CHAPTER 1
SMILE
I was five years old when my teeth got kicked out. It was my first trauma.
But before I get into that, introductions: My name is Matthew Johnson. Well, realistically, my name is George Matthew Johnson, but at five years old, I didn’t know that yet. It all will matter in the end, though.
I’m from a small city located in New Jersey called Plainfield, about thirty miles from the bright lights of Manhattan. You could literally drive from one end of Plainfield to the other in less than ten minutes. It’s a compact city with so many interconnected stories. Triumph, tragedy, and trauma all exist within those few square miles. It is a place I once hated but grew to love as my true home. My only home.
My family has been a part of the fabric of this city for more than fifty years. My parents both held down city jobs for nearly three decades and still live there to this day. My brother and I grew up middle class, or at least what Black folk were supposed to think was middle class. With Christmases full of gifts under the tree, my little brother and I never wanted for a thing. We were blessed to have parents who understood what it was like to have the bare minimum, and who ensured that their kids never experienced that same plight. We are a rarity amongst most Black folks, who don’t get to have intergenerational wealth like our white neighbors just one block over.
Family came first for us. I grew up with my little brother, Garrett, in the house. Our older brother, Gregory Jr., and sister, Tonya, from my dad’s first marriage had moved out by that time. There were also cousins, aunts, and uncles living in Plainfield. Holidays were always a big family affair. For reference, I think the movie Soul Food stands as the closest semblance to my upbringing, minus the fighting. Well, maybe a little bit of fighting.
My parents both worked “9–5, 5–9” as we called it. My father was a police officer who worked very long shifts. My mother was the head of the secretaries at the police department and owned a hair salon in town, where she would go in the evenings after her day job.
Some of my cousins used to live in the projects in Jersey City, an environment my mom’s mother, Nanny, felt wasn’t very conducive to the safe upbringing of small Black boys. Their parents were like oil and water. I can recall one time when their mom and dad visited Nanny’s house. Aunt Cynthia and “Uncle” got into an argument over laundry that I learned much later was really over drugs. It then escalated into a full-on fistfight in the upstairs hallway. That would be the last time I saw Aunt Cynthia for years. Nanny knew she didn’t want her grandkids growing up in all that. As she put it, “Y’all can run the streets all you want, my grandkids will not.” And from that moment, she took them in and put them into school in Plainfield.
Nanny became the caregiver, cook, nurse, and disciplinarian for us all. Nanny was brown-skinned and had a head full of gray hair. She was a bit heavyset, with one arm a little bigger than the other due to her lymphedema. She was from Spartanburg, South Carolina, and despite having lived in Jersey more than thirty-five years, she still had a very Southern accent.
My family provided the kind of upbringing and support system anyone would hope their children would have. The type of care, wealth, and love that should prevent a child from ever having to experience trauma or the same struggles that affected previous generations. Unfortunately, my life story is proof that no amount of money, love, or support can protect you from a society intent on killing you for your Blackness. Any community that has been taught that anyone not “straight” is dangerous, is in itself a danger to LGBTQIAP+ people.
* * *
The elementary school allowed me to start kindergarten at age four because of a loophole in the system and my birthday being a month after school started. I remember having to “test in” to kindergarten because of it. So I was five when this event took place (in the spring of that next year).
By that age I already knew I was different, even though I didn’t have the language to explain it or maturity to understand fully what “different” meant. I wasn’t gravitating toward typical boy things, like sports, trucks, and so on. I liked baby dolls and doing hair. I could sense that the feelings I had inside of me weren’t “right” by society’s standards either. I remember that on Valentine’s Day, the boys were supposed to give their “crush” a card. Not wanting to give mine to a boy, I gave it to a girl who was clearly a tomboy even at that age. I was always attracted to the company of boys.
I used to daydream a lot as a little boy. But in my daydreams, I was always a girl. I would daydream about having long hair and wearing dresses. And looking back, it wasn’t because I thought I was in the wrong body, but because of how I acted more girly. I thought a girl was the only thing I could be.
I struggled with being unable to express myself in my fullest identity. One that would encompass all the things that I liked while still existing in the body of a boy. However, I was old enough to know that I would find safety only in the arms of suppression—hiding my true self—because let’s face it, kids can be cruel. I integrated well, though, or so I believed at the time. I became a world-class actor by the age of five, able to blend in with the boys and girls without a person ever questioning my effeminate nature. Then again, we were so little—maybe all the children were just as naïve as I was about the kids who surrounded them.
I was five years old when my teeth were kicked out. It was my introduction to trauma, and now, I’m ready to start there.
