I want to start God Sent Me, this latest grant project, with a few words from Questlove’s book Creative Quest, which focuses on creativity and how creative people determine if they have it and how it works for them. He is, to my mind, truly one of the creative people on the planet, because he is also one of the most curious people around. As a founding member of the hip hop band The Roots, bandleader for the Tonight Show and now an Academy Award-winning documentarian (Summer of Soul…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Questlove is accomplished in a variety of fields, but driven by a desire to understand even more. In the opening paragraph of the introduction, he questions his own creativity, since he spends more time “absorbing the creative work around me than actually creating myself”. 

He and his creative aesthetic embody the notion of digging in the crates – how hip-hop producers travel the world to visit record stores to sift through stacks of albums across genres and ages to find samples to transform into new work – which has inspired my approach to film criticism and critical writing. The exposure and absorption are integral to the work.

I believe it is through the work around me, the books, music, movies and more generally the history of human experience that offers me a glimpse into myself that I can then remix into essays and stories that present a reflection (hopefully useful) for others to catch sight of some piece of themselves.

God Sent Me is…a short collection of writing that defies easy description. Are they essays or fiction or who knows what else? I suppose I’m tearing down a barrier between truth and myth by telling my story in the only way that makes sense to me. Is it (and by extension, am I) creative?

I’ll let you be the judge.

[There’s a caveat to consider. These three “pieces” of writing were supposed to be read as one whole, but I’m teasing you, dear reader, with this introduction. It is an interview I conducted with myself. In it, are elements of the beginning, middle and end of my creative journey, and just maybe, another beginning…]

Terrence: You’ve gotten several ArtsWave Black & Brown Artist Grants…

tt: Three total, yes.

Yes, and the first one was titled Critical Reflections. You explored representation, right?

What I realized, during the process, was that I was laying out my origin story as a film and cultural critic…

Your origin story?

Yes, my expressed aim was to use the term ‘critical reflections’ (which I had bandied about for a few years before the landing that first grant) to delve into what made me suited to be ‘critical’ about anything (film or otherwise) while focusing on, what I hoped would be a self-reflective journey into my experiences as a critic, especially a Black critic.

Did you discover a new depth of your ‘superpowers’ as a critic or a Black man?

That’s a great question. Looking back – and it helps to understand that the grant had both a written element (long-form essays) and a podcast, something that I had never done before – I didn’t know what I was doing. It was an instinctual project.

But you had parameters, based on what you included in the application process, right?

I did, and while the parameters didn’t change, the essays, which were about how Black people are represented in film and television (which I suppose we should call ‘streaming’ now), shifted from the very beginning.

How?

I wrote the first essay on January 6, 2021. I was sitting in my bedroom – where I had been doing film and streaming review work five days a week, since the Covid shutdown – contemplating what my first essay was supposed to be, when someone reached out to me via text, imploring me to turn on the news, which I did immediately. MSNBC was broadcasting live, the storming of the Capitol and I sat, watching a sea of white folks rioting and looting one of the ‘sacred’ democratic institutions in DC. As a Black man of a certain age, I scanned the crowd, hoping and praying that none of the people engaged in these activities was Black. I didn’t want us mixed up in this craziness. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve seen how we are pilloried for such behavior and never have the opportunity to live it down. When we march, it’s a riot. When we riot, it’s time for the authorities to put down a rebellion. We get painted with the broadest brush possible, and by ‘we’ I do mean all Black people. Our non-violence is violent. Our violent actions become barbaric and inhuman. Sub-human, in fact. And, yet…

And yet, what?

This was truly unorganized chaos. The guy with the horned helmet. The people beating back Capitol security forces and then running around the building, going into offices and putting their feet up on desks, doing all sorts of unsavory animalistic things. This was sub-human activity, not what should represent civil discourse or even organized protest.

So, you wrote about it…

So, yes, I wrote about it. I wrote about it because I knew, in my bones, that if Black people had done such a thing, the situation would have been nuclear for us. Storming the Capitol and acting a fool…we would still be living under martial law now, if we were allowed to live at all.

I don’t disagree.

