Category: essays

I put together a short story collection called Darker Than Blue, Volume 1: eight stories from the city. It’s available now for $5, which gets you 62-page PDF and epub versions of the work. Darker Than Blue contains eight stories about crime, violence, paranoia, grief, joy, and family in the city, and one story about Sun Wukong contemplating murder on a mountaintop. The book design, layout, and lettering is courtesy of my old Image Comics collaborator Sasha Head, while the cover is by East of West’s Nick Dragotta. This is the prologue:

The city ended up the way it did thanks in no small part to certain actions taken in the Summer of 1974, right around the time Nixon resigned. Six men died that summer, a number that pales in comparison to the city’s quadruple-digit body count that year. While their names will never appear in any history book, their deaths marked a turning point in the landscape of criminal activity in the city.

Two years prior, a young boy named Harrison was struck and killed when a gunfight broke out near a friend’s home uptown. The conflict was part of a series of running turf wars that were beginning to bubble up around the city. Three of the men, representatives of a local penny-ante racketeering operation, wanted to prevent two of their rivals taking over, and the most expedient way to do that was to force them out. The sixth was a tame cop, one who was interested only in making sure the newcomers got what they wanted and that he got paid, not in that order. The boy was nothing more than collateral damage, and the cop made sure that his death went unsolved when the investigation into the shooting began. No suspects, unreliable and tainted witness reports, and no arrests meant that it was just another night for most everyone in the city.

That summer, Rosaline Baines, mother to Harrison, enlisted Shawn Jenkins, a relative who served with her late husband in Vietnam, in her mission: kill all six men to balance the scales. They succeeded, though Jenkins lost his life finishing the job. After, Rosaline quietly returned to her life, raising three daughters, eight grandchildren, and twelve great-grandchildren before she died. She raised a family of teachers and activists, musicians and artists. They grew up ignorant of their mother’s sin, but unknowingly lived through the aftermath.

She never understood the full repercussions of her actions, but Rosaline’s hate made waves. The men were not high-up, they were not important men by any means, but they were significant enough to be missed. Each man ran or worked with a smaller gang of men and boys in addition to representing a greater organization.

Rosaline’s actions disrupted a delicate ecosystem in the city. The death of the cop gave the police an excuse to crack down on urban violence with increasingly militarized equipment and strategies. The police, already no friend to the majority black communities in the city, began to shoot first and justify their actions later, if at all. The death of the other men created two different power vacuums, one that left their crew leaderless and another that left their organization on its back foot and desperate to regain its former strength. The crews splintered, splintered again, and eventually went to war in the streets. Their former masters made a futile effort to regain control of their charges while the cops cracked every black and brown head in sight.

By the spring of ’75, the city was burning. Newspaper editorials demanded government intervention. Politicians found a toehold and dug in, eager to show how tough on crime they really were. The city was on track for its highest crime rate in years, with records being broken seemingly every month. Small business owners fled first, rising insurance costs eliminating the free-falling rents in the area, and a significant portion of the city’s whites soon moved to a neighboring town.

When summer arrived, crime suddenly plummeted to lows not seen in years. The police were baffled. Their strong-arm tactics worked, they believed, but the result was unprecedented. The streets went from noisy to quiet over a period of mere weeks, barely more than a month. Rumors swirled: secret police death squads, assassinations, bribes, and buyouts. The police expected a flashy new player to step in, another target to be knocked off its perch. Nothing materialized.

Outside of the eyes of the police, however, was another story. Months of machinations by persons previously unknown paid off, and the vast majority of the city’s criminal element found themselves under the control of one organization, which was itself controlled by a small coalition of men and women. Word came down quickly: settle the violence, keep the peace for a while, and we’ll make money for decades. Provide a few sacrificial lambs, eradicate the snitches, and the city is ours. Invest in politicians, in education, in the community, and we’ll be unstoppable. Resist, and the best you’ll get is a closed casket funeral in a potter’s field decades down the line, when they finally find what remains of your body.

Now, almost fifty years later, the organization had fully infiltrated several aspects of life in the city. The politicians that weren’t on the take knew that more than a few of their fundraisers and supporters had ties to crime. Undercover cops were tolerated until they ran afoul of the wrong profit-seeking venture and were ejected, not killed, from their top secret operations. A little give-and-take kept everything running smoothly. The cops got to hit their marks for the year and the crooks kept the dope moving and the streets under control.

The organization cracked down hard on random violence. Street gangs were annexed as soon as they formed and unleashed with better tactics, training, and discipline. There were rumors of a popular and expensive youth center in the hood that doubled as a front for recruitment, high schoolers used as muscle, and a veritable army of orphans who were adopted and trained to use their fists, sticks, knives, and guns in the pursuit of profit, not to mention the veterans who enlisted for a better life and came home with the best of Uncle Sam’s tactics lodged inside their head.

