How to Live Free in a Dangerous World

On Firsts

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Let's begin at the beginning.

The weather is winter. The time, 1981. The only place in the world to be, Minneapolis. First Avenue & 7th. A music venue. First row. The artist is local-years from now, everybody who wants to be anybody will lie and say they had tickets, but you do. Three. Half-smiling on the dashboard of a Chrysler station wagon. One hundred miles south, in a blizzard, back tires sunk in eight feet of snow.

Most of what follows is meant to be true and what's not, probably even more so. Outside the car, the muffled buzz of "Soft and Wet" rocks the wood-paneled LeBaron, the bass replaced by the car engine, exhaust coughing holes through chunks of ice. Two men huff and slip in matching pairs of wing tips while their shovels scratch out a hard timpani on the gravel. Polished, ruined. Inside, the car is dark and hot, the windows blind with fog. The woman in the back seat opens her coat as pearls of sweat unzip down her chest. She scoots to the console, turns the defroster on high, and switches the cassette in the tape deck. Dirty Mind. The windows start to clear. She wipes a spot clean on the windshield with the back of her dress sleeve, gold lamé, and its streaks make the streetlamp under snowflakes look like a strobe light. The vents scream loud and crowded over the song on cassette and she lies back on the crushed velvet interior, tapping her pregnant belly. Everyone will say that they made it, but you were actually there.

My parents. I'm there too. Barely alive, just a thrum under the heartbeat of the woman who knows all the words to "When You Were Mine" in the front row. Prince was first and I was second. This became my origin story. Of the two men we came with, it took me a while to know who was actually first, my father, the three of them so thick as thieves by the time I was born it was more conceivable that I was the child of all three of them than one or the other. This was their gift to me. A black and brilliant world. A world full of music that knows the cold. A promiscuity that understands destruction. A few years later, one of the men left us all behind to become an astronaut, the first Black man to walk in space. And so began my family.

In the beginning was darkness and Prince was music. Everything I remember about the womb carries the sound of arpeggiators. When I came out, it took me longer than most to understand I do things differently. I wasn't built for anything but. I wanted to be Prince-like. And so I was. A star floating above the stage like a blade of tinsel. An actual star. Fiery, and patient, hurtling through the sky. By the time "When Doves Cry" became a hit single, I was two years old, and the story'd been threaded through so much of my youth that I remembered it like it was my own memory. And hopped around on unsteady legs singing Maybe I'm just like . . . in a ruffled dress like I understood those words. To be earthly is still alien to me. That I should be so terribly lucky.

At the close of a second encore, there I was: hugged by my mother, between my fathers, God and otherwise. I listened to the crowd's rumbling applause of We love you, we love you, unaware they adored anyone but me. If I had to choose, I couldn't have picked a happier beginning. My opening act taught me something. The road ahead is dangerous. You never know what's in front of you. But that shouldn't stop you from keeping the beat funky and showing up well-dressed. And just when you think you can take no more, life brings you, at least, one beautiful encore. What's come first is foreshadowing. How we begin is a metaphor.

I remember the first time I told a story. I still had baby teeth. But the memory plays like a song on muffled wood-paneled speakers-I can't make out the words but I still pick up the melody. Their laughter rippling on my heart like a drop of water. We love you, we love you. When there are so many wonders in the world, how do you recover?

I try not to.

Not every new thing's a beginning. I don't remember a single first day of school but I remember nearly all of third grade, where I learned to play chess and memorized an old Abbott and Costello routine, "Who's on first, what's on second," and "I-don't-give-a-damn" past third. Some firsts are so deeply imprinted, they're eternal. The skit's wisdom is as alive to me now as it was back then. First isn't about "who." It's what came next. Where we're headed after is anybody's guess. But since we're counting what got us here, we might as well begin at the beginning . . .

