The Weight Of The Gun: An Interview With Trymaine Lee
Trymaine Lee Examines Black America’s Bloody History In Gun Violence & How It Almost Took His Life In New Book
Take a gun, a gun that’s been fired, and stack it on top of another that’s been traded for a slave. Take all the guns; the ones that have been used in war and those that have been used by gangs and add them to the collection of guns that have been attached to Black bodies all of their lives. Add them to a room. Watch as the guns begin piling up over top of each other. Watch as they overflow; try to shut the door, and when it won’t shut, feel all of it buried inside your chest. All the pain, all the devastation; the history of those guns; the weight; all the lives that they’ve altered and carry that until it feels like “…someone had jammed a beach ball inside of me, pumped it to the verge of exploding, and then pumped it some more. I was nauseated, dizzy, and washed in cold sweat.”
The weight of it all came crashing down on Trymaine Lee in 2017, when the MSNBC contributor suffered a heart attack that could’ve left his wife a widow and his daughter without a dad.
“I had the heart attack…and I just stepped away for, like a year and a half, two years. I didn’t put a single word on the page,” Lee told Cassius. “I took that time to get right; physically healthy, mentally and emotionally healthy. And so by the time I got back to it, I felt a sense of peace and calm and steadiness that I really hadn’t had before. Before that, I was in the eye of the storm. You had Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Mike Brown in 2014, and Freddie Gray and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. And the list just kept getting longer and longer. And Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, this long string of public Black death.”
Lee, a former reporter who worked in places like Trenton, Philadelphia and New Orleans, continued: “Coming back to it, I felt that I had to be even more personal and more vulnerable because it was clear that even before we got to that long string of Black death, I’d been a street reporter for a very long time and carrying all the little pieces of every single story that I’ve ever told. And I can literally, to this day, still see some of the faces, still. Still see some of the crime scenes. When you arrive somewhere and you see a young brother your age shot dead, and then to see the pain of that death reflected in his family, his people, and you can’t help but see your own self.”
Once Lee worked through his own pain and trauma, he was able to revisit inside of him where all of the Black death was stored and give at least part of it back to the world. The offering is A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, a memoir that explores America’s bloody history with the Black body. He examines the fraught and violent history of African Americans and firearms, documenting both the devastating toll of gun violence and the immense profits reaped by the legal and illicit gun trades. With stark candor, he guides readers through his own path: from narrowly avoiding becoming a victim of gun violence as a young man, to retracing his ancestors’ journey from the Middle Passage in Ghana, to navigating the difficulties of speaking for his community within a predominantly white and often antagonistic media landscape. And all of it can be traced back to the early days of Europeans stealing Africans and making them slaves.
“A lot of us have been educated to see enslavement as there was just this surplus of black people on the continent. And these Europeans came and just saw a labor force…When in reality, in the early 18th century, as the gun technology is rising, what you see is European powers plying regional African powers with guns to create more war and instability; to create more enslaved people. It’s part of the entire plan,” Lee explained.
“So they had these co-conspirators on the continent, and some of these European powers would only trade guns for humans. And so you think about what got us to North America in the first place was the gun. And so we’re forced out of Mother Africa with the muzzle of a flintlock rifle at our backs, and then we’re welcomed in the hell of the Western world with more white men and more guns and more violence.”
It adds to what Lee calls “psychic residue,” a literal film left on the collective psyche that “we’ve been unable to wash clean.” And that, Lee believes, is what takes a “psychic toll, and a genetic one from the stress that we’ve experienced in violence.”
Violence that didn’t forsake Lee’s own family; Lee’s family, like most Black families in America, was traumatized by “enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the insidious racism of the North,” and gun violence that took the lives of his great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.
Despite the violence, and the guns, and the death, and the bullets, so many bullets that it’s impossible to count and the toll and the tragedy, and even the heart attack that Lee suffered, that in many ways was the impetus for this book, Lee noted that he wouldn’t change a thing.
“Every pebble, stone, or boulder in the river forces a new direction, and you have to go with that, so I wouldn’t change a thing,” Lee said.
Lee, whose new life involves invites to Martha’s Vineyard, explained that sometimes, when he takes a moment to look at how he got here, how all of it made him the man that he’s become, he has moments of clarity; moments when he feels his most free.
“I was sitting on a bench at the Inkwell, and I’m seeing these beautiful black people and their families and their kids. And there was this sense of peace,” Lee said. “And this is why the pain of the loss hurts so badly. Whether it’s from community, whether it’s from the cops, whether it’s from the white supremacists or vigilantes. That pain hurts so bad because of the possibilities of who we could be. That through all this violence, we’ve had our imaginations limited and we haven’t been able to fully imagine a world where we are free and at peace to love and embody the fullness of our humanity. And so that’s why the hurt is so bad.”
