Today I am taking a brief interlude from the Comic-Con sketch book to post a new drawing that juxtaposes an image of a contemporary Oakland figure with some headlines from Oakland’s past. In this picture, a young man of today is emerging from an early issue of the Oakland Tribune.
8-Rock
This is the first of 10 drawings from my Comic-Con 2011 sketch book. If I had to give this drawing a title, it would be, “The Truth is Out There.”
8-Rock
This is just a bit of a meditation on history and ancestry, with a Victorian style wallpaper pattern as a background, to help create the historical mood of the piece.
8-Rock
For this drawing, I did a sketch of a man I saw a couple days ago wearing an old-time letter sweater. I gave him a 1920s-style center part and set a wonderful vintage photo of African American college athletes as the background, all in order to create a tribute to the history of Black Americans in collegiate sports.
8-Rock
Ka’Ba
By Imamu Amiri Baraka
A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.
Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone’s
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.
We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.
We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new
Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy,and create. What will be
the sacred words?
Art by 8-Rock
Simple story. I was talking to a guy I see a lot at one of my favorite Oakland grocery stores. We were speaking about how scary some of the bizarre changes in the weather have been. “The really bad [changes in the weather] are pretty freaky,” he explained, “but they’re pretty far down the road.” He went on: “The stuff that really scares me are the things that are a threat right now.” I asked him what some of those things were, and he gave me a list. I asked him if I could record him speaking, and I told him I’d be doing a drawing of him and writing this short anecdote. Mad props to him for giving me permission. Here’s what he said about the six things that scare him the most.
- Guns really scare me. I’ve never owned one, never touched one. I don’t like ’em.
- The cops scare me worse than guns, ‘cuz some of then just don’t like Black folks. I’m just speaking the truth. Some of them don’t like people like us, and their guns are legal.
- I’ll be honest. I’m scared of dying. I shouldn’t be, but I am. I’m scared of the unknown.
- I’m scared of women. I mean, not all women, not like you. I mean I’m not really scared of women at all, really. Seriously. What I mean is that I’m scared of a woman breaking my heart. I scared of heartbreak. I am admitting to you right now that I am scared of having my heart broken.
- When I was a kid, I saw a photo of a man who’d been struck by lightning. Scared the something out of me. I’ve hated lightning ever since. In the summers I’d go see my grandparents in Arkansas where they had real thunderstorms. I couldn’t even stand it. I’d climb under the bed.
- I guess this ties in with hating guns, but I am definitely scare of getting shot. Some of these young men walk around talking about having a target on their back like it’s something to be proud of. I can’t understand it myself. We were never like that. They have so much to live fore. I’m scared of getting shot. In some ways, all Black men have a target on their backs, but I’m working to stay away from violence. I’m a man of peace.
- And I’m also scared of spiders.
8-Rock
When I came up out of the 16th Street BART station there was some sort of emergency taking place. Cops were already on the scene, and a fire truck pulled up while the man in this drawing observed, repeatedly and loud enough for everyone in the vicinity to here (not just the friends he was standing with), “Police and fire! Yep! 16th and Mission! Somebody called them and they got here fast. They got here real fast! They sure did.” This continued after all the emergency personnel had had rushed out of their trucks and down the stairs and into the station. By the time I returned to the station to get a train back to Oakland, there was no sign of the earlier crisis, and everything was back to normal. People were talking to themselves and each other, skateboarders were narrowly avoiding the moms pushing strollers who were, in turn, making no attempt to avoid any non-stroller-pushing pedestrians in their path. The only sign of the morning’s excitement were two cops who looked exquisitely bored.
8-Rock
Strange things happen when you tell people you’re a professor of African American literature. Some folks make uncomfortable jokes about their bad grammar, while others share the names of some of their favorite Black novelists and poets. Upon learning that I was a specialist in U.S. Black literature, the man in this drawing quickly concluded that we were kindred spirits and immediately embarked on a 20 minute monologue of “knowledge and truth, my sister.” “We are sister and brother,” he assured me, “even though I am from Ethiopia and your are American.” He then shared with me his perspectives on religion, the environment, the prison industrial complex, Africa, nuclear energy, and Black masculinity, as well as the ways that all of these issues were being addressed by his favorite contemporary African American novel, Beloved. The main idea that I took away from this encounter? I desperately need to reread this novel.
8-Rock
Whenever I encounter a young person who is living on the streets, I wonder whether or not his or her family knows where s/he is. I have to admit that my first instinct is to question how his or her family has allowed their loved one to become so marginalized and isolated. But then it occurs to me that he or she may have already exhausted the family’s resources for taking care of a troubled adult. Still, there is a big difference between a business or park posting no loitering signs and a group of family members effectively passing a no loitering sign in their hearts.
8-Rock