Red Is Not My Favorite Color
growing up as the world burns
When I look at childhood photos I get nostalgic, but I also feel jealous. I am envious of the younger iterations of myself who lived in worlds of hope. Worlds where a disaster was an anomaly and Martin Luther King’s speeches had wiped out all but vestiges of American racism. I yearn to return to those worlds, as I imagine we all wish for a return to innocence. But I’m too old, those worlds are closed to me now.
Red Nature
I grew up simultaneously a city child and a country kid. Before I had begun logging concrete memories, my parents purchased a house in a verdant agricultural valley in northern California. But it wasn’t the house that my parents cared about, a house alone would not spur my parents into making a purchase so grand that my mother now struggles to retire. It was the land.
243 acres of raw land. Sprawling beyond our view, untouched by anyone we knew. Sometimes we would feign ownership over the land and call it “ours,” but we knew that no one could truly own something so wild. That no one but the Patwin could truly claim this land. We were stewards, there to protect the hills and plains from those who would exploit them for agriculture and profit.
Before us it was owned by a cattle farmer. The thick clay soil was compacted by hooves. There were areas where even hardy star thistle couldn’t grow, where the hulking beasts had eroded the soil seemingly beyond a point of return.
But by its very nature, the earth is regenerative. The process of succession is painstakingly slow, but it is as predictable and guaranteed as any natural process can be. I watched in awe as tiny blades of grass pushed through clotted soil, my astonishment grew as the empty plains of hard brown dirt slowly turned into lush fields. I was amazed as the deer and rabbits returned to feast upon the new greenery, as the turkeys reappeared, first in pairs, then in groups, and then coming in flocks of twenty birds at a time. I grew to love the howl of coyotes as they tore apart their prey. Like ghosts in the night leaving piles of skin and bones and the occasional skull that we would leave in a tree for the bugs to clean before we placed it on our macabre shelf of feathers, insects and skeletons.
I loved that land and it loved me back. One sunny day I laid in a sea of grass that reached above my waist, staring at the undulating clouds and watching birds dart through my field of vision. I laid there for what felt like hours, baking in the sun until my parents called me back inside. When I arose I found that ladybugs had nested in my unkempt hair. They flew out with a deafening buzz. At once beautiful and terrifying, a cloud of black and red.
The next day we found a four foot long rattlesnake in that same grass. I imagined that the snake had seen me lying peacefully and chosen to leave me undisturbed. We had to kill the snake, we had cats that we weren’t willing to spare.
In the spring I would go to the stream and catch turtles and bright orange newts. Their webbed toes would stick to my hands as I released them back into the pond, the refracting light and rippling water made the newts look like shocks of wobbly red. I would paint my face with red clay that I scraped off of rocks. I loved the color red because it was rare in the chaparral, but when red made an appearance it was always stunning.
One day my dad cut his thumb so deeply that he needed stitches. He walked up to our front door, holding his hand above his head and leaving bright red droplets on the ground behind him. I followed the crimson circles down our gravel driveway and out into the grass until they disappeared into the fields, absorbed by the dry, cracked ground.
Red Flames
I was almost too young to remember when the first fire swept through the valley. I was enjoying myself at a summer camp when my mom came to pick me up. She leaned down to tell me that the land was on fire. This was before “fire season” was a common term in California and it was still novel to watch fire tear through hillsides and plains and homes and communities. She told me that the fire was close to our house, but I was too busy writing a review of my friend’s restaurant, an establishment that only served plastic vegetables, to care about an encroaching apocalypse.
I didn’t know this at the time, but the damage was mitigated by Cal Fire’s response and underpaid labor extracted from incarcerated people.
What I remember distinctly is how it felt to walk over scorched land. How the burnt grass crackled under my feet, how thick white ash felt like hot, hellish snow. How kicking at the ground sent particulates dancing into the air.
I remember how the trees groaned in the wind and how many of my favorite branches had fallen to the ground. Hollowed out oak husks where only the bark survived.
But even then, nature regenerated. I once again watched as the land recovered. As the grass turned to bushes and as little oak trees pushed through the ashen soil. The fire felt like an anomaly. Something horrid, and terrifying and once in a lifetime.
Red Blood
I was having a bad day. My chronic pain was flaring up, I had been late to class and I was running from cafe to cafe trying to find my misplaced computer charger (spoiler alert: it was in my room the whole time). I was disheveled and tired, it was 5:00pm but I was ready for bed.
I heaved myself towards a bus stop bench, ready to light up a cigarette and carp to myself for a few minutes. Right before I sat down I looked at the bench, as is good practice when using public facilities in the Bay Area. I saw a single burgundy spot on the bench. Then I looked closer, I saw two, then ten, and then countless shiny drops on the bench and the ground below it. This isn’t CSI or a murder mystery, I didn’t have to touch it or taste it to know that it was blood.
