(ThyBlackMan.com) I have buried friends. Sat across thick glass from men I love too, watched them grow gray under hard fluorescent light while the world kept on turning without them in it. So when I speak to you now, understand the words are coming from a heart that has already grieved more times than it should, and from eyes that have watched too many bright boys go dim before their season ever arrived.
A jury down in Texas just handed a teenager 35 years. Karmelo Anthony was seventeen when he reached for a blade at a school track meet and drove it into the chest of another child, Austin Metcalf, seventeen himself. Before that rainy morning was finished, one mama had lost her baby for good, and another mother stood before jurors asking them to show mercy to what was left of hers. Two households broken in the space of a few breaths. Both of them, in their own fashion, condemned to carry the weight of it the rest of their living days.
Now, I already know how the wider world wants to slice this thing up. People have turned it into a shouting contest about color, about who put hands on who first, about which corner you are supposed to go stand in. I have no use for that racket. My business here is with the youngblood reading this with his whole road still stretched out in front of him. Hear me the way you would hear your granddaddy if he set you down on the porch steps and cupped your face in both his rough hands.
Listen close. The whole thing started over a tent. Rain was falling, somebody told somebody else to get up and move, the words went hot fast, a push came, and a seventeen year old is now resting in the cold ground. That is the entire tale. No grand cause sat underneath it. Glory never lived inside it either. Just a little quarrel that two children swelled up into something neither one could ever pull back.
I need you to feel the size of that. Not the headline, not the verdict, the actual heft of it. A boy who will never come home for supper. Another who will spend the best years a man is given inside a cell, counting other folks’ holidays through a small window. He goes in a teenager and, if mercy comes early, comes out near fifty, with the strength gone out of his back and the spring gone out of his step, a stranger to the world he left behind.
Here is the part I beg you to tattoo on the inside of your skull. The thing that turned an ugly minute into a funeral and a courtroom was the object in that bag. Take the blade out of the picture and what are you left holding. A shove. Some cuss words. Maybe a busted lip, maybe a bruise to the ego, maybe a coach yanking two hot heads apart. By suppertime it would have been a story they told with a laugh years down the line. Tempers cool. Vanity heals. A wound to the body can mend. But steel does not forgive, and it surely does not care who was right.
That is exactly why I want this verdict to put a chill in you. Because the one who lost everything was not some monster the rest of us could never resemble. He was a regular kid having a regular bad moment, the same kind every single one of us has lived through. Wet and irritated, somebody got in his face, and that hot knot in his chest flared up like a struck match. The only difference between him and a thousand other angry teenagers that same day is that he reached into a bag instead of walking off mad. One reach. That is the whole gap between a free man and a number on a state list.
Let me tell you something the young rarely believe. The strong one is almost never the fellow swinging. He is the man who turns and goes while the crowd is hollering for blood. It takes nothing to throw a punch. A coward can throw a punch. Any scared child can pull out a weapon and feel ten feet tall for half a second. What takes a real spine is letting somebody think they won, swallowing that bitter lump in your throat, and choosing your mama’s peace over your bruised name. Anybody can prove he is dangerous. Precious few can prove they are wise.
The biggest lie that has buried more of our sons than any sickness whispers you must answer every disrespect, that you can never let a thing slide, that a fellow who walks off is somehow less of a man. I am here, with all my gray, to tell you that whisper is a snake. It does not love you. Won’t visit you in lockup, neither. Never once does it sit beside your mother on a hard plastic chair while she runs clean out of things to say. Nor will it write you when the appeals dry up. That snake used you and slithered right along to fill the next young ear.
Consider the arithmetic a second. The state said 35 years, with parole somewhere near the halfway mark. Picture it. Children you have not fathered yet. A wedding you will never throw. That phone call when your grandmother passes and you cannot get to her service. Fresh morning air you cannot taste whenever the notion strikes you. All of it forfeited, not for some cause worth dying over, but for a tent and a temper and a single bad reach on a rainy day. There is no version of that story you could ever tell where the trade makes a lick of sense.
And do not breeze past the other house in all this. A twin brother who shared a face with the child in the ground now wakes up alone in a quiet that will never lift. His father stood in that courtroom trembling with a sorrow so heavy it came out sounding like fury, because some grief runs too deep for gentle words. Two mothers will travel toward two different kinds of graves, one made of earth and one made of steel doors, and neither will ever stop aching. When that blade comes out, it is never only two boys it cuts. It tears clean through everybody who ever loved either one of them, and it keeps tearing for generations down the line.
I have to say a hard word about that weapon some of you keep telling yourselves you carry for protection. It does not protect you. Hear me. The very thing you slip into your pocket to feel safe is the same thing that stands up in a courtroom and convicts you. You think you are arming yourself against the world, and all the while you are quietly building the case that locks you away from it.
Let me lay this race business to rest, just between us. Grief has no color. A prison bunk has no color. Both of those mamas cried the same salt water, and both of those caskets, the wooden one and the one made of years, will swallow a mother’s joy with the same cold indifference. The world wants you fighting over the flag while it picks your pocket. Do not let anybody hand you a blade and call it honor.
So what is it I want from you, son. I want you to settle it right now, while your blood is calm and your head is clear, what kind of man you mean to be when somebody finally tests you. And somebody will. Some fool will run his mouth. Another will bump you and refuse to apologize. A third will try you in front of a crowd just to see what you are made of. The deciding has to happen long before that moment lands, because in the heat itself there is no room to think. You will simply do whatever you already trained your body to do.
So train it to walk. Teach those hands to carry nothing but your good sense. Bend that hard knot in your chest a little so your whole life does not have to snap in two. Learn the old sayings that kept your people breathing through worse than a track meet. He is not worth it. Let it go. My freedom costs more than this moment is worth. Speak those lines to yourself now, out loud if you have to, until they live in you the way a song you came up on lives in you.
I am not writing any of this to dance on a grave or pile shame on a boy already buried under the heaviest load a young life can hold. My reason is simpler. Having stood at too many caskets and pressed my palm against too much glass, I will not add your name to that list without first saying my piece. Somebody loved Karmelo. Austin was somebody’s whole world too. Both of those women held a newborn once and whispered soft dreams over him. Look how it ended. See how fast.
You are not too tough to learn from another man’s ruin. The wisest among us read somebody else’s sentence as a warning written in their own name. So read this one. Tape it to your heart. The next time that fire climbs up in your chest and the whole world dares you to prove yourself, I pray you hear an old man’s voice underneath the noise, telling you the bravest thing your hands will ever do is stay empty, stay open, and stay down at your sides.
Walk home, youngster. Just walk on home.
Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna
Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.
One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.
