The Bitter Northerner

When I was young, my grandmother’s New York City apartment building almost completely burned down. Not all the way, but enough. Enough that the back half of it went black and opened to the sky, enough that the kitchen where she made pies and fruit salad for every funeral became, overnight, a place you could see the stars through. The fire started in the wall in the apartment below hers. An electrical fire, something that had been wrong for years, something the landlord knew about and said he’d fix and never did. By the time anyone smelled the smoke, the damage was already done, had already been doing itself quietly for hours inside the bones of the building, and what everyone saw when they came outside was only the fire’s announcement of what it had been up to all along.

The landlord scolded my grandmother for her lack of composure. 

What I remember most, is that it rained the next morning. Hard. Rained like something I had only seen in the south.

In the South, it rains something like an apology. Something invested in your feelings. In New York City, it had only ever rained like it had somewhere else to be later. Like it doesn’t intend to learn your name.

A long, slow rain came in through what used to be West facing wall, and my grandmother stood in what used to be her kitchen and let the water fall on her face, stared into the infinite sky with her outstretched hands, and she did not cry, and did not curse. She paced and she worried, and she opened the cabinets to see what survived. Sage and cinnamon and paprika, still in the same aluminum tin they had always been, labeled in my grandfather’s handwriting decades after he died. She smelled like wet wood and charcoal and something clean underneath it, something the fire had tried to reach and could not.

I suppose that smoke rises in the same way that people do. Because it has to. 

I think about that every time White people at some fancy dinner casually say something about the neighborhood changing and means something about the people in it, and I have decided, again, that I am not going to be easy about it. I have been easy about it before. I have nodded into my overpriced wine and let those words float above the shitty salad and dissolve into the noise of the underpaid pianist, and everyone’s well paid laughter. I have told myself that the moment passed, which is another way of saying I let the moment win. Which is another way of saying I chose my own comfort over someone else’s life, and dressed that choice in the language of keeping the peace, as if peace were something that could exist in a place where people are being lied about and the liars are being protected by the silence of everyone who claims to love and support them.

Gentleness is something that has been overasked of me. 

I think there are people in my life and in the lives of people I know who have built a whole theology around the idea that if you are angry about the way someone speaks of your own humanity, your right to live, of Black and Brown people, of queer people, of anyone whose body has been made into a question by someone who never had to answer for their own, then you are the problem of disruption. That your sharpness is the violence. That the dinner was going fine until you opened your mouth. That you are something to convince and to solve. And this is a theology. It has its own scripture, which is the group text, the Teams chat, the birthday card that’s passed around before the 10 AM meeting. It has its own hymnal, which is the phrase “let’s just agree to disagree.” It has its own god, which is the white comfort that sits at the center of every American gathering and asks, without ever speaking, to be worshipped.

For years now, I have been the one who opened my mouth. I am my grandmother’s youngest heir, which is not a boast but a fact of custodian, because somebody had to carry the things she carried. She insisted on being seen fully in a country that has only ever wanted to see her partially, and she carried that insistence until her hands were too old, and then she put it down in front of me, and I picked it up, and I have not put it down since. I was not handed bitterness. I was handed the sky. A place where there is no left or right, only forward. I was handed a kind of clarity and ancestry that comes from having stood in a kitchen that no longer had a wall, from having let the rain wash your face while the wood still smoldered, from having walked out of the wreck carrying something the fire could not reach and could not name.

There is a version of this story where I tell you I used to be quieter and that I grew into something louder, but that isn’t true, or it isn’t the whole truth. What is true is that I have always been listening and that listening is what makes me loud. When you hear enough people say something about someone’s son and mean it as a joke, or say something about a neighborhood and mean it as a eulogy for whiteness, or say something about a wedding and mean it as a refusal to see love where love can live, you begin to understand that silence has weight. That every sentence you let go doesn’t vanish. It settles into the ground like something buried, and someone else has to walk over it every day and feel it under their feet and pretend it isn’t there because you decided the dinner was more important than the truth. When I say “the truth,” I do not mean something abstract. I do not mean a philosophical position. I mean the specific truth of specific people who are, at this very moment, being spoken about as though they are a problem to be solved rather than human beings who did not ask to be your question and will not wait for you to arrive at the answer.

