Mr Magpie

On the song of the same name from the album Trapdoor (2021), by Defcee in collaboration with Messiah Musik.

“I just want to go home, I just want to go home, I just want to go home, I just want to go home, I just want to go home…“

Every time I hear Defcee (born Adam Levin)-a Chicago-based rapper, writer, and educator-say these six words twenty-five times in a row, something happens to my face: I start to bear a closer resemblance than I’d like to my namesake, or a dish rag being wrung out to dry. My features huddle inwards, the furrow between my brows deepens, and creases ripple like fault lines around my eyes. If you looked closely, you’d notice they aren’t quite dry. 

“Time Off” is about Levin’s time working as a prison educator, using hip hop as a pedagogical foundation to teach personal expression, poetry, discipline, literacy and verbal skills, and life. It is therefore a song about wage slavery, incarceration, and systemic racism: the three rotten stumps upon which the spectacular economic prosperity attained by the ruling class of this country-and the rampant capitalism which produced it-have rested since America’s founding. People have been making efforts from the beginning to dig them up and burn them down, but once you start pulling at the roots of the poisonous tree you realize that the system runs deeper under the hard-trodden earth on which you stand than you could ever dig with your puny human hands, even if someone loaned you a pick and a shovel, or a backhoe.

Levin attributes the song’s “I just want to go home” outro to the words of one of his students echoing in a recurring nightmare, one which runs for him and his students in different directions along parallel but separate tracks. His students live it in prison’s half-day and (if they’re lucky) escape it in sleep at night; Levin is trapped in it, in a different sense and state, at night, but free (depending on your definition) to wake up, commute to work, clock in and out. He and his students spend their days in the same physical space, but separate realities. All it would take for him to leave is a letter to his boss, but his kids have, as he puts it, “caught the loop”. Even if they get out, there’s every chance that at some point they’ll end up back inside.

I’m reminded of a scene from Charles Burnett’s film Killer of Sheep (1977) in which Stan, the central character-a slaughterman, husband and father in 1970s Watts-talks to a friend about his troubles:
“…working myself into my own hell. Close my eyes, can’t get no sleep at night. No peace of mind.”
“Why don’t you kill yourself? You’d be a lot happier…”
The line might be serious, or it might be a quip-perhaps it’s both-but Stan demurs in a voice devoid of humor: he won’t; he has to keep his kids fed and alive.

“Time Off” makes tears start to my eyes almost every time I listen, but they never do start to fall. I don’t cry often, but neither do I try to stop myself when it happens, not anymore. It must be a reflex, then, rather than a conscious act of suppression, that clamps my tear ducts shut: like one of those valve-pumps that turns a house’s water off when it detects a leak to prevent a full-on flood. Why, then, when I saw the film Sing Sing (2023), which is also about a prison art program (an inmate-run theater group in the New York prison of the same name), did I leave teardrops in my wake all along the dingy theater carpets and the sleet-soaked sidewalk to the garage at the end of the street? 

In theory, it might have something to do with the nature of film: the sonic, visual, and dramatic scale of it, the enormous force of emotional potential energy that can be built over one hundred and five minutes as opposed to a song’s three. I don’t think so, though, because Killer of Sheep has yet, after several viewings, to make me shed a tear. What it is, I think, is that Sing Sing has an ending. Every film and every song-hell, literally everything-ends, of course, but not everything has an ending. Sing Sing‘s comes when Divine G, the central character and leader of the prison troupe who has been wrongly incarcerated for murder and has been fighting for parole in the face of unremitting denial for years, is finally released. Divine Eye, a reluctant-turned-star member of the troupe with whom G had formed a special bond, and whose earlier parole he had helped secure, meets him at the gate to usher him back home like some inverse Charon. The film does not ignore the reality that the rebuilding of G’s life will be grueling and uncertain work, but it does bask in the possibility of renewal and hope. As they begin to joke with each other and finally laugh, feeling the momentousness of freedom, the credits roll, along with a montage crediting the majority of the actors-almost all formerly incarcerated members of the real-life troupe-‘as himself.’ And then the lights came on and we walked to the car and drove home.

Killer of Sheep does not have an ending, as such; it just ends, with footage of Stan doing his job in the abattoir, beating sheep with a towel to keep them moving along into the chute that leads them to where they will be stunned and killed. Slaughterhouse footage is nothing new at this point in the film, and so what we are left with is the steel-trap stasis of Stan’s life. There is no catharsis. Dinah Washington’s “Unforgettable” soundtracks this scene and the credits, singing “Forevermore I intend to stay.” Danielle Amir Jackson, writing for Criterion, interprets this as a “life-loving affirmation [underscoring] how Killer of Sheep is about a single ordinary man who, for his family, is the whole world.”¹ This is true; Stan is a good man and a devoted father, and the film looks lovingly on children as a source of joy and hope. What is also true is that, much like in “Time Off”, there is a much darker reality running in parallel, shadowing the family story.

