Nightshirt

It was the hospital where I was born, during the Korean War, where my mother and father celebrated my rst breaths. I was the rstborn, a child they hoped would take care of the others, and be a guiding light. In the morning edition of the Baltimore Sun that day, it was reported that the bodies of 13 soldiers from Maryland were headed home on board the Allegheny Victory, one of the Navy’s cargo ships. In Korea, the war fought inside America was revealed in the G.I.s’ preferences for ags. On the day after I was born, the Baltimore Afro-American reported that white G.I.s were ying the Confederate ag, so many that the Koreans mistook it for Old Glory. Two weeks after I was born, Paul Robeson presented a petition to the United Nations entitled “We Charge Genocide: e Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” e racial problems, in the next two decades, would bring Black people against one another, the anger and frustration expanding the pressurized space of cities with diminishing opportunities as jobs were outsourced to other countries, and urban populations became customers for drugs deemed illegal.

As I stood in the emergency room waiting for my parents and the hospital sta to consider whether to let me go, I knew the atmosphere of desperation in Black neighborhoods, where the war against drugs seemed more like a war against Black people. e homicide rate for the year was hurtling toward another horri c sum. By the end of 1979, 245 people would be dead, the majority of them Black men killed by Black men, a drama I knew all too well, having survived confrontations with angry Black men with guns. Sometimes all of us were intoxicated, lled with alcohol, drugs, or some combination. I knew how quickly chaos could explode, and situated as it was in the middle of the city as a trauma facility, anything could develop in the emergency room. I had enough knowledge of Taiji to apply it with more con dence than when I tried to go into stillness when my grandmother died. With my focus on my breathing, I endured my time in the emergency room with a calmness that overcame my agitation. e social worker assigned to us was a white woman named Kay. Some years later, I would learn that she seemed to believe that going back to work meant I would lose my job once the supervisors determined I was unhinged, and losing my job would awaken