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In a world where Black lives are a symphony of stares, stops and frisks, where our bodies are at an omnipresent risk of becoming the warm patina oxidizing the bullets of local law enforcement, I feel it necessary to leave instructions to my family and friends — in the case of my unwarranted death.

Should I die at hands of police, please know that I was murdered not by a single uniformed officer, but by America and all the trepidation she has monikered across my forehead since inception. She has engorged prejudices against my very existence via the stereotypes she has chained to my ankles, coupled with the crippling weight of striving to escape white contempt and white rage that has inoculated me (and all Black folks).

Nevertheless, please know that somewhere, quietly in suburbia, a white community sleeps more peacefully knowing that there is one less Black body to face, to pretend to care for and to cross streets in avoidance of. Also, be remarkably aware that the soil I shall be lowered into will fold onto my Black body like honey onto a pillowy biscuit, and that shall be a revolting homecoming of sorts. It shall be a disembarkation for the son America has never cared for but grew corpulent from as a result of its many years of discarding boisterous, benevolent, breathtaking Black bodies while monetizing it’s very birth and each subsequent breath.

Therefore, I call upon you to give them the hell that you so fervently refer to in your tabernacles. Come out of your pews and your Sundays’ best to manifest that fire and brimstone you often reference, to disrupt their PTAs, potlucks, policies, patrols and programs. Do not let me go into the night softly and quietly. I want you to place those full African lips together to speak my name and those of whom I will have joined. Summon our ancestors — from Baldwin to Nzinga, Maya to mother Yaa, Huey to Samore — place those brown toes deeply into the earth you were created from, and stand rooted and deeply connected. Breath for you, breath for me, breath for us. Rebel, raise hell and revolutionize. Prepare these lands as feasts for our children, a place they might finally know as home.

I am demanding that you take up spaces, billboards and occupations in my stead. Make them know that Black life is not some indefinable mass. Illustrate that I was not just a Black life that mattered, but that I was an uncle who enjoyed the high-pitched voices of his young nieces and nephews. I was a brother who marveled at the nuances in gene variations with his siblings, a lover who knew no end of romance, an ardent bibliophile, a mouth from the south and I was as stylish as any brown boy, birthed in Brooklyn. Let them know that I doted upon my Grandma’s banana pudding more than life itself, that I adored reading Nayirah Waheed, bell hooks and Joseph Beam. Tell them that I coated my now decomposing melanin with Kuza castor oil before every bedtime story. Recite my mantras, my anthems, my -isms. And please, I beg you, gift my books, journals and notes to my nieces, sisters and aunts, because I have long realized and reveled in the fact that our brilliant Black women are the catalyst for our evolving liberation. I know they’ll get s**t done.

And whatever you do, don’t hug my murderer! Don’t forgive my murderer, because forgiveness is just the father of tyranny — and also, I’ll come back to whoop yo a** if you do.

I now entrust and yield all remaining and residual liberation work I have interest in at the time of my death to all my friends and family, categorically and unquestionably. You now have a directive to dismantle a distorted regime and protect as many of us, as your voices reach. This is an explicit expression of my last will and testament.

Don’t let me down.

Kenneth W. O’Veal Jr.

Writing since September 2019 · 3 stories contributed