But a part of me wished we, at some point (really any point in American history), had done something like this. Given in to rage and engaged in a righteous fight for what we believed was fair. There is a privilege in that. I just said righteous, but that was wrong, in the January 6^th context, because these people were not truly acting from a righteous place. This was petty and childish. I didn’t get my way, so instead of grabbing my toys and going home until the next election, they decided to upend the game, toss the board off the table and step on the pieces. This was a group of sore losers, who had been told repeatedly that the game was as fair as it had always been, but they refused to accept defeat.

And so, there was an attempt to change the game…

Is it weird to say I never thought about changing the game, not like this?

Why not?

Why would I? I had swallowed the lessons, the definition of what it meant to be American.

Are you talking about the Cornel West definition, which you have often referred to in your writing?

No, not that. I have always admired the philosophical purity of his definition. His sense and belief that America was an experiment of improvisation. It was jazz. It was like a game of pick-up basketball. A team of players come together with different talents, work towards a common goal. They win or lose together and then, if they lose, they wait for the chance to play again. The rules don’t change. The game remains the same.

But games and rules evolve all the time…

I remember an essay, back in the 1990s, published in Esquire, one of their special issues – I used to keep them, like a hoarder and I probably still have it in my basement storage unit – about a baseball game where a batter stood in the box and took three strikes, three pitches down the middle of the plate, called by the umpire behind the plate, but he refused to leave the box after the third strike. He remained and as everyone watching waited to see what would happen, his sheer force of will bent everyone around him and the game continued until he got a hit. That was the only way he was going to leave the box. He, of course, was white. It was a random short story and even the outcome was inevitably meaningless. None of the players that followed him reacted in a similar fashion. Only this one player.

That’s different.

Yes, it was. And that’s what I’m talking about. Changing the rules in the middle of the game. We were in the process, on January 6, 2021, of certifying the votes that would confirm the next President of the United States. One person, inspired a whole group of people to attempt to bend the will of American voters and the system, as it was doing its work.

What would you do…what situation would compel you to act in such a way?

Now that’s a real question.

You don’t have an answer, do you?

Not now. Let’s see if I figure something out as we go along. Next question.

What happened after that first essay?

I wrote a response to what was going on. It wasn’t Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? or Public Enemy broadcasting the news from the underground. It wasn’t angry, not as angry as it could or should have been. It was halting and uncertain. It was me asking if I had actually seen what was going on, if others had seen it too. I think I tried, with the podcast, to ask the people I interviewed if they had seen it, but I didn’t do it directly or consistently. I asked people to talk and think about their lives and experiences, what had shaped them. Did such images – whether from the news or the movies and shows they had watched – offer reflections or representations of their own lives?

Well, if this was also your origin story, is that what happened to or for you?

Representation has never been clear cut for me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself onscreen, not directly. Not that I ever expected to.

What did you expect?

Nothing.

I know that’s not true.

You sure about that?

You wanted to be a hero, a subject, a protagonist in some story.

Maybe The Protagonist, like John David Washington in Tenet. One of the most confusing narratives ever. A story where a Black man shifts back and forth through time, fights himself, saves himself, starts a revolutionary outfit that he can’t remember or understand. That’s exactly what I wanted or maybe I’ve been living a version of this reality the whole time.

That’s not a fair example.

How about Killmonger from Black Panther then? Stranded in this country when his uncle (King T’Chaka) kills his father for attempting to seed revolutionaries with the instruments and tools that could build and sustain their ability to fight a fairer fight, who then plugs into the system available to him, learns the tactics and lessons of his enemies, reclaims his place in the world, eager to fight the fight that matters only to die in his homeland. I love so much of his story, but I realize I’m not a revolutionary, not like that. I might want to go back to Africa (the fictional realm of Wakanda), but there is an isolationist part of me that would get there, see the riches and cultural resources, and just decide that I could be happy with that knowledge and life. I would want to protect it and would be willing to do so with my life, but conquering and colonizing the colonizers? I don’t think I could care enough about that.

Why not?

I’m selfish.

No. Don’t forget I know…

…me? Us? You know yourself, or at least some version of yourself that is…

…some part of you. I know you talk to students about film and criticism and share your stories and experiences to inspire others to find the next step on their journeys. That’s not selfish.

