Search All Winners

Gil Scott-Heron has a beautiful song I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates and all of us would listen to again. It’s called “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” The title is also the refrain, but the force of the rhetorical question lies in its pithy yoking of materialism and slave capitalism to a logic that transcends the material. This is also the crux of my dissent: What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes? Part of the work here is thinking about the value of human life differently. This becomes obvious when commentators—including Coates—get caught up trying to tabulate the extraordinary value of slaves held in bondage (don’t forget to convert to today’s dollars!). It shouldn’t be hard to see that doing so yields to a mentality that is itself at the root of slavery as an institution: human beings cannot and should not be quantified, monetized, valued in dollar amounts. There can be no refund check for slavery. But that doesn’t mean the question of injury evaporates, so let us ask a harder question: Who will pay reparations on my soul?

Black American music has always insisted upon soul, the value of the human spirit, and its unquenchable yearnings. It’s a value that explicitly refuses material boundaries or limitations. You hear it encoded emblematically in the old spirituals. Black voices steal away to freedom. They go to the river. They fly away. Something is owed.

The next day I piled my possessions among the goats and chickens and boxes tied with string on the roof of a taxi brousse, squeezed in with the Senegalese passengers, and went to Dakar. I got the key to my new house, took a pregnancy test, and arranged a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C. Every Peace Corps volunteer was allowed one abortion.

Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We

were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,

thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was

Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth

an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or

was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets

together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,

such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow

from a shinbone.

“YOU COME WITH ME NOW,” Uma madam says one day, after breakfast. She has come prepared. A male guard comes forward and grabs my arm. 

“Where?” I say, wrenching free. He lets go. “Stop it! I need to talk to Gobind about the appeals.” 

“You walk or he will drag you,” says Uma madam in reply. 

Back in my cell, I gather my sleeping mat, my other salwar kameez, slip my feet into the rubber slippers, then look around for anything else that is mine. Nothing is.

Uma madam pulls my dupatta off my neck. When I grab at it, she clicks her tongue. “What use is modesty for you anymore?” she says. 

We walk down the corridor, the three of us, and a few women look up from inside their cells. The corridor is so dim they are no more than movement, shapes, smells, a belch. Perhaps sensing my fear, Uma madam finds it in her heart to explain. “You can’t have a dupatta in this place where you are going. Not allowed. What if you decide to hang yourself, what then? It has happened before.” After a pause, she says, “Nobody’s coming to see you, don’t worry about looking nice.” 

Uma madam unlocks a door at the far end of the corridor, which opens onto a staircase I have never seen. Though the day is dry and sunny, there is a puddle of water on the top step.
 
“Go down,” she says. 

When I don’t move, she insists, “Go! Don’t look so afraid, we don’t keep tigers down there.” 

I climb down, my slippers slapping the steps.

Orion shot rabbits, but to tell the truth, it almost sickened Cora to clean and cook them. Stripped of its pelt, the taut body glistened. The small legs put her in mind of fingers. On her plate all she could think of was the pleading eyes. Somehow this did not trouble her about chickens, which she took the pains to behead herself, sometimes chasing the headless flapping bird around the chopping block. Orion plucked the bird for her, and the feathers were saved for a sleeping crib for Madge.