NO SHELTER

after Emilie Townes

When you find yourself tucked away in the corner nook of a garage

waiting on a tornado

along with two of your distinguished professors

and their eighty-three year-old aunt

and their little dog, too

certain theo-ethical quandaries are bound to emerge

and start to spin with the deadly force of nature

particularly when one of the professors in question is,

in Brother Cornel West’s words,

THE TOWERING WOMANIST ETHICIST OF OUR TIME

and, in this case, the dilemma at hand was

bike helmets.

the bike helmets were for protection

              from projectiles, debris, what have you

and there were four of us human folk, but only three

      helmets.

therefore, in the interests of fairness, that is, of justice

nobody got a helmet.

And so we sat together, helplessly

wondering what manner of natural nonmoral evil might be fixin’ to

spring upon us

blow the door off that garage

descend on our heads

and fling us ruthlessly out of Kansas (well, Tennessee)

into outer darkness

into wailing

into gnashing of teeth

…but let’s be honest:

in America, in twenty seventeen

we are halfway there already.

So, huddled together, waiting on a tornado,

we talked about the darkness –

or, rather, the fear of darkness that has seized whiteness

for centuries

and which has reared its ugly head again and birthed on us a monstrous presidency.

Scanning her phone,

THE TOWERING WOMANIST ETHICIST OF OUR TIME

notices a news headline: “Betsy DeVos claims HBCUs ‘Pioneers of School Choice’”

my teacher frowns

and wrinkles her face up

“…hmmm,” she wryly reflects.

“That’s not the way I remember it.

I’m not sure much choice was involved there.”

…the forty-fifth president had gathered a bunch of HBCU presidents together

because, who knows, he wanted a photo-op with his “black friends”

and he had the nerve to ask them, what the “Harvard of HBCUs” was

Howard, they said.

Howard University

“the Mecca,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates calls it

founded in 1867

in 1867

1867

in the year of our lord eighteen hundred and sixty seven

when countless black wrists were surely still sore

from the grip and grate of rusted iron

when scar tissue on countless black backs had only just begun to settle

to fold gently over open wounds

to recede, to fade

into the darkness

but to remain

a trace

always there, still, silent

refusing to concede the lie of total erasure

and Betsy DeVos is talking about CHOICE.

well, I never.

hearing the headline, the eighty-three year old aunt

who taught French and Spanish at an HBCU

before integration

sat there, still, silent

and the dog just stayed resting on her lap.

but like I was saying about those bike helmets.

you see, we ethicists love to invent scenarios just like this.

10 passengers stranded in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean…

                                  …only enough food and water for five days

                                                                                                what do you do?

                                                                                                …whom do you save?

And, it’s a funny thing, I had always dismissed those made-up mind games as ridiculous.

There are enough real problems, real death, real destruction and danger out there

there is no need to make a bunch of other stuff up.

And yet, here I am, trapped in this garage, waiting on this tornado, with

THE TOWERING WOMANIST ETHICIST OF OUR TIME

another professor

their eighty-three year-old aunt

and their little dog, too

and we are staring down one of these impossible ethical puzzles

and our solution is,

nobody gets a bike helmet.

and I must say, I very much like this solution

although I am quite sure many ethicists and moral theologians and philosophers

would find it problematic indeed

but look, as my friends in #blacklivesmatter say:

ALL OF US or NONE OF US

                                             and that means      

                                                          if there ain’t enough bike helmets for everybody

                                              then fuck bike helmets

                                              nobody gets one

                                              we are in this boat together

                                              and nobody is free

                                              until every last one of us is

and, anyway

if God or the devil or some wretched and heartless mindless force of nature elects to send a tornado down on our heads

a bike helmet sure as hell ain’t gonna save us. there’s

no shelter from this storm

no shelter from this president

no shelter from this dread

no shelter from these gathering mindless furies, there simply is no one here

and never has been

with the power to tell the future, to gift us a sense of security, or to assure us

that it will all be ok.

right now, there’s just the four of us and this dog

and as my friends in #blacklivesmatter also say

in a lovely black colloquialism that

as a white guy

I can only poorly imitate:

we all we got.