![]() Had he been an imperfect white man, because all men are imperfect, the world may have loved him still. But he was the first black man who loved me and I loved him back. The beatings he meted out, like the time he twisted my mom’s arm until she cried in my presence when I was a boy because she talked back, were common. He held me in the same hands that were often used to hurt my mother. He was not always aware of others’ plights to render him invisible, and sometimes he did a good job of discarding himself. He was not always the best at showing care, but when he did his care was generous. prisons and a rental home in Camden made him something of an absence to be derided and desired. His hands were sometimes scaly and calloused from too much physical labor performed for little pay when he could land jobs, whose split-time between U.S. He was a black man whose belly sometimes protruded far beyond his waistline, who spoke in a poetic vernacular that allowed him to communicate in code to the people he encountered on the streets of our black hood in New Jersey, his words holding different meanings to those inside and outside the community. He was not America’s fabled monstrous buck nor was he an icon of meritocracy. The first black man I loved wasn’t an accumulation of white America’s long-held fears.
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