Friday’s Mr. Jones Was Right: An Anecdote On Black Children, Pugilism, Patriarchal Shame, And Learned Defenselessness
You win some, you lose some, but you live…you live to fight another day. — Mr. Jones, Friday
Looking back on all this now, I feel like I never got into playfighting when I was growing up. I figured it was because of several things. One, I didn’t really grow up having multiple siblings. I was an only child for a minute. The other reason, I was born in Nyack, New York—about an hour north from New York City. I didn’t stay there long though. I was a city hopper. First it was Nyack. Then it was Nanuet. Then it was West Haverstraw. Then it was Blooming Grove.Then it was Chester—we lived in upstate New York for the longest period of our lives. I vaguely recall my mother telling me a fragmented story…that, before she birthed me, she used to live in New York City — Queens specifically.
She mentioned that she didn’t want me to be exposed to any crime or violence in the inner cities — which I later in life learned and suspected these sentiments came from a place of her own internalized antiBlackness — was her way of saying she didn’t want me to live or be around other Black people who lived in the trenches — Black folk who appeared to so-called “not have anything going for them” — Black folk who drank alcohol, did drugs and didn’t attend church or school — mind you, I was raised Catholic, but I felt I was an aloof believer of the mythologized, Eurowestern, male god.
Subsequently, my mother moved to Nyack. Every time we moved, the communities in which we lived were egregiously more white. I say this because I’ve felt that I’ve had reason to believe that suburbia to an extent, not only removes a Black child from their native surroundings, but it pacifies them to their truth—the iterative process of revitalizing one’s Blackness as a Black person.
This is not to overlook the history of Black suburbanization, it is nevertheless important to recognize this in itself. Before I digress, I feel like the reason(s) why I never engaged or initiated playfighting was because I never learned? I never really learned how to act on the impulse to run someone’s fade in any capacity. In fact, I saw playfighting no differently than fighting. I also was afraid because of the ongoing taunting, derision, and embarrassment that came with fighting—my worries ranging from,
What happens if this person hits me? What should I do if they do hit me? What if I did hit them back? What would happen afterward?
Afterthoughts—shit like that. Most of all, I feel like I never got into playfighting because the physical, sexual, economic, emotional, psychological violence that was done onto me by my biological family members (and their friends and relatives), was evidence enough that someone hitting me, was nothing to be “playful” about. This domestic violence reinforced the reality that, regardless of whether anyone was “playing” with me or not—fighting was fighting. Fighting is fighting. Violence is violence. There was no changing what my heart was saying about playfighting—to any degree, as I got older.
I worked as an activity specialist in Brownsville at the Brooklyn Community Center (BCS), a nonprofit organization, as stated in their vision, which “believes all Brooklynites should have the resources, education, opportunities, and safety they need to thrive. We envision healthy and sustainable communities, where members are engaged as leaders, neighborhoods draw from their strengths and generations flourish together.”
I worked there back in December 2020 and left late August of last year. While this wasn’t the first time I worked among predominantly Black communities, it was the first time I really felt like I saw some of the same degrees of violence that was dealt to me as a child, affected the Black children I worked with—how over-policing, lack of funding, decadal, generational gang rivalries, and racist, so-called, “good-mannered” white management seldomly trailing around the workplace and many more sociopolitical factors contributed to all of this.
Most of the kids, have extended families—many siblings, and from that moment, I caught on to the fact that self-defense was woven into our DNA. The number of times I’ve caught myself having to stop one kid from hitting the other and their response to me being, “we’re just playing” made sense to me—and at the same time, it didn’t. I didn’t want any of their playfighting to transpire into a real fight, and in a number of instances, they did.
I haven’t read Albert Samaha’s book, Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City and yet, I vaguely recall overhearing a Brownsville native using the off-rhymed, idiolectic colloquialism, Brownsville: never ran, never will; the never ran, never will truism runs deep in Black culture — Black history — from the parents passed down to their offspring prevails an impassioned, militant, fighter spirit — a willpower to fight. I sifted through WNYC reporter Yasmeen Khan’s article, “Brownsville: No Label Necessary.” Khan refers to Brownsville resident and founder of the We Run Brownsville collective, Dionne Grayman, who is quoted sharing her fervent, unwavering support to the spirit of the Black, Latinx, and poor people of the Brownsville community. Grayman states:
Never Ran, Never Will” describes how the people of Brownsville remain unashamed and unbroken: “Still believing in the possibility and the potential even when faced with the horrible and the heartbreaking. And that there’s still something to fight for, something to celebrate, something to be excited about, something to look forward to.
Overall, I took these experiences as lessons as a way of understanding the culture, the intergenerational and reflexive necessity to fight back, and what this has meant for me being Haitian—being Black. In retrospect, my conversations about Haitian history with my parents—my aunts, were consistently short lived.
They taught us French in school.
My mother used to say. I didn’t know much of the history and when I inquired about it, that’s as far as the conversation would get. No vivid or direct, anecdotal mentions of the Haitian Revolution—revolutionaries, healers, writers—Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Adbaraya Toya, Sanité Belair, Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel, Catherine Flon—Haitian Voodoo practitioners—oungans and manbos—when the U.S. settler fascist state occupied Haiti in 1915 to 1934—I learned none of these crucial moments in history from my family. I had to research and learn about them myself.
Backtracking to my youth, I ain’t never get into no fist fights at all throughout my school years. I had bullies throughout middle school to high school—and these were instances where I remember boys just constantly hitting each other and from what I saw — and gruesomely endured — was if one boy was hitting another, and the boy hit back, they would either stop or continue.
I vaguely remember seeing a quote sometime ago and the way I remember it, it was like,
The moment a hand is violently laid on you, you begin to believe that your body is no longer yours.
That stuck with me. I later learned that defending oneself takes many forms—not just in the pugilistic sense—no one taught me how to defend myself—to remind me that this body is mine—had to learn to defend — protect myself, to the point where I didn’t need to over-explain or magnify the threat. I just needed to know me — what happened to me — and how to react accordingly.
Needless to say, I’m a work in progress.
To say it’s sad that I had to learn these lessons later in life is understating it. at the same time, I live and I learn, and the cultural shame that comes with having to assume the ‘gender responsibility of Man’ remains in question. Before anyone asks, no, my parents ain’t really teach me shit about protecting myself. They were the ones inciting that same violence that against me.
To highlight the epigraph in the beginning of this anecdote, Mr. Jones’ presents this truism to his son Craig not only as an ultimatum, but also words of his wisdom — of urgency, in an attempt to dissuade Craig from resorting to wielding a gun to protect he and his friend Smokey from Big Worm, Smokey’s former plug. Mr. Jones insisted that he still fight back through pugilistic self-defense — pugilistic, meaning, with his fists.
Needless to say, in the long term, Mr. Jones was right. To put it differently, this instance forced Craig to take a pugilistic approach to protecting himself because he was afraid to be embarrassed — harmed — killed.
This movie not only reflects Black toxic masculinist roles in South Central Los Angeles during the 90s, but also to this day across AmeriKKKa — these ideologies reinforce the many contradictions in which Black boys are forced to surrender themselves in this imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal culture, as an end to a means to survive — with no room to resist — to protect ourselves from our enemies — our colonial oppressors — and scarily enough, from what this oppressive system forces us to be.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Brooklyn, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.
