When the Roosters Crow

The Great Divide Between Black Elders and Today’s Young Generation

You can wait until the roosters crow, but soon there will be no more doves to release at funerals.

Early Mornings

The lack of discipline it takes for morning preparation today compared to the past may have lowered the sense of urgency to actually have intentional days. Sure, the latest iPhone may be able to play your favorite song at high volume and cycle through your snooze sessions, but it is not the same as the call of duty that came when the rooster crowed in the field. It was not simply a call to wake up. It was a call for responsibility, for purpose. That is my intention with this piece.

Long have those days passed. Church bells do not ring anymore to gather the town. Today, the calls to gather the people are few. Beyond the church, elderly engagement, which once stood as structure, is now replaced with a silence mixed with criticism and absence.

Sodom and Gomorrah with bullets could be happening at their front door. Prayers enter chatrooms before they ever touch these streets. In this sickness of mind, praying itself has turned into a scapegoat that lets God handle everything while rejecting all accountability ourselves. The church itself provides no soldiers for these battles amongst our youth, while melanin blood soaks garments before leaking into the streets. God himself is absent in these wars.

The irony of waiting for him to return to stop our tribe from going to him at the gates before they even fully mature.

This is the frustration. This is the anger that sat on the church pew with fellows who are gone now. Their names are in stones, on papers that become bookmarks as the elders' council sits quietly, choosing to be ignorant

.

Until it is their grandchild.

Even then they submit to an acknowledgement that we are beyond solutions, only observing the slaughter on the evening news.

System Errors

Before unity is ever shown, youth are taught separation. He is not shown the pride of his skin as Father Garvey showed, and she is not made aware that she is the mother of all bloodlines. We are taught, often forced, who to call God, what to call him, and how to serve. The God that looks at us in the mirror is ignored.

Thus, if we the people are scattered, how can the youth believe in peace if they see examples? Violence only stirs from our differences. Different blocks that no one owns the deed to but require the deed of your soul. Colors once established in communal union against imperialism have become target markers. Their founders are elders now. This plea also goes to you, even through the prison walls.

The ancestors sacrificed everything, establishing programs to push our existence. Schools, institutions, hospitals, and wealth were systematically removed while their history is hidden in basements today. In their place sits the repeating baseline of Black history. Dr. King pleading to coexist and Momma Tubman freeing the slaves. Or did she?

Were the chains ever removed?

I pray her spirit covers us today as we travel through these underground railroads of knowledge, carrying the truths they once held in secrecy.

These are the answers to the common questions that arise. Why are our youth killing each other? Why is there a thirteen-year-old in the courtroom with a body but unable to read his own paperwork? How does a young lady lose her life to a stray from a young brother who plays tough online but fires into a crowd? Why has death on media outlets become a morning ritual of the most unsanctified acts?

Before this level of crisis could initiate, every form of identity had to be stripped away. There could be no existence of truth and no evidence of prevalence. 

Education came from those whose intent was always to remain in power, like slaves in the big house yard hearing the Bible.

Backstage

Our ancestors wait like lost dreams waiting to be revealed with every book we pick up and every article written. The knowledge we share is resistance and the only solution I have found prominent so far. The village is gone. The environments are toxic. Yet the seeds watered from our ancestors’ tears still come from good soil.

We often speak of our differences, where we of melanin call home, our stories, and our religious choices. Yet even the violence amongst our people is diasporic in nature. This is no mistake. It is by design, beginning with the music of my generation.

Once a wave that hyped us all in the moment, it came with a curse that can carry pain. The creators now lie either dead or in confinement while each generation continues the rhythm and gravely continues the act.

We went from Black-owned music labels that uplifted our Black women and told resistance stories to bragging about hurting each other, all while filling the pockets of those who control the narrative.

The only thing contagious in this is self-hatred and violence.

When I came across the UK drill era, it was not surprising that the same script existed, only catered to their way of force under stricter gun laws and access thereof. Forming tunes around the up-close and personal stabbings of each other should be a signaling alarm itself. Yet it only highlights something deeper.

This was never solely a music problem, as elders often scapegoat it to be. It is a structural problem, a structural technicality within our race that is simply shown vividly in music. Music is only art, and we of melanin have always used art to plead our case when conditions cannot be translated by words alone.

Which brings the point in matter.

Headphones

Why do elders complain about the music yet ignore the structure of chaos it is birthed in? How naive are we to say melodies are the source of generational genocide? Have our ancestors not sacrificed so that we could intentionally march to our own drum and choose our own fate?

This purposeful ignorance safeguards us from accountability, if safeguard is even the word for this destructive thinking.

The pattern must be exposed before any solution can prosper.

The problem.

The ignorance.

The justification.

The cure.

The problem is always brought to the communal consciousness of our people by the critical thinker, the one who recognizes that the principles do not align with the conduct. Contrary to popular belief, this often comes from the younger generation. Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the bus long before Rosa made headlines. The young people in the streets who are tired of burying their friends often say the solutions must come from more than just a church house.