Then I looked further up the street. I saw a trail of little red dots, just like the ones left by my father so many years ago. I followed them, hearing whispers of my childhood as I walked. I looked around me and was shocked that no one else appeared perturbed by the bloody spoor in front of us.
When I reached the top of the street I laid eyes upon the person who had left the gory Hansel and Gretel trail. His face was bright red. Blood poured from what appeared to be a fresh wound, the last visible patches of his pale skin were bedaubed as he wiped his brow. Though he wasn’t looking at me I could see that even the whites of his eyes were made pink by the blood that had dripped past his eyelashes. He looked like Carrie when she stood on her high school stage drenched in pigs blood. It was the most gore I’d ever seen on one person and my first instinct was to scream.
However, I know better than to cause a scene in a predominantly white and upper class neighborhood. I knew that my scream would draw attention and that that attention would lead to a police response and that a police response would only bring violence and harm. So I approached the man, I called to him, asking,
“Sir, do you need help?”
When he didn’t respond I asked again, “Is there anything I can do to help you? Would you like me to call an ambulance?”
He took two big strides towards me. He looked unsteady and I feared that he would fall. I took a step towards my car, ready to grab my first aid kit, to treat him for shock or disinfect his wounds.
Finally we locked eyes. His brow furrowed and he said,
“You nigger bitch — I will fucking kill you!”
I backed away like I was evading a rattlesnake — wary of letting my eyes off of this bloody antagonist. I crossed the street, walking on a diagonal so my line of sight remained clear. I continued up the street, still looking over my shoulder with every other step.
“You nigger bitch — I will fucking kill you”
An instant replay ran on a loop in my brain as I grappled with the silence of the white shoppers, diners and students that must have heard the threat.
“You nigger bitch — I will fucking kill you”
I turned a corner, and I ran.
Red Sirens
When Philando Castile died I cried harder than I had in a year. I watched the video of his murder on a loop as tear drops fell onto my kitchen’s red linoleum floor. I listened to the scream of his girlfriend as she told us, told me:
“the police just shot my boyfriend for no apparent reason”
There was a child in the backseat. No amount of therapy, or civil damages, or courtroom “justice” could begin to right the trauma that was blasted into that child’s brain. Nothing could undo the reality of watching your boyfriend bleed out into the driver’s seat.
I don’t often journal, but I wrote to myself that day:
Under moonlight Black boys look blue, under sirens Black boys turn red.
I turned off my computer and turned on the TV only to see him die once more. This time his blood was pixelated, as if bright red squares on a white t-shirt would be any less upsetting.
I was filled with fear, not for myself (lightskinned mixed girls are shielded from a lot of racism, not all, of course), but for my father, and my cousins, and everyone I loved whose racialized body could easily serve as a police officer’s target practice.
Philando Castile was not the first Black person to publicly lie in their own blood. Not the first Black person to die before our very eyes, to have their death spun into the news cycle for 48 hours only to be usurped by electoral happenings or political snafus.
I remember when Oscar Grant laid dead on the Fruitvale BART platform. I was eight years old but I can recall the local news reporting and the slow shake of my mothers head as she turned off the TV for dinner. The murder happened at night, but the BART fluorescents shone bright enough to ward off any ambiguity.
I was too young to march, or organize or riot. I was afraid, but I was callow. Like the fires that scorched the valley I loved, this too was a horrifying aberration. Because how could an officer who had sworn to protect and serve kill someone, and kill them so publicly. This country, I thought, is not so barbaric that public slayings of citizens could be anything but an appalling and singular stain on our cultural tapestry. The murder was too brazen, too public to ever reoccur.
Of course it did reoccur, and continues to reoccur, and justice remains an elusive figure on an untouchable horizon.
Oscar Grant’s murderer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. After the verdict his mother cried:
“My son was murdered. He was murdered. He was murdered. He was murdered.”
Philando Castile’s killer was acquitted.
I’ve come to expect as much. The murder of Black people is treated as an incidental and Black people are told time and time again that our lives lack the intrinsic value that lies behind white skin. America is a horror movie and Black people are always first to go.
Red Sun
I awoke one September morning to a dark room. At first I was chagrined, thinking that I had slept through the day, but when I looked at my alarm clock it read 10:00am. When I peered through my curtains I saw what appeared to be a scene from an apocalyptic movie. Smoke had engulfed the sky and hung low, bringing the heavens down to earth. The sun shone in a bloody red.
