The Warriors Are Not the Cooks, or An Ode to Finding Your Way

Memphis : June 2020

By Rebecca Sanchez

William Golden is the kind of person you can feel even before you come to hear him. His eyes are loud in that way, making the visions they’ve endured pronounced and unapologetic.

He is a poet. He is an ex-offender. He is a man paving his own road with seasoned hands. He is a philosopher, a thinker, a “rapper who knows words.” If life in Frayser, North Memphis, Tennessee were an opera he would be the libretto— the key to your orientation, as lookers-on. He would lay out the landscape before showing you the way, page after page of his handwritten lyrics comprising the official “book of the work.”  He is Golden.

On June 17, 2018, in a conversation at Lifeline to Success, a local organization founded by Pastor DeAndre Brown that works to help ex-offenders “through the confusion, frustration, and obstacles experienced when reintegrating into society after serving a prison sentence,” Will recited Tupac, a recitation at once lyrical and political, both worn and true. “I’m not gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world.”

The topic of the day amongst Pastor Brown and the group members was “100% participation, 100% of the time.” The question: How do you participate in community when you live under a system that has largely excluded you and yours (according to The Sentencing Project, for instance, Tennessee is one of the 12 worst states for Felony Disenfranchisement— the state rule since 1981, and only one of a number of ways in which every sentence becomes a life sentence)?

The important thing to remember, Pastor Brown reminded the group, is that “not everyone will have the same values and goals as you do,” and that everyone can’t do everything— “the warriors are not the cooks,” he said, and you can’t just do “enough.”

Though Will wakes up and goes to work, helps sustain his community and the young people within his reach, walks the proverbial line, he thinks still, consistently, about ways to do more.

Speaking with him nearly two years ago to the day, he presented a challenge to media coverage, asking “Why does life have so little value in our neighborhood? You only see a Black man in America who isn’t a politician when it’s bad. First we’re Black, then we come from impoverished neighborhoods, we don’t have the right education. I have a white friend from the same neighborhood, same place. I have to put on this green shirt so someone would want to hear my story. Nothing wrong with that, I love this green shirt, but it should be different.”

Speaking with Will this week, in the midst of the mirror image of what has been his daily life refracting and reflecting a nation in crisis, and coming up on a Juneteenth already tense, Will holds close to the same goals he had two years ago, further developed though not necessarily materialized.

“I wish I had the ability to go and protest with my brothers and sisters. I wish I already had a platform to speak from. Maybe I’m not ready yet, or the world’s not ready yet,” he said. Asked why he felt unable to join ranks on the street, he went on: “I won’t be able to sustain myself if I don’t work and I really want to start a podcast, but it’s hard to come up with the money for it when I’m in survival mode all the time.”

This is the trade-off between the warrior and the cook. The understanding that you might be able to build yourself a platform from which you can guide your community through culture, thought and experiences of injustice, but that showing up in that way will come at the expense of showing up in another, and that what you hope to get out of that sacrifice is not guaranteed.

For Will, 100% participation 100% of the time manifests as sometimes sleeping at Lifeline to keep space from situations that put him at risk. As negotiating between modes of survival within a mindset anchored in his dreams, still in the distance. It means reading Plato’s Republic and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to cultivate those dreams in the meantime. And sometimes, 100% is found in the discovery that warriors who are also cooks can be forged in thinking and ideas, but knowing that given that capability you still, in the end, find yourself situated within a system that does not offer you the tools for making it sustainable. And it’s in recognizing that the challenge to everyone within that system comes back to 100% participation. In the simplest terms, it’s a call to everyone else’s participation too: “We need people to invest in our dreams.”