I’m the part of you that’s tired. The part that knows he can’t be Jeffrey Beaumont from Blue Velvet, despite Blue Velvet being my favorite film of all time. Jeffrey Beaumont was a white first- or second-year college student who comes home to help take care of his father after he collapses and is hospitalized. What was the most important part of the previous statement? White. Jeffrey stumbles across a severed ear in an abandoned lot one day and takes it to the police, realizes they aren’t doing enough to figure out what’s going on and decides to discover the truth on his own. He wanders blindly into a world beneath the placid suburban façade he’s lived in his whole life. It’s The Matrix over a decade before minus the trippy sci-fi posturing. I wanted to be Jeffrey when I saw that film back in the day. Maybe that’s why I watched it so many times. I kept looking for ways into that world, but I knew a Black kid like me wouldn’t have that adventure, wouldn’t be able to dance with the devil(s) like that and find his way out the other side. There wouldn’t be a good girl waiting for me at the end or an Isabella Rossellini to tease and torture and tame the devil long enough to help me save myself.

What would your story look like instead?

Edmund Perry’s. It’s no movie, like Eminem said, there’s no Kyle MacLachlan. There’s just the true story of a Black kid who graduated from a premier prep school in the mid-1980s, went home the summer before he was supposed to start college at Stanford, but ended up dead in Central Park, killed by an undercover police officer who was taken to the hospital for the treatment of minor injuries while Edmund bled out on the sidewalk. Edmund’s Black life should have mattered more and deserves to be remembered as part of the roll call.

Edmund is us, yes.

Damn right, he is. He’s been me for decades. He was a couple of years older than me. He graduated from Philips Exeter the summer before my junior year of high school. The same year I attended Exeter’s summer program before I entered The McCallie School for Boys in Chattanooga, TN, on the same scholarship program that funded his time at Exeter. The same scholarship that questioned whether or not they should continue offering scholarships to Black students if they weren’t going to be able to get a return on their investment, like it was somehow the fault in our stars that we weren’t able to make it past 18-25 years old.

What’s the lyric from Sign of the Times – let’s fall in love, get married, have a baby, we’ll call him Nate if it’s a boy?

…hope the little Black boy grows…

What am I to you?

You’re, maybe, the part of me that wants to be seen, whereas I’m the part that knows he’s invisible. I’m the ectoplasm, the part the light gets bent around and somehow remains unseen. I never get to transform my invisibility into something meaningful and possibly even powerful. My invisibility doesn’t even truly protect me.

Then there is no place for you?

Back to the Future, is that what you’re thinking? Why can’t I go back and show Chuck Berry’s cousin how to play Johnny B. Good? Who listens to the ‘me’ from the future? Is it even worth saving myself from simply fading away? Black people going to the past is way to fraught. Didn’t we learn anything from Octavia Butler? Of course, we’re connected to white folks, but why do we have to go back when they are in crisis? Their crisis is our crisis? Black and white are inextricably linked. Yeah, we know, but do white people truly care?

I’m starting to wonder if you care.

About time.

Going back to comics for a second. Wakanda had technology, but the focus was on weapons. What about Krakoa, the mutant homeland explored recently in Marvel Comics?

Mutants have always been stand-ins for marginalized people and this era for them was a natural extension of what I talked about earlier. What if we fought and pushed for a homeland of our own, right here and now. What would that look like? I love the idea of the rules. Kill no human. Bring all mutants to the island, let mutants take care of other mutants, both the good and the bad. Share resources like medicines that help all. But that era shows us how and why there is no happily ever after. Humans fear mutants. They can’t trust the gifts given. They will always want more. If Black people discovered the power of resurrection, white people would go to war to claim it for themselves. We could cure cancer, but it wouldn’t be enough. White people would destroy themselves to eradicate us in the process.

Is there no love? Is that the issue?

AI (Artificial Intelligence), the Spielberg movie breaks it down. White people create AI, robots to serve as surrogates for lost children and/or family. Not just to do the work people don’t want to do anymore, but to love people. Robots can be taught to love, but the question is, can people love the robots in return? It should not be mis-understood that this question comes from the only Black person in the room at the beginning of the film. Have white people ever loved us?

Are you comfortable with the tone and tenor of this exchange?