My first isn't the only start for which Prince is responsible. I think about Lizzo, first of her name, whose music Prince cosigned soon after the rising star arrived in Minneapolis. Her first big break? His song "Boytrouble." The feature validated her, made her, moved her. That's why firsts thrill me so much. It's where we lock legacies with each other. Being first isn't just about who you are, it's about what we become together. First. Who we become to one another. Second. All that's left is the choice to love. I don't give a damn who you are, we are the people. Electric, glittering, and about to burn out.

We need each other. That's the first survival rule of traveling. And we have a long way to go before we stop surviving and actually recover from surviving. But we can do that. We feed each other. Nowadays, I'm never homesick for the journeys I've taken, I'm hungry for the stories I know that bring everyone along; this firms us up for the long journey. There's no finish line. Just living. In concert, all of us rubbing bodies, whether we want to dance or not. We move, so we might as well be bumping the same decolonize mixtape. First thing to know: Minneapolis is a city that knows what good music sounds like. When traveling, you need those.

Minneapolis is Minnesota's only city. Calling St. Paul a "twin" is giving the town the same compliment you'd give a pretty girl with a smoke-show mom, just to be polite. Because it doesn't matter who's first but it does pay to be original. It's hard to be original. To be the first to believe in the beat in your mind and ask, Will anyone else love my music? It's imagining and seeing beyond. Will anyone else love me? You know it won't last-like sex, like snow-but we all love a good beginning. You know that song by Foreigner, "Feels Like the First Time"? I don't. No matter how many times I play the rest I can only remember the chorus. Because that's all we need, the feeling so wet and ephemeral.

Let's cut to the scene where the thrall in the concert hall matches the square drumming nails of a young Bermudian working at an airport booth. The year is 2008. The weather is never winter. The musician is Yesha. Nearly-out and about, and "making far too much money for a twenty-one-year-old" at her day shifts in immigration. We meet for the first time, after the pandemic, and our stories intertwine like we've known each other forever. Here I am, in Bermuda meeting a Black woman who knows what snow is like. Knows how the world started. Our meeting breaks some new dimension. This brings me nostalgia; I get started all over again.

"Why did you move to Minnesota?" I ask her as I've asked my parents, imagining Minneapolis' cold chill on her skin while, in St. George's, our cold drinks sweat profusely. Her first answer is simple: she was supposed to attend music college. Her second answer is profound: revolution.

"Change," she says. While my parents dreamed of becoming heroes, so did she. The art, the artist, a commonality. And more. Lizzo arrived in 2011, after the passing of her father, and Yesha, after losing her mother-January 1, 2010. Yesha's band, the Mad Way Out, made way for Lizzo's, so to speak. The group was composed of Yesha, her best friend Madeline, and Mad's boyfriend Tao ("the Way"). Lizzo's first Minneapolis band was also a trio: the Chalice-Lizzo fronting a band, alongside DJ Sophia Eris and singer Claire de Lune. It was fate that all their destinies overlapped. It was inevitable Yesha and Liz's "firsts" would be mistaken for each other's.

"I love your music," people would say. Yesha got mistaken for Lizzo around town, never sure if the compliment was paid in reverse, but sure it was a compliment meant to be paid forward. They weren't at odds, they were living the same dream. That's the only way we make it out some truly terrible shit, is by making the place we live beautiful. Making something out of it. Maybe music, if that's how you're talented.

"We were on a couple bills together," Yesha says. "Liz and I were both curvy and animated. The actual content of our music was very different." Two big-boned Black women who could spit, write, and sing, clearing the roof off concert halls covered in twelve feet of snow. Raising the roof into darkness. Because they'd survived the worst and weren't afraid of what happened if their music tore the hood off First Avenue. They knew they were loved into being alive. Whatever came first for them, they saw this.

