Sisyphus and the Black Millennial Child

Have you heard of the myth of Sisyphus? A king, punished for outsmarting the gods, condemned to endlessly push a boulder up a hill.

We each have our own boulders, placed in front of us by our own Gods. Join me as I explore the boulder that was placed in front of me, where it came from, and the difference between dying on a hill and dying for my own.

In the mid 50s, my grandfather moved from Chicago to the segregated south of Memphis TN with a chip on his shoulder and a pebble in his shoe. He arrived to work the land. Hard work and doing more than the next was all he knew.

“They ain’t just gonna give it to you… and they don’t want to in the first place,” his father would tell him.

With money saved, he bought a home in “Whitehaven”, appropriately named before the great white flight that kicked off with his arrival. The sweat of his brow lubricated the the wheels of commerce that were happily abandoned by the “fairer” of races. The city now saw no need to fix roads, keep schools open, or invest in parks and hospitals.

“Just because you get it, don’t mean they’ll let you keep it,” he always told me.

Good enough could never be enough. Tired hands wiped the dust of a sharecropper’s past and future from themselves and reached for something more promising. That pebble that poked and prodded at his heel and became too big for the shoes he had yet to fill. He placed that ever-growing stone down and began pushing it towards a place worth letting it settle.

My grandfather would find himself managing a bakery at the local grocery store. He had climbed the insurmountable hills of financial security, that stone pushed along with him at every step. It stayed with him unchanged until bits were chiseled away and placed in the hands of my mother and her siblings. My grandfather had taken it as far as he could and it was up to those who followed to go farther, do better, and be greater.

They carried the burden forward, born at the edge of the Civil

Rights Movement. Anything could be theirs, so said the powers that be. None of it will come easily, those same powers whispered to themselves.

I was welcomed into a world that by all rights would have been wide open just for me. With my cries of new life, I took on the grand promise. Being brought into this world was step one in a long list of achieving the impossible. There was no time to waste. A pebble had already been chipped away from that stone just for us.

On the day we were born, our mothers took that pebble in one hand and cradled us with the other. They held it for us until we were ready to carry it on our own; Black Greatness prepared to be molded. As we grew, so did that pebble.

We threw that stone into our backpacks and lugged them through the doors of our early education.

A “talented youth” is what they called us. We were going places. Born from a generation that seemingly never had the benefit of living for the day, every decision made was a promise kept or broken. The smallest moments were the safeguarding or detriment of the grand promise. And after we’d colored in the lines once, we were never supposed to stop. The pebble in our own shoes.

I recall the first time my 2^nd grade teacher called my mom to inform her that I was talkative in class. It didn’t matter that all my work was done. My grandmother told me that if I kept showing my ass then she would light it up. My mother told me that all I needed to do was stay quiet. Different tones, both pleading on behalf of my survival. This was my pebble.

“Just because you get it, don’t mean they’ll let you keep it.”

Behind the curve, we were told we had to be twice as good. That was now our mission. We placed that stone, now a boulder, on shaky earth and began rolling it towards a success that rested yards beyond the horizon. I was told that the answer to everything was on the other side of higher education. I was being told where the answer was, but I hadn’t even formed my own questions yet.

My horizon was college. There was no other path laid out for me and my parents went out of their way to show me what happened to those who didn’t go.

I obsessed over my schoolwork. I took the ACT 3 times just to make sure I got the scholarships I needed and I ran cross country to make sure extra curriculars rounded out my resume. My friends would jokingly ask if my parole had been approved anytime they wanted me to come outside.

“Not today,” was commonly my response. There was always work to be done or another yard to cut in the morning with my father who wanted to teach me about hard work and accountability. I was exhausted. Where was everyone else’s boulder? Mine was beginning to get too heavy. But I could not stop pushing it.

It became too much the moment I arrived in my dorm. For the first time, I was the only one there to make sure that the boulder kept moving and you know what… I just didn’t care. I was 17 when I discovered that I might actually hate school. 17 when I discovered that my life had become a fear of what would happen to me and not a love for what I could make happen for myself. I didn’t know what I wanted to be and I wasn’t sure how to be anything other than what my parents wanted for me. At 17 I dropped out and joined the military. I let the boulder go, just for one second, and it crushed me.

I didn’t find my end between the earth and that crushing stone. I found myself. A year would go by before I got the boulder rolling again. I’m 33 now, no longer in the military but working a job that I genuinely love. I managed to keep my promise to my parents and grandparents. Even better, I managed to keep that promise to myself as well.

Our parents did their best and so did their parents. They made a promise to a future that none of them had seen and gave warnings from a past that terrified them.

Dear reader, I think it’s up to us to actualize the future they prayed for. We must make and keep the promise for ourselves.

Like Sisyphus, we have outsmarted the greater forces. We have done so in ways that our ancestors couldn’t have imagined.

We weren’t supposed to make it in the first place. We’ve already won. In the beginning, we felt that we were defined by the struggle, that inherited burden. We are now learning that we are perseverance instead. Beneath weight great enough to flatten, we dig in our heels and continue forward. Like Sisyphus, I imagine us happy.

A burden is an expectation we had no say in. Don’t let the grand purpose be a burden. Choose your path and walk it with a head held high. Taking a step for yourself is the greatest victory there is. We didn’t choose the boulder and it may not even care who pushes it but, dear reader, we can choose our hills and each horizon looks as beautiful as the last.

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