The Plunder of Black Lives
By Isaiah Matthew Wooden
Joe Morton performs in "Between the World and Me" in 2018. (Photo courtesy of Jati Lindsay)
My mind settles on a particularly hot and humid August night in 1994, when my excitement about beginning a new school year was painfully interrupted. My oldest brother Maurice and I shared a room on the third floor of the conspicuously blue-grey row house my parents rented from Baltimore City for most of that sweltering summer. He, however, had already gone back to the quiet town in rural Virginia where he attended university, so I reclaimed our shared space as my own.
His twin bed had become the staging ground for coordinating outfits, even though the strict dress code at the newly formed Jesuit middle school for boys that I attended didn’t allow for much sartorial creativity. Having riffled through my new “back-to-school” clothes for a first day look, I pressed each piece, blasting them with spray starch before applying heat. With my uniform carefully placed on my brother’s bed, I prepared myself for sleep. I do not recall the exact time I laid down, although I am certain it was sometime before midnight. It was probably the earliest I had been to bed in weeks. I remember pushing the room’s windows wide open, flipping the light off, and jumping into bed.
Though it was often bustling during the day, my East Baltimore block was eerily quiet in the hours before sunrise. This likely accounted for why, when a small crowd began to gather in front of a house a few doors up from mine, I was startled out of my restless sleep. Annoyed by the ruckus, I threw off my covers, found the closest window, pulled up the screen that had been protecting me from mosquitos and peaked my head out to survey the scene. I would regret that decision almost immediately.
The crowd was gathered around a man lying face down on the pavement. From my perch, I could not quite make out who he was—or if he was dead or alive. The police, I heard later, had been called several times, but, as was typical in our community, they were slow to arrive. I scanned the crowd, hoping to see my middle brother, Billy’D. I felt a deep sense of relief when I spotted him walking with the swagger that I had long envied. That feeling was replaced with dread, when I realized that the man lying face down had yet to move. I began to pray.
Although the police had still not arrived, the crowd started to thin. It was surreal to watch people wander away while the man remained on the concrete. Everybody seemed convinced that help was coming and that things were going to be OK—at least that’s how I interpreted their whispers and gestures from my bedroom.
There was no more hoping, however, when the onset of rigor mortis caused the man’s body to flip 180 degrees, sending the baseball cap that he was wearing flying several feet. I saw his face clearly. He was the older brother of a kid I knew from elementary school. I also saw his brain leak from his skull onto the cement. A mix of blood and feces ran down the sidewalk. My heart stopped. Then broke.
Plunder.
There would be no returning to sleep. The sight of stolen life had awakened me to new realities. I was a Black boy living in a world hostile to Black being, to Black thriving.
When I arrived for the first day of school later that morning, I felt heavy. In an attempt to lift some of that weight, I told what I had seen to a teacher, an earnest white man who had recently arrived in Baltimore from the Midwest, what I had seen. He could not bear to hear my story. To be sure, neither could I.
For the next several years, no matter how high the temperatures got outside, I made sure that all the windows were shut before I headed to bed. I knew that the dead youth on the pavement could easily have been me.
On a not-quite-spring day in March 2008, I traveled from my studio apartment in Washington, D.C. to visit my father who was back in the hospital. The previous two years had been full of emergencies.
When I entered his hospital room, I was immediately struck by how frail he looked. His hazel eyes had lost their brightness, and his reddish-brown skin looked ashen. I remember again feeling heavy—this time with anger. I was mad that, despite my father’s health woes, he refused to stop drinking.
We didn’t talk about much that day. I told him about the move I was plotting across the country to California, an idea that he didn’t like. Baltimore City had been the center of my father’s universe for over five decades and he loved it in a way that is hard to capture in words. For me, Baltimore had been a site and source of tremendous anxiety. California, on the other hand, signaled light, fresh air and, most importantly, freedom.
After saying goodbye to my father at the hospital that day, I hopped on a train back to D.C. My mother would call me a few days later to tell me that my uncle, my father’s younger brother, had died. He was 48. I remember getting off the phone with her and weeping. And not just for my uncle.
