new single - recovery

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i won’t let you make me hate you

I didn’t know the name the pastor called, but I knew the pastor well enough to recognize when he stumbled over it. He disguised the misstep well within dramatic flourish, as if carried along by the movement of the Spirit of God. “Please welcome my friend, Gemikal.”

A Black man one row in front of me rose, and a kind of silence filled the room that only happens when many breaths catch at once. This was some new and strange liturgy. Something shifted in the atmosphere—barely discernible, and if discerned, barely comfortable. I glanced around for others, but there were none.

Every few months, a new cluster of faces adorned the altar, ready to take membership vows to the church. This happened often enough that I had the words memorized. The throng on the stage would say to the throng in the folding chairs: “We’ve memorized the criteria. Please admit us,” to which the throng in the folding chairs would reply: “We will take care of you on the condition you never leave.” And that would be that. It was always a throng. We were a fast-growing church and had been for years. When I had taken my vows half a decade earlier, over twenty others had joined me, and such were our numbers at every receiving, until today.

The man found a place on the stage and stood frozen, hands folded in front of khaki pants, toes hanging over the edge of the platform. Sidestepping the pulpit, the pastor smiled and wrapped his arm around the man’s shoulders. His introduction took longer than normal, full of vague flattery.

The man gazed out. Every gaze that returned was white.

lyrics:

took a loan from your knuckle bone

blood in the light of day

but if i’m going down

you’re going down with me

at five years old, i was told

you use your fists to pray

caught up in a country

that demands violence from me

well i can see the future

stitches and sutures

but i’ll set my mind loose

let me show you how we do when

we bring down heaven

i was born a lover

you’re never gonna make me hate you

and i was raised to recover

well, grams had hope, momma had hope

and they handed it down to me

so i believe in recovery

i believe in recovery

you better know what’s in your bones

what deep in your dna

‘cause if i’m getting free

you’re getting free with me

i can see the future

stitches and sutures

but you know, I can set my own mind loose

ain’t gotta prove that we look like heaven

i was born a lover

you’re never gonna make me hate you

and i was raised to recover

well, grams had hope, momma had hope

and they handed it down to me

so i believe in recovery

i believe in recovery

i can see the future

and there’s enough love for you and me

i can see the future

there’s enough dignity

i was born a lover

you’re never gonna make me hate you

and i was raised to recover

well, grams had hope, momma had hope

and they handed it down to me

so i believe in recovery

i believe in recovery

i believe

i been places, i seen things and

i believe

in the kingdom coming

i believe

Earlier that week, halfway across the country, Colin Kaepernick sat alone for the first time on his team’s bench while his teammates stood for the national anthem. In the same way that Emmett Till’s name weighed heavy on the mind of Rosa Parks during her famous seated protest, I imagine there were names that haunted Kap, too.

Trayvon Martin. Mike Brown. Freddie Gray. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland.

Two months prior to Kaepernick’s protests, videos of the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling went viral—at least, as the Christ would say, for those who had eyes to see it. As I sat that Sunday morning watching the man named Gemikal repeat promises to fight for the purity of the church local and universal, I wondered how many among our congregation had ears to hear and recognize the names Philando, Alton, or Emmett.

Three weeks later, Terence Crutcher would be murdered by police on a highway. Three months later, 81% of the people who took their own vows to lovingly support Gemikal would vote for Donald Trump as president of the United States despite his well-documented history of racism.

Once the benediction was given, the 81 and the 12 came to shake Gemikal’s hand. I was one of them. He mentioned looking for a job adjacent to my field and I made a mental note to send him some contact info. Facebook messages about jobs turned into friendly get-to-know-yous over Flipside chicken plates, where we unknowingly inaugurated a twice-a-month dinner tradition we maintained more or less up until the pandemic. Enough shared meals can often make family, and it did for us.

Gemikal writes magic and speaks peace. He embodies both immense pain and immense hope together in a way that diminishes the reality of neither. These both were his birthrights—things he inherited by right of being Black in a country that demands violence from those who are called Black, and by right of being the son of his mother, and the grandson of his Grams.

To be sure, violence was a language he became fluent in early. It’s a language that proved essential to his survival, and one he has not forgotten how to speak, though well-acquainted with its costs. It was upon this language that his world communicated to him an essential truth: that we all are—all of us—bound together. We’re connected in such a way that his destruction meant the destruction of his abuser, and that his liberation meant the liberation of all.

◊◊◊

You retrieve me from the abyss

only at your own convenience.

Destroying my identity,

What I stand for is neglected.

Your hands, groping and squeezing me

Until I grow warm with a fever.

Only to be ignored . . . put away 

For another time you’ll want me again.

And the cycle will forever continue 

Forcibly using me . . . in public or private

Until I’m the one that’s left empty.

- Gemikal Prude

◊◊◊

When I asked Gemikal if he wanted to become a collaborator on the Human Becoming project, he enthusiastically agreed. It would take over a year to hone in on what would become Recovery. The record asks the question: where do you belong? Who are your people? And this song—the penultimate on the record—answers it by showing us his family: the potential legacies of both his brothers in each verse, and in the chorus, the resilient hope of his mother and grandmother.

As was the case with many songs on this record, the writing process coincided with a tumultuous time in my own life, and this song especially seemed—I use this term loosely—prophetic. In other ways, this song reminds me today of the many dinners at Flipside and Brother’s BBQ in which I had to learn from my brother how to live a life without succumbing to trauma, how to find hope when those I loved turned their backs on me, and how to resist allowing the hatred of others to poison my own heart.

I was listening to what has since become my favorite episode of On Being with Krista Tippett, entitled “Where Does It Hurt?” with guest Ruby Sales. In it, Sales discusses a Spiritual once sung by enslaved peoples in the United States, who communicated their refusal to allow white hatred to malform their spirits: “I love everybody. I love everybody in my heart, and you can’t make me hate you, and you can’t make me hate you in my heart.” Gemikal, having lived before the face of white hatred from the day of his birth, intuited this spiritual principle as a way to assert his own dignity and power as a human being, at the very least, to himself—even if no one around him would. When others demanded, “Hate as we do,” he replied, “I was born a lover.”

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Blake Mundellrecovery, courier, new music, black lives matter, my brothers keeper1 Comment