When I get up in the morning and the first image on my screen is Benjamin Crump wielding a pointer, I’m tempted to shut my eyes and dive back under the covers. Like uniformed soldiers showing up at a military spouse’s front door, his appearance means the news cannot be good. His press conferences expose an excruciating problem that African Americans must regularly confront: how to thrive in an unsteady nation committed to the systematic devaluation of Black lives. The predicament threatens our mental fitness, our ambition, our faith in justice and in ourselves — all critical elements of what W.E.B. DuBois would call our spiritual strivings.

I’ve got nothing against Crump, perhaps the nation’s most visible Black attorney. From what I’ve seen of him, he seems earnest if overmatched by fate. By fate I mean an indifferent public, predatory law enforcement, and inscrutable juries perversely averse to convicting police officers. It isn’t his fault that neither street-level activism nor traditional civil-rights campaigns have prevented police and self-styled vigilantes from continuing to kill unarmed African-Americans and mostly get off scot-free. Watching him, I can see that he is as exhausted by events as we are. I imagine him asleep, then startled awake by yet another phone call conveying bad, predictable tidings. Perched on the side of his bed, the box springs creaking beneath his shifting weight, he listens to wailing parents, shouting witnesses. Someone is dead.

Soon after, he emerges in a semi-circle of microphones, flanked by men in suits and perhaps a grieving relative or two. Behind him is an illustrated autopsy report, the flat, Black outline of a body against a background of daunting whiteness. Crump’s voice and image stream across social media as he points out the incriminating entry wounds, the tell-tale heart. Hunched over our laptops, we see Crump in the spotlight. In his drawl familiar to us since the Trayvon travesty, he tells assembled reporters exactly how many bullets severed the spine as the victim fled in terror, how many bullets shattered bones and ruptured organs while the victim was bound and subdued, how many bullets continued to fly after the unarmed Black man breathed his last. It’s the same ritual he performed after Michael Brown. After Tamir Rice. After Terrence and Stephon and EJ. I watch the mournful sequence unfold and wait for my headache to roll in, as reliable as the tide. As regular as a stream of dispiriting headlines.

“Chattanooga Cop Caught On Video Savagely Beating Handcuffed Black Man”

“He Served the Longest Sentence of Any Innocent U.S. Inmate”

“Supreme Court Guts Affirmative Action”

I’m as certain of the headache’s arrival as I am sure that somewhere, at the same time, another police officer is pumping bullets into a Black person’s back. Or ripping a Black baby from its mother’s arms. Or breaking into a Black man’s apartment and shooting him in his own living room. Or maybe just beating the shit out of him.

I can watch with the sound off and still determine everything Crump is saying, still take note of the careful legalese straining to suppress the outrage lurking in every syllable. I can visualize a future of endless press conferences, countless coroner’s inquests, and innumerable bullet wounds.

For these reasons, I’ve come to believe that Mr. Crump should preface his public statements with his very own content warning. Caution: Exposure to these comments could provoke a variety of traumatic reactions, including nausea, depression, paranoia, agoraphobia, and skull-splitting headaches.

Like Joan Didion, I have long known the latter as “central to the given of my life.” When I was in primary grades, my mother suspected my sluggish digestive system as the source of my torment, resulting in immeasurable hours in darkened rooms, chewing morosely on Sunsweet prunes, followed by St. Joseph’s aspirin, tears, and more prunes. I have suffered fits of wrenching agony all my life, since long before I learned of Benjamin Crump and his melancholy trade. My struggle with headaches, like injustice for Black people, is a pre-existing condition.

I don’t see auras when a migraine has me under its spell, but I do picture the affliction as a colorful, glowing shape trespassing inside my skull, seizing territory with all the presumption and violence of a settler colonialist. It exudes buzzing phosphorescence that improbably takes me back to “The Invaders,” a cheesy sci-fi series my mother was briefly obsessed with when I was a small child. I was too impressionable to watch it, but I hated to leave her side, so I paid for my disobedience with imaginary nighttime visitations featuring pale marauders from another planet. On the show, each time an alien was caught and killed, he glowed briefly before vanishing entirely. I sometimes recall those glowing aliens when a migraine descends.

The headache will generally take one of two forms. The first and less frequent invader is what I call the sledgehammer. It feels like my temples have been battered by a muscular assailant swinging the kind of bludgeon found in test-your-strength sideshow attractions. The “impact” renders me wobbly, like a cartoon character that has had a kettle thrust over his head and a mallet thereafter applied. The other, more frequent intruder is what I call the axe blade. Producing a sharper, more acute pain, it waxes and wanes in intensity, like a blinking motel sign. A sledgehammer headache tends to settle in one spot and squat there for hours. In contrast, an axe blade is restless and mobile. Like a policeman’s baton, it’s both predictably violent and violently unpredictable, making it hard to anticipate when and where it will strike.

