This is the latest episode of Homegoings, a podcast that features fearless conversations about race, and YOU are welcome here. Follow the series here.
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If you’re a regular listener – you know, a “Homegoings Homie” – then you might recognize the name Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr. from our credits at the end of each episode. Saidu edits our show which means he helps to shape this whole thing, deepen our curiosities and challenge our implicit biases. All in all, he works quietly behind the scenes to make this show awesome.
But being behind anything isn’t usual for Saidu. Beyond being our editor, Saidu is also a fellow podcaster, a poet, an actor — basically, Saidu is typically the one in the spotlight. The one in front of the mic. So for this episode, we gave Saidu a break from behind the scenes, and put him front and center in front of a live audience at Vermont Public studios. Host Myra Flynn and Saidu went back and forth asking one another questions about being Black podcasters in a “post-Floyd” era and the differences in Blackness, both in America and in Sierra Leone, where Saidu is from. And they swapped juicy stories about their individual times living in New York City. We’re calling this episode: Ask me anything.
Myra: Is it really anything?
Saidu: Anything. It's anything.
Myra: Does anything mean everything?
Saidu: I mean, you can ask anything, it doesn't guarantee that you're going to get an answer to everything, but you can ask me anything.
Watch the episode as a two-part video series!
Deep listen
How to water a transplant
Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr.
You're 21
You're one of them cocky transplants from a small planet that no one's ever heard of.
You're one of them immigrants who crash landed in some culdesac, somewhere far, far away from home
and you've been called an alien in every other solar system you sought asylum.
You've managed to carve an ID out of Nike SBs and Lupe Fiasco albums.
And you're a boy with a name no one would care to pronounce, much less know.
But you knew it was never gonna be Miami, L A, Connecticut.
Your dreams, your dreams would only be possible up there in new metropolis
and sure there are horror stories of cities like that.
The streets occupied by tweaks and suited zombies,
the apartments, filthy with roommates and rude roaches,
the twisted faces marching towards a future that barely pays rent.
The overwhelming stench of wealth rising up all around you.
And it's all bad gravity up there they say
and no one tells you, no one understands why you would move to this sunk city.
Why you would think it possible that you would shine where so many others have failed.
But knowing you, animated by doubt, propelled by “prove it.”
Maybe it's the African in your blood.
Maybe it's your gut.
But you go
Your voice, a fresh cut, two duffel bags and that smile your mother gave you.
It's all you pack before take off.
You whisper a promise to your reflection on the launch pad.
I'm gonna take that city
Having no clue what was waiting for you on the other side
And you fly across galaxies for years to get here
And you finally spot new metropolis on the black horizon,
Stiletto skyscrapers posing with their technological face.
You glide close to row after row of windows glowing gold like the city's only got eyes for you.
And the sight of metropolis at night is like an answer.
It's a yes, so dazzling it makes all your red flags disintegrate into rumor.
It's the kind of dreamy silhouette that makes you forget sense.
The kind of bright magic that turns all men like you into moths
And those lights would look so good on you.
And you start thinking to yourself that maybe one day I'll glide across these skies
to brunch on Sundays with my besties like Carrie Bradshaw.
Or maybe I'll find a stage that loves the color of all my stories like Jerry Seinfeld.
Or maybe they'll even learn how to pronounce my name too here.
You're not even asking for it all at once.
Just a chance to land somewhere
a small place to nest and enough money in your pocket to keep a baddie jagged breath pressed against your ear on Friday nights
and oh my god, how good it would have felt to arrive to a big soundtrack like “Juicy” or something, or “Get money,” anything old school and reckless.
But what you get is the hissing of sewers.
The 3 a.m. sirens, the tin can conductors, voice over s—-- speakers.
The landlord's knock on the first of the month and every week your little sister sends you a holograms
And she's so proud of you for leaving.
She thinks the sky of you.
And she asked, “Hey, big brother, how is it up there?”
And you say, “It's good. It's everything I've ever wanted.”
And she goes, “It's good and everything I've ever wanted.”
She's like, “Be honest, how is it up there?”
Honest, honest.
You would rather write her an ode for this city
Because how are you supposed to tell her about the six months of nights you spent on strangers beds, cramped couches and dusty attics.
How you tunnel through the city five days a week to hunch over a desk downtown
Just knowing that everything you want is in one of them buildings
just sitting on the other side of a white man's yes.
How are you supposed to say, “I feel like a glitch in this city sis and every time I open my eyes, I wanna beg my dreams for forgiveness and I'm starting to forget what my own voice sounds like.
And I'm sorry for everything that I have not brought back home yet.”
How you supposed to tell her about this one time when you got so stressed out, you buried your head into your backpack and cried on the 2 train?
And when you lifted your heads up, there were two niggas dancing in front of you for change.
And all you could do was laugh.
How are you supposed to say, “I'm sorry, sis for everything that I have not brought back home yet.”
And still, I want to stay, here, still, here, still, here.
Still?
Even on the days the heat sizzles me. Dizzy with lonely.
And I get home to sweep my cat and mop my sink and open the medicine cabinet to find something to eat.
Even when I lose my sense and myself to the rat race here,
there are still reasons I stay
And I can almost hear the city laugh when I complain like that
because I know for a thousand years it's seen a thousand of me and it knows exactly who I am.
I mean, bless me with rent control and laundry in the basement.
Bless me with a roommate who pays her rent on time.
Bless me with neighbors who know my name,
Miss Shirley, her 98 year old smile,
Bless me with all the moments.
I linger a while in the hallway because the Caribbean woman next door is cooking something that reminds me so much of my mother's hands on Sundays.
And still, every morning I wake up and I stand on the steps of the home this city made for me.
And I don't say thank you.
I get on the train.
I open my book.
Pretend I'm the main character again.
I try not to miss my stop
And I ask for more.
Credits
This episode was reported and edited by Myra Flynn and mixed by associate producer James Stewart. Myra composed the theme with other music from Miles Hopper and Blue Dot Sessions. Elodie Reed is the graphic artist behind this episode’s Homegoings artist portrait.
See you in two weeks for the next episode of Homegoings. As always, you are welcome here.
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