We cry at endings not necessarily because they are sad, but because they are safe. Whatever preceded them may have been painful, perhaps deeply so, but it can no longer hurt us, not in the same way. It has been transmuted into catharsis, burned up and dissipated like incense. True endings are very rare in life. Mostly we live day in and day out, each one interchangeable with the next. This mode of existence, near-necessary for survival under capitalism, is awfully capable of reducing a life to little more than a pile of possessions, a handful of dust. The residue of days accumulates inexorably, clogging the valves of emotional release (how fitting to refer to it as ‘the grind’). In his treatise on the art of cinema, Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky posited that “what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had.” He could just as well have said that we go to the cinema for time off – from being ourselves, from feeling our self and body being ground down, or from feeling nothing at all: to experience closure of a kind life offers only seldom to most and, to some, never. 

There is such a thing as ‘reflex’ tears, which the body uses as a defense mechanism against harm and irritation. Science distinguishes these from ’emotional’ tears triggered by joy, sadness, or fear. There is no point in producing the latter in the face of something that shows no sign of ending. Evolution having made us practical creatures, physiologically if not psychologically, our body knows that we cannot afford such expenditures of strength. Crying in the face of unchanging conditions is not only pointless but actively harmful, leaving you only more tired and drained and still facing the next day’s work. (The Catch-22 of it being that there is, of course, also a mental and physical toll to holding it in.) So instead we cry reflex tears: enough to blink the grit out, but not so much that we cannot keep moving, or trying to, one day at a time, towards a future in which maybe things will be changed. Even though we know that in all likelihood they will stay the same.

Killer of Sheep‘s most heartbreaking scene depicts Stan and his wife slow dancing to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”. One gets the impression that the song means a great deal to them, as if perhaps they had danced to it at their wedding. It is a desperate dance, at least for Stan’s wife: she clings to him, caresses his bare back, gazes at his face and then rests her head on his shoulder when he doesn’t gaze back, nuzzles into his neck. All this, while he stares into middle distance and holds himself like a manikin, trying not to hold her at all. He exerts none of his body’s considerable, though perhaps in this moment drained, strength: his arms are where they should be at her waist but his wrists hang crooked and limp like broken hens’ necks; his fingertips do not so much as graze her dress. After the song ends they dance for a short while longer, and then Stan pushes her away, gently but firmly, and leaves. Her face crumples and she falls into the window sill, seems almost about to fly into a paroxysm of grief, then chokes back a sob and sits to collect herself. The big release never comes. The scene lasts three minutes but feels twice as long. 

Throughout the course of the film, Stan never cries. None of the adults really do. Tellingly, the opening scene depicts a boy of perhaps eleven or twelve being scolded by his father for not coming to his brother’s aid in a fight. After his father is finished, his mother steps up to him, smiling, and slaps him hard across the face. His face fills the screen, his mouth screwed and defiant, but his eyes are still somehow those of a child: full of sadness, and just barely wet with the kind of tears that come unbidden when you’ve been slapped. Reflex tears. Paul Robeson’s recording of “My Curly Headed Baby” plays-“so lull-a-lull-a-lull-a-lull-a-bye babe / Do you want the stars to play with? / Or the moon to run away with?”-fading out on the words “They’ll come if you don’t cry.”

No doubt the tears that come to me when “Time Off”‘s outro plays are reflex. They usually start at the third “I just want to go home”, and by the final one they’re gone. The effect of so many repetitions was moving, at first, but on repeat listens so bludgeoning that I became numb to it. Form mirrors meaning. Fittingly, the song’s instrumental (by Baltimore-based producer Messiah Muzik) is, aside from the occasional filter sweep, just a loop. Slightly wistful, neither melancholic nor saccharine; a scattered piano figure underlined with bass and accented by an electric piano, driven by a crisp snare and shaker. The song ends in that simplest of ways-with a fade-out-and loops nearly seamlessly.

For a couple of summers I worked as a counselor and coordinator at a summer camp in Baltimore. The camp split its time between the mostly white, affluent neighborhood where my parents live, and several other, mostly black and poor, neighborhoods. The business model hinged on the parents in the nice neighborhood paying full price so that, with the aid of grant funding, the kids in the other neighborhoods could go for free. 