White flight eased as the decades passed, though the city remained overwhelmingly non-white as the black, Asian, and Latinx populations eventually reached parity. It’s one thing to fear for your life and your business on a daily basis, but if the crime is limited to happening over there, to them, then maybe the risk was worth it. There was a lot of money to be found in the city for anyone who had an eye toward profit.

Segregation was built into the DNA of the city. The further north you went, the closer you got to the Neon, a ten-block district of nightclubs, bars, music venues, and conspicuous consumption. The further south you went, the worse things got. Toward the middle was a tug-of-war between the rich and poor, both angling to push the other out of their neighborhoods as soon as possible. But it was stable. It worked as intended.

The city was ringed by a route on the light rail system that most natives called the O or Loop. It was a project that began as a triumph of city-planning but was soon outpaced by the growth of the town. The Loop surrounded most of the city, forming a perimeter that touched almost every single major district. Supplemental trains and buses covered the rest, spider-webbing across the city. For a dollar fifty-five, you could loop from blight to the Neon or vice versa in about thirty-minutes. Everyone that didn’t drive used the train, and everyone that didn’t use the train or drive never left their neighborhood.

Most people in town have one goal: don’t rock the boat. The city works. Keep it that way. It became a vibrant and up-and-coming place, a place where a family could be raised with a certain amount of care and jobs could be found no matter your skill set or education on one side, and those with certain skills or temperaments could thrive on the other. The penalty for Heaven was just a bitter taste of Hell now and then.

Life goes on.

You can buy Darker Than Blue on Gumroad.

I don’t have any answers.

One of the best ways I have to describe my life under white supremacy, of living and functioning in White America, is that it’s a constant battle to define, protect, conserve, and nourish my self in the face of relentlessly overwhelming opposition. It’s having to keep a firm idea of who I am in my head to counter the onslaught of dissenting opinions from people, from pop culture, from tradition, from the world as a whole. I have to assert myself and define my self, because the definitions thrust upon me have never been true.

I have what I like to think is a strong name. David, then two middle names honoring different men who came before me, and then Brothers. I’m proud of it, proud enough that I haven’t used a pseudonym online in probably fifteen years. My name is always either present from jump or just around the corner when you come across the places I haunt online. I want you to know exactly who I am and what I said and where it came from.

Names are powerful, whether you possess a name or learn someone else’s name. I learned as much from Kunta Kinte, Marlo Stanfield, and Roxanne Shante. Your name is your name. It’s currency. It’s all you have, after everything is over. It’s your life. Your name is storage, and that storage holds your reputation, your hopes, your dreams, your likes, your dislikes, and more. My name is my definition, a way to organize and preserve the collection of experiences, talents, and feelings that made me what I am. I am David Brothers.

I have a hard time with how we hashtag victims of violence to honor them. I don’t actively argue or root against it, because I understand exactly why we do it, but I personally choose not to do it. A hashtagged name collapses the three hundred and sixty degrees of a person’s life and self to a single point, like a sphere seen from a distance. Their name shifts from a definition of who they are to a hashtag that describes how they died. When I need shorthand when discussing violence, I try to refer to the killer and not the victim. A recent and particularly egregious murder isn’t #BothamJean to me—it’s #AmberGuyger. She committed the sin, so why should he have to bear the indignity of having his name taken from him on top of losing his life?

That loss of detail comes naturally from working in shorthand…it’s how compression works, and it absolutely kills me inside. It feels unfair to the dead, another injustice heaped on top of a lifetime of them. When you see the names Oscar Grant, Abner Louima, Nia Wilson, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Stephon Clark, and dozens more names I’ve seen and had to consciously put out of my mind to keep from screaming until I die, you don’t think of proud fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, daughters, siblings, or anything else. You think of them as victims of America first and foremost, and then, hopefully, you’ll recall some part of their humanity after. It’s hard to explain how unjust that is to me, to have your whole self taken and then completely redefined due to matters beyond your control.

The murder of Oscar Grant by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle in 2009 wasn’t the first one that hit close to home, but it was the first that happened in my backyard as a grown man. I live in Fruitvale now, and I still go to 12th St BART on my daily commute rather than Fruitvale Station. Every time I think about Fruitvale Station, I think about watching Ryan Coogler’s movie Fruitvale Station in Berkeley with a theater full of black people weeping at what America puts us through, bawling at the way Michael B. Jordan’s portrayal of Oscar Grant passes from a man to a memory, and then from a memory to shorthand for state-sponsored violence.

