Late August, When Even the Devil Is Asking for a Cold Compress

Diary of Pepper Saint Clair
New Orleans, Louisiana

Late August, when even the devil is asking for a cold compress

I always find myself in a bit of a quandary when I have time to sit in this heat.
Here I am, on this veranda — and I do mean veranda, I do not do "porches," porches are for people who think Olive Garden is Italian — fanning myself with a funeral program I picked up from Second Zion last Sunday, watching the afternoon do its best to liquefy my eyebrows. I am about ready to depart this lovely city, because we all know what happens after certain months. The weather turns treacherous. The storms come. And my eyebrows, quite frankly, cannot take it. Nor the heat, for that matter. But before I pack my trunks and flee northward like a sensible person, I simply had to write a few things in my diary.

You see, I got to thinking about the elite.

[She pauses. The fan slows. One eyebrow arches — just the one, because doing both is common.]

That is what they call themselves. The elite. As if "elite" were a thing one could declare, like bankruptcy or a peanut allergy. For four centuries they have clung to this adorable little fable — that we were the inferior pieces, the tar babies, uneducated and unseasoned and utterly without value. We were stupid, you see, because we lacked that nice little sprinkle of white pepper dusted across our skin. We had only the black pepper. Coarse ground. The kind that makes you sneeze, clears your sinuses, and properly seasons a gumbo.

And yet.

[She leans back. The fan resumes, languid, judgmental.]

Here I sit, moving air with a device powered by electricity that is practical because of a Black man. Lewis Latimer. He did not invent the light bulb — no, that was the fragile glass teat that Edison birthed and then abandoned like a prom-night baby. Latimer gave it a spine. Carbon. Durable. Bright enough for all manner of nocturnal activities. The kind of steady, patient illumination that allows one to... oh, I don't know... find one's friends in a field at midnight? Stack one's timber? Coordinate a little social gathering of the hooded and the hopeless?

They needed our light, you see. They needed Latimer's filament burning bright and true while they struck their matches and struck their poses. The very same glow that let them find each other in the dark to do their little tribal dances of terror was the glow that let us read the newspapers the next morning and know precisely which cowards had been busy.
But here — here — is where it gets delicious. Like pralines left too long on a windowsill. Sticky. Messy. Impossible to scrape off.

[The fan stops again. She leans forward.]

You cannot burn a cross without producing smoke. And where there is smoke, there is a need to breathe. Enter Mr. Garrett Morgan. The Safety Hood and Smoke Protector, 1914. The same gentleman who gave them the traffic signal — stop, wait, go, such orderly little fascists — also gave them the means to survive their own suffocating execration. He waded into the Lake Erie tunnel disaster in 1916 and pulled white men from the smoke with his own two hands, wearing his own invention. And they repaid him by turning the descendant of that mask into the very protection they used when their own toxicity became too much to bear.

It is a perfect little ecosystem of hypocrisy, is it not?

They needed Latimer's light to start the fire. And they needed Morgan's mask to survive it. Cause and effect. Action and consequence. The very inventions they claimed came from an empty people were the inventions that allowed them to organize their own execration — and then keep themselves alive long enough to vote for more of it.

And then there is Charles Drew, who did not invent a bag but invented salvation itself — the preservation of blood plasma, the banking of life, the mobile units that carried it. He built the architecture of staying alive. Which means that every Klansman who survived a car crash on the way home from a rally, every segregationist who received a transfusion after a heart attack, every politician who lived long enough to sign another Jim Crow bill into law — they all did so courtesy of Black innovation. Drew's plasma kept their hearts pumping just enough to execrate our humanity. They execrate us, but they needed our blood science to survive long enough to write the laws that tried to drain us dry.

Here is the part that should truly curdle their milk: the reflect-back. The ricochet. The same light that let them find each other in the dark also illuminated our reading rooms and our churches and our kitchen tables where we planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The same traffic signal that organized their routes to violence also organized the streets our children marched down in Birmingham, Selma, and Ferguson — orderly, dignified, visible. The same gas mask Morgan invented to save tunnel workers became the ancestor of the protection worn by those who faced tear gas in the streets demanding what was already theirs. The same blood banking that kept them alive to sign our death warrants also saved the lives of Black soldiers in World War II, Black children in emergency rooms, Black mothers in childbirth.

They built a world that required our genius to function, then wrote myths claiming we had none. They sat in rooms we illuminated, behind doors we designed, eating food we preserved, wearing clothes we dried, writing their constitutions of exclusion with pens we perfected — all while insisting we were the empty ones. The hypocrisy is not merely ironic. It is structural. It is load-bearing. Remove our contributions and their entire edifice of supremacy collapses into darkness, into choking smoke, into gridlock and blood loss.

So let them keep their crosses. Let them keep their hoods. Let them keep their little rituals of theatrical execration performed under the warm, steady, unmistakably Black glow of a light they did not invent, could not improve, and still do not understand. Let them execrate us. They have proven, again and again, that they cannot function without us. Their execration is a parasite feeding on a host it pretends to abhor. And the host? The host is not just surviving. 

The host is lit.

I must stop now. This humidity is winning, and I feel one of my eyebrows has already surrendered. I shall pack my bags before the storms arrive to wash away what the heat has baked in. But I shall return to this diary. Oh yes. I have so many more receipts to organize.
They execrate us, but they could not even choke on their own smoke without us.
Isn't that just the most tragic little arrangement?

— P.S.C.