THE MOST BEAUTIFULLEST THING IN THIS WORLD

BY CHRISTOPHER P. WOLFE

The most beautifullest thing in this world is just like this:

Standing at the corner of Amsterdam and 120-something, we waited for the lurking white man in the crosswalk signal to grant us permission to move about our business. When he appeared, we continued our journey away from Columbia’s campus, catching, between blocks, glimpses of Morningside Park as we headed toward parts of Harlem less occupied by new age settlers known for displacing the natives and Guiliani-ing the homeless.

This was the second or third time I had seen you since you’d gotten out. You looked healthy and calm, flashing a smile I didn’t often see when you were a student in my writing class on the inside. We’d been planning this link-up for a minute. “You’ll be seeing me, Professor,” you had said a number of times throughout the semester. However, when I first started teaching with the program, I had been forewarned that only a few students would come to campus and continue taking classes once released. I was forewarned about the many factors determining the path of the formerly incarcerated—financial support, familial stability, struggles with addiction, whether or not an employer could see beyond labels to the person standing in front of them. It was an apt warning. At least two of the guys in our class were back in jail before our semester ended. A few others, when they were released went down paths to which I’m not privy, but, to be honest, I still look for them. And then there’s you... You showed up on campus. You continued taking classes. Your word was your bond. And so here we were, walking in Harlem.

We were headed to your place of employment, an invitation I hadn’t expected, but appreciated as it gave me a chance to see you enjoy what we both had longed for: your freedom. I remember the first time I read you more clearly than the first time I met you. Your voice, on the page, had a poignant clarity and a vulnerability that cut through the noise. In class, you often sat quiet, thumb and index finger contemplatively twisting your dreads as if your mind was in another place. And I wouldn’t have blamed you if that was the case. But at any given moment you were subject to open your mouth and show and prove that you had been listening intently, bringing the crux of the matter into sharper focus.

We kept moving north into Harlem, passing corner stores and bodegas where you received head nods and pounds from Black men from around that way. You told me how strange it was to come down to Columbia and be surrounded by white folks and resources in abundance then go back home to see young Black men and women with too few good options and too many negative consequences. You pulled your cell phone from your pocket and showed me a picture of your close friends, pointing out the ones that had been locked up since the photograph was taken. It didn’t seem that there was a face you left untouched. Listening to you, I couldn’t help but conjure in my mind the same dangerous dichotomy running rife throughout our country’s history: anemic, resource-starved communities of color sitting if not adjacent then in close proximity to flourishing white neighborhoods as if part of some cruel joke. As you talked I saw the many black and brown faces in our classes at jail versus the scattered few in the classes I’ve taught on Columbia’s campus. As you talked, I recalled my Bedstuy block. How during the financial crisis, streets of cracked-up asphalt and potholes so big they reminded me of bombed-out Iraqi airstrips, were suddenly paved clean over pristine pipes bringing in new utilities as Black households were being pushed out. I remembered a trip I took down to New Orleans to visit my brother after I got back from Iraq. How he drove me down to the Garden District and we stood in a street median, pivoting to see broken down, dilapidated houses comprising the Black neighborhood on one side of the road juxtaposed with white-owned, multi-story Victorians propped up on the other. “How are our kids going to ever aspire to have shit when this is what they see, generation after generation?” he pondered as we surveyed our surroundings.

“We were Black kids who knew the taste of a butter sandwich. Had felt the weight of government cheese. Born into the cycle, our anger at the world left unleashed. We were mean-mugged and scruffed-up. Some of us had been cuffed up.”

I never asked (and never will), but as we kept walking, for some reason you told me the charges that led to your incarceration. You hesitated mid-sentence and said that you didn’t want this revelation to change the way I saw you. I assured you it wouldn’t. How could it when, stepping into my fourth decade, I’ve seen too many times how clearly the line separating the free and the incarcerated is one made malleable by money, power, privilege, and class? How could it when I’ve repeatedly walked jail hallways seeing the walls swell with Black bodies as if America has deemed it part of our natural progression? It’s a sight that saddens, sobers, and arrests you in a way that no essay or intellectual exercise can or should. How could it after I saw our incarcerated cohort (myself included) spend months in that classroom showing each other more civility, mutual respect, empathy, and uplift than you’d find in a New York City subway car? How could it change my view of you when in you I see clearly the memories of my youth? Memories filled with young brothers who smoked dope, some who sold coke, stuffed crack vials down tube socks, on a mission to never go broke. We were Black kids who knew the taste of a butter sandwich. Had felt the weight of government cheese. Born into the cycle, our anger at the world left unleashed. We were mean-mugged and scruffed-up. Some of us had been cuffed up. But regardless of who we were in that moment, we could never forget the kids we’d once been: Black boys with beautiful Black smiles before we were cloaked in sin. Black boys who grew into Black men. Black men who came to understand that we faced a system designed to have us acting like corralled crabs, clipping and clawing at each other’s limbs. Black men working to dismantle the bigoted system that put us in the barrel in the first place.