Lupe Fiasco released a new album recently called DROGAS Wave. There’s a lot to chew on in it, but two tracks that caught my attention are “Alan Forever” and “Jonylah Forever,” and they’re named after Alan Kurdi and Jonylah Watkins. Alan was a toddler who died when a boat capsized on its way from Turkey to Greece, where his family hoped to find asylum. Jonylah was a six-month-old girl who died of gunshot wounds in her father’s lap, due to a gangster seeking retaliation against him.

I vividly remember Alan. 2015 was a bad year. It was the year my grandmother died, and the year that videos of police brutality went from rare to constant. Alan died a little over halfway through the year. I remember him because well-intentioned but foolish whites posted his image all over the internet in an attempt to bring constructive attention to the refugee crisis, the same way the same group posted videos and pictures of black lives being cut down to bring awareness to an issue that black people have had figured out forever. I get it, because something has to be done in the face of atrocity, and sometimes you need to shock people into action. Galvanize them. But it still made me unbearably sad, and still does, because he was a boy who had been transformed into a tool by people who did not care about him except as leverage, a final indignity in his short life. Alan’s photo is at the top of his Wikipedia page. A photo of him smiling and being a child is below the fold.

Lupe does something I’ve probably only seen in poetry before this. He wrote about the dead, trying to get at their interiority, to express that they aren’t just another victim of the evil that people do, but people unto themselves. Souls. It’s fan-fiction, of a kind, and one where, rather than dying due to factors far beyond their control, they experience life in a better world than this. They get a chance.

Fundamentally, the songs are about how important it is that adults protect children, and in so doing, secure our future. Alan survives the water that took his life, expresses joy, grows up, and joins the Canadian Olympic swimming team. Jonylah survives the bullet that took her life, takes her first steps at one year old, gets a scholarship at sixteen, a doctorate at twenty-two, and goes on to serve her hometown with a free clinic. At the end of both songs, the reason why Lupe chose those specific occupations become clear, as Alan and Jonylah rescue their younger selves from their real-world deaths. Alan leaps off a boat, grabs his younger self, and swims to shore, while Jonylah was on the scene when her younger self was shot and leverages her medical knowledge to save her own life.

It’s a parallel universe thing, but despite the fantasy, it hollowed me out. It helped me realize why I have such a hard time with hashtagging the dead. As I am now, I’m all potential energy. I could be this, I could be that, I could be anything. Anything. But when I’m #DavidBrothers, I’m the victim of a person, entity, or culture that considered my life less than theirs. All that potential energy would be lost in favor of a static existence I never wanted, earned, or asked for. Lupe’s song suggests what they could’ve been if the trauma of reality hadn’t cut their lives short, and the idea is equal parts enthralling and heartbreaking, particularly because they’re children.

“This is what life would be like if we were better.”

originally published in Study Group Magazine #4

Power checked and unchecked provides a backbone for Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, a through line for understanding the characters and why they make the choices they do. Otomo’s story is equal parts admonishment and encouragement, with certain characters clearly taking a more righteous path than others. Otomo covers the in-between as well, those who are unsure or un-accepting of their own power and need guidance. Between the first and final pages, Otomo illustrates the lives of people who are forced to act by their situation, and in doing so, reveal who they are inside. Some characters grow into their power slowly but surely. Others embrace it and find peace. Still others reject it when the time comes.

Otomo is wrestling with power and consequence in Akira, and each character uses their power differently. Consider Ryu, a man with a good heart working on the side of the freedom fighters, who ends up led astray by his dependence on following orders. Yamagata, Tetsuo, and Kaneda were great friends before Tetsuo gained powers, which makes Tetsuo’s murder of Yamagata a true breaking point for the character. The Colonel appeals to Tetsuo by seducing him with the idea of gaining further power, but makes sure that Tetsuo knows where he stands in the pecking order. The psychic children lose their freedom in exchange for power, but find peace and stability through friendship and shared experiences. Lady Miyako is theoretically on the side of the just, but raised up her own private army, keeping the power to a select few of her own choosing. Nezu, a politician working for the resistance, betrays his own compatriots in an attempt to wrest power for himself, and brings about the destruction of Neo-Tokyo through his selfishness. Even Kaneda, the ostensible protagonist of the story, is a bull in a china shop at the beginning of the series, fully aware of the fact that he can get his way simply by pushing. It’s only through serendipity that he’s placed in a situation where he must help others.