"Minnesota is a place for beginnings," Yesha says, "a place where a tiny seed can sprout into a rock star." In 2013, both Yesha and Lizzo debuted new two-woman bands at South by Southwest. Sophia and Liz, now a duo. Mad and Yesh going by DONNA. By that time, Yesha described her relationship with Lizzo as "colleagues working in the same building on different floors." Lizzo might have forgotten Yesha's name but always cheered her on when they saw each other. "D-O-N-N-A all caps, period!" Lizzo greeted the girls as they passed backstage. Always that way, a nod to the Minneapolis music dynasty. In a few more years, Lizzo would be a household name. But it was DONNA she dapped in the audience that day-first row, cheering her on-bumping fists with a "Hey, sis, what's up?"

That's why firsts are important. You don't have to be there to benefit from their beauty. You already are. Hello there. At some point, we have all been radicals in the wild regard of pulling ourselves up from the root, making sure we get enough water. It doesn't matter how you began. You did. And now we're here together. So what will we do but revolt, because that's all there is in front of us-change. Each turn around the Earth: a revolution. Aren't we terribly lucky to be alive? Hasn't it been nothing but heartbreak ever since?

Every time I believe I'm ending, I travel somewhere. Even in my "dirty," messy mind. I used to say taking a trip was just a coping mechanism. I know better now; it's my way of mapping the Earth, so I know there's something to come back to. So that I know we're still here. It's my way of reintroducing myself. Of saying, I am so very happy to meet you. I am so very pleased to meet-you are so welcome, I feel so very welcomed by you. I turn the engine on. I shovel my dreams out the blizzard. And you know, if I stick in there, there will eventually be music. I know that. I believe that you'll play it for me.

That's what I love about "lover" when Prince says it. He means it. Like, when we really live, being and being in love are the same thing. I love you enough to interrogate myself. To do everything I can to get you started.

•


How do you know when you’ve begun? When you have somewhere to come back to. The year is 2015. I take a plane to Minneapolis for the first time in thirty years. I’m in the midst of my first divorce. I roll the loss around my mind until it’s purple and hoary. Candy hard. I meet a bald-headed man in a suit who offers to stow away my suitcase and I think, It’s not baggage we carry but the propensity to start over. He is playing chess.

"You should castle your king," I tell him. The suit is uncertain that "castling" is a good move. And he should be. He's wearing a wedding ring. I was looking for a reason for him to slide over and distract me from my heartbreak. But I don't look up. I'm using my iPhone camera to apply matte lilac lipstick, Nars' "Pussy Control."

"Because when we land, I am going to Prince-party," I tell him. I leave out the article. I'm headed to First Avenue. A Prince tribute. Some of the people I love most in the world are meeting me there. It feels like the first time all over again, like before I was born. The castle is the wrong move. The computer puts him in check. As we exit the airplane, the suit tells me, "Send me a pic when you're out on the First Avenue dance floor." I agree to oblige. One story ends, another finds itself, somehow.

When I arrive at First the sky is raspberry. It's March, just as it was when my parents arrived, but the weather is warm and I take off my coat before hopping out the taxi in my party clothes. I march right up to the door with my coat and my rolling suitcase. I throw down the mélange at coat check, the way I imagine my family did. We are lovers in what we share in common-the daring, the drama, the uncertainty-a humble hunger for this dangerous life. Before the show begins, I ask someone to snap a photo of me, blurry and hot pink. My lips pressed tight, I hear the opening bars to "Kiss," and I kiss, I kiss, I kiss you first.

On Blackness

Harare, Zimbabwe

Farai is drinking Zambezi lager behind the wheel of an evergreen Acura at three o'clock in the morning. I've been in Harare less than a couple of hours. The sky is pitch, anticipating the day as a vision of itself rising up again. Meaning: somewhere over on the glint of the horizon there's the gold-pink seam of a new day breaking upon New Dispensation, a new political regime and the end of Mugabe's thirty-seven-year reign, which began just a few weeks before I arrived in Harare. But tonight, in the sticky bucket seats, with the windows rolled down, our driver is drunk and the four of us are looking for a place that's still open to dance.