Being Black in America offers inexhaustible ways to die.
Article continues after advertisement
I almost met my death one night in the summer of 2017 when I was awakened by a crushing pressure in my chest. It felt like someone had jammed a beach ball inside of me, pumped it to the verge of exploding, and then pumped it some more. I was nauseated, dizzy, and washed in cold sweat. I looked up and found my wife standing in the doorway of our bedroom, her eyes filled with fear and wider than I’d ever seen them. This startled me because she has the kind of smallish almond eyes that narrow to quarter slots when she laughs. She’s most beautiful when she’s like that, so filled with joy that her eyes nearly get lost in her face.
Yet what I saw staring back at me were doughy white orbs wet with worry. I had a sinking feeling that at any moment our then five-year-old daughter would be roused from bed by all the commotion and materialize on her mother’s hip with the very same doughy-eyed look. But she was sound asleep, comfortably twisted like origami in her favorite Doc McStuffins sheets. For just a moment, I felt at peace. Baby girl wouldn’t have to see me like this. Her Superman dad rocked to his knees by some sort of kryptonite.
Statistically, nearly half of all heart attack deaths come within the first hour. I barely survived the night.
What was crushing down on me that night was death. At the age of thirty-eight, I suffered the type of heart attack that kills its victims so often that it has its own ominous nickname: the widow-maker. A blood clot lodged in one of my heart’s major coronary arteries was starving my heart of life-sustaining blood and oxygen. With each minute, the clot grew larger, and death’s grip grew tighter. Prior to that night, I hadn’t thought much about how the human heart worked, but now I can picture the long snaking line down the left side of the model heart I’d stared at in high school biology class—my tortured artery—all jammed up.
Statistically, nearly half of all heart attack deaths come within the first hour. I barely survived the night.
The paramedics, who arrived twenty minutes after that ball nearly blew through my chest, took my blood pressure, asked a few questions, and then said I seemed okay, but they would take me to the hospital if I wanted. I chose not to go.
My wife was scheduled to go on an out-of-town work trip that next morning, and my little Nola was starting camp later that day. I figured I’d tough it out until my family was taken care of. That decision almost cost me everything. I tossed and turned through the night, unknowingly inching toward my end. My wife canceled her trip, and we dropped Nola off at camp. I hobbled doubled over into an urgent care center, and they pointed to the door and told me to get to an emergency room immediately. The cardiologist who later helped save my life by inserting two stents to clear the clot said that if I hadn’t gotten to the hospital when I did, I likely wouldn’t have lived.
None of this made sense to me. I’m a former high school and college athlete. I don’t smoke or have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, or a family history of heart disease or early death. Yearly checkups with my doctor never included any mention of heart disease. Yet there I was, fighting for my life.
I’m one of the lucky ones. I survived. But survival was just the beginning. For a long time after my heart attack, there wasn’t a single hour of the day when I didn’t fixate on my own death. Death was there in the morning when I woke up, alongside me when I dropped my daughter off at school, peering over my shoulder as I told my wife to have a good day at work. It was there during my workday, at home or on the road, a constant presence.
And almost always, without fail, before I closed my eyes at night, I wondered if that would be the night that I finally closed them for good. I was losing sleep thinking about all the class trips and science experiments that I’d miss. The family vacations that would never be booked. The weddings and anniversaries that would go uncelebrated. Thoughts of all the beautiful, mundane, familiar things that make life so sweet had turned sour in my ominous fortune-telling. I ached at the idea of my wife, Gabrielle, becoming a widow and my little Nola growing up without her father.
Although I have been physically healthy most of my life, my heart and spirit have taken on tremendous psychic burdens. I’ve spent more than twenty years as a journalist reporting on stories that led me to people who had just missed death, or others who were withering from the weight of someone else’s. I’ve chronicled the tragedy of lives taken too soon, most often with guns. I have traced the path of bullets ricocheting from person to person, wreaking physical and emotional havoc long after victims are laid to rest or their scars keloid over.
A blood clot and a bullet are very different things. But both have the ability to take and twist a life.
Upon reflection, I probably came to this work because of the intergenerational suffering guns have rendered in my own family. A century ago, a Deep South murder catapulted my ancestors into the waves of the Great Migration, and decade by decade in the North, gun violence would threaten to drown us. Generations of loss would affect us in different ways, the trauma yanking us back and pushing us forward in a dizzying time warp.
So it’s preternatural that I’ve made a career as a griot of sorts, telling the tales of Black death and survival. In that way, I’m bilingual, translating the pain of others into something palatable, something that might stick in the guts of anyone willing to listen. But evidently these stories have stuck with me, too, achingly knotted into the threads holding my heart together.
A blood clot and a bullet are very different things. But both have the ability to take and twist a life. The trauma of my own near-death experience puts questions of death and survival into stark relief. As I healed physically and emotionally, these questions took on a new sense of urgency. Not only in trying to understand the big picture of human mortality, fragility, and finding meaning in survival but more personally as a husband, father, son, and brother. As a man. As a Black man.
