk about a weeks-old story as if it happened yesterday.

Miss Sheryl doesn’t have a computer and definitely wouldn’t know what a selfie is. Her cell runs on minutes and doesn’t have a camera. Like many of us, she’s too poor to participate in pop culture. She’s on public assistance, lives in public housing, and scrambles for odd jobs to survive.

Sheryl lost her job as a cook moments after she lost her daughter to heroin, her son, Meaty, to crack, and her kidneys to soul food.

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