It was a full time job, in theory, but with the commute and the amount of work that crept in outside the 7:30-3:30 lines, it wasn’t really. I did some of everything: unpacking, sorting, and packing supplies, curriculum development and delivery, some actual teaching, tracking health forms, parental concerns, and medication management, coordinating free lunch services, making sure we didn’t fail the fire inspection, managing other counselors, etc. That, and caring for many young children for seven hours per day. 

It was exhausting. It was also gratifying: I got on well with my kids and was fairly universally liked (if not always heeded on disciplinary matters, at which I have always been ineffective – I’m too soft), I got on well with my coworkers, and I got on well enough with the mix of parents, foster parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends and legal guardians. I clocked in and clocked out, totted up hours for my little check, and quietly savored the satisfaction of being a contributing member of society. Pretty soon, though, I started to share the same sentiment as Defcee: “I just got to work and already wanna go home.” After my second summer came to an end I quit.

I didn’t quit because I’m a quitter – if anything, I tend to stick with things too long and take masochistic pride in doing so. I didn’t quit because I didn’t like the kids – far from it. I didn’t quit because I couldn’t work hard – I’m a workaholic. I didn’t quit because I had a better alternative waiting – I didn’t. I didn’t quit because the pay wasn’t enough – I was living at home rent free. I was exhausted, hardly had time to make art or the mental space to think, but I didn’t quit because of any of that, either. I quit because I was angry.

I was angry at the differences between the neighborhoods I worked in; I already knew but the kids made me see it again through their eyes. A difference of a couple of miles.

I was angry that one of the community centers we worked in was shot up a week before the program started.

I was angry that earlier that summer a teenager had gotten shot just up the street while sitting idly behind the wheel of his car. 

I was angry that I had to pause out on the basketball court, hearing shots a little ways off, and make a judgement call about whether to bring the kids inside or not. 

I was angry that we had to have a pair of ear protectors handy at all times because one of our kids had been hit by a stray bullet when he was four and so was terrified of loud noises. 

I was angry that when the local cops threw a 4th of July party they trashed the playground swings and left firecracker debris all over said basketball court and beer bottles overflowing in the trash cans. 

I was angry that the city had to be hounded to cut the grass at the park where we took the kids to play sometimes; that if not for the playground equipment it would’ve looked like just another abandoned lot; that it almost looked abandoned even with it.

I was angry that sometimes we had to stay inside all day in a too-small duplex because the air quality was too poor to go outside. 

I was angry that we had to ask parents to donate bottled water and juice.

I was angry about that twice over because I couldn’t help but be reminded of Flint.

I was angry that the computers in the tech center were ancient and probably hadn’t been turned on in ages. 

I was angry that I, a white guy, had to teach myself about Aksum so I could teach Black children about it because they might never hear about it in school. 

I was angry that we almost lost their free lunch access because an overworked administrator forgot to sign some forms. That someone seated at some desk somewhere had the power to let kids they’d never met go hungry just like that.

I was angry that the free lunches were half-inedible and paltry, and that the bits that were edible were so only because they were full of processed sugar.

I was angry that I had to send kids home with extra food for their families who had nothing to eat; the offhand way they asked, like it was nothing.

I was angry that all of these kids, even the hungry ones, had phones which they were addicted to and which we had to take away; that they were on TikTok at seven, eight years old. 

I was angry that I had to clean a seven year-old child’s shit off the floor in the one bathroom we all had to share because no one had bothered to bathroom train him at home. 

I was angry that the other kids found out and picked on him for it; he and they both knew there was something wrong at home, but it’s hard for children have compassion for someone hurt by something no one can see, or name, or explain.

I was angry that I had to physically separate children from each other, and that they were probably fighting half out of boredom, because we had such limited curriculum and space and resources to offer that everything got old fast, and I felt like a hypocrite for telling kids not to fight with each other when I was just as angry.

I was angry that I had to imagine what kind of traumas had filled a six year old child so full of rage that he bit a coworker and tried to punch out the rest of us.

I was angry that we hadn’t had the proper de-escalation training to manage him the right way and so made the situation worse. 

I was angry that we then had to threaten to send him away when we all knew he wasn’t going to end up anywhere better.

I was angry that he was in foster care, that his parents had abandoned him, but then I figured maybe that was for the best; that this was the best our society was willing to offer him. 

I was angry that no one getting hurt or killed on my watch felt like success, that I was stressed to the point of heart palpitations, that I felt I had done the best I could do, and that my best wasn’t worth shit.

Now here I sit, having spent days writing this. I’m taking time off this summer before I finish graduate school, and am using it to make music, write, read, live. I go to the boxing gym; tried to sing Sacred Harp; I walk down to the weird little neighborhood near mine sometimes to record-dig, go to the used bookstore, visit the co-op café where I’m finishing this, have lunch with a former teacher and friend of mine. But mostly I sit in a little windowed study and write, and think.