This attention to detail extends to the supporting cast, too. A school nurse Kaneda has a sexual relationship with would be a half-thought of a supporting character anywhere else, but here, she is crucial to understanding exactly what kind of person Kaneda was before the fall of Neo-Tokyo and rise of the Great Akira Empire. She’s never named, and only appears on six pages of the story. She provides him with drugs when the doctor’s not around, and he plays with her emotions in exchange. When Kaneda approaches her to identify a drug—the military placed Tetsuo on industrial-strength sedatives of unknown origin—she admits that she thinks she’s pregnant. Kaneda’s reply is “Hey, great! Can I watch you have it?”

The way Otomo depicts her tells the story on its own. You can extrapolate a lot simply by comparing how Otomo chooses to draw her before and after her painful confession and how he draws Kaneda. She goes from breathless and hopeful when he greets her with a surprise kiss to slumped and silent after he dodges her admission with easy aplomb. Kaneda is fast-moving, smiling, and bubbly, only acknowledging the awkwardness long enough to decide to ignore it entirely. While she looks at the floor and holds still, he grins and winks with not an inch of concern on display.

She doesn’t appear again, and the fate of her and her child is unanswered throughout the series. But the callous disrespect and selfishness Kaneda shows her, and the little hint that Kaneda knows exactly how ugly he’s being to someone he owes tenderness, speaks volumes. Kaneda is a user, and if he has no use for you, he doesn’t care. By the end of the series, he’s more attuned to the needs of others and willing to sacrifice for the greater good. Here, he’s a simple thug, with a me-first and you-never attitude.

A significant theme in Otomo’s masterwork is that power is dangerous when applied without care and insight. Akira’s powers manifest and launch World War III long before the events of the series. Tetsuo receives powers without being trained in how to control them, and his inner pain leads him to take his selfishness out on others. The Colonel, confident that his own power alone can control others, is quickly shown how untrue his belief was, and spends the remainder of his panel time attempting to atone for his mistake.

While Kaneda and Tetsuo must learn to control themselves and the Colonel must learn to how to use his power wisely, Chiyoko represents power applied properly. She is introduced roughly a third of the way into the series, a member of the underground rebellion alongside Kei and Ryu. She’s taciturn in the extreme, carefully guarded and direct in all her dealings. She doesn’t boast and she doesn’t fool around. Everything she does is geared toward completing her mission. When faced with the threat of a young girl with psychic powers, Chiyoko doesn’t hesitate. She grabs a gatling gun and chases her down.

After the fall of Neo-Tokyo, Chiyoko continues her duties as a freedom fighter, protecting her comrades and gathering intelligence. She stands out in a series defined by characters wrestling with unchecked or misapplied power. She has a purpose, one that she has decided is worthy, and dedicates her whole self toward fulfilling that purpose. There is no confusion on her part, no chance of corruption. She simply is, and by being, she completes her task.

Chiyoko provides a foil for the Colonel early in the series, and a blueprint for the path he eventually follows. They both share a confidence that allows them to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals, but the Colonel’s goal is rotten from the start. He is seeking more power, and through it greater control over the world. Chiyoko exists within the world and uses her power to improve things for others. She’s seeking justice, not more power, and that informs the way she goes about her business and treats others.

Otomo’s exploration of applied power is bigger than politics, and he avoids wrapping things up with an easy moral. It isn’t “Power corrupts,” or else the epic ends on a bitter scene where Kaneda and the rest of Neo-Tokyo seize the power of the idea of Akira to maintain their sovereignty in the face of foreign invaders. It’s more nuanced, more complex than that.

The Colonel finds freedom by giving up his power. On the other hand, Chiyoko stays her course, while Kei and Kaneda learn how to properly harness the power they have. If anything, Otomo is exploring the intersection of power, wisdom, compassion, and purpose. There is no single right way to use power, no correct answer, because life is complex. Sometimes a firm, uncaring hand is the best choice for a situation. Sometimes a situation requires more empathy, more compassion. These solutions are not equal and opposite—they’re a part of plethora of options on how we choose to use our power in our day-to-day life.

It’s easy to look at Akira and find something resonant. The cast aren’t points on a spectrum from bad-to-good or incorrect-to-correct. They simply exist, and do the best they can with what they have. Carelessness and compassion exist in all people, and Otomo reflects that well.

Kaneda’s relationship with the school nurse is a very real one, something taken directly from real life and applied to the page. Kaneda makes a choice in that moment, and we see the effects of that choice immediately. Chiyoko’s quiet determination, too, is a reflection of real life. She is no leader, but she clearly has the capability to show others the way. Akira works so well because we recognize aspects of ourselves in the characters and the choices they make. The message of Akira is not that power is good or bad unto itself—it’s that power lets you affect others on every scale, from small to apocalyptic, and it’s important to be not just aware of your own power, but to deploy it effectively.

david brothers, 2015