Notes On An Overly Emotional Brother

Reuben Jackson, existing in context

Kamala Harris knows full well she is building legacy and lore as she steps into the throes of presidential campaigning. She is writing her biography as she lives it. I never imagined a professional story for myself. By writing, I am documenting my own personal mythology. While we are alive, we can leave markers of who we are for the next generation. I think about this often with my family's history. What is our story? In what ways would we like to be remembered?

Earlier this week, I was invited into a conversation about establishing a writing award named after the late Reuben Jackson. Jackson was beloved locally as a folk hero, a poet and scholar who dosed his followers with an abundant if restrained love. He passed away in February of this year. Private to the point of lonesome, he was known by reputation for most of us. His smooth basso as host of Friday Night Jazz was familiar to ardent public radio listeners. He came to Vermont by way of Goddard College and has called this place home ever since. 

Photo shared by Alan King to his Reuben’s Facebook page on 2/1/24. Reuben was signing books for fans at the D.C. launch of This is the Honey, an anthology in which he was included.  

I think I surprised my friend with my concerns about establishing an award. The exchange brought up questions of legacy, gatekeeping, competitiveness, white saviourship, and who gets to economically benefit from Black folks and their labor. I eventually withdrew from participating. Not only would it be too emotionally taxing, I didn’t feel it was meaningful enough of a salute to Jackson and his life. His legacy should cost more from us than a pittance.

At the Negotiating Table of the Muse

I’m so tired of pink slips, poetry competitions whose crowning glory is
bus fare,
audiences too literary to feel.
give me b flats for adjectives,
a 25 piece band,
And I'll revive the two-step single-handedly;
criminals will put down their handguns
and do wop under the streetlights again
I’ll wine and dine you like no pulitzer winner ever could
- Reuben Jackson

The rage supply is endless

“I share my Mother's unfettered emotionalism. (My Dad's was deeper in the underbrush ) I also share her love for musicians like Chopin and Harry Belafonte. And though some of you may not believe it, I carry her deep black rage.” - Facebook, 4/25/23

My daily commute takes me past a Confederate rebel flag twice a day. It is mounted to a garage, facing the street. The fabric has been wind-whipped and tangles around its rod. It’s part of a scene that includes a Trump 2024 banner and various yard debris that is also weather-worn and faded. It’s easy to miss if you don’t know it’s there.

I take the Sheep Road because the sight of lambs frolicking in the field gives me joy, even though I know that they are farmed for their bodies and their value is in the slaughter. My brief bliss is bookended by this symbol of slavery and its insistence of white superiority. Other flourishes along this path include a thin blue line banner, a guns and ammo shop, and election signs promoting a candidate who opposes Black Lives Matter. Everyday I am surrounded by constant reminders of white oppression. 

Reuben Jackson lived this too while here. To cope, he leaned on his colleague the late Dr. Daniello Balon, who was director of diversity and equity for the Burlington school district, where Jackson taught English. He wrote about it in a remembrance posted to Facebook¹:

“When you are the first/or one of the few --the support (and I mean support beyond flaccid lip service) of someone like Dan is ultra, ultra, crucial. The loneliness which accompanies forays into frequently hostile bends of the river can, and do, crush the spirit. Some days I would call Dan, or stop by his office and cry. And he would allow me... 

“He also acknowledged my humanity. This might not sound like a big deal to you.. Until, of course, yours is stepped on. Or denied.” - Facebook 1/30/19  

In his writings, he cuts himself open every time to expose the generational trauma and rage that he kept barely hidden. Jackson understood that a life could be a series of wails, could be a hymnal if you pair misery with joy. 

By the time he’d made that post, Jackson had already returned to Washington, DC. I remember seeing posts of his that expressed an immense fondness for Vermont while acknowledging that in the end, leaving was an act of self preservation. 

