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On Staying Black and Dying

Meditations on a Park Drummer Who Will Not STFU

Last night I slept for about thirty minutes before startling awake. A single yellow light filtered in through the streetlamp outside. My love lay asleep next to me. It was only the third time we’d seen each other since the pandemic came along making travel a logistical impossibility. We both have kids. She lives with a parent in their 70’s. Spending time together has become a rare and precious idea.

As I lay awake in bed a drummer in the park across the street from the bedroom played a djembe with trance-like determination. My partner tells me this person can be heard some nights, appearing near dusk, playing until the time she falls asleep, and apparently beyond. She has never seen the drummer. It does not sound to me like they are “jamming.” The repetition, the intensity, the simplicity, the speed, the hard driving make it sound more like they are trying desperately to communicate with something that can only be reached through the sheer kinetic force of their own insistence.

I lay awake listening to this drummer and thinking of a thing I had seen eight hours earlier: a countdown clock recently unveiled in Union Square in Manhattan. The clock itself was not new, I was in a student at NYU a few blocks away when it first appeared as what I thought was an art project about maybe…time…or something. I was entranced by it. I would sit in the park, smoking cigarettes and watching the numbers…