One of my favorite books is Good Omens written as a collaboration between the English authors Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. In the book angels, demons, famine, war even pollution have personified human forms and have grown and changed along with humanity.
The longer they’ve been on earth around humans, the more humanistic traits and characteristics they’ve picked up. Ever since I read this book a few years ago, I’ve been infatuated with a character idea for a human personification of the most stereotypically cold and uncaring “being,” Death. I wanted to give him what human emotions he might have picked up while working amongst humans. I’ve tried to write a story for this character multiple times, but each time the story didn’t quite fit or seem significant enough to house this character. I knew he was an important character that could tell an important story, and it wasn’t until 2020 that I figured out what that story was.
This year as many were, I was glued to the news day after day watching new videos of unarmed black men and women being brutalized and killed by not just the police but their white neighbors as well. I watched the judicial system fail its people, again and again; Americans consumed and then quickly forget black names like it was the latest Netflix show. During the Pandemic while everyone was quarantined, names were said, donations were given and black squares were posted. It was a nice distraction from the boredom of being at home all day, but when the chance came most Americans wanted to go back to the way life was before the pandemic. What some don’t know or choose to ignore is that life before the pandemic for a black man was just as scary as life during the pandemic. The number of nuances and situations that we have to expertly navigate every day is tantamount to maneuvering a hallway of laser beams because the consequences are just as severe.
I felt like this monologue would be easy, I was trying to write a counter-narrative from a position where I have always been the other, but it was difficult to decipher the answers to questions about a society I can only try to understand. Attempting to remove myself to provide a completely omniscient view required changing my understanding of who the real perpetrators of injustice are. This year has been a wake-up call. We live in a country where the living cares less about those that have been killed than death himself. I know I’m tired of watching black lives lost for no reason and I have to assume death is too.