Where do the chickens actually come "home" to roost?
No, you aren't a Black Voice for Trump. But most of us know a Harrison Floyd.
Your first thought is about karma. That sweet revenge that everybody prays for when a traitor meets their judgment. You smile at the news that Harrison Floyd cannot make his bail, and maybe say, “Well the chickens have come home to roost,” or, maybe say, “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future,” or, maybe say, “Well, Mama always said, ‘Bad company corrupts good morals,’” or, maybe say, some other thing to set yourself firmly on the moral high ground.
And you feel firmly rooted on that high ground because you have committed your life to being a positive influence in your community. Floyd’s role in Black Voices for Trump seeks to demolish your community that you love and fight for. Over and again, he seems perfectly at ease selling his soul, selling all of us, to the highest bidder. A bidder, this time, notorious for not paying accounts when they come due.
But trouble also worries your mind about Harrison Floyd and the impact of this arrest on your community from an entirely different angle. A storm with which you are intimately familiar clouds your moral superiority because you actually know this man. Not personally, but you know the man. He is a Black man. He is a Black man believing wholeheartedly that full assimilation and rejection of Black culture is the path to white acceptance and the American dream.
He has a family. A mama and daddy, brothers and sisters. Perhaps a wife and likely children. You hope not a wife and children, and yet, you do pray that he has somebody to love him. He immerses this wife and children in a white community. He likely has nieces and nephews, cousins, in-laws, married-into family, and kith and kin far and wide from old schoolmates to co-workers to neighbors to dogs he’s met on the street.
And they all love him because outwardly, he is easy to love. He is handsome. Gregarious. Engaging. A good listener and great with kids. Not only is he successful at his job and active in his church, but he is a vocal evangelist for both, though in his youth, neither would have welcomed him through the door, and in his adult years, neither is in any real rush to increase their numbers when it comes to Black people. He volunteers to coach his kids’ teams and plays music from an extraordinary collection for white neighbors who drop by for impromptu gatherings at the house.
You know him because you are remembering him. Maybe he is your father, and you are remembering being a nice family. Nice is the word neighbors use to describe you because you are Black and they are white and nice is what makes you nonthreatening. Memory transports you back to your nice house where your parents park nice cars. You attend nice schools, and before you are old enough to know better, you are nice to neighborhood playmates who teach you n****r jokes and tell you that Black people are stupid but good athletes.
Your Black friends come from a Jack and Jill chapter two towns over because no Black people will live even close to your subdivision until you reach junior high. Jack and Jill gathers you. Your first crush is from Jack and Jill—a boy your older brother’s age who you decide to marry one day, though you never tell him. This is where you feel more like a solid than a gas around other children your age because you exist here in their faces and their skin and their hair. Jack and Jill is for the adults too. They listen to music and talk back-home language in the den while the kids hang out in the rec room or outside. You can hear your daddy, the most charming of the bunch. He laughs. Mama laughs. Everybody laughs. They are happy. You never charm your crush though.
You have a nanny who grew up down south and comes everyday. She is the closest that you will get to coming up with a grandmama. During the summer, she fries chicken and makes hand cut french fries for lunch and she fills you with stories when she is not watching her stories. She arrives and then Mama and Daddy leave for the day. But before Mama walks out the door, she affirms your Blackness, your beauty, your brains, and the sacredness of your body. You are not a gas; you are a solid—a beautiful, phenomal, smart Black girl whose face shines with light when she looks in the mirror. You are nice. But by the time you are four or five, you fully understand that the n****r jokes that always felt wrong actually are wrong; that what the neighborhood kids say about you is wrong. You are nice by learning to remove yourself from situations. You are nice but you sever most friendships. Daddy will ask why; demand that you play with these kids. Mama knows and doesn’t demand anything of the sort.
You don’t know why Daddy stops going to work one day, but he stops and he never goes again. His work becomes staying in the back study with the door closed. You are not to disturb him; he emerges when he needs you to go to the liquor store. The man at the liquor store gives you rod pretzels, a pat on the head, a brown paper sack, and your change. Your change should be $1.27 and you learn to count it exactly. And early.
Your parents start arguing at night. Mama screaming. Often. The police come and take Daddy away, but you overhear them tell Mama that he’ll be out by morning and to take the dog when you leave the house. You stay in a motel for weeks while Daddy has his cooling off period at home. You know nobody can know because you are the nice family. Remember? And when Mama breaks that rule, and tells Daddy’s Mama on him, hoping to get help, your grandmama says something to him to get him to act right. This leads to an argument between Mama and Daddy during the family reunion and your business is in the street. But his siblings cannot fathom that their big brother, the hometown-boy-made-good, the example-setter that let them know what was possible in the world, is capable of thinking about harming his family, let alone actually harming them. The verdict becomes that Mama is a bad wife.
This is how you grow up. Not knowing how unusual it is for Daddy to wear himself out whupping you with his belt. This is how you grow up. Being nice despite the screaming at night. This is how you grow up. Being afraid and distrustful. This is how you grow up. With fierce love for your mama because she fights every battle with you hiding behind her skirts. Of all of you, she gets the worst of it and she makes it through that fire. Your mama finds strength from her family and her faith and her love for her children and you know that if she lives through that, you can live through anything. You idolize her without apology.
But you are scarred. And when you see Harrison Floyd on television pleading for his release when the other eighteen defendants have already made bail, the gloating of chickens coming home to roost is fleeting. You care. You know that his constant need for proximity to whiteness has ruined his life. That his belief that assimilation was the key to the American dream has led him to the nightmare of indefinite incarceration in the Fulton County jail. Achieving that proximity is no different than the drugs many of his fellow inmates are in there for now, and in that drug-induced haze of white acceptance, he is willing to say and do anything about, and against, Black people if it means another fleeting high. It has served him until now. He is the only one left in jail because they used him and discarded him.
You know that a discarded Harrison Floyd is already someone who, at some level, hates Black people. But you know that the rejection of white proximity will make him detest his Blackness even more. And that self-revulsion has the potential to leave familial casualties in its wake: to harm his wife and children; to have his mama pleading with him and to shock his brothers and sisters into denial. To sever the last threads of already fragile family and community bonds. No, you don’t know Harrison Floyd. But you cannot share in the rejoicing about karma because you know that his self-loathing from his rejection of proximity to whiteness will reverberate forward in your own community for generations.