Until We Meet Again, An Apostrophe to Jordan Taylor
I thank the Universe for all the ways that I’ve evolved, just in time to face the problems that we need to solve / Gotta be ready for when my name is called / Empires fall, but I’m my own God / The answer is, no questions, just focus on ya blessings / My destiny, I see it manifestin’ I’m reflectin’ on the past n’ present, that’s my secret weapon / And with my last breath, I hope you saw my truth, was in at my best when I stepped into the booth / Went to war with myself, and I won that shit, sweeped the game, dust to dust, ashes to ashes — Jordan Taylor, Ashes (feat. WatchMyTone)
I had first met Jordan when I attended SUNY New Paltz in 2015. I vaguely recall my “Intro to Black Studies” course professor telling us that the administration had been trying to continually undermine the Black Studies department. Being an overwhelmingly white institution in itself, administration believed that there was in fact no evidence nor instances of antiBlackness that permeated throughout the history and concurrent day of SUNY New Paltz campus. As a result of their continued negligence, Black students — Jordan Taylor, being among one of the leading scholars speaking out against the racism and injustices on campus, mobilized and organized a Save Black Studies movement:
The Black Studies department played a fundamental role in the educational and community-based development of the Black student body in addition to its white and nonBlack allies who were not only aware of the Black struggle but also in support of Black liberation — inside and outside of predominantly white institutions. The Black Studies department was also virtually difficult to discern not only until fellow students pointed it out to one another that it existed — in other words, it was architecturally similar to that of a trailer park in contrast to almost every other building on the campus including the Humanities classroom building, the Student Union building, the Coykendell Science building, the Engineering Hall and other buildings as well.
Jordan and I never had classes together, but we met at different points in both academic and political circles. We would exchange ideas in conversation about the state of the world, music, art to our own philosophical inquiries we had in relation to our own relationships to ourselves. Even though he graduated before me, we still kept in touch — we spoke at several points about getting on a song together. Among many gifts, Jordan was an artist and I, too, was slowly getting back into the rhythm of making music myself.
Four years later, we were both consistent members of an anti-patriarchal project called BLFF, which stood for Black Liberation Freedom Fellowship program. With the love, support and endorsement of Callie of Rise Up Kingston organization and Rae of the Newburgh LGBTQ center, I helped co-facilitated what became this project, which consisted of three phases for twelve weeks in which ten cisgender-identifying Black men would come together via Zoom chat each week to synthesize and unpack Black feminist writer and educator bell hooks’ works, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity and All About Love — implementing how we as masculine-idenfifying men contributed to cisheteropatriarchy and we can be better allies to our communities, particularly our Black LGBTQIA+ communities. How this idea first came about is that I wanted to have a space for Black men to talk about our problems — ranging from anything going on in our lives without scrutiny.
Despite the few folks who left the project, there remained four of us who stayed. Among the four who remained was Jordan, Patrickson, Tyler, and Barry. Mannie, who co-facilitated Success Stories sessions with us, which was a program founded by incarcerated men in 2014 whose intentions were to create a world without prisons and patriarchy. Utilizing feminist theory as their primary framework, the goal has been to deliver these programs to people who have caused harm in their communities and to establish safety amongst themselves and one another.
A pivotal moment in this work we were doing showed itself not only in the concluding town hall meeting we held with other Black men on being open about love and vulnerability — two things that the world holds scrutiny and represses Black men for — but also how it affected us outside of this project.
About more than twenty Black-masculine identifying people attended the meeting via Zoom — those of whom were across the generational spectrum — from older Black men to young Black men — a beautiful and unforgettable experience. A second instance in which made the work we were doing so pivotal is how it panned out in everyday life for Black people. I recall us being on a Zoom call just casually talking and checking in on each other.
Jordan hinted to us that he wasn’t feeling well — emotionally and mentally. Barry, Patrickson and Tyler I believe then visited him in person to see how he was doing and how they could help Jordan. It was from that day that reflected — rather, went against the patriarchy we had been fighting against simply because we were men who have been socialized to rely on our own sheer individualism, willpower, and apathy to progress forward.
Sometime after the BLFF project ended and we all went our separate paths, the liberatory work of undoing patriarchal harms did not end with us and BLFF — rather, it continued and remains a trademark of history in our collective goal toward Black liberation because none of us are free until we are all free. I hadn’t heard from Jordan since that moment on — except for when he was applying to get into CUNY Law school and he wanted recommendations.
Our last conversation via text was that he followed up and let me know that he accepted into CUNY Law. I think it was about a couple months after that conversation that I, among many friends and community members who were close to Jordan, found that he was missing.
“Was Jordan kidnapped?” was my initial thought.
Sundown towns still exist across the United States. Search parties have been around looking for him across all of New York City. Nonprofit organizations such as Black and Missing, Inc to Facebook groups titled Let’s Find Jordan consisting of about over three-hundred people, were sharing the flier of him — updating the community of where they thought they last saw him. News outlets from NBC New York, lohud, Gay City News to PIX11, The National Jurist, Reddit NYC, and more had shared articles detailing his last whereabouts. Two months since January 8th 2023 — we were informed that Jordan had died, March 7th 2023.
I was devastated. His funeral was held at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Spring Valley, New York where family members, friends, colleagues and community members gathered to celebrate the life of Jordan. Despite my feeling discombobulated and at a loss for words, moments after folks gave their respects and love to him, something in me pushed me to also walk up to the podium and say a few words. Subsequently before the gathering came to a close, I met Jordan’s mother, who hugged me and we cried together and said to me that she had heard great things about me from Jordan — in a way I felt that while I didn’t know Jordan for a long time — we were still kindred — in the same way Malcolm X once said to an interviewer, “every Negro I know is my blood brother.”
Since his 30th birthday last year, I wrote an ode for Jordan titled Semicolons:
bridge gaps between two different path
ways we will find new places to reach
goals lights near blinding, flashing from
left right; never dim, soundscapes take
no form; we hear sounds amplify
decibels fluctuate with each other
converge over time, mesh into
one, becoming more again
“the more the better” clearer
for us moving into new trajectories
new chaos. new tranquilities. new
bridges to gap, the story never
ends, we are African kin
harnessing reverberations of
the last nigga who walked earth
so we continue the sentencing
I still feel like he’s never left.
Rest in Power, Jordan Taylor. Until we meet again.
Embracing the spirit that lives beyond the body is one way to choose life. We embrace that spirit through rituals of remembering, through ceremonies wherein we invoke the spirit presence of our dead, and through ordinary rituals in everyday life where we keep the spirit of those we have lost close. Sometimes we invoke the dead by allowing wisdom they have shared to guide our present actions. Or we invoke through reenacting one of their habits of being. And the grief that may never leave us even as we do not allow it to overwhelm us is also a way to give homage to our dead, to hold them. — bell hooks, All About Love
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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.