At that age, I wasn’t allowed to walk home from school by myself. So, I walked home with my older cousins, Little Rall and Rasul. During that time, my cousins lived with our grandmother, who also happened to be our primary caregiver—since our parents worked long hours. Walking to Nanny’s house after school was our routine. I usually walked holding hands with Little Rall while Rasul went ahead. We would take the back way every day, which meant walking behind the school, through the football and baseball fields, to the street one block over from Nanny’s house. On a normal day, that walk took less than ten minutes. Living so close to the school, I’m sure Nanny never imagined that within those ten minutes, her grandchild’s life would be forever scarred.
The memory is vivid. I can still smell the air from that day, sunny and mild springlike weather. That walk to my grandmother’s started just like any other, with me holding hands with Rall, while Rasul sped ahead of us. We were at the corner of Lansdowne and Marshall on the lawn of the corner house when we ran into a group of kids from the neighborhood that I didn’t recognize.
They had to be about my cousins’ ages—around nine or ten years old. The main kid was white. To this day when we talk about it, we use his full name, but I won’t say it here. The other kids were Black and white if memory serves me correctly. My cousins knew who they were, I guessed, because they immediately began arguing. When I sit with this memory, there is no sound in the moment. I can see it. When I write about it now, my body can feel it. But as I close my eyes to think about it, the situation was instant chaos. I got extremely nervous. I just held on to Rall’s hand even tighter.
There were three of us and six of them, which was really two on six because what did a five-year-old know about fighting? The arguing kept getting more intense with my fear growing as the boys got closer, in each other’s faces. It’s strange how near to home and safety one can be when some of the most traumatic things in life occur. I used to wonder what would’ve happened if we had walked a different route that day, or left the school five minutes earlier? Would my life have turned out any different?
Before I knew it, the argument broke into a fight, and I, the invisible boy, somehow became the biggest target. As my cousins squared up with three of the boys, two others grabbed me by my arms and held me on the ground. I screamed for help, as it was all I could do. The third kid swung his leg and kicked me in the face. Then he pulled his leg back again and kicked even harder.
My teeth shattered like glass hitting the concrete. In that moment, I felt nothing. It was as if it were all a dream. Then I felt the pain. I also felt an emotion I had never experienced before: rage. I didn’t fully understand the feeling at the time—had not yet had the pleasure of introducing myself to it. The tears that streamed down my face were no longer about pain. I was now crying tears of anger. Tears of rage.
That rage was enough to stop the boy from ever bringing a third kick to my mouth. I somehow broke free, lunged forward, and bit his leg with the teeth I had remaining. He screamed so loud as I bit through his jeans. By this time, my cousins had handled the other three boys and saw what had happened to me. They ran toward us together, which made all my assaulters retreat. They grabbed my book bag, and said, “Run to the house, Matt.”
So, I did. Ironically, this moment marked the beginning of my track career, which I would pursue from elementary to high school. Sound is now back on in the memory at this point. I can hear my crying as I ran home. I got to my grandmother’s house, and I continued to cry—bloody mouth, busted lip, and baby teeth knocked out.
“What happened?” yelled Nanny.
“We got jumped,” my cousins explained. Nanny went and got ice and wrapped it in a paper towel, and she told me to hold it to my face.
It all gets a little hazy after that, as I remember bits and pieces of what occurred. My mother left work immediately to get to Nanny’s. She sent an officer ahead to meet us at the house to take down the report. When my mother got there, she came and checked on me immediately. She sat in one of the dining room chairs and had me sit in her lap with her arms around me.
I finally calmed down once my mother held me. At some point, my uncles showed up and were sitting with us all. My cousins were still visibly upset. I sat there in silence, feeling the rise and fall of my mother’s chest with each breath she took. The officer began asking my cousins what happened, and they told their story. The officer asked me to open my mouth so he could note the damage in his report. I recall not speaking for hours after this happened.
* * *
When I close my eyes now, I see it all happening as if it were some out-of-body experience. I think back on that day a lot. I wish I knew what motivated the attack. Could it have been because I was effeminate? Could it have been a race thing, since the main assaulter was a white boy from a different part of the neighborhood? Could it have simply been the toxic behaviors we teach boys about fighting and earning manhood? I know that impact and intent always play a role, so even if their intent wasn’t those things, the impact would forever change me anyway.
There were no counselors or therapy sessions to help me work through what had happened. Therapy is still very much a taboo subject in the Black community. Those who are seen as having issues with their mental health face a lot of stigma and discrimination because mental health is often conflated with mental illness. So rather than having their child labeled as something hurtful, my parents did the best they could with what they knew.