I’m not sure my comfort matters. We aren’t doing this for me.

What would Edmund think of you now? If he is you (us), then have we lived and represented him as we should/could have?

That’s a tough one. I don’t know that he would be happy with this life. I followed in his footsteps, in a way. I got the Ivy League degree, but squandered it, doing non-profit work rather than seek the material gains and creature comforts from investment banking. I write and talk about film on television and radio, but it’s local, too localized for real dreamers and strivers. Would he have waited as long as I did to marry (well and white) or would he have married at all? I imagine a path, a divergence with infinite opportunities and a myriad of different choices. I think the better question might be, would I have been happier with my sense of his choices and the life built from them, if it had been me that died, instead of him. Was he that much more driven than me?

I’ve never thought about it that way.

I’ve got a question for you. Are you ever angry?

You know the answer to that one.

I do, I guess, but I want to hear how you talk about it.

Am I ever angry…not frequently. I imagine age takes the edge off, except when I hit that spot of pure rage where I’m ready to rage at the machine, I stew in it. I don’t act from that place or speak too quickly from there. But I don’t throw out those marinating juices. I keep them and sometimes, with the right trigger or reminder, I pour them out again and slide in for more stewing, more brewing.

I feel like one of us needs to react from that rageful place. Sometimes. It’s not about easing pent-up tension in a valve. No, you must speak that truth, give it a voice. Righteousness is a call to action, although self-righteousness is petty and feeble. It is what remains when the game has been played and the winners and losers are long forgotten.

Why can’t it be you? The one to speak those truths from time to time.

I can only do this with you, in this imaginary conversation.

Why is this not real? Self-interrogation is self-awareness.

Yes, but to challenge the world, that takes an anger and rage that goes beyond speaking truths. There’s real action and a willingness to die. I don’t need to die over the things that make me angry. My dying won’t change anything.

That sounds privileged.

Privileged?

Yes, because you get to say it after careful consideration, even if it seems spontaneous. But, in the moment, when your truth-saying puts you in the crosshairs, you don’t get the time to think or process, even for a second. You’re angry, you lash out and bang, it’s over. Who cares what you thought about it?

Or what I thought about anything, right? I like the low stakes I live with. That’s what I’m saying.

Feels like you’re squandering your superpower.

Saving myself, each and every day. What’s wrong with that? I mentioned The Matrix earlier. How about this? Neo, across the trilogy, is the savior, The One, because his experiences with and love for Trinity helps him to realize who he’s fighting for. Jesus died for all of us. A Neo, maybe one of the earlier versions of him, was more like Jesus. But the one we got to watch in the movies, that Neo fought and died, not for all of us, but for Trinity. I like to think I’m different. I’m the hero because I fight to protect my neck from all the dangers of the world. I don’t do it for somebody else or the whole human collective. I do it for me.

You mentioned Cornel West earlier. I want to return to him, to question what it means to be American. What does that mean to you, especially now? You’ve written and danced around this idea from the very beginning of these grant projects. Where are you, at this moment, with your American-ness?

Of the terms he explored in the introduction to his reader (along with being human and modern), the American notion was the one I enjoyed the most. For years, I facilitated conversations with teenagers during afterschool programming, high-risk teens who most people would have never considered broaching such dialogues with, but I loved engaging them with the ideas. I think that was when and where that philosophical journey began for me. And the American piece, I rarely read the full quote to students. It was academic and jargon-y, but I had underlined elements that spoke to me in a more direct fashion, and I believed it would work as well for them. Clips like “a fragile experiment” and yielding “forms of modern self-making and self-creating unprecedented in human history” offered a combination of all of the ideas in one, in this feeling of being American. I’m not a patriotic person in a traditional sense, but I loved the sense that America could allow people the opportunity to create new versions of themselves. I shared with students how I had undergone a metamorphosis of sorts. When I got married, I changed my name, which made it easier for my wife to just take on the new name we created. I cut my dreads. I became a stepfather instantly. I was in my mid-30s when I did all of this. It was freeing. Now, as part of these grants, I take everything a step further. The self-making and self-creating are about understanding the power of mythology. Every person, every family has stories that are shared, histories that are unique to them. Along the way, I’ve come to recognize that not all of those stories are fact-based, but to paraphrase John Edgar Wideman, one of my favorite authors, all stories (that we tell) are true, meaning they contain a powerful and fundamental element that feels, I don’t know how else to describe it other than to say that it feels, right.

