When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps

To break free from the plague of time, you must first go where it cannot. Which is to say, you must go to sleep. In thinking about how to interrupt and subvert time—time as a tool of colonization, time as a weapon, a prison—I can’t help but think of the “modest slave cabin” where Muhammad Ali slept in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, during training camps before boxing matches against Sonny Liston, Ken Norton, and George Foreman, this cabin that allowed Ali to escape the cameras and cornermen and the circus barking that was sometimes the spectacle of his life. A four-poster bed huddles in a corner of the room just to the left of the door, an old wooden trunk at its foot. A handmade quilt lays on the bed. Above the bed, a photo of Ali, whom Norman Mailer calls “The Prince of Heaven,” lying down on another version of a four-poster bed in the same room, in the same cabin. The bed in the photo is less stately, and with Ali’s body laid across it, it looks positively miniature, a child’s bed. Not a bed for the Prince of Heaven—if the Prince of Heaven truly ever needed to sleep.

And what would be the dreams of a prince of heaven—a prince who spends his nights in what Mailer called a “modest slave cabin”? What riots and riotous longing would cross the sleeping brow of the Prince of Heaven, of Ali? I’m interested in thinking about Muhammad Ali sleeping, not moving but dreaming, because we remember and think of him as both the butterfly and the bee, someone—a thing—always in flight, in motion, in combat or preparing for it. He was to appear as combustible, as natural as a piston stroking up and down in its cylinder. Ali, the Prince of Heaven, stung, floated, deflected, and dodged even when standing before a roomful of microphones, tape recorders, and anxious and awed reporters awaiting some koan, poem, proverb, or treatise about Vietnam or the Vietcong, Islam, his mood, the gastrointestinal goings-on of his belly, Black power, or the gorilla-like features of an upcoming opponent. Parry, stick, move, feint, dip, slip. Ali, the perpetual motion machine. Ali, the honey-tongued chatterbox. Ali, the child of Scheherazade and Sengbe Pieh. Ali, casting off the shackles, breaking down the walls of the dungeon, letting his people go. Even now, I have to stop myself, stop myself from forcing Ali into some sort of motion, submitting his body to labor in the fashion that we expect him to labor—pugilist in the arena, in the streets, on the slick cover of a magazine.

But Ali in repose, and not in the repose of a casket. Ali away from the heavy bags and the sweat of running along the side of the road as some black-and-white-spotted cow chews through a field of wildflowers. Ali stretched beneath the handmade quilt and green sheets or white sheets or brown sheets of that four-poster bed. Ali’s head against a pillow, his afro haloing his brown face, his eyes closed, his mouth still. Here is how I will interrupt the time of the arena, time as a weapon used against the world’s subdued—by placing a sleeping Muhammad Ali in front of you, not as a spectacle but as a break, a pause, as another sense of time, as another sense of power, protest.

For me, one of the most subversive images in art is a Black man resting—not dead but resting—his body not compelled to work for anyone’s gaze. His body ungovernable, or that which governs it hidden and opaque. Stillness, silence, is not the realm given to Black men and surely not the realm of Ali. The most iconic images of Ali are of him in the coil and violence of motion: Ali crouched on the bottom of a pool, his hands positioned as if about to jab; or standing over Sonny Liston, who lays on the canvas beneath him, Ali’s right arm flexed at the elbow, the striation of muscles pressing through his skin, his mouth open and yelling something at the downed Liston whose arms on the canvas are in the position of surrender and who can do nothing but look up at the Prince of Heaven. Ali as the completion of rage and temerity, the libido of America. Ali, in motion as heaven. This is the heaven I want to leave behind—the heaven that requires not just a tired body but a depleted and debilitated body, someone else’s pummeled flesh beneath it or stretched out on a canvas mat; a body that earns its place behind the pearly gates and in the mansions and upper rooms of heaven because it has wearied itself to victory, to death—transacted itself into oblivion. The sleeping Ali defies the need for this oblivion, for the legible heaven of exhaustion.

