A Cosmic Funk Odyssey: Journey to the Black Planet
I ain’t never heard of no sundown Galaxy.
Back in Texas, we carried the Green Book when traveling. Best be safe.
I would learn the same rules applied to space.
But there was hope. We heard and were in search of a Black planet. There’s been a great Black space migration. A group of African American astronauts was on a mission to escape the dying Earth and find this new home.
Our spaceship dipped quickly past the Andromeda Galaxy, an estimated 2.5 million light years from Earth. The first of many galaxy’s that I assumed we’d pass.
We couldn’t stop in Andromeda. The risk was too high. There have been rumors of multiple space hangings of humans — ain’t matter what color.
There was a new racism in space.
We hoped to escape the racism on Earth.
“How fast does this thing go?” I’m not trying to stay anywhere near Andromeda for that long. They send militias, and slave patrollers, marked by the blue stripes across their spaceships, to capture any humans they can catch.
These same worries reminded me of our road trip down south through Mississippi a decade or so ago. This was before the space race.
It all started with the moon landing and the Apollo missions. Humanity had spread to the stars.
As I looked out the window at the stars rushing past, nervous about the trip, I thought, “This is crazy. We’re really doing this.”
“It’s the only way out, brother. We’ve got to escape this madness and build something new,” my inner voice replied.
“We’ll be far past Andromeda, I’ll use the hyper-speed,” captain James “JJ” Johnson replied from the cockpit with his eyes focused on the controls. Born into a flying family, his grandfather was a Tuskegee Airman.
“We got any tunes,” I asked JJ, as the silence of space and fear of space patrollers was deafening. I needed background music. A soundtrack to the revolution.
We were on a mission to escape Earth, a planet ravaged by war, racism, and poverty. Our destination was a distant planet known as the Black Planet, where everyone could live free from oppression.
As we flew through space, JJ replied, “There is some vinyl in the back of the cargo…they were my grandfathers.”
So, I went searching.
I found the collection of vinyl sitting in a crate at the back of the cargo and went flipping, “Earth, Wind, and Fire…Funkadelic…Parliament”…Grandpa Johnson was a big fan of funk and soul music, “Gil Scott Heron.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard this one before.
The voice of Gil Scott Heron escaped through the speakers:
With all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon
How come I ain’t got no money here
Hmmm, whitey’s on the moon
I closed my eyes, letting the music take me away.
“You know, this song is just like today. The government continues to spend billions of dollars on space travel. White people are living it up on the moon, completely removed from the struggle of Black folks.”
JJ nodded thoughtfully, “That’s deep. It’s like we’re always being left behind, no matter how hard we try.”
Our spaceship dipped at hyper speed, leaving the past within the vastness of the cosmos, as above and so below. We were searching for freedom in the sky.
“How much longer till the next galaxy?”
Our radar picked up a militia, probably from Andromeda.
I thought back to my ancestors.
Through time and in space, I couldn’t imagine that they would’ve dreamed the risk and hope of freedom remained a far awry dream.
We searched for a Black planet within the darkness of the universe, driven by hope and a new dream of freedom.
I always kept my head to the sky. My grandfather told me to.
As we continued hurling through the vast space expanse, JJ told me to put on his grandfather’s favorite album. The needle dropped as the vinyl began to spin, Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. The haunting guitar rifts and psychedelic soundscapes blasted through the spaceship.
Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For ya’ll have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit.
We both closed our eyes, lost in the music.
We were far past Andromeda.
