Inherited Tears
By Corwin Malcolm Davis
I cried while sitting on the toilet the other day. It’s not what you think, I promise. The culprit was not a sour taste of spoiled food or night of drinking turned bad—trust me, I’ve had my fair share of both those experiences. This cry wasn’t one that accompanied a prayer of relief for my body; rather, it was escorted by a prayer of release for my heart. As many of us are want to do, I was on my phone while in the bathroom, knowingly against the advice of medical professionals, and I saw a picture of my niece. And I cried while sitting on the toilet.
My niece just turned eight years old, and she has wanted a cell phone for a while now. She has even gathered up her spare monies, trusting with great assurance that she can purchase a brand-new iPhone with what amounts to no more than fourteen dollars and some loose change. As a birthday concession, my sister—her mother—created a Facebook Messenger Kids account for my niece. New to me, these accounts allow a child to communicate via text and video call with whomever their parent approves, as the account is a subsidiary of the parent’s account. In the days prior to the one I am describing above, my niece and I shared in some small chats at her initiative.
“Hi uncle”
“Hi, Haleigh! How are you??”
“I’m doing good”
“What did you learn at school this week?”
“Learn about my friend and I learn that I can learn about number blocks I learn about the”
“Cool! You are so smart! Did you have fun?”
“Yes sir”
“I’m glad! Well I’m about to eat breakfast so I’ll talk to you later. I love you!”
“I love you too”
I was initially impressed at her ability to text and type so well, and I was trying to be conscious of the words and phrases that I was using to ensure that an eight year old could read it. There were other moments when she would video call me (unannounced I might add) and if I was able, I would answer and talk with her that way. But what came next, I did not expect. A few hours later, out of the blue, my beautiful Black niece sent me a selfie.
The selfie itself is not remarkable; it’s admittedly a pretty rough photo. She’s lying on the upper of the bunk bed that she shares with my other niece, the light of the floor lamp shining over the right portion of her head. Her hair is frazzled and in disarray, no doubt from rolling around or playing in the moments before the picture.
The gap in the front of her smile is pronounced, her missing teeth on display like a hard-won battle trophy, contributing to the still of her enjoyment and pride within herself. The green blanket on her bed is taking up almost the entire bottom third of the photo, and the picture itself is blurry and unclear.
When I first received the image, I was confused as to why she sent it. We were no longer in a moment of conversation, and she had not sent me a photo before. And why did she choose to send this photo? Although she is eight years old, my niece knows how to take a photo, and in fact is very particular about making her uncle retake photos or selfies if she is not pleased with how she looks.
Then I realized: she wanted to be seen. For the first time in her life, she had the capacity to capture herself authentically, and more importantly, to feel safe enough to share that with someone else. Just as she was, in that exact moment, with what she was wearing and with her missing teeth and in that bunk bed with the green blanket while cheerfully playing on her tablet, she wanted someone to see her. To witness. So I saw her, and then I cried on the toilet.
***
As a child, my siblings and I used to mock our mother because of her tears. She would cry at the drop of a dime, and for reasons that sometimes seemed imaginary to us. It became a running joke in our family—even our mother herself would laugh while telling us to stop mocking her—she was so easily affected by emotions that we could usually anticipate when her cheeks would serve as familiar canvases for the waves of sniffles and waterworks. She always felt, and still feels, everything so deeply, so much so that she is prone to crying mid-sleep because even her nightmares feel like reality and she can become overwhelmed by the ensuing sensations.
The sad movies at which many folk cry are not what I’m referring to in this instance. Sure, folk cry at The Notebook or For Colored Girls, but my mother cries at baby diaper commercials and at lone dogs walking down the street and at Christmas decorations—an attribute she undoubtedly passed down to my baby sister. And for her and my sister, the tears became a bonding activity, a shared experience.