When I think of a sleeping Ali, I also think of other images of iconic Black men in domestic spaces, and the way that that domesticity, in my eyes, acts as a protestation of capitalistic time, a slipping of the yoke of extractive labor. Their bodies sitting in a wooden chair at a kitchen table or tending to a garden or a flock of beloved pigeons on a roof removes them, even if only momentarily, from laboring on behalf of accumulation, consumption, and the eager eye or ear; thus, placing them outside of time. Their bodies in domesticity, in the banality of the four walls of a house, on a shopping trip, or on the roof offers a countermelody, a counternarrative, to the public nature and narrative of Black men as denizens of the street, the club, the arena. John Coltrane, for instance, giving an interview to a journalist while on a trip to a supermarket. I love this moment, Coltrane pulling the young interviewer, Frank Kofsky, along with him on his shopping duties, thus imparting a slick and subtle lesson to him. The music is, and is of the domestic. It’s as though Coltrane is saying, If you really want to understand the sound, if you want to understand the feeling, you have to understand that I have to go pick up these groceries for the kids. In other words, I have to attend to the mundane, to that which seems outside of the grand art of jazz composition and improvisation. Or, more so, the grand is in the mundane, in working with and through it. In other words, the train requires coal and someone to shovel it.

After Coltrane admits to Kofksy that he doesn’t like to go out much, they visit as many stores as possible on one long shopping trip. Back at Coltrane’s house, you can hear children playing, the throes of domestic life all around Coltrane. In a longer cut of the interview that I can’t find anymore, I remember hearing someone washing dishes. From the halting way Coltrane answers Kofsky’s questions, I always assumed it was him doing the washing; or at least I hoped it was, and I’d like to imagine such here. Coltrane having to stop cleaning a plate to better answer a question.

The clinking of the dishes going into the dishrack, glass grazing glass, offers us a complement to Coltrane’s composed melodies on Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, or even Interstellar Space. The sounds of domesticity expand our understanding of his sound, his music, his sense of time, his touch. How might the children laughing in the background, the plates sliding across one another, the water hitting the basin of the sink, offer or propose another sense of a radical sound, a radical imagination, a defiance of time? In hearing the children in the background, I wonder if Coltrane ever played what he heard in his house, played the children running in the yard, played their laughter, the seesaw and sometimes teasing rhythms of their banter. Did he play their cries, their wailings, when they fell?

We know that Coltrane often played language, played his prayers. For instance, in “Psalm,” the fourth movement of A Love Supreme, through his tenor horn Coltrane plays the devotional poem that acts as the liner notes that accompany the album. In “Alabama,” a song that Coltrane wrote in response to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church by the Ku Klux Klan on the morning of September 15, 1963, you can hear Coltrane playing the bombing and its aftermath. It’s as if the breath passing through his horn and the wail that comes out play the fire licking at the walls of the church, erect the burned-out tabernacle via sound. This elegiac wailing is especially palpable and felt in the live version of “Alabama” that Coltrane, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison recorded at Birdland. In Coltrane’s horn, you hear the mourners processing into the church; you hear the eulogy and the creak of the pews as the mourners shift in their grief. The hung head of Coltrane becomes the hung head of the minister in the pulpit, the hung head of the mourners passing in front of the caskets of the dead girls.

How might listening to the domestic life that rang out in the yard and kitchen below Coltrane’s practice room have shaped his sense of sound, particularly when composing A Love Supreme, an album he wrote in the month after the birth of a child? Might some of the reaching for a supreme love have come not only out of a devotion to a supreme creator but also out of a devotion to his children? Might this be another understanding of Creator and creativity—that of the domestic, that of the kitchen, the garden?

In thinking about a garden, another image or set of images floats to me—that of the rapper DMX taking care of a greenhouse of orchids on the comedic television show Fresh Off the Boat. Less known for taking care of flora, DMX is more known for barking and growling on vinyl, riding motorcycles with his crew, Ruff Ryders, raising pit bulls, addiction, debt, and recording club bangers that declare, “Y’all gon’ make me act a fool up in here, up in here” and “Y’all gon’ make me lose my cool up in here, up in here.” Gentleness is not his name. Dark Man X, born Earl Simmons, courted darkness, though he also courted vulnerability. In an interview on the television show The Shop, Jay-Z recounts the wild fluctuations of a DMX arena performance. Club bangers and anthems would morph into DMX praying on stage and possibly crying. In fact, if you search YouTube, you can find such footage: DMX, sweaty, shirtless, gold chain bouncing against his chest, a microphone clutched in his hand, calling out to “Father God!” in his signature staccato cadence that sounds as if he were rushing to get every syllable out at once before slamming on the breaks, the “God” punctuated as though “Father God” had appeared suddenly in front of him and DMX was standing in awe of the Creator. But it’s not the DMX of the arena that I’m most interested in, but the DMX in the garden, DMX taking care of orchids. Here DMX disrupts the time of the arena, even if momentarily, even if the desire of the television show is humorously or sarcastically to pull on our known associations of DMX—Ruff Ryder, hood, dark, troubled—and cast those in comic relief against the nurturing character of “DMX” discussing the needs of flowers. Even if the desire of the show was to create a caricature built upon dissidence—look how funny it is that DMX is talking about gardening—the derision, the joke, loses its sting because Earl Simmons, “DMX,” the actor, delivers the lines not as a caricature but as a person with an interiority, as someone who loves, someone who’s come by the wisdom of nurturing relationships through life experience and reflection. Reflection comes about in moments of repose, moments of stillness, silence, in the dry hours, outside of the arena, outside of the performance of Ruff-Ryder-ness, in the space of one’s mind when the conversation is lit only by the voices in one’s head. Intimacy. Reflection is the intimacy one builds with oneself or with one’s many selves.