The fire in my grandmother’s home was like that. It was there for years before it was visible. Everyone who owned the building knew the wiring was bad. Everyone who lived in the building felt the heat in places the heat should not have been. And no one fixed it, because the people living in the building were the kind of people whose emergencies have never been emergencies to the people who own things. And then the fire came through the wall and suddenly it was everyone’s problem, and suddenly everyone wanted to know how it could have happened, as though it were a mystery, as though the fire hadn’t been sending letters for years that nobody wanted to open.

I do not think calling out veiled anti-Blackness or homophobia or xenophobia or anything else that is used to ensure our erasure has to be gentle. I do not think it has to arrive with a permission slip or a tone that makes the person who said the thing feel held through the consequences of having said it. I have been asked to hold people gently through their own violence and I want to be clear that this is a setup. That the request for gentleness is almost always a request for silence dressed in the language of compassion. Someone says, “I just think you could have said it differently,” and what they mean is, “I wish you hadn’t said it at all,” and what they really mean is, “I was comfortable before you made me answer for what I believe.” This is, in the end, what all of it comes down to: the belief that the person who names the wound is more dangerous than the person who made it. That diagnosis is worse than disease. That the real problem in this country has never been the violence but the people who insist on calling it by its name.

Many of my friends who are Black, who are queer, often both, and often tired in the way that is not about sleep, often tell me in different ways that the worst part isn’t the slur or the policy or the sermon. The worst part is the friend who heard it and then texted later to say, “I’m sorry that happened,” as though they were watching from behind glass. As though presence without confrontation is the same as absence. As though love can be something you only practice when it costs you nothing. And I think about this often, because it tells me something about the kind of love so many of us are willing to offer, which is a love that will post a black square and attend the vigil but will not, under any circumstances, say to their aunt at Thanksgiving, “What you just said is wrong and I need you to hear me say that.” Because the aunt is family. Because the aunt has feelings. Because the aunt, who just said something about how those people are shoving it down her throat, is apparently more fragile than the queer kid sitting at the end of the table who heard every word and is now being asked, by everyone’s silence, to bear it.

I know that kid. I was that kid. I am that kid. And what I can tell you is that the kid does not break.The kid sits there and eats the shitty salad and goes home and calls someone who loves them and laughs about something that has nothing to do with the aunt and falls asleep and wakes up and lives, and the living is the thing the aunt was trying to make impossible, and the kid does it anyway, and the kid smells like rain in the South. The kid smells like rain because the fire could not get to the part of them that matters, which is the part that knows they are allowed to exist, and no aunt and no sermon and no policy gets to be the final word on that.

Violence, is the invisibility of our minds, bodies, and spirits. Violence, is ignoring that we are being burned down from the inside out. Survival is knowing we can never catch fire at the parts of us that are infinite. 

This is what I have come to understand about the White American arrangement. That the people who do the harm are always, somehow, the ones who must be handled with care, and the people who survive the harm are always, somehow, the ones who must be reasonable about it. The racist aunt and manager, and student, and politician must be met where they are. The homophobic coworker is a product of their generation. The neighbor who called the police because immigrant children have the audacity to sell lemonade was just concerned. And us, the ones who see it, the ones who feel it, the ones whose bodies carry the memory of every time something like this has happened before, we are the ones who must be measured. We are the ones who must educate with patience. We are the ones who must not raise our voice, because if we raise our voice, then both sides are the same, and if both sides are the same, then no one is responsible, and if no one is responsible, then your aunt can finish her overpriced wine in peace.

And I refuse this. I refuse it with the full weight of everything I have watched and everything I have been asked to forgive without anyone first admitting they had done something that required forgiveness. I refuse to meet someone where they are when they are standing on my neck and calling it a difference of opinion.

