In a 1907 experiment, physician Dr. Duncan MacDougall determined souls weigh 21 grams. He placed near-death patients on a scale to measure any weight loss at the exact moment of death. One of six patients lost about 21 grams. Critics called the MacDougall results flawed and unscientific.
If means exist to weigh one's spirit, give calibration to soul, then readers should first calculate theirs before entering, "A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Black Death in America" by Trymaine Lee.
Lee, a former crime-beat writer for The Trentonian (2003-2005) who chronicled the personal side of capital city homicide, bodies ripped apart by bullets and families shattered by gun violence from either side of weaponry, in "A Thousand Ways to Die" (Sept. 9, St. Martin's Press) offers an investigation of both personal and professional life experiences involving death. His first offering as book writer lists as provocative and powerful.
Lee, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Emmy award winning journalist and MSNBC contributor, also hosts "Into America" a podcast where he covers the intersection of Blackness, power, and politics. A contributing author to the "1619 Project", he has reported for The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Lee offers this insight about his own life.
"For two decades, I've been a journalist, the kind that tells stories about the way Black folks have lived and died in America. The ugly and beautiful parts of our experiences here, the weight of bearing witness, the resilience no human should have to muster, the ache of death and the pure unadulterated Black joy of surviving America, our way, with all the rich irony of Black life here. For so long, I've wrestled other people's grief into stories.
"Yet all the while, I've kept my own family's story tucked away as if it were some secondary plot in my life. When in reality, in ways I can't fully explain but know to be true, the past, our past, has led me to this moment," he writes.
In the moment readers enter into "A Thousand Ways to Die", Lee gains trust in telling his near-death experience, a heart attack at age 38. Lee writes about the high-profile murders of Black people in America.
"Black Death is often a public spectacle, a centuries-old traveling horror show. Our grief and trauma are communal. When we watched a police officer murder George Floyd in the street over a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, and another cop shoot Walter Scott in the back in a public field because of a broken taillight, and other cops gun down John Crawford III in a Walmart over a toy gun he picked up on a store shelf, we all carried the weight of their very public killings. When we watched young Tamir Rice shot down outside of a community center and heard Trayvon Martin's final screams at an apartment complex in a 911 call, there wasn't a Black person in America who didn't feel like they could've been any one of our boys. When we watched Ah-maud Arbery chased and shot down by white vigilantes as he jogged through a white neighborhood, we were all stopped by the blast that took his life. When we saw the pictures of the Tops Ten murdered in that grocery store, it was more of the same -- a collective public execution.
"One of the more disturbing things I heard from witnesses in Buffalo was that when they first heard the gunfire at Tops, they thought it was "normal" gunfire and not the mass-murdering kind. By "normal," they meant the more typical shootings in poorer Black urban communities all across the country. The kind they don't typically even flinch for. The common, everyday kind of gunfire that echoes across street corners and from speeding cars so often it's unremarkable. As devastating as those kinds of gunshots can be on a micro level, they just don't register among the general public or even researchers the same way as the high-casualty kind. But they're one and the same. Violence from the hands of white supremacists and the everyday violence from Black hands have become intertwined; bullets ring out the same no matter the intention of the shooter. They function in tandem. How we order and classify American violence is far less important than how we stop it. Be it a second line parade or in the seafood aisle of a grocery store, a house party or a house of worship, there has been no haven."
Lee's words weight and deliver gravitational pull that moves readers downward into a dark abyss for inspection of personal interactions with violence and death. Persons familiar with laws regarding quick sand advise not to struggle, that calm delivers extrication.
So, allow Lee's monumental work, his observations and personal insights to engage.
The experience is well worth the weight.