Deja Vu

Deja vu: a feeling of having already experienced the present situation.

My thesis from my masters in English program is titled, “The Unheard New Negro Woman: History through Literature” and it explores the literature from the Harlem Renaissance with a focus on black people passing for white, motherhood, and lynchings. I completed this research in August of 2015 and I worked on it for several years prior to its completion. My most memorable moment while conducting research was Trayvon Martin being killed as I read lynching plays at the beginning of my thesis research. This murder shook me to my core because it so closely mimicked the same lynchings and treatment that writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Dorothy West, Georgia Douglass Johnson, and Nella Larsen illustrated during the 1920s.

The feeling that I felt that day in 2012 as I watched the news broadcaster explain the tragic death of Trayvon Martin with tears pouring down my face is incomparable to what I feel now in 2020. Than, I felt a feeling of despair and anguish but this week as I watched protest erupt again due to yet another ruthless killing… I felt anger. These are modern day lynching and instead of bodies hanging from trees as Billie Holiday sung in “Strange Fruit” they instead lay in streets as they are broadcasted on all of the social media platforms. The poem below, “I, Too” by Langston Hughes was written in 1926 and it rings as loud as it did then today.

I, Too by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

I was first introduced to this poem in my Harlem Renaissance course during the fall of my masters in English program and it resonated so much that I have it tattooed on my right arm along with “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou and “A Dream Deferred” which is also by Hughes. They all embody my experience as a black woman in America with its highs, lows, and everything else in between. However, fear was not a word that I believed was included in my experience as a black woman when I first had the many words to those poems etched into my skin. Now, unfortunately it is. I am afraid for my community. My family. My students. As well as every single black man that I know. This fear is not because I doubt our power as black people but because I acknowledge how threatened others are by our existence alone.

“I too sing America” despite how you attempt to terrorize and torture us and we might bend but we will never ever break.