I am not interested in the gentle correction. I am not interested in the educational moment that centers the comfort of the person being educated. There are books. There are entire libraries. bell hooks, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, and everyone else are right there. There is the way the information has been available for decades and the not-knowing is, at a certain point, a choice, and the choice is a politics, and the politics is a violence, even when it smiles at you, even when it brings a bottle of wine to your house and asks about your mother. The not-knowing, at this late date, is itself a violence, because it requires an active commitment to looking away, and looking away is something you can only do if the thing you are looking away from is not your own body. This is the privilege that underwrites all the other privileges and it is the ability to not know. The ability to decide that someone else’s emergency is a topic you’ll get to when you’re ready and comfortable, when the time is right, when the mood is better, when you’ve done enough research, when someone explains it to you in the right tone of voice, which is to say, never.

I think about how a bruise works. How the blood pools beneath the skin where the impact was, and how the surface might still look almost fine, and how someone can point to the surface and minimize the pain while underneath the body is doing its slow, purple, work, of remembering what happened. That is what the joke does, and the policy does, and the sermon does. It bruises. And then someone tells you to be gentle with the hand that made the bruise, because the hand has feelings, too, and doesn’t like being called a fist. 

And I want to say something about this that I think is important, which is that the hand always has a way of forgetting what it did. The bruise does not forget. The body does not forget. The body is, in fact, the only honest record of what happened, and when you tell someone to be gentle with the hand, what you are telling them is to distrust the testimony of their own skin.

My grandmother did not get her kitchen back. What she got was a check that did not cover what was lost and a building that was patched but not repaired, and she lived in that patched house for another twelve years, and some nights when the wind hit the back wall a certain way you could smell something that was not quite smoke. Memory, maybe. A ghost, maybe. Something still living in the wood like a bruise. She never once pretended the fire hadn’t happened. She pointed at the back wall when people visited and she said, “That’s where it came through,” and she did not say it with sadness or with anger. She said it the way you say a thing that is true. She understood that the only thing more dangerous than a fire is a house full of people pretending they can’t smell the smoke.

I am my grandmother’s youngest heir. I am my grandmother’s midnight sun. I say this because she taught me, without ever using these words, that there is a kind of light that arrives precisely when it is not supposed to, when the infinite sky has done everything in its power to go dark, and the light finds us anyway. The light does not require permission to exist, and neither do I, and neither does my anger, and neither does the truth when it comes out of my mouth at the wrong time, at the dinner table, in the middle of someone’s sentence about the neighborhood, about the wedding, about somebody’s son.

I am not asking to be loved for my sharpness. I am saying that my sharpness is a form of love. 

That when I say, “That is a racist thing to believe.”, I am not ending a relationship. I am finding out if one was ever really there. I am finding out if the person across from me loves me enough to sit with the discomfort of being wrong, or if they only loved the version of me that kept quiet, that smiled, that fixed their problems comfortably, that gave them my knowledge so they don’t have to read those books for Black people. There is a version of love that requires nothing, and there is a version of love that requires everything, and I am no longer interested in the first kind, which is not love at all but only the agreement to be pleasant while we are bleeding. To be pleasant as our home burns down. 

And if they choose the comfort, which most do, I want to be clear that I am still here. I am still whole. You are, too. We do not lose anything that was ours to keep. The walls and cabinets were never ours, either. What we lost was the pretending, and the pretending was never ours. It was theirs. They just like to keep it in our mouths.

My grandmother’s kitchen is gone. My grandmother is too. But somewhere in Queens, there is someone who can see the sky tonight through the place where she kept sage and cinnamon and paprika.

You can still smell the smoke, and underneath it, always, the rain. 

There are people who have walked through fire and still smell like rain, and I come from those people, and I am one of those people, and I did not start the fire, and the fire was always in the wall

and I am desperate for you to say so. And I am

infinite at the parts that cannot be touched,

chase owens