My precious Nola is in middle school now. A self-assured big girl who has long since shed her Doc McStuffins blanket. But I still can’t shake those post–almost dying days when my little girl was still little and grew more curious by the day. In those early days, Nola’s bath time routine became peppered with questions. Why are we here? Why did God make us? What happens when we die? I tried to satisfy her flowering mind the best that I could. I told her that we’re here to do good, that I have no idea why God made us, and that some people believe that when you die, your spirit leaves your body and goes to heaven or hell depending on how good you were. “What do you believe, Daddy?” she asked. I struggled to give her a good answer.
For a long time when she asked me about what happened to my heart, I tried to explain that a clot got stuck in my artery the way a drain gets clogged with gunk, and not enough blood was getting through.
“But why did it happen?” she asked.
“It just happened,” I told her. “Some plaque broke off, and the clot filled its place.” Her face scrunched up. She sensed there was more to it than that. And so did I.
She’s asked many of the same tough-to-answer questions with news of the latest police killing of an unarmed Black person, the umpteenth mass shooting, or the garden-variety murders that fill the daily news. I struggle to answer why things are the way that they are, especially when it comes to Black folks like us. I haven’t found adequate words to explain to my daughter how death falls uniquely on us, let alone how death nearly fell on me. But I do believe the two are inseparable.
Throughout our history, the gun has been a cudgel, beating us back into place if we dare to ever live too fully or too freely. Few, including me, have escaped its reach.
Gun violence is an American problem, not just a Black American problem. But Black people are thirteen times more likely to be shot and killed by police and seven times more likely to be shot dead by another civilian with a gun.
The gun was used to capture the first enslaved Africans, dragged from home with flintlock rifles at their backs, and then lifted to their faces like flagpoles for a bloody greeting in the hell of the Atlantic World. It was the weapon of choice for white slave patrols, the predecessors to the modern American police, who stood between Black folks and freedom.
During the Civil War, guns left a bloody trail that led finally to emancipation. Through Reconstruction, guns in Black hands fended off armed and masked Klansmen, and helped Black people build nascent political power and the infrastructure of citizenship. By the close of Reconstruction, guns in white hands ushered in a century of political violence, so-called Redemption, pushing the formerly enslaved as far back into slavery as possible, through widespread lynching, mass shootings, and the social and legislative violence of Jim Crow. Thousands of Black families fled the South during the Great Migration, an exodus toward the promised land of the North, where they believed they’d find good jobs, less hate, and something like solace.
In the North, they found crowded slums and a kind of “up South” racism that felt eerily similar to down South racism; here were more armed and angry white men, just with different accents. Those who remained in the South during the brutal fight for Civil Rights saw leaders and laypeople assassinated by white supremacists with long-range rifles, beaten by the butts of shotguns during marches, or shot with pistols at close range.
In the Black Power years, colored folks became BLACK and lifted fists and firearms, shedding the politics of respectable “good” Negroes, and then felt the full militaristic heft of state surveillance and violence; through the eras of trickle-down economics (that never trickled down), mass incarceration, and crack when the government helped send South American cocaine and American guns into Black slums, where illegal Black gangs and legal police gangs waged a bloody war that left Black America trapped in a vicious cycle of sanctioned and unsanctioned violence and incarceration, pushing this country to record highs in gun homicides; to today, with everyday gun violence, suicides, police-involved shootings, mass shootings at churches and schools and supermarkets and birthday parties, and shootings for knocking on the wrong door or turning into the wrong driveway.
Yet the gun industry continues to manufacture millions of new guns a year, and conservative right-wing lawmakers continue to pledge allegiance to guns and not to their constituents who are being slaughtered with them.
Gun violence is an American problem, not just a Black American problem. But Black people are thirteen times more likely to be shot and killed by police and seven times more likely to be shot dead by another civilian with a gun. Even eight years of the first Black president in the late aughts couldn’t spare us the deep and public welts. Barack Obama’s hometown of Chicago became the poster child for the scourge of urban gun violence in America. But not just in the most obvious ways the pro-gun advocates have spun so gleefully. Deeply segregated Chicago, fed by a pipeline of guns from faraway states and nearby counties where guns are plentiful and easy to get, with an entrenched gang culture and consistently corrupt police force, reveals the many ways in which structural violence begets gun violence.
The policing of Black bodies with guns is as old as America itself.