DMX in the space of the greenhouse and garden defamiliarizes the familiarity of his public persona. The image of him spritzing orchids with a copper mister—the water imperceptible—demonstrates his sudden and excessive vulnerability, his interiority. The lightness of the mist touching the leaves and heads of the flowers draws us toward DMX, draws us toward his touch, his hands, his eyes, and the vulnerability behind them. In the hands of DMX, the copper mister gathers and reifies what we cannot see, what has been ignored—his thoughtfulness, his silence, the nimbleness of his fingers, the delicate maneuvering of his body among the soft flesh of petals and stems. We are drawn to the intricacies, the looked-over, finer details of DMX, rather than the larger swirl of him. It’s like that moment in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved when we learn that Paul D has stuffed his love, his hurt, his desire, into a little tin box inside of his chest and kept it closed, rusted shut, and away from even himself because of the atrocities of being enslaved, sold, whipped, cudgeled, and nearly drowned. Only after slavery did he allow himself to open this metaphoric tin box, to touch its contents, to feel what he would not let himself feel before. In the greenhouse, we pay attention to what we have not paid attention to before—DMX beyond the black ribbed T-shirt and Timberlands and braggadocio and stereotypical, well-circulated, and commodified forms of masculinity. The copper mister acts as synecdoche of DMX’s sense of care, announcing how he might bring beauty into the world: with a careful spritz, a nourishing touch. This touch, small and spectacular, but not a spectacle. No longer mired and fixed in the realm of the public, DMX, the figure, eludes us for a moment. Or, asks us to remove him from circulating only as an outsized persona of masculinity.

All my life, I have archived these sorts of images and moments of Black men touching and holding the largesse and largeness of their lives in the smallness of their hands. In Chicago, I’ve watched Black men on city buses and in the rain on a park bench hold the bulb of a child’s head in their palm. In Mount Holly, New Jersey, I watched a man in a dark blue barber cape stand on a cement step and tweeze a Newport from a crumbling soft pack with the tips of his fingernails, place the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and eye the slow crawl of evening traffic lurching by him before lighting it, taking delight in the traffic and the first draw of smoke working its way into his body, slowing down time.

An image that has captivated me since I first saw it in the late aughts is that of Mike Tyson caring for pigeons on a rooftop in Brooklyn. In the video clip, Tyson raves, almost to the point of ecstasy, about his lifelong love of these frail birds. There on the roof, Tyson holds, kisses, fondles, and coos into the necks and breasts of a handful of birds, the whole time repeating to us and to himself that they are beautiful, beautiful—their wings, the patterns across them, their rolling and long-distance flights. He is all joy, untempered and unabashed. It shocked me, drew me closer—this nurturing and intimacy from “the Baddest Man on the Planet.” This was the Tyson who was convicted and sent to prison for rape in 1992. The Tyson who seemed to move in the ring with the unpredictability of a tornado. Enraged and without reason. At one moment, he pounds his opponent’s ribs with hooks, jabs, and in the next, digs his signature upper cut into his chin and chest. Shortly after this barrage, his opponent’s body falls to the canvas in one long heap. And Tyson moves away from his prostrate adversary in quiet anarchy, with all that violence shut up in his bones, his eyes still flickering with ruin. My mother forbade me from seeing myself in this Tyson, which was and was not the Tyson on the roof delicately holding a frail bird in his hands. Let me explain.

