Without cigarettes, I would not have survived my childhood. My mother smoked a pack a day—more than a pack when our circumstances grew dire, and/or she was bound to the state via a prison cell, a mental ward, or the welfare office. Bump that pack up to a pack and a half. She could only buy them pack by pack. Never could afford the savings bundled in a ten-pack carton. She took it day by day, every night, making sure she set aside at least one to have with her morning cup of Folgers.
Without the snug fit of a cigarette between her index and middle fingers to weigh her down, my mother’s anxious thoughts would’ve carried her away, mistrals of the unfortunate winds careening through both the front and the back door and every closed window of the house, leaving my mother heels over head in a heap on the floor. When the dust devils whirled in, kicking up crisis after crisis, it was hard to hold steady. A cigarette gave her something to hold on to, something to wield as a weapon—a sword and shield made of smoke to choke out despair.
Unless you’ve spent years sitting across the kitchen table from a chain-smoking mother inhaling and exhaling her breakfast, you won’t be able to tell the difference between the curls of smoke and the piercing rays of morning sunlight. For those of you who are unfamiliar, I’ll tell you the difference between the two. Let’s begin with the smoke. The smoke is essential. It was invited in. The click of the lighter ignites a holy flame. The sage is lit—inhaled, exhaled like a call and response. The first prayer is an invocation, and the ashes fall to the tiny ashtray on the altar of the kitchen table. The smoke is the Chosen One. The sunlight is an invader. Its radiance is superfluous. Its purity cannot help calm my mother’s nerves. Sure, it brings light, but my mother is well acquainted with the darkness. She has twenty-twenty night vision. She finds no ceremony in the sun rising. It ushers in responsibility, not ritual. The sun rising is only a reminder of all that she wasn’t able to accomplish, all that she wasn’t able to afford the day before.
All across this country, morning after morning, there are versions of my mother waking up beneath rafters of despair to sit at kitchen tables sanded down by worry, varnished with loneliness. Being able to decipher which part of each atmosphere is smoke and which is sunlight can win you an election.
When culturally elite minds laughed at Donald Trump’s orange skin, or his failed hair transplant, or his saggy suits, or the way he held a glass of water, or the way he danced like he was jerking off clouds, or the way he stood like a stuffed penguin, he placed his hurt feelings onto the real grievances of rough-and-tumble Americans. He used their backs to grind his axe.
When we cracked jokes and sent memes of him trying over and over again to say the word “origins” but couldn’t, when we guffawed over his suggestion to inject ourselves with bleach to kill COVID, when we rolled our eyes because he didn’t know that nuclear weapons won’t stop a hurricane or that Korea was never a part of China, or that the president of the United States is also the president of the Virgin Islands, we were guffawing and rolling our eyes at people like my mother who also might not have known those things.
Remember those NFT trading cards of Trump as a superhero, as a champion boxer, as a bronco-riding rancher, as an astronaut, as a sheriff in a white coat coming to save the day? They worked like icons of saints, painting a vision of a savior that so many of the working poor have been waiting for. They’ve been praying and praying for Jesus to return, but shit… he’s taking his sweet old time getting around to rapturing them up into paradise. But here’s Trump in flesh and blood right here and right now. His streets may not be made of gold, but his toilets are. For many people, that’s close enough.
We the people of the culturati who start our mornings grinding our IPA-soaked Himalayan coffee beans aged in bourbon barrels, watching the smoke rise from our Chemex pour-overs, sunlight kissing the steam rising from our oat milk lattes, can comfortably sit at our quartz, granite, marble waterfall kitchen island and judge Trump all we want. We think he cares. But this is a man who didn’t care when the entire UN laughed at him. He took it on the chin. “I didn’t expect that reaction,” he said, “but that’s okay.”
Trump takes our ridicule and puts it in a blender with the grudges of blue-collar, pack-a-day workers. He sifts our insults into the bones of Americans who also feel insulted by us—we, the educated—who got an A+ on this American experiment. He cashes in all the fucks he gives alongside them when they cash their paychecks at their Walmart or a check-cashing place (which, of course, is conveniently located right next door to a smoke shop). He uses the barbs we throw at him and makes a coat of chain mail for the ones who feel just as rejected as he feels. He wields their pain like a blade to part the smoke from the sunlight, slicing despair from reality. Then he peddles his wares to those who are a paycheck away from any number of possible deaths of despair.
