for being a black man. Like: Oh, you want to get shot in your chest 42 times? Be a baby’s daddy? Like, I’M A MAN hanging around your neck, like I’M A MAN hanging? You want to do that? Be a beasterized sexualized hugeman? Like, bars between you and me and roped soap? You want to be disposable, bro? Like, be the first to go?

He made my desire Other. The act grotesque, as he translated the disgust he saw on his friend’s face. But what I clearly witnessed was my brother’s disapproval, his forehead lined with admonition— warning me about the dangers of asserting unconventional sexual desire.
 
He’s driving this car and this conversation and I’m a captured audience. The disgust: pleasuring woman, woman pleasuring woman on period, woman on period, a bloody pussy.
 
Is this what you want to do as a lesbian?
 
I do not say,
Is this what you will do as a heterosexual man?

How can you not love the pussy in all she shapes and forms. For the water she can produce, for the life she sheds in cycles, for she does not need to play war to know the letting for she is the gateway and first port to life.
 
I was once again activated into flesh and tagged wrong.
 
Cars have had a terrifying effect on me. For one, I was hit by one. My brother, only a 12-year old, thought it best I cross the two-way street to go to the apartment building where my mom lived. This was not the first time. Cross the street, run to the building, buzz Mother D and she’ll come down and bring us the cab’s fare.
 
Now my brother is the driver. Twenty-three years and misbelieving he’s supposed to be a father figure or male role model and so he’s lost himself in religion.
 
Then there were the vans. The blue vans. The blue van with tinted windows that were said to circle around schools. Eyewitness News said it. Daily News said it. There were sketches of men’s faces that were lifeless, nonthreatening. They were drawings, not bone and flesh, not calloused hands made of man-strength that could snatch you from the sidewalks you walked everyday, take you from the family who stay getting on your last nerve.
 
I walked holding my younger brother’s hand and flinched in fear when he let go and went running to a friend—the air cold where his kept mine warm.
 
This brother, driving the car, I’ve always felt side-by-side with. Like a parallel construction, like Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Avenue. My first girlfriend would often say to me, You’re brother tried to kill you. After I show her the burn on my arm. After I’m exhausted and in pain from the tooth that got knocked out when I was younger—this brother pushed me to the ground. There are 17 surgeries I have had in my twenties to have a normal smile. The girlfriend is so sincere about this observation, so sincere.
 
We are driving. And there is something dead between us. Something dead like the men in the white vans that snatch grown women who are going in and out of the corner store on MacArthur Avenue in Oakland. A Facebook friend, concerned for all her ladies, tells us to be careful. They will take us and drug us and traffick our bodies for sex.
 
Do I turn to my brother and ask, Do you want to be like that as a heterosexual man? This legacy of stealing and selling women bodies in exchange for your own good?
 
And when we go missing who is there for us? The best thing to steal is a black girl, says bell hooks, because hers is an expendable body: He can invade and violate a black female body with no fear of retribution and retaliation.* Too many men, regardless of color, is all about my pussy. Brothers included.
 
Brothers like to say, They don’t care about us? “They” being those white people in power. But do you, brother? Do you care about us?
 
All those black girls gone missing in Washington D.C. Young, adolescent, high schoolers. Their MISSING photos are cute selfies. Some have changed to does. How many cars transported them? Who are the dicks involved? Pimps and politicians, men in power, in money are stealing and drugging them, putting his rangoon into some walnut’s ass. They scream all night in the basement of a pizza slice. Their backs hysterically arched, they will snap off into stronger compartmentalized versions of themselves. One self will not know about the other self, and they will not greet. 

Like, hello, brother, is that what you want to do as a hetero man?
 
When that R. Kelly video came out in 2002, with sexual predator R. Kelly pissing on a young girl, you heard the brothers’ voices spill from barbershops and wherever: She don’t look like a 14-year old. If the Daily News published a still from the video, the child’s body pornographically visible, while her face’s redacted. You take away the “r” and you easily become a bother, and Kelly means war.
 
It is justified. She doesn’t look 14 and what does a 14-year-old black girl look like, brother? And when she doesn’t fit your description, you imagine other things for her? Is that what you want to do as a hetero man, bro, use a black girl’s body as a urinal and say, She didn’t look human. Her back went porcelain and my dick took a leak. It’s the kind of wound that keeps me alert to every potential doorway through which I might enter as a friend, sister, or woman, but leave as an Other, like a bitch or a ho.** How easily brother is “rob the other.”
 
Have you taken a compassionate long look at our faces? It reminds me of the time we were in Disney World and there was a guess- your-age booth. Mother D pushed me ahead, said, “Guess.” I was 5’9 and 12-years-old. And for most of my life, because they are looking at my height, they’ve put five to eight years on me. But this guy, this guy, looked in my face, took note of my short time lived in this body. He said my exact age and I realized then no one has looked at me wholly. Always fragmented in another’s gaze and Mother D was hoping too he would default to not seeing me. 

People across gender and races see black girls as more adultlike than their white peers. Left to navigate situations by themselves, because they are “grown,” and their bodies look “ready,” we are easily manipulated by men.** I heard brothers say, What she doing  in that situation anyway. When will you be the hero and not a sandwich?
 
Why aren’t any questions directed to R. Kelly—why are we buying
his records, brother, playing his songs, brother, letting him produce, bro,
why are all those child molestation and sexual violence cases settled out of court and the black girls and women are gagged.
 
What’s he doing in that situation, bruh? They all can’t be hos reminding R. Kelly of his Jeep. All that knocking he’s doing is the same-old colonial enterprise, upgraded for present-day. Knocking ‘cause he wants to get inside. But why was he set out in the first place?
 
Brother, let’s not drive these seen-it routes, the yellow lines are hepatitic.


*bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Print. pp.64

**Tressie Mcmillian Cottom, “How We Make Black Girls Grow Up Too Fast.” New York Times. 29 July 2017.