Back of Book Scripts #12

A List of Scripts, of the Inspiring Sort.

☂Full moon is in SNOW tomorrow, let's go! 

☂ Song of Harlem, Happy Thursday

• Our next soak circle will be this coming Sunday, February 25, and will take place online. Join us as we check-in, connect, share and somehow manage to soak our feet. Please register here.
• You can order your next jar of body butter for yourself or community groups here.
• This evening an online Tai-Chi class will be held. Sponsored by Memorial Sloan Kettering and Abyssinian Baptist, you can find more on that here.
• A documentary on the Pan Africanist and scholar, Walter Rodney will be shown at Teachers College this Saturday. Find out more here.
• Join Kaira Jewel Lingo and Fr. Adam Bucko for a Buddhist / Christian retreat at the Garrison Institute. March 7 - 10. More info here.
• This Saturday Brenda Bunson-Bey, Craig Harris will offer a Wearable Art Show and concert honoring Kwame Brathwaite and Elombe Brath at the Harlem State Office Building. More info here.
• Portraits of Harlem by Cathleen Cauldwell are on display at the Hamilton Grange Library. More here.
• Yummy Recipe Links: Sautéed Broccoli Rabe, Chicken Cacciatore, Turkey Meatloaf, Sesame Salad Dressing
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We've got today's letters below. Please like, share, & comment below.

With love,

n

AudioEssay of below letter

Over and Over, Again

by Nzingha Hazelton

Two Thousand and Two was the year my niece, Sakile, and nephew, Chike, died. I turned to Bob Marley’s best hits. I needed the music ​t​hen, needed to follow the chords, the twangs of the guitar notes. It was music that kept my fears in order, soothed my nascent anxiety.​ Some twenty-two years later, I finally returned to these songs. Has it been twenty-two years of grief? Have we grieved enough?  What ​are the songs ​that are hard for you to hear? What music makes you cry?

About a year later we held a memorial for the children at Harlem School of the Arts. At the time I was at college in Amherst, Massachusetts and a friend had joined me on the trip down to New York for the weekend. It was not until much later that I realized​ that I did not tell her what had exactly happened. 

I was away from home studying at Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding school in Western Massachusetts. Picture the Connecticut Valley of New England. I believe it was our last year there. 2002, yes, that would have been right. The kids were born in ’93 and '98. We were about sixteen or seventeen; they, eight and four. 

It was a blustery time of year. I roomed at the time with my sis in a dorm called Merrill Keep, an eighty-seven year old dorm on the Northfield campus. Yes, the school at the time contained two campuses. In the past one of these, Mount Hermon, had been for the boys. The other Northfield campus with its ethereal, feminine air; this was where the female students lived and studied. Nef and I had moved to Merrill Keep in our second year attracted by the beautifully crafted dorm, spacious rooms, and some four or five dining quarters on that campus.

The beauty of the Mount Hermon campus stole our hearts away when visiting a few years prior. The classrooms, the fields of green, the buildings and the trees. In fact, I do believe my late niece and nephew came with us on that day we drove up Interstate-91 in Mommy’s maroon Nissan. As we approached the entrance signs to the school we all got quieter, both excited and a bit uncertain about what was to come. I think my older brothers, my older sister were there as well, or perhaps they came on a visit. We set up our rooms, along with Mom, who wanted us to be comfortable. We got pillows and new comforters. Our rooms, or our portion of the 125 sq ft rooms, were like little cottages.

But, in our second year, we left Mount  Hermon. At Merrill Keep, we found out that we had joined one of the more enterprising dorms. Each year a housemate would design the school's T-shirt for Mountain Day, and we made good money for the dorm selling those bad boys. Mountain Day was a designated day, though a surprise to most students, where the entire school went on a hike up Mt. Monadnock in southern New Hampshire and other local trails and peaks in the area.

Thinking of it, at this time, Mountain Day would have been in the fall. At this point, on this day, it was late winter / early Spring and letters of acceptance to various colleges dotted our doors. Nef was actually home in New York, attending a callback for a place in the drama division at New York University. I was home, or home in my dorm, when the phone in our room rang.

I think it was Mommy on the phone. It was very hard to hear her because tears kept getting in the way of what she was trying to say.

“What?” I asked. My face screwed up, scared to understand my mother’s words. “What?” I yelled, my voice rising in fright. She continued to whisper, choking on tears, she said, “there was a fire…there was a fire…Chike…Sakile…they passed.” As she spoke, I began screaming.

