The Black Commentator - Reluctant Remembrances

They are the faces in my high school yearbook from my freshman year. It was 1993.

Headshots of little black faces sprinkled between lighter ones, peering out in cookie-cutter squares on page after page. Some smile affably, others grin close-lipped, a good share look blank-faced and placeless.

Youth smiled on them with the bravado and braggadocio of their man-child reckoning. Their eyes sparkled; their brows were unfurrowed; their lips were full and shiny like ripe keloids.

They were the ones who lined a special hallway at school between classes, standing in mock B-boy stances, blinged out in the faux gold of the day, bought at shopping mall kiosks. Gold knuckles dressed their fingers in rows like church pews or like the braided cornrows atop their heads. Sometimes a wry smile flashed a glinting gold tooth. And there were the requisite gold earrings and watches that shone glossy and gleaming like isolated plutonium eruptions. They were flashy but unpretentious. They were flashy like lightning strikes. Blink ... and you missed it.

They walked with a swagger built upon the bricks from which they came. It was saturated with brawn, steady like a slow drag and sexy like, "You know what they say about bow-legged men". Deferred to without demand, they were like the lead floats in a parade of amateur bands. Everyone knew they slanged candy, but in this show, they were the hard-as-nails gumballs with a jolting sour center.

Recently, their faces began haunting me. These uncrowned princes of my yesteryear. On a whim, I pulled up the local database for looking up the criminally convicted and incarcerated in my area and opened my high school yearbook. I began not-so randomly entering names, purposely choosing black faces bedecked by black cutlines. I wondered if the statistics were true. How many of these black boys had become all that the teachers, who nervously and voluntarily cut their eyes in the other direction, thought they would become?

If they had looked into their faces, they would have seen what I saw when I looked at the images from 13 years ago. They would have seen that blank look that no bravado could break. They would have seen smooth baby faces just sprouting the landscaping of manhood - the backdrop of a baby turned a boy turned a young man, who had been sleep deprived and unattentive in class for domestic reasons unknown and unasked; the virile slope of refined shoulders underscored by the gauntness of inconsistent nourishment and hunger; the weary lost look of wanting to be a man yet having absolutely no tangible example; the hearts capable of love and tenderness yet shut down by gangsta rap, the quest for a new pair of Jordans and the incessant beeping and buzzing of their entrepreneurial pagers.

I typed the first name eagerly, like a woman on her anniversary peeling open a small felt-lined box. The result? A history of cocaine dealing with repeated revoked drivers licenses and petty thefts, capped with a 10-year sentence. Up for parole in seven.

My heart quaked.

He was cute in high school - the kind of guy a grown woman could spot as a heartbreaker. And one of the few brothers who didn't talk badly about me, with my Valley Girl/Hillary Banks ("Fresh Prince of Bel Air") dialect, clashing with my Pan-African hairstyle and grunge-gothic style of dress.

I sighed.

I turned the page of my yearbook and typed another name of another young black male face into the database. Bingo. Another hit. This one was a short, modest boy in high school whose major accessory was a seemingly unintended snarl. He had been locked up for a multitude of drug charges and recently let out on parole. And now he was back in ... for murder.

My heart ached.

Each name I entered turned up a similar result. Drug charges. Robbery. Burglary. Assault. Aggravated rape.

I don't believe they were convicted of felonies fallaciously. I believe they are serving time for acts they committed. But a part of me can't stop feeling like they were framed before they had a chance. I yearn to look into their eyes, not on paper but face-to-face. I think about taking their reluctant hands and reminiscing about how I recall them. I consider hugging their fully grown bodies with the hope of engaging undergrown, dwarfish hearts.

I would read them poems, buy them copies of Randall Robinson's The Debt, sit them between my runner's knees, rock them back and forth, oil their scalps and plait their hair.

Just to let them know that even if they have forgotten me - or remember not to dare - that I, for one, do care.

K. Danielle Edwards is a Nashville-based writer, poet and communications professional. She is the author of Stacey Jones: Memoirs of Girl and Woman, Body & Spirit, Life and Death (2005) and is the founder and creative director of The Pen: An Exercise in the Cathartic Potential of the Creative Act, a nonprofit creative writing project designed for incarcerated and disadvantaged populations. To find out more, go here: www.kdanielleedwards.com.