One of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about is becoming a teacher myself. I’m weighing whether to teach in public or private schools, which is a dilemma I haven’t been able to reconcile either way. If I choose the former I’ll be under-resourced, have classes that are too big and students that are struggling with so much at home and outside that of course school isn’t their priority. I may well end up being so busy just trying to hold things together that I ultimately fail to teach anything at all. I have always struggled to separate my life from work, and I know that some of those kids and what I cannot help them with will haunt me.

If I choose the latter, I know what the private school environment is like-I went to one-and I fear that the smug entitlement of some of the students would tempt me to throttle them with my uniform tie. In theory, given several classes of fifteen to twenty kids, almost all of whom will go to college and make something of their lives, I might be able to shape their minds enough that they will go on to use their privilege for something other than their own enrichment. In practice, I know that most of my classmates have gone on to careers in private finance, white collar law, or business. The more I think about it, the more that hope seems to me to just be the educational equivalent of trickle-down economics.

Oh, and either way there’s a non-zero chance of getting gunned down. 

Right now it feels like an impossible choice between two inadequate options in a system designed to grind down the hearts and minds and lives of our children in order to turn them into good little workers, at best, and beasts of burden at worst. In “Time Off”, Defcee declares that “I’m not trying to save anybody, that’s not the point.” Neither am I; any idealism or big-picture societal optimism that might once have been at home in my head crawled up into the attic and died a long time ago. What worries me is that nothing seems to have moved in to replace it, and I know I’m not the only one to whom this has happened. In its absence, despair has crept in. I could congratulate myself on at least not having checked out, unlike many of the people my age I know-for being hyper-aware and scared and angry at the cruel machinations of this country-but I did clock out, because I could, and on a purely practical level what’s the difference? 

Taking time off is a privilege. Having the time to express despair about these things in the form of writing is a privilege. The old saying that you can’t buy time is a lie. I’ve worked one job or another since I was fifteen, so I’ve saved enough to buy a little bit of my own, but primarily I’m able to take this time off because I was born lucky. I guess someone has to be, and I’m not self-hating or ashamed of that, but I have always been (and still am) troubled by the unanswerable question of ‘why me?’ I’m not an exceptionally good person, am in some ways quite selfish, and yet I have always been keenly sensitive and empathetic. It is in large part a deep sense of obligation and anger fed by this strange mixture that compels me to work seven days a week, with the bit between my teeth, trying to create something-some piece of writing or music-that might justify all that has been invested in me. And yet I know that inevitably, between my failings and faults and the unavoidable wear of forces beyond my control, some of these gifts of time and whatever talents I have will go to waste. I also know that nothing I can make or do will stop what’s coming. To think so would be vanity. Art cannot save the world, and I’m not sure it can redeem it, either.

I think often of an excerpt from an interview with Audre Lorde in which she says that “none of us are going to move the earth one millimeter from its axis; but if we do what we need to be doing, then we will leave something that continues beyond ourselves…” I have to believe that writing this-this word right here-is, at this moment, exactly what I need to be doing. That it is worth something. I’ve never been able to picture myself having a normal job, and still can’t. My mother used to tender a pet notion that I would join Doctors Without Borders, I once thought that I would be a solider (which now repulses me) or a mountain guide; it seems now that I might soon be a teacher of sorts but really I don’t know what, or whom, I will be. I only know that I will write, both because I can’t not, and because art has given me a second life. I feel I owe it to everyone whose work has kept me going to do my part, to not let the fire die.

My work seems to be drawn, whether I like it or not, towards the melancholic and painful and the irretrievable past. While I have my theories, I’m not entirely sure why this is. Perhaps all I am really suited to do in this life is catalogue my own and the world’s brokenness: not to save anything or anyone, but to sweep up the pieces and reassemble them into something utterly useless but beautiful, maybe, alive. An offering, of sorts. Like the Watts Towers, built by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia over thirty-three years, in his time off from work as a mason and manual laborer, out of scrap metal and tile shards and still standing, on that fault-line-furrowed land, seventy years later. To join those who, in writing an essay, making a film, or recording a song, say, over and over again, that “there isn’t such a thing as a lost cause.” As if in the saying we might make it true.

In that spirit, and for whatever it’s worth, I’d like to dedicate this little essay to the little kids in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine-all the world’s children-who just want to go home, to the children in America growing up with a parent in prison who they just want to come home, and to the parents of so many schoolchildren in this country who just wanted their kids to come home.

1. As Jackson notes, “Unforgettable” only appears in the most recent version of the film. Burnett was not, for many years, granted permission to use the song in the film and so Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”, used earlier in the film, was repeated instead. ↩︎