And Then Comes a Lynching

Gabriel Noel

I’ve been spending these hazy, anxious, warping days with my father in an attic in Long Island, a few miles from the national epicenter of the virus. The perpetual stress that living in a cramped space puts one under has been hard to shake; I’ve tried drowning that stress in video games, music, books, and other activities that are perhaps less healthy. Millions of Americans are in the same position; they fear for their health and the health of their loved ones; they’ve lost their jobs, or, like me, are entering a job market that seems to have collapsed right before their eyes like sand spilling out of a child’s shoddily-made beach castle. The fog of disaster hangs everywhere, and there are only so many ways to ignore it. The days have worryingly blended together; the constant drum of dread from the news has kept that fog firmly over our heads. Things are bad enough for us.

And then there comes a lynching.

I still find it incredible that that word applies to a contemporary event, and not only certain horrors that were banished to the darkness of the past. I hadn’t planned on that occurring. This website is based on the premise of spending a few minutes in silence, and I had planned on using that space, opened up by silence, to explore and write about other things. Things that I personally find beautiful and redeeming — things that can repaint the world from its current grey tones to something kaleidoscopic and entrancing. I tried to keep the darkness at bay and do what I had set out to do, staying with that silence. But as with anything one represses, the images kept returning, and I had to reckon with them.

I saw the video posted on Facebook a few days before it seemed to become national news. It only had a few thousand views at the time, with a tagline giving condolences to the family. I then realized I had heard the name — Ahmaud Arbery — in passing in a short article addressing the death and the fact that there was no investigation. Shamefully, I had ignored the case. I believed it was just another police murder and, frankly, I’d grown tired of them. Like many black Americans, I’ve become cynical and tired of death by authority. Seeing dozens of people with your shade of skin getting killed, on camera, with no accountability brought to their killers can leave you jaded. But watching that video, my cynicism turned into terror; these were not policemen. These were civilians. Civilians who took the power over life into their own hands; who grabbed rifles and pistols, stalked a man they did not know, overran him in their car, and killed him. The image of Ahmaud struggling with that man for his gun seemed straight out of the deepest Jim Crow nightmare. There was nothing left for him to lose then. The mob had descended upon him; there was no possibility for diplomacy or respectability; it was clear that those who were hunting for him were doing so for bloodshed. In such a situation, what else is there to do than to fight dearly for your life, by any means at your disposal?

This image of terror, and the thoughts of terror that circled it, brought back to me the conviction that here I was witnessing another manifestation of the tragedy of the United States. The tragedy that our fundamental identities and fates are determined by our outsides, not our insides; that color is the defining mark of a human being’s worth, of their potential, of their soul. Those two men in Georgia, father and son, saw Ahmaud and saw not a man, but a shadow. It didn’t matter that he was simply jogging, or walking, or was unarmed. What mattered was that they identified him as someone who didn’t belong there. And they needed only one mark to determine that. That father and son were initiated into an old fraternity, as old as America itself, whose doctrine is to know who does and who does not belong. One’s identity is based on this doctrine, and solace is taken from it. Although many fight against it, its logic pervades American culture; as with the other killings, people will go on television and into comment threads and debate the worth of a man’s life, on what actions he may or may not perform that make his life void. The fact alone that this debate will occur is tragic.

 The terror that rose up from me during the silence of this exercise is one that is buried deep within every American, repressed over and over again because confronting it would make life almost unbearable. One wonders if there is a way to meet it face to face — to break through America’s legacy of terror and arrive at the potential beauty that awaits us on the other side, if it is even possible. But maybe, as a nation, we are too afraid to enter the realm of silence that is the barrier to such a breakthrough. Entering that realm would mean an extended awareness of that terror within us all; an awareness that I could barely tolerate for four and a half minutes.

Gabriel Noel was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. He is about to finish his undergraduate career with a degree in Political Science from Boston University, but lapses into literature from time to time. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons. @GabrielNoel6