A black man wearing a black beret always makes a point. Add shades and a black leather jacket he automatically becomes a suspect. Put a shotgun in his hands and the revolution is on.
Power to the people.
The revolution against white America needed to happen sooner rather than later. Not sure about hospital policy pertaining to black militants on the payroll, Darryl followed his best instincts for fighting injustice by almost any means necessary.
Still, armed revolution worked.
As a student of history Darryl knew the Viet Cong and Fidel Castro won. Without bullets, guns, bombs and the guerrillas willing to use them, peace never would have come to Northern Ireland. Men and women willing to fight and die for a cause are unstoppable. Most American soldiers don’t sign up to die. Most don’t even want to fight. Insurgents are a different breed. IRA commander Bobby Sands and his nine comrades went on hunger strike in the name of liberty and willingly welcomed death as part of the process.
Nobody asked Darryl to fight or die but he had to do something. Out-of-control cops across America ran amok across the land. Mostly white men, they killed black men, women and children with reckless bloodlust that seemed deliberate and satisfying.
As an ER nurse Darryl regularly witnessed horrible gunshot wounds from bullets that tore through human flesh. People who shot people devolved into inhuman creatures, pulling the trigger without thinking, reacting to whatever stimulus large or small pushed them over the soft edge into the hard darkness. He also saw the end result of the novel coronavirus pandemic on the African-American community. Stunned, he joined security guards and orderlies as they wheeled mostly black COVID-19 body after COVID-19 body to the morgue, decent people who lacked good or any health care, people with underlying conditions due to poverty, poor housing, poor education, income inequality, unemployment and racism.
Cops now stalked the streets as some of the worst killers in the nation.
Police held the power.
Firepower ruled.
Rubbing his eyes, Darryl pushed his chair back from the computer. He didn’t look good in a beret. Forget the turtleneck and leather jacket. The Black Panthers stood for yesterday. And he wasn’t VC or IRA. For what did Darryl stand? What action could he take to wage peace or at least die trying?
Google searches sent shock waves into his brain as he read dozens of stories of mayhem against peace activists like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and fearless Vietnamese Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire to protest the ruthless war machine.
Tank Man impressed Darryl as much as anybody. Running from the Tiananmen Square sidelines that June day in 1989, the unidentified Chinese man stood alone against a column of Chinese tanks moving toward him. Just the day before the military put down a protest on the square, using violence to kill, maim and imprison an unknown number of people. Tank Man’s fate remains unknown to the world.
Darry read the photo caption above another newspaper story.
“The May 28, 1963, sit-in demonstration at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Miss., turned violent when whites poured sugar, ketchup and mustard over the heads of demonstrators, from left, John Salter, Joan Trumpauer and Anne Moody.”
The 2015 LA Times newspaper headline said, “Anne Moody, sat stoically at violent Woolworth’s sit-in, dies at 74.”
Darry stared at the photo for what felt like a lifetime. Then epiphany struck. Berets, leather, shotguns and act of destruction work. So does the discipline exhibited by freedom fighters who embrace hatred, accepting white-hot malice as a gift that might one day thwart injustice. Now, he, too, would welcome the hatred, the malice, the bitter bigotry that fueled America and drove the white power elite insane. He, too, would accept scalding prejudice as a gift, as a way to turn evil into good by sacrificing himself, dying, if necessary, to be the captain of his soul.
Nelson Mandela, who endured 27 years as a South African political prisoner, relied in his darkest moments on a poem to inspire him to press on despite the odds. “Invictus,” by white English poet William Ernest Henley, is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of human oppression.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”
In his deep baritone, Darryl recited the poem aloud, drawing strength from its cadence. Darryl’s enemies would find him unbowed, unafraid and unconquerable. He vowed to rise from the ashes and be reborn from the fire.
On this day, the Hate-Eater was born.