He be mugging! Jackson at the book event from Facebook 2/1/24

Unquestionably your friend

“One of the hardest things about living in a small town is that you will inevitably see people, good, and otherwise, somewhere… Mother would tell me about seeing prominent Klan members in the Post Office, a day or so after a cross was burned on someone's lawn, or worse. They know that you know, and they know that you know that they are untouchable. That they represent a way of life they are fighting like hell to hold onto. I wanted revenge.” - Facebook 1/30/19

Vermont loses people of color everyday due to its racial climate. I am in touch with folks who may never return. I’ve reunited with an old classmate who was so traumatized by his schooling here that he’s still processing it in therapy. Friends want to leave but have  familial obligations. How does the diaspora survive here, you wonder?

I think that LeVar Burton put it succinctly in the final episode of Clipped. We who weave between worlds have to make ourselves safe in order to engage our rage. 

I’ve been so practiced in maintaining a steady keel that even my intimates sometimes don’t see how much I stew. This is the balance of sanity and safety that many of us maintain in order to exist in the environments we have to navigate.

I write all this without knowing Reuben Jackson personally. We orbited each other and maintained a friendly distance online with a slew of mutual connections. Jackson was  a safe Black man for Vermont to love. He was large and unassuming, taking up necessary space. His delivery was modulated, his speech smart—-he was inoffensive in all the ways. 

Surviving becomes an act of defiance. To exist in spite of. But sometimes surviving means leaving. And so many of us have left (for various reasons): Jarvis Green, Tyeastia Green, Major Jackson, Brian Peete, Bor Yang… Add to them the private individuals we don’t know about and the ones who could not make it out alive.  

Stewarding a legacy

“I am sure some of you think I need to move forward. Well, I would argue that I have.. But like love, trauma has to go somewhere.. And where does it go when it is a kind of isolated, occasionally whispered about -tragedy drenched trauma?” - Facebook 1/30/2019

Reuben was an early supporter of this newsletter. He was one of the handful of monthly paid subscribers—not for the poetry that I sneak past the paywall. But for the careful optimism I have for a Vermont in which people of color can survive. When he enrolled as a monthly subscriber, the note he wrote to me was a command: “Preach.” 

As I write this, Kamala Harris is jettisoned to the spotlight in her pursuit of the presidency. So too is Sonya Massey, another life quashed by the police state. These become the new up and down beats of Black life in America. 

I’m not sure there’s an adequate way to honor someone who loved us so well. For now, there’s a GoFundMe to set up a scholarship fund at the University of the District Columbia for students interested in poetry and/or jazz. It requires a $40,000 community investment, so who knows if it will reach its goal. I like the idea that he will continue to educate young minds in perpetuity. 

The most radical legacy project I would suggest we consider is to transform Vermont into a place where young people of color can feel utterly unbound by what has come before, free to grow into themselves. This happens with systemic overhaul, policy changes, and ballot initiatives. It may not convince our neighbor to remove their white pride symbols, but it will let them know we are getting down with a different groove.

People will grieve how they grieve. Everyone should be given the grace to do what is best for them. There have been celebrations of life in his honor and another is planned in Montpelier for August. However we memorialize him, I hope it endures, as we the living attempt each day to understand what a life is for. ❤️

Sunday Afternoon

East Glover, Vermont

Two lane roads
Twist like an awkward boy
At a house party

Chamber Of Commerce
Autumnal breezes say
“It’s ok to be
an October smitten brother
in a corny plaid jacket
which screams

“I too fell in love
With technicolor fairy tales
About this place”

I am a concrete weary man
En route to a tryst with trees
And silence

I wave to blushing hills-
check the rear-view mirror
for police
suffering from a draught
of quotas

But now
It is as calm as a day in which
my blackness is unsettling
to some people

Somewhere
God is watching football
On a flat screen

I share my wishes
With the sky

- Reuben Jackson

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1. All quotes are ones I found through scrolling Jackson’s Facebook page, though they are not all marked as “shareable”. The title of this post is adapted from one dated 5/2/23.