In 1997, Tyson did the unthinkable. During the third round of a boxing match with Holyfield, Tyson spat out his mouthguard and bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear. Shocked and in pain, Holyfield leapt about the ring grabbing at his bloody ear. Tyson stood there, gazing at him with blood trickling down the side of his mouth. Though I didn’t witness the bite, I heard about it the next morning from my mother who, despite her Christian demeanor and turn-the-other-cheek ethos, loved boxing. And Tyson, who had become a young phenom and champion on the level of Ali, was the new prince. Not a prince of heaven; but, nevertheless, a prince. His ability to knock out most opponents within the first three rounds rocketed him to the level of legend. Gossip, watercooler punditry, and all sorts of talk circulated the week before and after a Mike Tyson fight. And the kitchen table in our house and the vestibule and aisles between the folding chairs at church were no exception. Everybody was talking about Tyson, and after he tore off a piece of Holyfield’s ear, even more so.

The morning after the fight, my mother told me what had happened. I rushed to the television, quickly channel surfing to find a clip of the incident. I saw the headbutting from Holyfield, Tyson complaining about it; then, when the headbutting continued, the bite. My mother asked me what I thought. I remember saying I thought Tyson was right to bite him. I would have done the same. My mother shook her “no, no, no” over and over again.

“You shouldn’t say stuff like that, Roger. Tyson is no one to look up to,” my mother said. “Not for that.”

Watching Tyson exact his revenge there in the ring, I felt a surge of recognition—finally, finally, someone doing something about the unfairness of the world, tearing at it, ripping it apart. I was always supposed to take the headbutting of the world and not react. To turn the other cheek; always, always, turn and receive the next blow, accept the insulting looks, gestures, comments. At grocery store and mall entrances, I was not to yell at the white women that I wasn’t trying to steal their funky-ass purses or maul their blue-eyed babies. When my AP Physics and Calculus teachers separately stopped scribbling equations on the chalkboard to decry the degradation of education in America because I, a Black boy, was admitted into an Ivy League School—not because of my record or outstanding academic performance but because of quota systems, affirmative action, and minorities receiving an unfair advantage in college admissions—I was not to stand and rage and raise my voice, nor demand an apology, but just sit there and watch them wonder about what America was becoming now that its darker brother and sister could sit in lecture halls named after slave owners and learn of Socrates, the hippocampus, and Horatian odes. Rather than drag them into the basement of feeling where I might bludgeon them with the school desk underneath me, I sat in the morning and afternoon light of their racism and pious, ignominious patriotism. I took it.

So when the man who had bitten off a portion of Evander Holyfield’s ear all those years ago clutched a pigeon between his hands and kissed its head, I leaned in and listened, because it was the first time that I saw Tyson not coiled in anger or violence. His hands, not hidden inside of blood-red boxing gloves, instead holding the quivering body of a bird. And the bird appeared as if it had no knowledge of what his hands, in and outside the arena, had wrought.

How long had Tyson held birds? How had he come to this love, this passion, for keeping pigeons? I started typing two terms into a search bar in a Google browser that no one would have ever thought to put in proximity to one another: “Mike Tyson” and “pigeons.” In the searching I learned that Tyson’s first fight as a child occurred because an older neighborhood boy, whom Tyson had invited into his home, snatched one of his birds and fled with it. When Tyson ran after him, the boy snapped off the head of the bird and threw it at him. They fought there in the street. Not yet the composed Kid Dynamite, Tyson flailed and threw undisciplined haymakers at the boy’s body and face. Eventually, he bested the boy who had stolen and killed his bird, setting in motion the mythology of his preternatural fighting ability. Tyson’s first fight was in defense of the fragile, in defense of love, not an exhibition of some maniacal desire to maraud or maim. He fought to protect what brought him joy. In all the years of watching Mike Tyson in and out of the ring, marveling at the explosive power of his hands, I’d always assumed he had run toward boxing, run toward it in the way that I had run toward running and poetry—as a thing called up deep from the interior of oneself, as a way of making beauty in a world that refused you beauty or constantly tried to sequester, limit, or narrow what makes you beautiful. But for Tyson, the beauty was in the birds, in their lives and the way they allowed him to live next to them, allowed him to touch their fragility, allowed him to know them intimately and without fetters.