Tears streamed down my face and I continued screaming, unsure of what else to do or say. Scared to return to sleep, the room too big now to hold me and my tears, I decided to put on Bob Marley’s Best Hits. Did I listen with headphones from a CD player or discman? Or was it on a loudspeaker? I needed Marley's calming lyrics. Alone in this dormitory room in Northfield, Mass, I trembled and cried. I began to hear feet outside my door, of my dorm mates asking what happened.

It has been twenty-two years since 2002, a fact that I realized while writing this piece. By the time this gets to you, it will also be the 22nd of February, two days before Saturday’s Full Moon in Snow. Sometimes I wish that the 22nd of February was in fact a portal, with a reset to the prior day, a continuation the day after​.

I found out that the music video for the No. 1 hit song The Crossroads by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony came out in July of ​’02. The music video, which depicted a grim reaper of sorts taking souls to a faraway place, ​​must have match​ed an undercurrent of sorrow in the air of our house. We watched and listened with great attention. Pulsing with and in the after life, the visuals chill the soul. But my brothers were fans, and no matter how ghostly, or ghoulish, or downright occult the music, they were there for the lyrical deliveries; they were there for the beats.

Brought together by the late rapper Eazy E, also a member of the group N.W.A., Bone Thugs-n-Harmony consisted of Bizzy Bone, Wish Bone, Krayzie Bone, Layzie Bone, and Layzie’s older brother, Flesh-n-Bone.  

It might have been, because of my brother​s, that I grew incredibly too used to the repeat effect, or the effect of playing a song on repeat, incessantly. In an older poem, I characterize the way their music sealed itself to my spine like a synchrony, “the beautiful bony and harmonic music” that they played for days on end. 

Driving around with friends on the Navajo Nation reservation in Arizona, one of my brothers first encountered the music of Bone. He was there studying at the local high school; my mom having previously volunteered as a midwife on the reservation as well. My brother says the song playing was No Surrender, which went on to become one of his favorite songs by the group. When the song came on, he remembers, “the beats were so crazy and they were so animated.” Rapping fast, you could also still understand Bone. My brother goes on:

That Deejay. DJ U-Neek was an amazing Deejay.  Their beats…you never heard them before. I'm hearing these songs over and over again is over those beats. DJ U-Neek's music was so complex.  It's a certain thing that I love about the songs. They had an element of something that I like to hear. You ever heard Hotel California? It begins,  On a dark desert highway , Cool wind in my hair…and then the guitar comes in. I will play that over and over again just for that guitar. 

At the time, Mama was not a fan of Bone Thugs. This same  brother would play the records not just on repeat, but quite loud, and on repeat. He was going through a tough time, and with their repetitive measure, the mellifluous songs became an antidote to things that he or we could not quite express. 

I remember, for example, later on at boarding school, when it was only Maxwell's album Embrya that could relax me enough to go to sleep. My roommate, a Liberian soccer goalie from Boston, favored Destiny's Child’s The Writings on the Wall and listened through her headphones, night after night, her discman aside her in the twin-sized dorm-room bed. 

What was it about playing songs on repeat?  Much of this music spoke of loss, of grief, of sadness, and yet the songs gave us a certain type of relief. Momentary reprieves extended into a mesmerizing space of meditation. Space where the healing of sore wounds and broken hearts began. Indeed, it was a musician in New Orleans who reminded me, as I listened to Nina Simone’s Trouble in Mind (also on repeat at the time), listen to the blues to cure the blues, or something like that. Was this music we listened to continuously a new form of the blues? Did we listen to them to feel better…to feel…again?

Last Wednesday of this month of February 2024, I found myself playing Legend, the compilation of Bob Marley's greatest hits, over and over again. I played the album at least three times that day. It happened to be Valentine's Day here, and advertisements of the movie depicting the king of reggae’s life floated on loudspeakers throughout the subway system here in New York. After hearing One Love repeatedly throughout the day, and seeing images of Marley around the city, on T.V., I finally chose to listen to the sixteen songs of the artist's best hits again, an album I had not listened to non-stop since 2002.

I can handle snippets of the compilation, but listening to the whole album always brings me back to ​2002, the 22nd of February​, a day I rather wish did not exist. 

☂ About Nzingha