I always avoided crying. It was not that I didn’t feel anything, in fact it was often the opposite. I, too, felt everything somewhat to an extreme degree. And I avoided it. I stuffed everything back inside. I ran from the tears that I felt coming, attempting to beat them at their own game by trading that sensation for another, by substituting that emotion for an alternative. I replaced tears of rage with the silence of contemplation, replaced sadness with anger.
Trading and manipulating emotions is in fact what I was conditioned to do. As a black boy child in the rural hills of Southern Tennessee, I was instructed to make this emotional exchange. It was understood, both stated and implied, that there was no space within the masculinity I inherited for expressions like that. Folks such as my traditionally “masculine” little league baseball coach and older women cousins alike made it clear: being sensitive was not a desired trait.
“Hey—fix your face. It ain’t even worth all that.”
“Toughen up, man! You out here whining like a sissy.”
“You know better: boys don’t cry.”
Even as a black boy child with a little extra limp in his wrist and switch in his walk, the conditions of the surrounding cultural milieu did not bend. The productions of cis/heteropatriarchy are strong, and the disciplinary measures used to ensure such production seem inflexible. It is, as many Black feminist thinkers have already told us, to the detriment of people of all genders that these conditionings function. Patriarchy and heteronormativity and such narrow constructions of gender and masculinity cannot shield us from pain or emotions, even if we think we’ve tricked the system.
My misguided attempt to replace the sadness or grief or pain for anger has only been destructive in my life. Time and time again it has been that which has actually kept me from what I needed, and left me only with the scraps of what I thought I wanted. I’ve watched it and I’ve felt it.
This is difficult to admit, but thankfully (with the help of my therapist in recent years) I try to no longer be afraid of looking at myself, of seeing myself. I’ve borne witness to myself trying to be detached from my own emotional experience, and succeed. I’ve seen myself pretend like I didn’t care at all as a mechanism to conceal that I actually cared too much. I’ve hurt people with my anger, rather than admitting that what I was really feeling was hurt, a pain that resembles sadness, but is often cloaking disappointment.
Contrary to my mother, I only have one distinct memory of my father crying, and that was at his best friend’s burial. My father, in true Black Southern funeral aesthetic, wore sunglasses during the funeral service. The shades obscure, and they reveal an intentional effort to not be seen, just in case any emotions do surface and cannot be tamed in time. We left the funeral service and went to the graveside, where my father originally sat under the velvet green tent from the city’s only Black funeral home. As the words of committal were pronounced, my father hastened our family back to our 2001 white Dodge Caravan, where we sat in the car at a distance from the burial itself. His friend’s casket was lowered into the dirt, and my father whimpered and moaned—the sound like that of what can only be described as a severely wounded animal.
“Let’s go. Let’s go!” He insisted through his tears and through his heaving, turning his head away from the graveside and from the body of his deceased comrade. We didn’t even see the casket fully lowered into the ground. My father didn’t want to bear witness to that. He didn’t, couldn’t, see it.
***
If seeing is what can cause such suffering, then of course not seeing seems like the simpler option. I am thinking about “seeing” here as partly a representation, since I know this expands beyond those with physical sight. But it can be quite painful to see someone else, to fully experience another person. It can hurt—damn near destroy you—to bear witness to all the complexities and joys and traumas and hopes and injuries of others.
I don’t think it’s too far a stretch to suggest that some of us even have an aversion to being seen, and to seeing. I’ve noticed even within myself the tendency to avoid seeing, particularly in the past few years. I tired of watching and hearing the videos of police officers shooting and killing unarmed Black folk across the country. I was, and am, turned off by it. The type of trauma porn that others guarantee they consume, I circumvent with great intentionality. Scrolling on Instagram or TikTok, I immediately swipe up if I catch even the faintest semblance of a horrific video on my screen. No thank you.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? The same phones and social media with which we attempt to have a particular type of visibility for ourselves simultaneously render others quite invisible to us. Like the sunglasses at a Black Southern funeral, that type of hyper-visibility conceals as much as it reveals. Perhaps this is why my niece’s photo struck me the way it did. When she gained access to a tablet, she first wanted to talk to her family and send them photos of herself. Some of the tears come from knowing she’ll be a teen one day soon and will probably try to avoid talking to us as much as possible. That type of engagement can feel too intimate for a pubescent teen.