This was not the first time that the sun had turned red in Berkeley. A year before I had trudged to work wearing an N-95 with smoke stinging my eyes. I came home that day and wrote to myself:
Today the sun is red
Red like my mother’s hair
Red like my shoulders when the melanin ain’t enuf
Red like fire, like bloodshot eyes inflamed by smoke
or tears
But suns should not be red
that is reserved for my mother’s hair
The fires of 2019 felt removed from my life. The flames were far from me, far from those I loved, far from the land that raised me.
2020 was different.
On September 9th my parents called me to let me know that the valley was on fire. Cause by lighting — turns out that it can strike twice. At least it wasn’t an arsonist like last time, I thought to myself, only to be struck by the more existential horror that We started the fire. By pillaging the environment and pumping toxins into the air and raising temperatures and drying out the land such that a freak lightning storm could set the state ablaze.
My mother called me on FaceTime so that I could see through her eyes: flames jumped over mountain ridges alighting trees like struck matches, brown smoke billowed over the hills such that even the light of the wildfire barely shone through, and the wind howled as if even the air felt the pain of the scorching heat.
This time there was no support from the Cal Fire — they were too busy battling hundreds of other fires across the state. There weren’t enough volunteer firefighters in our tiny town to do anything but try to protect our house. There were no incarcerated firefighters because our prisons are overrun with COVID and too many prisoners were sick or dying to create a formidable firefighting force. Calamities converged and pain intersected as I watched the brown sky through my cracked phone screen. I begged my parents to put on masks. To protect them from the few volunteer firefighters that were there as protection, to shield them from the smoke in fear that their lungs would become more susceptible to COVID.
This time the fire ravaged the land. The trees are dirty brown and the hills are black. When it rains the earth smells like an ashtray and when my nephew went to climb trees he returned with black, ashen hands.
We joked that at least the land can’t burn twice, at least we were done with fire season. But it will come again next year.
I fear for the hills of California. 4,197,628 acres of land went up in flames in 2020 and the fire season stretches longer every year. With every seasonal cycle we truncate the time that the earth has to recover, I fear that someday this damage will be irreversible. I fear that the land I loved, the land that loved me back, will be stuck in a cycle of ruination and return. I fear that as the fires increase in frequency, the land that I love will turn into foreign terrain. The ground will erode, the water will become toxic, the grass and shrubs and baby trees will slowly cease their attempts to push through layers of ash. I fear that one day I will return to find a wasteland.
Red, White and Blue
I’ve found that the best emotional substitute that I have for fear is anger, and I refuse to live a life clouded by fright. I used to shy away from anger, I knew that my anger was rarely well received. I’ve been called aggressive, been ignored, mocked and belittled all for reacting to the inhospitable world that I navigate. Now I no longer give a fuck. There is no energy left in me for respectability politics or facades of politeness. I am done hiding my anger, I am ready to let it erupt, to let myself overflow with red, roiling rage.
Red like twitter death threats, never “real” enough to warrant as response.
“where is a mass shooting when we need one?”
Red like my brain as my cortisol spiked, reading a lynching threat off of a high school library computer. Another death threat not “real” enough to warrant extra security (the district has a tight budget you know).
“KKK Forever Public Lynching December 9th 2015”
Red like two swings of a nightstick from the Berkeley police, a crack to my father’s dog and a crack to my father’s head.
“Run nigger”
Red like watching the land you love turn to ash and then being told that imagining beyond capitalism is a pipe dream.
“Jeff Bezos worked hard for his money”
Red like peering into the rotten core of the United States and being told
“That’s just the way it is”
Red like remembering that some people aren’t angry at all.
Every day I mourn the loss of people I’ve never met. I shed tears for families that I have never known. I repost missing persons reports of Black girls across the country, I find out another Black girl turned up dead. I hear of another “bad apple” and I am sick to my stomach. Eric Salgado was murdered by a cop who was still working after murdering someone four years earlier; George Floyd never caught his breath; Oluwatoyin Salau was found, but she wasn’t found alive.
I used to let hope grow within me, little Rococo tendrils of optimism pushing through layers of epigenetic trauma and fear. Those hopes would grow and bud and bloom until they were razed by another state-sanctioned murder or oil spill or hate crime. A cycle of ruination and return.
Now my hope grows underground like mycelia. Stretching through the earth, maintaining the soil, saving my spirit from irrevocable erosion. No longer painterly or beautiful, but no longer vulnerable to razing. Latent, but present nonetheless.
I have tried hard to protect my heart like I have protected my hopes. I’ve tried smoking and drinking and running and singing but nothing can shield me from the bottomless hurt in this world. Even though I have attempted to build a callous wall around my heart, every denial of justice stings like a fresh wound.
So I am angry, and hurt and tired. Red is no longer my favorite color. Because we all bleed red, but some of us shed more blood than others.