You’ve been trying to explain this current project to people, and I know that you’ve stumbled over describing what you’re writing.

I have. The first grant was criticism to a certain degree. Not film or streaming based, although I referenced moving images and storytelling throughout. The second one – Stepping In (To Fatherhood) – was longer essays on fatherhood and health. I wanted to write about my absent, recently deceased father who, through his genes, had passed down a legacy of cancer. While working on those essays, I found small discrepancies in the stories I was incorporating into the work or things that some folks didn’t want shared.

Some folks…

I know that’s not a question. You want me to say that my mother didn’t want some details included.

To be fair, she was concerned about the use of her government name.

Yeah, from her marriage license. It was a small thing, as I said, but it stuck with me. My father was dead, but was there stuff that he might have questioned being included? Everything was part and parcel of my collective story, ultimately, but my stories don’t exist without so many others and what if the other stories I had known about and accepted as true had details that were omitted or simply weren’t factual? So, this time with God Sent Me, I figured why hold myself to a standard that might not be necessary. What if I just told stories?

Not to give anything away about what’s to come, but…

Sneaky. I have a little myth, one that I wrote decades ago, that’s about my mother. I think it might be the best way to sum up what we’ve done here in this interview and set the stage for what’s to come. I started a novel in the 1990s, about meeting my father. I wanted to write about him, based on snippets I had heard over the years. I figured if I could create him on the page, it would get me ready to meet him in-person. I wrote about 10-12 chapters and then, suddenly stopped. I can’t explain why. He lost meaning to me, I guess. I was in my 20s and had lived my entire life without him. I didn’t need him. When I finally did meet him, it was because I knew about the cancer concerns in the family and I wanted to put a face to what I was likely going to carry forward. But in that manuscript, I wrote about my mother, not even a full chapter, just a fever-dream of a story that wasn’t remotely factual, but man, it was true to my sense of her.

Are you ready to share it?

Sure. If this is the end, let’s make this a bit more solemn, recalling my Catholic upbringing.

(clears throat)

A reading from Finding Father, an unfinished fictional manuscript.

The boy stands in front of the house, waiting for his father to return. Mama said he had to stay out there until his father came back and that he had to shoot, shoot to kill. That was the only way she’d let him back in the house. She said if he didn’t do it, he’d just as well crawl up her raised skirt between her legs where he come from. The boy, at eleven, had never seen what was between a woman’s legs like that and it scared him almost as much as the idea of having to kill his father. Somehow, he figured this was a lesson. His father taught him how to shoot, how to kill and his mother must have been teaching him something too. Lessons came all at once or like crumbs off cake. He waited outside a day and a half. It was late summer, so it wasn’t cold. He slept in Pavlovian spurts, the kind he had been raised to take where, when he realized he was asleep, he snapped himself back awake and searched around with his eyes, they were seeking what had been missed while the silence rang in his ears. Mama slid food out the door and he had the well for drinking. While retrieving the pail after a drink and a splashing on his drying face, he caught sight of his father coming up the road. He let the pail drop from its perch and it plummeted without scraping the rock and dirt on the way down. By the time it found bottom, he had the rifle cocked, taking careful aim as he had been taught, but he allowed his father to come closer. There was no doubt, now that the moment was upon him, he would be able to shoot and kill and could do so at any time. He wouldn’t let him get close enough to take the gun away and he wouldn’t simply wound him. The one and only shot would do what he had to do. He would kill him. His father never said a word as he approached. He stared in the boy’s eye, the open one aiming, watching him grow into a man and when he was grown, the shot was fired. Mama emerged from behind the cracked door in a white tattered dress spotted with dirty man-prints along the bottom. He met Mama at the steps. She remained one above him and he lifted her skirt from the bottom, taking care to leave no new prints and climbed inside, disappearing as if he had never been born.

GOD SENT ME is supported by the generosity of tens of thousands of contributors to the annual ArtsWave Campaign, the region’s primary source for arts funding.