Intimacy, no matter how we crave it, can feel so uncomfortable. And maybe it’s because we know it’s fleeting. Who wants to see trauma after all? Who actually wants to see their best friend’s body lowered into the ground? Where is the award for the person who consumes the most sadness or pain?
Seeing or experiencing someone else’s life requires something of us. It’s difficult to see someone being mistreated and not intervene or to see someone else in pain and not empathize and attempt to offer solace. In this regard, the choice to avoid seeing or experiencing is a protective measure. Why do I need to watch 24-hour news programming, or see the replays on social media? I know what’s going on. I don’t need constant reminders. It’s difficult to fully witness those we know and love; the effort it requires to see a stranger is even more demanding. In fact, I’m trying my best to not remember it, to not see it, to not have to witness it. I don’t know if my sensitive ass could take it.
When I was a child, as is true for many folk who were reared within the stained-glass halls of Black religiosity, I was always frightened of the end times. I remember as a child hearing the sermons and testimonies of faithful church folk, each of which were assured that Jesus was coming back, and coming back soon, and that we must get ready for his return.
“Jesus is coming back for a church without spot or wrinkle! We must be ready, for no man knows the day nor the hour!”
“All these men acting like women these days—they’re going to be in for a rude awakening when Jesus comes back. He’s given them over to their reprobate mind. They’ll see one day.”
“When He comes, the trumpets will sound! Hallelujah—and the Lord’s gon’ crack the sky. Glory to God—and every eye will see him at once! And I wanna be ready when He comes!”
If it was storming outside, or if the sky looked a little too ominous and unsafe within my ten-year-old mind, I stayed inside, and I made sure to not look out the windows of the house. Y’all are telling me that God can see me? Always? Talk about an aversion to intimacy. I didn’t want to be seen. And no, I didn’t want to see any return or apocalypse. In my mind, if they were saying “every eye will see him,” and I refused to look outside, then he couldn’t be coming back. If I wasn’t seeing it, then it couldn’t be happening. Right?
***
I have often wondered, and still do, if others feel things as strongly as I do. Am I alone in the overwhelming emotions of witnessing others? Am I experiencing others in a one-way type of exchange, where I’m seeing but not being seen? That’s even scarier to me—that maybe I am the sensitive one, the only one actively bartering one emotion for another, the one that can’t take it.
Then that autumn arrived, and brought with her grief and pain that was foreign in both its intensity and its tenacity.
My partner and I were on the cusp of a break-up, and I knew what loss of intimacy was coming next. In the middle of that, the mother of one of my closest friends died. It was a whirlwind in those days, complete with the full spectrum of emotions and the cyclical stages of grief and loss. A few weeks after the funeral, I flew to visit my friend and check on him. We were riding around in his car, talking about any and everything, and eventually the inevitable conversation emerged:
“I knew it was coming, I did, but I still can’t believe it. I still keep trying to pick up the phone to call her and tell her about what I just saw in the store or to ask her opinion about something for the house.”
“I can only imagine. It’s so hard for me to see you in this grief. I wish there was something I could do for you.”
“Shit, me too.”
There was nothing to do—but grieve, that is. There was nothing to do but see each other, both in a wounded state and an unfamiliar pain. There was nothing to do but see.
I started crying. He reached over and embraced me, holding my head tightly against his chest—the rising and falling of his breath I could feel as if it were housed in my own body.
And there, we cried. Two black boys, now men, both reared in Tennessee saw each other. And we cried together.
About the author
Corwin Malcolm Davis (he/him) is an emerging public writer and a current Religion PhD student at Emory University. At Emory, he studies religion and theories of queerness, blackness, and sociality. Born and raised in Tennessee, Davis currently lives in Harlem, New York City. You can find him on Twitter and IG @corwinmalcolm.