Pigeons were Tyson’s first love. In interview after interview, he admits that he couldn’t imagine his life without them. That there would be no peace, no calm in him if he could not be around birds. Tyson will sometimes put on headphones and sit in his garage and just watch his pigeons move, eat, live. He’ll stay there for hours, not speaking to anyone, and if he does decide to speak, it’s only to the birds. The pugilist in repose. The pugilist in his sanctuary. The pugilist fleeced of the fight or the need to prepare for one.

I imagine Tyson in his garage barefoot, sitting on a high-backed wooden chair, his head tilted slightly, gazing at the pigeons leaping or flying down from their perches. He listens to them coo to one another, noting the change in one bird’s urgent trill. In the garage, Tyson is both studying and in a state of wonder, reflecting rather than reacting.

The birds allow Tyson to enter a state of meditation. In residing with these animals, Tyson touches his own animal, is in solitude, silence—a realm not imagined to be inhabited or wanted by Black men. Tyson’s solitude is not the solitude of escapism or erasure, but a solitude of sitting with the self without the noise, traffic, and bluster of the world. A solitude of being one with others and just that—being, being so deeply inside oneself that there is no outside of oneself; there is no tension between you and the world. While there might be difference, there is no tension. I’m not trying to overly romanticize the man or his ritual, but I’d like to think alongside him, to sit in study with him.

In interview after interview, Tyson’s face glows with joy as he tries to articulate the inarticulable—why the birds bring him peace; why he is attracted to this sort of solitude. Tyson’s love for his pigeons is almost prelingual. It is without language not because he lacks the vocabulary or intelligence, but because the satisfaction is so deep down in the marrow of him that it would almost be like trying to bust open a piece of chalk to find its interior only to realize it’s all interior. And all exterior simultaneously. His joy with the birds is—it only is.

Tyson’s pigeon-sitting reminds me of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion that in order to be one’s best self, one must first be a good animal. Tyson’s garage in Arizona and rooftop in Brooklyn are his Walden, his space for transcendent rumination, a space to shed the arena and listen to the littlest and loudest parts of himself. In the space of the domestic, under the flap and feather of his birds, Tyson becomes his best animal—not an animal of the arena, a spectacle, a gimmick, where his pugilism corroborates the time of market, the time of economy; here he accounts for the length, breadth, and depth of himself. His best animal roams and feels outside the reason and logic of time.

The time of the garage and the pigeons is only measured in the time of the garage and pigeons. This statement might seem tautological, but it is not. In the garage, time no longer becomes the measurement of accumulation, a measurement of efficacy. The time of the pigeons, the time of the garage, has no order or minutes or imposed structure. It is not the three-minute round of the boxing ring or the post-fight interview and media circus. The time of the pigeons, the time of the garage, exists unto itself, does not subject itself to anything other than its own happening, its own making. Tyson steps outside of the time of commerce, outside of the billion-dollar industry of the sports industrial complex, becomes a subversion of it. And makes for us, here and now, for himself, a pause, a break, a rip in time.

When watching Tyson talk of his birds or lovingly clutch them between his hands, you are watching a man deep in the throes of love and devotion. Not a man who’s ravenous or enraged. But a man who’s humbled by his proximity to beauty.

Maybe, in that “modest slave cabin,” the sleeping Muhammad Ali dreamt of this: a man on a roof who fought and broke himself and the world and was now surrounded by pigeons. And in being surrounded by the pigeons that man learned something of love. Or maybe Ali watches a man in a bedroom listening to his children, to them teasing each other, to them wailing, the quietness of his house when they go to bed; then, that same man picks up his horn and plays his house, plays the music of silence, of solitude, of being one with others. Maybe, Ali dreams of a Black man lying in a hammock or on a hillock, buried deep in the grass, his finger tracing the edge of a blade of grass. The man in the hammock or on the hill doing nothing else but tracing the afternoon, its heat, its buzzing mind. Maybe, he dreams of orchids. Maybe, he dreams of water and the water speaking to him of the orchids’ needs and his own. Maybe, the Prince of Heaven dreams of a man sitting on the floor of a kitchen, talking to his child while chicken fries in a cast-iron skillet on the stove. Maybe the Prince of Heaven dreams of walking out into a field and watching the sun turn down in the sky until he’s in nothing but blue. Maybe the Prince of Heaven does not dream at all. Maybe, he sleeps.