In the future imperfect, which is to say, in that commingling of temporalities wherein the past is brought forth to the future to give rise to the present, Black (Trans) Lives Matter provides a conceptual framework to understand the ongoing struggle in the present by way of a future (aspiration) in which black lives will have mattered to everyone.

—C. Riley Snorton

I’ve had two songs stuck in my head since May 26, when mourners and demonstrators began gathering around the site of George Floyd’s last breath. When this is all over, I’m not certain I’ll be able to think of one without the other, those songs and the feeling of a gathering force. Or, more nearly, I don’t think this—the struggle for black life—will ever be over, but something will take its place in the immediacy. The virus will wax, the governors will make tepid conciliations, attention will turn back to the presidential election, a new song will become the only song I know. But for now, these two songs, written on either side of social and historical divisions, have become for me a single, oscillating anthem.

The first is somewhat unlikely, more a memory than a song. I hadn’t heard Evan Greer’s “I Want Something” in nearly a decade, but watching the old brutality unfold anew in video after video online, there it was, still playing in a younger corner of my mind. In the story I tell myself, I first encountered Greer’s music as a teenager in the Philadelphia suburbs. I have a vivid memory of biking around that town, feeling the wind in my face, playing “I Want Something” over and over. It’s possible that this is an invented scene, given that I can’t find the version of the song I remember anywhere. Nonetheless, I loved that song in the way that disaffected suburban kids love things. Bush had been elected for a second term. The Patriot Act, which expanded the state’s ability to surveil its citizens under the auspices of war, had been renewed. War was endless. I wanted out.

At the time, in the early 2000s, Greer was a founding member of the Riot-Folk Collective, whose album Rise Like Lions I associate with a specifically Bush-era sound, a kind of mostly white anarchist heartfeltness. In truth, I periodize this style of folk-punk as “Bush-era” not because the bands stopped playing afterward but because I stopped listening. In the long interval since then, Greer became the deputy director of an internet freedom nonprofit, released a new album, and came out as trans, a fact that, though a decade belated, came to me as a surprise. Or, well, surprise is not exactly the right word because, although I didn’t yet know it, my attachment to “I Want Something” as a teenager had to do with what feels to me now like its markedly trans sensibility.

“I Want Something” is profoundly, almost painfully earnest. Each verse of the song sketches a portrait of young people who are isolated, burned out, worn down. Each verse, that is, paints an incredibly bleak, dysphoric picture of the here and now. But despite (or because of) all of that bleakness, Greer sings through it with exuberance. Each chorus interrupts these scenes of depression, dissociation, with what can only be called a utopian demand—“I want something / better than this.” And while Greer insists, over and over, that she “doesn’t know exactly what” this something better might be, as Kathi Weeks observes in The Problem with Work, “the utopian demand can be seen as something more than a demand for a specific goal or set of goals. Rather … it is a process of constituting a new subject with the desires for and the power to make further demands.”

When I say that this is a trans sentiment, this exuberant oscillation between insisting on the bleakness of the present and making inchoate demands for “something better,” I don’t mean that it is only trans, or that trans politics should be organized around this style of hopefulness. I ordinarily don’t have much tolerance for it. At the same time, transness, at minimum, is the insistence on the human capacity for once unimaginable change. Certainly, and despite my lucky suburban life, as a black, dysphoric teenager in 2005, I had to cultivate—actively cultivate—a kind of wide-eyed optimism about what the future, and the future of my own body, could entail. I had to believe that feeling, intense feeling, was not only important but also potentially life- and world-changing. That with care and time and resources, my desire for “something better” could materialize. Although we tend to think of earnestness as a kind of naïveté, naïveté is nowhere among its definitions. Instead, earnest is defined as, at once, a form of potency and a portent, as “showing sincere and intense conviction” and “a thing intended or regarded as a sign or promise of what is to come.”

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Still from Mickey Mouse: The Haunted House (1929)

Mom played Hooked on Classics, three albums of disco-beat-backed classical music, for me and my brother Frank when we were young. The albums were ancestors to the modern-day mash-up,  one song morphing into the next. Hooked on Classics 3: Journey through the Classics’s track nine, “Journey through America,” was my favorite, especially when I’d spin it on my Fisher Price turntable at night. Jaunty. The track was composed of twelve songs conflated into one instrumental tune.

“When the Saints Go Marching In Jimmy Crack Corn.”

“When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again Deep in the Heart of Texas.”

The needle skipped despite the dust-free vinyl, and the whole record player, playing at max volume, wobbled on my nightstand. The nearby music box’s blonde ballerina spun herself, and everything, to reckless abandon.

My favorite part of “Journey through America” was “Shortnin’ Bread Star-Spangled Banner.” On cloud-stilled mornings when the distance between the bed and shag carpet seemed as wide as the Chesapeake Bay, Mom broke the silence by calling, “Three lil’ children lyin’ in bed.” And we’d get up.

Sometimes I still hum the song, alone and under my breath, while brushing my teeth or making coffee. I don’t have children. But I do think I carried my nephew, Frankie, before he was born, in my body. At least the idea of him. Anticipation in my stomach. A foot cramp where my toes spread out like they got to be free. Somedays he sat on the slope of my nose. His ultrasound profile looked a little like mine.

Mandy, my sister-in-law, gave birth on November 11, 2016. Frank Prescott Dawson V (yes, Prescott, and yes, the fifth), whom we call Baby Frankie to avoid confusing him with his father, Frank, and his grandfather Frank, and his deceased great- and great-great-grandfathers, Frank and Frank.

Legacy.

About ninety minutes after Baby Frankie’s early arrival, I bounded down the jet bridge onto the next flight to Baltimore. On the plane, to pass the time, I scrolled through photos of our new baby. We had an album’s worth of hours after the caesarean. Everyone wanted to capture it all. When I arrived and saw Baby Frankie in the crib for the first time, I took a pic of Mandy in her bed, druggy. Or maybe just that happy. I prefer that version.

My nephew’s newborn body looked comfy in its Blackness. His skin, still ruddy from birth but quickly browning, absorbed all the hospital room’s florescent light. He clenched both his fists, his eyes wide open, arms in the air like a celebration of his excellence. He looked like Usain Bolt. He looked like T-Pain just told him to put his hands up and stay there.

Everything seemed possible. He could be a doctor like his dad.

He could be anything.

He could be arrested for doing nothing on a West Baltimore street, like Freddie Gray before his death by police.

These are the realities of today’s Black boys. The extremes. Acknowledging the spectrum isn’t morbid, but elegiac—a lamentation not for the deceased but for those separated from the meaning of their bodies almost from birth. Feared as early as five, as if their small frames cage a rage no one can temper.

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