Have you noticed how Trump doesn’t stride to the podium like a God, but shuffles up to it as if the weight of the whole world is on his shoulders? He leans on the podium like he’s just received more bad news on his way to the rally, and then he sighs, and then he promises:
“You want a life that looks like mine? Ladies, you want be a hot piece of ass like my wife? You want to be taken care of by a man who knows how to turn a buck into a million dollars? Fellas, you want to be a man who’s a man and not a pussy? You want to stop apologizing for being a man? You want to date a hot piece of ass like my daughter? You want a private jet? You want a mansion like mine? Do you want more than a welfare check? You want to be a winner and not a loser scraping the floor for crumbs? Well, have I got just the thing for you: drink this… wear this… buy this signed and sealed promise. Let me tell you a story about a guy I know—big guy, rich guy, strong guy—who bought and sold and sold and bought… you won’t believe how big this guy’s dick is… this big strong guy who I knew when he was nothing, but now he’s worth a billion. You could be too. I got what you need. I got what you want. I alone can fix it. I made this for you. I’m giving you the deal of a lifetime on this 24K gold-plated, genuine red cotton, American-tough, American-built, American-made sneaker, watch, Bible, insurance, vitamin, USDA Angus beef filet mignon, Ivermectin, picket-fence-American-dream… Whatever you want, I got it. I can make it better.”
Let me tell you, despair can be a beautiful unifier, especially when that despair is hard-earned by factory lay-offs, train derailments, car boots, contaminated water, power outages, convictions, foreclosures, and, yes, cancel culture. When the despairing hordes of the disparaged inhale and exhale in unison, their curls of smoke rise and collect into a cloud hefty enough to knit its own silver lining. No other billionaire has ever spoken to them before. No politician has ever said, “You got a raw deal. Let me fix it.”
I would not have survived my childhood without cigarettes—but also, I would not have survived without Blackness floating like dust particles through the sun-glazed nicotine haze. Despair is long-reaching and, like everything else, turns to dust you can’t rid yourself of. But Blackness is more enduring than mere despair—at least my mother’s brand of Blackness was: Marvin Gaye on the record player and ham hocks cooking on the stove and the smell of Blue Magic permeating our hands and our hair and the sound of cards being shuffled for a game of spades at the rent parties she threw at the end of the month. Blackness as thick as that is infinite. It won’t check its coat at the door for the promises of some traveling salesman’s snake oil. It won’t fall for his sleight of hand. It wants nothing to do with whatever ails him.
More than seventy-four million Americans voted for a flimflammer, a felon, a grifter. They bought the Goldschläger snake oil he was selling. But not all Americans are equal, and most Black people—especially Black women—did not buy his sales pitch. It’s not because we’re less broke. Many of us have memories of our mothers selling their food stamps in exchange for cash to use for gas money to get them across town to their job, trading cigarettes for a ride to the store, saving the cigarette butts for rainy days when there was no money for the phone bill or the light bill. Despair comes in many hues and colors. One shade of despair does not fit all. The moment he said, “Make America Great Again,” Black women like my mother tsked and said, “Say what? What does he mean by again? Again? Again when? For who?”
If you don’t know what it’s like to live in a home built on cigarette smoke, you will point your finger and blame and blame and blame. But you won’t ever see the sunlight for the rage clouding your vision. It’s really simple. Most Americans who love Trump are white folks who have about as much as my mother did. They want what they feel is owed to them. And who are we to blame them? Who are we to judge how they pay for their bread?
Trump understands there’s a simple remedy for this: Ask desperate Americans with lungs filled with despair, “How much do you need?” Then, promise to give it to them. If Democrats did this, perhaps they could free seventy-four-million-plus Americans to vote for their conscience over their needs. Of course, they will still vote for Trump, because what those voters hate more than their own despair is living in an America that grows three shades darker year after year.