We did what we always did as a family—we loved on each other even harder. In that moment, my mother just held me, and we sat there together for a long while. Eventually, she took me home. But the next day became just that. The next day. What happened the day before was to be forgotten, or better yet, buried.
* * *
Unfortunately, part of what I forgot was how to smile. I immediately became self-conscious about smiling. It’s something I’ve struggled to remedy even as an adult. Because my baby teeth had been kicked out, my adult teeth—almost “buck teeth”—grew in extremely early. Adult-size teeth on a seven-year-old are very odd-looking, and it brought me a whole new type of attention I wasn’t looking for. My lips became protection for the smile that was stolen. Picture after picture after picture, I refused to smile. There are photos of me at seven, nine, thirteen, twenty-two, and twenty-nine years old where I refuse to smile.
Every now and again, my mom will find a picture of me with my teeth showing. There aren’t many of them, though. And when I look at them, sometimes I cringe. Other times, I’ve actually teared up, wondering if I was truly happy in that picture or if I simply felt the need to smile because someone said, “Smile, Matt” and I obliged. The fact that I don’t feel happy when I look at those images lets me know there wasn’t any happiness when I took them.
What did I look like to others—a child who rarely smiled? Did they ever take it as a sign that I was actually dealing with a trauma I couldn’t get past? Or did they pass it off as a “boys will be boys” thing that I would eventually grow out of? To go years without smiling in pictures, rarely being questioned why, leaves me to wonder how many signs of trauma we miss or ignore in Black children.
Black boys are required to be rough and tough. To suck up the pain, and not shed a tear. If you get into a fight, you better win the fight or I’m a beat your ass when you get home is a phrase I’ve heard too many times from friends and family throughout my life. Being Black and queer brings on layers of issues. There can be both a fear of your own community and a fear of dealing with bullying from other children who don’t respect your identity. When that kind of pressure builds within a young queer kid, the fear becomes constricting and can wrap you up in layers, each more difficult to peel away as you grow up.
As an adult, I have gone through the unlearning to understand that my community’s treatment of Black queer children is in fact a by-product of a system of assimilation to whiteness and respectability that forces Black people to fit one mold in society, one where being a man means you must be straight and masculine. I didn’t have the ability to separate my Blackness from my queerness. The loss of my smile was as much a denial of my Black joy as it was my queer joy. When I did smile, it was a coping mechanism. My smile was a mask that hid the pain of suppressing who I was.
Masking is a common coping mechanism for a Black queer boy. We bury the things that have happened to us, hoping that they don’t present themselves later in our adult life. Some of us never realize that subconsciously, these buried bones are what dictate our every navigation and interaction throughout life. Oddly enough, many of us connect with each other through trauma and pain: broken people finding other broken people in the hopes of fixing one another.
I used to think that I had gotten over it if I took a good picture where I was smiling. But it only required one bad smiling pic to remind me of how trauma has a funny way of showing up in our lives during the moments when we least expect it. It can be an action that we write off as something else, when really it is the manifestation of a pain we had refused to deal with. A trauma that no one helped us fully process or that they didn’t have the skills to even know we needed help for. Boys aren’t supposed to cry, so hold that shit in. Sometimes to the grave.
There have been times when I brushed my teeth too hard and got a taste of blood and was immediately taken back to that day. An adult, crying in a bathroom mirror, pretending I didn’t know why.
Trauma appears all throughout pop culture, often sung by the masses as a hot lyric, penned by the performer as a release of that pain. The trauma is shared by the community, too. Songs become our battle cries; trauma becomes the thing that bonds us together. So much so, that I’ve heard people actually say, “I need sad Mary J. Blige to come back because her music is better.” Our community struggles to connect with joy in the way that we have with pain.
When I hear Cardi B say, she “gotta bag and fixed [her] teeth,” it’s more than a cute line in a dope song. And yes, “Bodak Yellow” was a bop! But she is responding to years of hate and flack she received for having crooked teeth. She is talking about the trauma she dealt with, and what she was able to do to gain back agency over those moments, and then use it in a way to make folks proud. Every time she speaks about her teeth, she is allowing herself to work through the process of healing rather than be burdened by the weight of holding the trauma in.
For years, I held that traumatic moment inside of me, and it was reflected in hundreds of pictures that captured my face absent a smile. I tried smiling with my mouth closed or making faces. As I got older, I would get hit on by guys and crack a smile. They would say, “You have a nice smile” and my instant reaction was to roll my eyes in disbelief. And I’d even have friends send me messages saying, “I noticed you don’t ever smile.” I would deflect the comments and give some reason that had nothing to do with what I was actually feeling. I still had that five-year-old in me who was not ready to smile. This queer in me that couldn’t fully be.
Copyright © 2020 by George M. Johnson