Black people in America have always had to contend with these lines of demarcation, reinforced and maintained by white men, and those deputized by them—with guns. That notion was made plain with the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 in Sanford, Florida. Armed with a can of AriZona iced tea and a bag of Skittles, he was shot down in his father’s suburban apartment complex by a white-identified Hispanic man patrolling for people he thought didn’t belong there. Trayvon fit the bill, criminalized because of his hoodie and brown skin. Trayvon’s killing was a callback to the earliest days of Black struggle and freedom, a reminder of the unfinished business of Reconstruction. Our freedom has always been fleeting, fragile. Its limits are sketched out by lines we can barely see, and boundaries we cross at our peril. Sometimes I wonder if we’re free at all.
The policing of Black bodies with guns is as old as America itself. Congress passed its first Fugitive Slave Act in 1793, which George Washington signed into law. A second was passed in 1850 as part of a compromise to keep the union together. The 1850 version mandated that the federal government actively help slave catchers track and apprehend people who’d escaped slavery. The act coerced everyone to take part in the policing of Black bodies; bystanders were threatened with fines and imprisonment if they didn’t help catch runaways. Armed with the new law and guns, white kidnappers had carte blanche to snatch and enslave free Black people, too. This deep investment incentivized the larger white population, and segments of the Black population, to play an active role in policing Black people.
This racial vigilantism is deeply American. For all the hope of change promised during the Obama years, what would come next would be anything but hopeful. The shooting death of a seemingly endless list of unarmed Black people by police or vigilantes, protests and rebellions in their names, then the often violent whitelash that followed, thrust this country into new territory when it comes to guns and political violence. Of the more lasting impacts would be the election of Donald Trump to the presidency and a surge of unabashed racial hate, violence, and animus. Trump fortified the federal bench and its highest court, the Supreme Court, with conservative justices with a barely veiled agenda that included reversing gains on gun control.
When Nola asked if I almost died from my heart attack, I hesitantly said yes. I made a promise to her when she was still in the womb that I’d always tell her the truth. My answer, that the heart attack almost killed me, left her silent for a long moment. “But how?” she asked. “How did you almost die?”
I wanted to tell her that for far too long, I’d taken all that I’d seen as a reporter and all the terrible things that came before me, before us, and buried it down deep until the weight became so great that my heart simply couldn’t bear it. That it all began long before that day, with a really, really bad thing that happened to our family back down South. And in so many ways, long before that. But I’m still trying to figure out how much truth a little girl needs.
When my heart attack happened, I was writing a book on the many costs of gun violence. For years, I sat soul-deep in people’s suffering. I traveled across the country talking with survivors of gun violence, trauma surgeons, therapists, activists, cops, and frontline workers in the trenches of the fight to save lives. I was searching for the untenable costs of gun violence in actual dollars, lost lives, and stolen dreams.
Yet I had little idea just how costly this work would be. Just weeks after turning in an early rough draft, that blood clot near my heart stopped me cold in my tracks. For my whole career, I’d been witness to other people’s pain while ignoring my own. At times, it felt as if I were single-handedly bearing the weight of every injustice, every police killing, every mother’s or father’s unbearable broken heart. I’d hide bits and pieces of that stuff wherever I could. But the residue would find its way into my sleepless nights.
My heart attack offered a new perspective on all the life and death that I’d seen before it and all that I’d experience after.
I spent countless days on the road in a high-pressure journalism career that I loved, a career that I’d built from the ground up on pure hustle, passion, and compassion, but with no real guidance on how to manage the stuff I couldn’t put words to. I found myself in a cycle of stress and insomnia, and sometimes I’d try to wash away both with long nights and liquor.
During my recovery from my heart attack, a certain kind of clarity set in. I almost died. But I didn’t. While I can’t change what happened yesterday, I still have today—or at least this moment—to live. Survival offered me a new vision on life, a second chance. No more burying the hardest, darkest parts. It was time to dig it all up, to lay it flat and handle it. Not just what I witnessed and chronicled as a journalist but the unseen forces and circumstances that shaped who I came to be. My heart attack offered a new perspective on all the life and death that I’d seen before it and all that I’d experience after. I was drawn even closer to the realities of what survivors face and what’s truly lost in early death. What’s lost in Black death.
The tally of American violence is deeply disturbing, or it should be, were it not such a routine part of everyday life. And anti-Black racism and violence are even more entrenched, potent enough to erode the most strident of American dreams. My own family hasn’t been spared in any of this. Our American dreams are as stripped and weathered as any other Black family’s. Until now, there has always been an implicit and unspoken rule in my family. We never talk about family business outside of the family. We buried the killings deep, yet the truth was always there, gnawing at us, moving in ways that we couldn’t fully understand.
I’ve decided that this rule will end with me. I’ll have to explain our history to Nola. That Black boys and girls her age are sometimes snatched away in ways her white friends typically are not. I’ll tell her how our family fled north. I’ll tell her that in spite of the painful ripples caused by so much death, we’ve been gifted with lives meant to be lived. That our stories are still being written, one chapter at a time. This is who we were and who we are. And that it’s up to her to help guide us to who we will become.
__________________________________
A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America by Trymaine Lee is available from St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan.
