… as I see it, in a bigoted society, I’ve either got the respect that the homies give me or I’ve got no respect at all, plus God forgives anyway and Jesus was black like dude that played Nino Brown. Name a better way to make through the cold, cruel world than this; we didn’t write the rules governing our lives, so we have to break them all on principle.
Many of us understand, but won’t admit, that we spent so much of our childhood running scared that by the time we’re supposed to grow up, we don’t even know what “grow up” means. We thought we did. And while we “can’t gunpoint when the life of [an] alter ego began,” we know that splitting in two and hiding behind our stronger selves will always, at least for a moment, shield us in our innocence.
In Dopplegangbanger (Haymarket Books), Cortney Lamar Charleston gives us these alter egos as the echoes of family, as stories told between streets and sheets. From Hoochie Momas to Grand Theft Auto. From violence to shuttered mouths. From words we might not have meant, but needed so badly to say. Because it’s not easy to discover your voice or yourself inside a world that doesn’t love you – or at least doesn’t love you back.
Charleston finds such intimate moments within such a masculine world that doesn’t fit the prescribed narrative. In this collection is beauty and gospel and testimony and Michael Jordan and “pale people [who] can’t imagine … us loving our families”. We are not meant to remain innocent. We are meant to push past our alter ego, find strength in all we’ve learned, and be something “polite people don’t talk about”.