Ignorance itself is cancerous. It spreads faster than any potential solution because it brings a sense of relief with little to no effort, a false validation.

When their names flash across papers or news screens, we change the channel. When the pastor closes the sermon at the funeral and walks away, he rarely makes intentions to save the next life. Instead he prepares the next speech.

Ignorance is a recessive trait held in a dominant race.

We were never meant to be non-confrontational in situations that required confrontation. Every false peace that is built on ignorance must be shaken to its core. We must address our youth beyond police brutality alone because we cannot continue to remain ignorant of the brutality we inflict on each other.

Yet still, why do we continue to ignore?

Because the culture has granted permission slips.

I Guess You're Right

Some justify this behavior with self-gratitude, convincing themselves that any help once given fulfills their duty to the lifelong crisis of the diaspora. Others follow the example of leaders or religions that present a God who answers prayers but requires nothing in return.

“Just pray on it” has become one of the most toxic and manipulated stances within our culture today. We are no longer in the service to safeguard our communities as a life’s work. These justifications create the illusion that someone somewhere is doing enough.

Like doctors in a research lab, we have searched for cures to recover from centuries of kidnapped prisoners of war called slaves. Mentally, however, there has been no cure, and we are more sick than we care to admit.

Elders sit with this image that prayer alone will solve youth genocide without building communal environments or engaging with the same youth they criticize. The same prayers Fannie Lou Hamer once cried will not halt genocide across the diaspora, reduce the number of Black and brown youth who become property of the state, or heal our tribe in truth again.

Prayer has become the chip we remove from our own backs and place on someone else’s.

The colonizers wanted us to pray, not to figure each other out, but to forgive them.

Our Part

These acknowledgements I claim only as an eyewitness. A youth who has engaged elders, built relationships, and tried to hold both my generation and those before accountable. My greatest regret, if one must say, is not addressing the urgency of these patterns sooner.

We can only reciprocate what we are taught and what we learn. Garvey said it best. Bless the day we can look ourselves in the mirror with pride and become the narrator of our own moral judgment.

Guilty consciousness must confront the fact that we have routinely engaged in music that promotes violence wars.

Humility and transparency must recognize that music is culture, a language waiting to be decoded.

Many staples of my era are now dead, imprisoned, or have grown far enough to step off the chessboard they were once placed upon. They, like me, carry a responsibility to decode the structures that keep this genocide going and rewire the culture not by changing our words but by changing our actions and our thinking.

In this action we become the generational bridge.

The connector.

The generational key.

If you did not know your role in this liberation, you do now, blessed to have been made aware before becoming elderly. When the ancestors grant you the opportunity, carry the purpose to do something different.

Common Ground

Whether young, old, child, or senior, this task is a collective effort for us all. Through the aggressive attempts to separate us, the Bloodline, our bloodline, stands as a survivor of the common ground. Beyond these pages embellishes a space more sacred than the church pews, one that shares the love of the Gullah praise houses in the woods far from foreign voices, like the songs of the 54th Regiment.

Here we can have safe, impactful, transparent conversations. I urge you not only to store the context of this discussion but to transfer the knowledge into tangible practices that extend beyond church walls, temples, prison walls, family dwellings, and all places alike.

In these rooms resides a presence not here in flesh but a guide to us all. To our ancestors. To our Kulanshi, those who have paved the way before us. To them we are all still in our youthful days.

The spiritual connection to our ancestors must go beyond religion, differences, and biases within the collective. This is a sacred unifying force if we are to truly practice what we preach.

If you cannot trust the word of a religious leader or the common man, trust the wisdom of those who came before you. A personal connection with the Kulanshi is beneficial not only for the self but for the collective as a whole. They are the mediators of generational gaps, composed of all who have joined them, old and young.

The question now arises in our intentions. Are we willing to mend the relationships in our personal lives, our communities, our tribe, and do our part to restore the village that the child today never knew existed?

Are we willing to remove ourselves from mental plantations and begin to till our own gardens?

Solutions must become generational actions rather than generational liabilities.

The dots of the Bloodline must be connected not by DNA alone but by belief.

Belief in a better sovereign tomorrow.

May the ancestors guide and protect you always.

Bury Me in a Free Land

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1858)

Make me a grave where’er you will,

In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;

Make it among earth’s humblest graves,

But not in a land where men are slaves.

I could not rest if around my grave

I heard the steps of a trembling slave;

His shadow above my silent tomb

Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

I could not rest if I heard the tread

Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,

And the mother’s shriek of wild despair

Rise like a curse on the trembling air.

I could not sleep if I saw the lash

Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,

And I saw her babes torn from her breast,

Like trembling doves from their parent nest.

I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay

Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,

And I heard the captive plead in vain

As they bound afresh his galling chain.

If I saw young girls from their mothers’ arms

Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,

My eye would flash with a mournful flame,

My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

I ask no monument, proud and high,

To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;

All that my yearning spirit craves

Is bury me not in a land of slaves.