II

“Working as a field hand while a young teen, [Harriet Tubman] was nearly killed by a blow to the head from an iron weight thrown by an angry overseer at another fleeing slave. She suffered from headaches, seizures, and sleeping spells  . . . for the rest of her life.” —

Kate Clifford Lawson, Bound For The Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero (p. xvi)

Psychologist Rachel Yehuda, economist Dora Costa, sociologist Joy DeGruy, and other researchers have each conducted various studies raising the possibility of trauma being transmitted through descending generations. Some scholars have challenged their initial findings, and Costa, for one, cautions against leaping to unwarranted conclusions. She has warned that her study of the effect of the Civil War on the grandsons of Union soldiers is by “no means saying that whenever there’s trauma, that it means it’s going to be transmitted.” Fair enough, but in the depths of my discomfort I can’t help wondering if my headaches might stem from violence committed against an ancestor centuries before. A collision with a constable’s nightstick, maybe, or a horse’s hoof. I could even suppose that a hapless Harriet Tubman heir might occasionally stumble under the impact of an invisible blow to the head, hurled like a weight across the centuries.

A headache can arise from emotional tension or from a physiological occurrence such as a constriction of blood vessels in the brain. A layperson can’t always determine what set off the pain and sent it thundering through her skull; in this regard it doesn’t differ much from general health concerns encountered in spaces where Black people live. Even in the best circumstances, it can be difficult to distinguish the varieties of mental anguish afflicting our communities from the more overtly biological ailments that also plague them. Writing in the Atlantic in 2018, the journalist Olga Khazan noted, “Across the United States, Black people suffer disproportionately from some of the most devastating health problems, from cancer deaths and diabetes to maternal mortality and preterm births . . .  African Americans face a greater risk of death at practically every stage of life.” Clearly, just the mental and physical effort involved in staying healthy is challenging enough to make us sick.

My temples begin to pulsate at the slightest consideration of these sobering statistics, and I imagine the facts and figures exert a similar effect on my fellow African-Americans. Of course, statistics are hardly necessary to verify observations like Khazan’s; one seldom has to take a gander beyond one’s own front stoop. “To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep, and, certainly, the children’s teeth are set on edge.” That’s how James Baldwin accurately described the state of things — and he was writing in 1978.

The reality of our condition is compounded not only by news reports but also by all the uploaded and live-streamed footage inconceivable in Baldwin’s day. The more we learn, the more we hurt, and those aforementioned headlines only confirm our worst fears. One popular health pundit, Dr. Andrew Weil, recommends, as a partial remedy, going on news fasts from time to time. He worries, quite logically, about the substantive power of media reports to aggravate anxiety, sadness, and depression. I understand his reasoning but I can’t help feeling that for a Black person, choosing to avoid current events, even for a brief spell, can be as risky as getting pulled over by a state trooper on a lone stretch of road. In my experience, going without information is like going without oxygen. Sure, ignorance can provide temporary bliss, but it can also lead to a permanent dead end. Ultimately, I want to know what’s going on around me, or at least cling to the illusion that such knowledge is possible. However, when I remove myself from the center of the narrative, other considerations come to the forefront — especially with regard to the possibility of inherited trauma. In my steadfast inhalation of today’s adversities, am I transmitting untold misery to generations yet unborn? Will my great-grandchildren, without knowing anything about Freddy Gray, instinctively tremble at the sight of a police van?

III

A 2015 study in the Journal of the National Medical Association noted, “Compared to their Caucasian counterparts, African American headache patients are more likely to (i) be diagnosed with comorbid depressive disorders; (ii) report headaches that are more frequent and severe in nature, (iii) have their headaches under-diagnosed and/or undertreated; and (iv) discontinue treatment prematurely, regardless of socioeconomic status.” Learning that I am not alone provides no solace.

My headaches are most likely to arrive in the middle of the night. Sometimes I can fight one off by sitting up for a while, or standing, or walking quietly about the house. If I must lie down, I use pillows to support my body at a roughly 45-degree angle. Lying flat induces a terrible, drowning feeling, or the delusion that I’m a 17th-century Salem resident, accused of witchcraft and being pressed to death beneath a board weighted with stones. When simple remedies will not do, I often turn to sound. Soft music helps, as does darkness and solitude. After discovering that songs featuring cellos and double basses can be especially comforting to me, I compiled a playlist designed for maximum therapeutic power. It includes solo recordings by Yo-Yo Ma, Dave Holland, and Malachi Favors, to name just a few.

Sometimes a deep, sonorous voice can also work wonders, none as effectively as Isaac “Dickie” Freeman’s. A member of The Fairfield Four, a celebrated gospel quartet, Freeman died in 2012 at age 84. His voice was otherworldly in its depth and strength, part of a vocal heritage including legendary basses such as Paul Robeson and The Temptations’ Melvin Franklin. On his solo recording of “Beautiful Stars,” Freeman introduces the song with an anecdote about his childhood.

