Radical Endurance Is Forged in the Fire

“To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.”

— James Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time

I ENTERED THE doctor’s office, met by the smiling face of the receptionist. “May I help you?” she asked, as I tried to maneuver my lips to smile to cover how terrible I was feeling. “I need to get tested.” She didn’t ask me what test I needed, or where I had come from, or what I was feeling. She checked me in and pointed me to the waiting area—a cold and lonely and familiar place.

I wondered if they knew how terrified I was for me, for my wife, for my son, for our baby not here yet. I wondered if they knew that my body was on fire, that my mind kept alternating between anger and regret for letting my friend in the house with no mask. I wondered if they knew how my stomach emptied the chopped carrots, old celery, and the warm chicken noodle soup into their clean toilet.

“Danté Stewart,” the nurse called out to me, “right this way.” I could hear my heartbeats through my ears as I took the steps through the cold and lonely and familiar clinic. She called in the other nurse. They took my pulse. They put the little white and blue device with the red numbers on my left middle finger. 97. Good. 106 bpm. My heart is racing. As I felt the blood pressure cuff tighten its grip on my arm, the nurses gave that look.

The doctor walked in about 15 minutes later. “Yep,” he said in the cold and lonely and familiar voice, “You’re positive.” My heart sunk. I could hear the beats in my ears again.

My mind, exhausted and hot, thought about all the other sick Americans like me. I thought of plastic barriers between bodies hoping to protect one from another. I thought of the touch we had missed, the dreams that were deferred, the meals never to be had, the kids locked up in rooms trying to get an education, the grocery workers who loved us, the nurses who loved us, the sanitation workers who loved us, the teachers who loved us. I thought of all of us and how sick we were and how hot we were and how lonely we were. I thought of how much our country had failed us.

I wonder if the country knows how terrified we were. I wonder if they knew how much we lost—how lonely, how sad, how hopeless, how exhausted.

I had read a recent Atlantic essay on the terrors associated with something that is trying to destroy you slowly from the inside. It does not care who you are. Its purpose is to destroy your body in the worst ways possible. I pulled out my journal to tell myself how much I was feeling and how much I didn’t like this feeling and how angry I was at myself for this feeling and how angry I was that so many had to feel this feeling and how many never made it to the other side to tell about it.

I’m lonely. I hate this anxiety. I’m nervous. I did some push-ups. I need to lose some weight. I’m not healthy. I’m feeling weird. I’m lightheaded. Not gonna lie, I’m a little scared. I still feel hot, I wrote day after day. Terrified.

Ten mornings and nights full of no sleep and cold feet and a racing heart and a hot body, and I am able to touch my wife and I am able to touch my son and I am able to drive in the car and feel the cool breeze come across my face.

I felt guilty as I scrolled through my Twitter feed and read how many Americans didn’t make it through. I was not rejoicing in the grandeur of my young body and its ability to recover and withstand what wants to destroy you. I was sad. So many didn’t make it. There is a story of their suffering that tries to diminish how terrified they were and how much we are failing them and how much we are failing us. I watched the “Faces of COVID” stories and saw all those beautiful faces and all those strong hearts and all of these mommas and daddies and friends and lovers become memorials of our love and our failure. I wanted better for us. I wanted us to not be forced to endure the worst of American greed and its insatiable desire to put profits over our dinners with each other, our hugs, our kisses, our late-night trips, our cutting up over card games, our lives when they were “normal. ”

But there is no normal for us. At least not for now or for the foreseeable future. This is the country that has been decided for us. This is the country that is as sick and as committed to destroying us and as unfamiliar as we know this virus to be to our bodies. We will have to learn how to breathe beyond the suffocation and live beyond the terror and make sense beyond the profits and find pleasure in the midst of the madness. We will have to be there for one another in ways we never imagined. For those of us who survive this—this pandemic, this constant assault on our humanity, these compounded traumas—we are together in the shattering of our hearts and our bodies into a million pieces. Can we imagine ourselves being better than the ways we have learned not to feel, not to care, not to remember, not to endure?

That’s the thing about growing up American: You grow up in a place as confused and as beautiful and as terrible as we all know ourselves to be.

What we hold onto

There’s an old King James Bible sitting on my bookshelf. It is black, dusty; the gold edging on the pages shines as light hits it. I don’t know what year it is from, but it is rugged. The jacket is missing, and the threads are unloosed from one another. It has been tried. It has traveled. Now it is with me, sitting here, containing words that conjure up memories of poetic sermons, sweaty mics smelling like old metal and stank breath, words that flowed from my momma’s mouth with a sort of normalcy I could never quite understand.

It was neither a new dialect nor was it ecstatic speech that carried with it a divine magic. It was her language, the language of my grandmother, the language of her mother, the language of all the Black folk between my old yellow house, my grandma’s red-brick house, and the white-stained brick church that told us we were somebody. It was the “talking book”—to hear it is to hear the voice of God in conversation with Black bodies in a land that has known neither God nor love nor Black bodies.

