I’m so sad to be doing this again. Again, and again. I know that death happens, but in a country that is always trying to separate us from our humanity, Black death always feels personal. This is probably because we resist by surviving. We resist by loving unabashedly, laughing at death, dancing when we’re supposed to be crying, crying when we’re supposed to be dancing, mourning loudly over beats, grieving while turnt up, metabolizing every horrifying thing that has happened to us into a storytime that has everybody rolling, in tears, on the floor, falling out, I’m ded. We do not take horror as only horror, we also take it as life, we flip from pain to love to death to laughter to sex to song to the ancestors to time travel to bloodshed to poetry to a plate of food and the flawless application of edge gel within a blink of the universe’s eye, within a blink of our own. This is life. This is survival. This is why it feels personal when we die here. Because for a moment it feels like — though this is not what it is but still it’s what it feels like — “damn they been tryna get her up outta here this whole time, and they finally did it.”

I have spent so much time thinking about our deaths here in this country. Once an editor asked me to write about a reflection about a Black man who had been killed, unarmed, and as always for no real reason, though the killers tried to make up some post facto defense about “robbers in the neighborhood.” I had to turn down the job, I had to skip the paycheck. I had to tell her that I was tired of writing about Black death. My whole career exists because of Black death. It’s why anyone ever started listening to me in the first place. The cycle is so predictable and sickening. Some innocent person is murdered in public and everyone competes to say or tweet or post the most profound thing about it. So once in 2014, I was declared a winner of the “who can post the most profound thing about Black death,” competition and my prize was to be offered paid writing gigs. It is here that I remember the old-folks phrase “can’t win for losin’ ” which I never understood but which always made me laugh. Now of course I realize that to be a Black writer in America means it sometimes feels that you can only win for losing. What I mean is: it feels like you can only win if you write about losing.

That is the schism of it all. That is what splits you into two parts living here in this place. That is why you need to be always putting yourself together and together again. Maybe that is why she was so well put together.

Anyway, I will skip the obligatory passage about how All About Love changed my life. That it did is a fact as true as it is basic, and no one needs to hear it. Declarations of love, even those about All About Love are useless. Love is a thing you do, not a feeling you have. If I “love” All About Love, let me show it. Let you feel it. Let us live it together.

No. Instead I want to talk about a time when my now ex-wife and I were two college-type kids in New York City trying to make some extra money so we could travel and see beautiful things and be in the world together and we took a one-time gig working the booth at a fashion fair on the Upper West Side. At one point in the day, Ms Gloria Jean Watkins, whom you may know as bell hooks, sauntered up to our merchandise arm in arm with a woman I did not recognize but who felt like a lover of some type. Ms Watkins surprised me with the way she carried herself, that is to say with an unapologetically high femme joy, a preciousness, hints of princess, a discerning materialism, the old folks might have said “highfalutin” whatever the hell that meant. We sold her a purse. She handed over the money — she did not seem nearly as concerned with us as we were with her— and thrilled with her new purchase she wandered away oohing and aahhing with her friend over the brushed brass clasp and the double stitch of the leather.

It was 1999. I was a 23-year-old boy who thought serious academic feminists were supposed to be dowdy and dour and drab. Therefore I did not entirely understand Ms. Watkins. But even then I was old enough or maybe raised right enough to know that when someone behaves in ways you don’t get, it is sometimes because they understand things that you don’t.

In the coming years as I read more of her work, I thought a lot about that Saturday afternoon exchange. I came to realize that she was rescuing me from the white way of politics that I had been trained in, a way that was grim and joyless and controlling, utterly lacking in room for ecstasy or the divine. She was reconnecting me to the politics of my family, of my mothers — a glowing fight, a sequined joy, burnished power of beauty, laughter, dance, music, the swaying of our hips, the caressing of our skin. She was showing me that love is a way of being in the world, a way of letting your eyes light up in the beauty of things. She was showing me that the fight for our liberation and the liberation of those we love is serious work and as such must be undertaken with a bliss unapologetic, and obdurate and sometimes defiant charm, maybe, if you are so inclined, a lethal batting of the eyelashes like the tingling flutter of one hundred thousand little knives.

It has always and only been women and most especially Black women who have shown me precisely what power feels like when you choose to let it run free and unrestrained within your body. In some sense I write to her every day. I write for her every day. The only way I know to love her is to try my little best to carry on what she taught me.

Anyway.

Rest in power Ms Watkins. Always in power.