“Here’s a song my mother learned me to sing,” he explains. ‘My mother was a solo singer, and she sang in the Bethlehem Baptist Church. Usually whenever there was a program, they would always call on her for a solo. She would take me by the hand, and I would stand there while she sang and look up and repeat the words out of her mouth until I learned the song. And the song goes something like this.”

Beautiful stars of love

Shining from heaven above

Leading the world to look that way

Radiant is the glow over the earth below

Cheering me on to perfect day

In African-American parlance, Freeman doesn’t simply sing; he sangs. Listening to him sang never fails to ease my troubled mind.

The author and musician Jerry Zolten produced the Freeman recording. He recalled that neither of them could trace the origin of “Beautiful Stars,” although Zolten suspects “it may be a hymn of non-African American origin.” No matter, for Freeman made the song uniquely his. He infused it with a certain rough eloquence seldom if ever found anywhere besides Black churches, jook joints, and streetlights where makeshift quartets once gathered. His sound tapped into a rich oral tradition in which wisdom is passed down through the ages in the form of time-ripened discourses on everything: from storytelling and singing to planting and harvesting to loving and fighting, to watching and waiting. When Black people share observations in this way, it’s often called folklore; when white people do it, it’s called philosophy.

Freeman’s philosophizing (let’s call it that) can be easily traced back to the early spirituals that DuBois memorably dubbed the Sorrow Songs, beautiful, haunting tunes “in which the soul of the Black slave spoke to men.” DuBois went on to suggest, “through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope — a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change so often to triumph and calm confidence.” This is also true of Freeman’s repertoire, which reminds us to not only look up at the stars but also to see ourselves reflected in them.

I try and fail to summon a similar confidence when Crump appears on my screen. I acknowledge that, like Freeman, the attorney can be seen as part of the same legacy that DuBois celebrated. The poet Henry Dumas described them as “long-breath singers,” women and men who use their voices to assert faith in Black humanity in a country of non-believers. Examples of these are not hard to find:

Tarana Burke launching #MeToo.

Rep. Maxine Waters claiming her time.

A little girl in Flint, Michigan reminding us that she still has no drinking water.

In this context, Crump’s revelations can amount to singing, discordant but necessary notes in the ongoing magnum opus that is the African-American experience.

Despite my knowing this, his disclosures send me careening through cycles of fury and bereavement, my own habitual “cadences of despair.” Only after shaking off the gloom — and the headache — can I begin to think about a quality as transcendent as resilience.

IV

A cure for the severe headaches common among African-Americans isn’t likely to be found in a bottle of extra-strength pain reliever. Consequently, we do what we must to remedy our afflictions, including but not limited to seeking therapy, praying to Allah, offering thanks to Oshun, building bottle trees and burning sage. Handled with care, these are not contradictory practices but the marshaling of multiple forces to support our spiritual strivings. This wellspring of custom and philosophy fuels the remarkable intestinal fortitude that keeps us keeping on, no matter what. The result is a miraculous Blackness honed over centuries of instinctive and intentional practice, one that reflects our wondrous gift of reinvention and all the ways we bring it. I remind myself of this wellspring as I turn from the screen, Crump explaining in the background.

Massaging my temples and breathing deeply, I allow myself a few seconds of respite from the gunshots and headlines. I will honor the ancestors, I tell myself. I will ask them to take me by the hand. I will repeat the words out of my elders’ mouths. I will receive from our amalgamated philosophies all the resources I need to keep my heart pumping and my head unbowed. I’m going to learn to move on up a little higher, as Mahalia sang. To run, stumble, fall and rise again, like Robert Hayden described. To navigate the marvelous wreck of this world while staying woke and staying sane.

Mm-Hmm. All of that.

Notes.

“ ‘They Basically Saw A Black Man With A Gun’: Police Kill Armed Guard While Responding To Call,” Mark Guarino, Alex Horton, and Michael Brice-Saddler, Washington Post, 11/12/18.

“Charges Droped Against Brooklyn Mother Who Had Baby Ripped From Her Arms By Police,” Michael Gold and Ashley Southall, NYT, 12/11/18.

“A Dallas Police Officer Shot Her Neighbor, and a City is Full Of Questions,” Manny Fernandez and Marina Trahan Martinez, NYT, 9/14/18.

“ ‘It’s Still A Blast Beating Pople’: St. Louis Police Indicted in Assault of Undercover Officer Posing As Protester,” Tim Elfrink, Washington Post, 11/30/18

Kate Clifford Lawson, Bound For The Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero.

“Inherited Trauma Shapes Your Health,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, Oct. 16, 2018.

“Being Black In America Can Be Hazardous To Your Health,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, July/August 2018

“Black Children Are Suffering Higher Rates of Depression and Anxiety. What’s Going On?” Katherine K. Dahlsgaard, The Inquirer/Philly.com., 12/11/18.