We kept walking; you kept smiling. We turned east and headed toward Adam Clayton Powell. In the middle of the block, we stopped in front of what I assumed to be a public school building given its limestone and brick facade, and tall, metal, yet still scalable fence. You led me inside and introduced me to your colleagues at the office of an advocacy organization that supports court-involved youth. You took me upstairs to where classes were being held and young kids of color canvassed the hallways carrying beautiful smiles I recognized. At each stop, someone offered praise for the work you are doing and the time and talent you are pouring into the community. After touring the building, we walked back downstairs. Curbside, I listened as you detailed your goals and aspirations, your dreams of getting into social work. You said that you could see yourself working with at-risk youth; you had recognized your ability to connect with them. We quickly talked up a strawman for how you could accomplish this before you gave me a pound and I went on my way.

“I believe that I was complicit by allowing myself to reach a point where I devalued and allowed others to devalue the life of Iraq’s citizen in the same way that people of color have been and still are devalued in this country.”

Many months have passed since that day. Months in which we’ve been in and out of touch for a number of reasons—a lost loved one, a lost cell phone, reconnecting with lost motives. In that time, I taught another semester at the jail. I stood in a dimly lit visitors center, head bowed, at the incarcerated students’ request, in a moment of silence for Tessa Majors, before I presented their college credit certificates. In that time, I stopped by your work and left a copy of ​Angela Davis: An Autobiography on your desk—I got your text confirming that you received it. In that time, the virus hit the city, shutting down everything including educational programs on the inside. In that time, we lost Breonna, Ahmaud, George, and Rayshard. In that time, I’ve been enraged that it takes 8 minutes and 46 seconds of torture for white people to reckon with the racist systems that they know black folks have been dealing with for generations. In that time, I found out about Elijah, adding more kindling to the fire. In that time, I’ve revisited a piece I published in ​The New York Times,​ titled “Sir, I Never Thought I’d See the Day I’d Be Working For a Colored Officer.” It’s the piece you and the guys used to jokingly ask me to autograph. I never told you this, but days after publishing it, I received a number of congratulatory phone calls and emails, a few mistakenly stating that I was a “patriot,” and “the best this country has to offer.” I also received a message from a friend and mentor honing in on this paragraph I had written:

“As a black veteran, I find it hard to reconcile my pride in my service with a sense of complicity in upholding my country’s legacy of white supremacy while deployed. I still remember the black and brown faces of Iraqis that I helped to round up, zip-tie and detain using tactics similar to stop and frisk, the use of which some courts in America have found to be unconstitutional. These experiences created a moral chasm with which I continue to grapple.”

Of it, my friend asked: how were you complicit? And if given a chance to reconcile, what would that look like? I delayed answering these questions for weeks, ruminating, better yet evading the necessary reflection to come up with this answer: I believe that I was complicit by allowing myself to reach a point where I devalued and allowed others to devalue the life of Iraq’s citizen in the same way that people of color have been and still are devalued in this country. I look back on those black and brown faces of detained Iraqis often, I see the HMMWV headlights shining onto their hooded heads and blinded eyes, I hear the heavy metal guitars riffs blaring to keep them awake through the night. And I see me not doing a damn thing to stop it. This past February I visited Cali to reconnect with some guys with whom I served. Together we rehashed other similar moments that we experienced, and at one point one of us said, “I wonder whatever happened to those guys.” For a salient minute, we sat in silence.

I’ve come to believe that the reason I find it hard to reconcile this experience is that it can’t be reconciled. The tension that exists within me from my service in Iraq will persist because it is something I should live with. It is the humbling Janus head that won’t let me forget the degree to which my shit stinks. It is the one that enables me to see that you and so many of the incarcerated women and men I’ve encountered are (and will be) leaders that our communities need. That your voices and perspectives, now that the white power structure appears to be listening, are the ones that need to be heard. This irreconcilable tension is what keeps me coming back inside the jail, not to educate you but to be educated ​by you.​ An education that I wasn’t ready to receive during my adolescent years occupying Black baptist church pews, one I couldn’t receive at West Point, nor while obtaining two master’s degrees, one I would never receive working on Wall Street. It’s an education that required me to be stirred by the words of Robert Wright, and to seek counsel from the likes of Jay Holder and Ivan Calaff, to learn my craft from Mitch Jackson, and to be a better advocate from Jarrell Daniels. It is an education of the soul. One that has helped me to see that the most beautifullest thing in this world is our collective freedom: the freedom from America’s reckless oppression, freedom from her nonchalant knees on our necks; freedom to forgive, to evolve, to learn, to love.

It is our freedom to come back home from our darkest place and, for our remaining days, live life to its fullest.