grow up isn’t what you think it means, a short story
How long have you been playing violin?
I asked the Black boy.
Fifteen years.
he said.
On the train I saw an older Black man denigrate his own kind. This was a few weeks ago. Why let this occurrence fade into memory? As the pandemic chips away at the fragmented remnants of my mind and thoughts? I sometimes seem to have forgotten how to spell words. That isn’t just from insomnia.
I don’t remember what I was doing — something I had to be doing to continue existing I suppose, but I just remember a dark skinned Black boy, dressed in all black, from his jeans to the beanie on his head about five-feet tall, who appeared to be in his teens, who walked up on the train and begun playing the violin. I’m an artist in my own right and have yet to learn music theory or any shit like that but I didn’t know what he was playing — though it was good. Real good. A minute or two later — a slightly older Black man — who didn’t appear middle-aged but definitely looked like he was in his late thirties — asked the Black boy who taught him how to play. He told him that he taught himself.
The man gestured in such a way that he didn’t believe the boy’s credentials — devaluing him. He told him to play songs — which I suspected the boy knew but didn’t want to entertain him with. The man kept instigating the boy to the point where a nonBlack woman got up from her seat as her stop was arriving and stood in front of the man. She was blocking him to prevent the man from further antagonizing the boy with a gesture that said —
he doesn’t have to prove anything to you.
I had my headphones with the volume just low enough to still hear when he was playing the violin — while seeing this exchange happening in front of me. What turned my stomach about this occurrence was that not only was it this Black man denigrating this Black boy — but also the fact that the motherfucker was attempting to rip his passion from him and to the fact that our own people are devaluing one another’s efforts to be.
The more I thought about it, it reminded me a lot of myself — how I’ve lived with this sense of existential dread about shit I’ve been scrambling to be “good” at — purpose — what have you. My biological family was the first to denigrate me when I wanted to get into art — from wanting to be an artist (my mom and aunts quite literally laughed at me) — to one of my cousins who said to me, “poetry is for girls” when I got into writing almost two decades ago. Then there was a more recent encounter with a woman who reignited this rage in me when I was just trying to buy some sleep aid to help me with my insomnia — who tried to give me a pep talk about how to live my life. She talked about how I should go into trade and implicitly said to me that writing wasn’t enough going to get me anywhere in life.
If you don’t get yo Hotep, homophobic ass the fuck out of my face and eat a hollow tip.
To hell with all of you careerist, elitist, capitalist ass motherfuckers who try to tell us Black folks that we need to be “good” at something or have to pursue something that will make us the most money in order to be of value. We ain’t livin’ for these settlers. we’re just racial captives here, the fuck.
Black excellence is an illusionary push for representation that is implemented in the pursuit of identity reductionism from the colonial imperialist oppressive systems that need to be destroyed.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.