This past year, a year full of so much death and destruction, I’ve found myself returning to that old book, trying to find some language that would keep my feet planted under the shaking. The sicker I got, the more I read. Like so many people during this time, my heart is numb. My stomach churned as I watched George Floyd crying for his momma; my body trembled as I tried to find some way of making sense of the image of a little Black girl screaming “No Justice! No Peace!” in a country that allowed white boys with badges and white boys with Bibles and white boys with bullets to terrorize us all with impunity.

This past year has forced us to see discolored flags and torn flags and red flags and blue and black flags wave as young children wonder about themselves and wonder about a country that knows not commitment but lies. Black bodies pressed to the concrete, and gasping for breath, and trying to breathe, and trying to love flags whose image is not one of safety but of suffocation. White people in white houses and with white badges and with white bullets and with white ballots trying to keep the country more white and less free and more sick and less familiar. Old folk, young folk, rich folk, poor folk, gay folk, straight folk, medical folk, retail folk, sanitation folk, transportation folk, documented folk, undocumented folk, incarcerated folk, free folk, and all the folk in between, all these gasping for breath through masks inside cold hospital rooms and gasping for breath outside in dark, lonely places, trying to breathe because we learn to be terrible and to become addicted to things that kill us. We have learned to be American, but we have not learned how to love and to take one another’s future seriously.

Like everybody, I’ve been terrified. I’ve been trying to find hope, something more free, more loving, more just, better than what we’re offered.

So I returned to this book to say something to me. I cracked open the old, dusty pages. I didn’t go to that old Bible because it would convince me that the terrible things would eventually get better. No. I returned because I knew that there was something about these words that the old Black country folk held on to in the burning.

How to live in the waiting

To hope—to believe in the better, to believe in your future, to shout in the great fire as your country is burning, to stare down lions, to shake the foundations of the empire, to make meaning in the face of death, to fail, to create, to live and to love—this is the stuff of hope. It is sometimes giving it up to begin again. It is not an assent to a construct or a phrase that resigns oneself to nostalgia or myths or lies. It is the audacious belief that one’s body, one’s story, one’s future does not end in this moment, but shall live, rejoice, and be free.

When I think about my momma and how much she and all those Black folk held onto old stories, I don’t just see people who courageously shake kingdoms and who preach audacious messages of liberation. I also see people who know what it means to live with deep trauma and still love themselves enough to believe in their future. These prophets are women and men, even children, who are caught up in webs of violence, histories of oppressions, systems of dominance, and the ongoing struggle to make a life when life is messy and seems merciless, who learn how to not let horrific tragedy have their futures.

If there is hope to be found and to be had and to be given up on and to be picked back up again, it is in the waiting, the living, the moving, in spite of the ways we have failed to wait, it’s hard to live, and a struggle to move.

The three Hebrew boys that my momma loved to talk about didn’t simply dance through the fire, nor did they simply make it out of the same flames that consumed others. The miracle of this audacious narrative, and the audacity of my momma, and the audacity to stare down terror is also about how violent empires don’t have the last say over oppressed bodies. They may be able to enslave our people, plunder our resources, and construct great fires to destroy both our bodies and our stories, but at the end of the day we are liberated and shown to be powerful in the midst of the burning. Empires will not always win.

We endure. We endure when we give up on the lies and try to make something out of a place confused about us and itself. We endure when we love one another enough to create a world where our fellow neighbors are healed, are free, are not alone, are not complacent with the terrible ways we have learned to live with one another. We endure by knowing the things we lost may not come back—or if they do, they may never be the same, and that will have to be okay. We endure by letting go and moving on without crushing memories or crushing people. We endure by learning how to remember and how to be complete and how to be better. We endure together.

When the terror ends

Weeks after I recovered, I went back to my old house, the place where I grew up, the place that made me. Black rural South, the country. My son was playing the dirt just like I did. His face glowing, his white teeth glistening as he smiled at the way the white South Carolina dirt stayed under his fingernails like old friends. I walked into the house and told my momma about how much I missed all her good chicken and dirty rice, how I wanted to talk about being sick, and how happy I was to smell her turkey legs, and how happy I was to not be sick, and how happy I was to be home, and how happy I was for us, and how much I felt loved. She smirked. “The Lord is good,” she said. “The Lord is a healer and a keeper and will keep us through the fiery furnace.” She laughed. I laughed. We laughed together.

At that moment, we were not terrified anymore. I was not terrified. I saw my momma conjure up ancestral tongues and hot, sweaty sermons and lyrics and love songs. I saw her conjure up dark memories and broken dreams and bent bodies and epistles of love and liberation. I saw her like the prophets, trying to shake kingdoms and rock souls straight and straighten bodies back up again and love us in simple ways that cooled our bodies and warmed our spirits and stopped our trembling.

I saw the meaning. I saw the hope. I saw what I was looking for.

We shall not always suffer.
We shall not always be terrified.
We can shout.
We can dance.
We can love.
We live.
Loved.
Loved.
In the fire.