“There would be no returning to sleep. The sight of stolen life had awakened me to new realities. I was a Black boy living in a world hostile to Black being, to Black thriving.”
I wept even harder at my uncle’s funeral, which my dad, still hospitalized, could not attend. Funerals often mean reconnecting with folks you haven’t seen in a long time. At my uncle’s funeral, I watched people I was once close to share hugs and condolences with my mother and brothers while completely bypassing me. After mostly staying away, I had become unrecognizable to them.
This awkward funeral scene would repeat some three months later on a balmy weekend in June. A few days before, I had been sitting in my basement office trying to pass the time. It was opening night for a stage adaptation of Anansi tales that I had worked on as dramaturg. I had decided to skip the performance, but nevertheless wanted to attend the opening night celebration to toast the cast and production team. Eventually, I heard the audience applauding through the theater’s monitor system, which let me know that the performance had come to an end.
There was no cell phone reception in the basement, so, after heading up the three flights of stairs to the building’s main lobby, I beelined to the front door to see if I had any missed messages. No one ever really called my cell phone, so I wasn’t expecting anything. When I stepped outside, however, I discovered missed calls from my mother, brother and, surprisingly, my father’s youngest brother. I called my mother back first. My father, she told me, had been rushed to the hospital. Things had taken a turn for the worse. She suggested that I get to Baltimore immediately.
Though I worried often about his health and well-being, it never crossed my mind that my father would die in the time it took my train to get there. But that is precisely what my mother told me when she came to the front door. It took me several minutes to fully comprehend what she was saying: a man that I loved so dearly and who loved me so deeply—a man who was only 52—was no longer breathing. My heart stopped. Then it broke.
Plunder.
The word catches me off guard each time I hear it uttered by one of the performers standing downstage center in the Kennedy Center’s production of Between the World and Me. Plunder. It is the incomparable Joe Morton’s percussive delivery that strikes me most forcefully. I hear the word again and again, one of author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s most repeated, crossing the lips of the likes of Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Susan Kelechi Watson, Savion Glover, Pauletta Pearson Washington, Greg Alverez Reid, Michelle Wilson, Black Thought and Ledisi.
It is Pearson Washington who gives voice to the mother of Prince C. Jones, Jr. during the performance. As I listen to her, I think of what it means to live in the wake of plunder. A friend of Coates from his Howard University days, Jones was murdered by a Black undercover Prince George’s County Maryland police officer in 2000. He was 25, the product of a solidly Black middle-class upbringing. By all accounts, Prince’s future was promising. That did not matter to the officer that followed him across state lines and fired more than a dozen bullets into his jeep.
Dr. Jones is a radiologist from Opelousas, Louisiana, who always longed to see her son succeed. When it came time for choosing a college, she hoped that he’d pick Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia or Stanford, the very school that my father once feared would take me away from Baltimore. Prince chose none of them, opting to go to Howard instead, where he would get to walk the quad with people like Coates and the late Chadwick Boseman. Too many years of being the only Black kid had left him longing to be fully immersed in Black life, Black culture, Black community.
”It strikes me that…I too am a marked man, the bearer of a body vulnerable to plunder. Just like my schoolmate’s brother and my father and my uncle.”
She does not regret that Rocky, her nickname for Prince, chose Howard, she says. What she does regret, however, is that he is dead.
As I listen to Pearson Washington recall some of Prince’s mother’s fondest and most sorrowful memories of her murdered son, it strikes me that, like him, I too am a marked man, the bearer of a body vulnerable to plunder. Just like my schoolmate’s brother and my father and my uncle.
The world would no doubt like to deny that I was ever here. For a long time, I tried to organize my life to prevent such an erasure—to ensure that there was sufficient evidence of my existence. I chased accolades that would make it impossible to relegate me to the blank spaces of history. It was all so exhausting. Indeed, the chasing nearly killed me.
I am no longer interested in trying to curate what remains. My focus is the present tense, the always-now of living. Breath to breath. Beat by beat. When you are Black in America, even that feels incredibly risky.
Isaiah Matthew Wooden is a writer, performance-maker and assistant professor of theater arts at Brandeis University. He was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland.