On the Ancestral Plane: A Posthumous Fan Letter To Chadwick Boseman

At 2:33 in the morning, I opened Instagram, and the first thing I saw was a picture of you posted by WakandaMoonCosplay. The caption read, “Our king…is gone...Thank you for giving us hope and breathing life into us. R.I.P Chadwick Boseman. We will love and honor you forever.” My first instinct: fact check. I found a CNN article that confirmed the news. All I could manage was four monotone oh-my-gods before balancing my laptop on my wrist and palm to show a friend of mine the news. They stared at the screen in silence until I turned the laptop back to me. I read the headline again and began to cry. When my friend finally spoke, they asked, “How’d he die?” I said, “Colon Cancer…they say he’d been fighting it since 2016.” We stayed up and worked for several more hours. For some reason that seemed like the only sensible option. All I could think while we worked in silence was, “We didn’t even know.”

Echoing your friend and co-star, Micheal B. Jordan, “I wish we had more time.” We all do. We speculated about your trajectory, and we wanted to go. By some combination of providence and planning, you’ve been solidified in our collective consciousness as an icon. We expected to watch you blossom over the next several decades into a Hollywood elder long before you became a Hollywood ancestor. We watched you blast off into stardom and we championed you — a man who gave us the audacity to dream. In the intimate act of inciting awe, joy, excitement, and inspiration, you became ours. We, your fans, experienced your death as sudden and tragic, but you and those closest to you experienced it as a climb, a climax, then a gradual decay.

Realistically, I know that we aren’t entitled to every detail of your life. I just wonder what would have happened if we’d known. I imagine a global community outpouring of our love and support, showing up for you, the way you’ve shown up for us. It is at the very least an optimistic imagining — if not utterly naïve — and I think this is where grief across the spectrum of relationships starts: wishing things were different. Imagining a narrative that disrupts the severity of loss. When I take off the fandom goggles and embrace the realities of the entertainment industry, I know that if we would’ve known, in real-time, you’d never have been King T’Challa. You would have been a high-risk investment. Executives would worry about your ability to have longevity in the franchise like Robert Downy, Jr. or Chris Hemsworth. You wouldn’t have had the opportunity to give what you were designed, destined, and desperate to give. As a fellow artist, I imagine that being denied the opportunity to create would have killed you long before cancer. Any blockage in an artist’s pathway to practice their art form in a meaningful and sustainable way is — in my opinion — similar to being buried alive. All that you were barred from expressing whithers into dust, silt, and ash; then it invades your lungs until you’re asphyxiated by would haves, could haves, should haves, and almosts. I think about the more likely outcome of you being open about your diagnosis. Instead of hailing you as a hero, we’d watch you deteriorate in the tabloids. TMZ and People would snap pictures of you in public as your appearance, health, and spirit began to decline. When I think about that narrative, I realized that you chose the best of what were some pretty bleak options.

That bleak choice begat films that would inspire us, make us walk a little taller, stand a little firmer, and dream a little bigger. We are forever grateful to you for the mirror you held up to us. Not the funhouse mirror that has been used in media for centuries to push us further into the margins, but one that you painted, cured, and cut by hand. You held it up to us at a time when we were wonder ing— as we often do — if there is a place for us in the future. While you were still uncertain about how many more tomorrows you would have, you made us look ourselves in the eye and you said with unweaving confidence, “Don’t you see, we are the future, the past, and the present. We are here. We are powerful.” There aren’t enough Instagram posts or think pieces to thank you for that. We thought we had much more time to give you many more flowers. However, the circumstances of your transition to the ancestral plane constantly remind me of exactly why we needed you.

Your rising career coincided with my growing interest in comic books and screenwriting. I’d gone back to school to finish my Creative Writing degree and picked up a second major in African-American Studies. I was doing a lot of rigorous academic and creative work. I needed a new hobby, so I figured it would be a good time to get into comics. Because I’m intentional about the media I consumed, my first stop on the comic book train was Storm. Because I was interested in Storm, I had to come across Black Panther. My first introduction to Black Panther was Storm’s origin story. The collection that was written by Eric Jarome Dickey in 2006. After that, I started consuming all of the Storm and Black Panther comics I could get my hands on. I imagined playing Storm in her stand-alone movie — which she and all the Black girls who love her deserve. My rational brain knows it is an unrealistic dream, but I believe we sometimes need unrealistic dreams in order to exercise our ability to dream. We need to imagine the grandiose on occasions to preserve our ability to imagine. I have plenty of them and I’m willing to bet you did too. There’s no way that you couldn’t have. Which is why I believe we couldn’t know. We couldn’t know so that you could be who you needed to be. Who we needed you to be.

The first film I saw you in was Message from the King on Netflix. In fact, I’ve only seen three of the films where you play the lead, and I saw them in this order: Message from the King, Black Panther, and Marshall. I believe it is a testament to your talent as an actor, and your spirit as a person that I didn't need to ride the bumper of your career to love you. You put so much of yourself into the roles you played that we felt a piece of you embedded in us when the credits rolled.

The day the news broke of your departure, I decided to rewatch Message from the King. Somehow, starting a fan’s memorial with Black Panther felt too abrasive— as if trying to squeeze the grief between my thumbs until it pops rather than gently soothing the inflammation. I tried to watch the movie analytically, the way I would for a screenwriting class. It’s very likely that’s how I first watched the film: timing plot points, identifying the inciting incident, mapping the hero’s journey, identifying the B-story, etc. This time all I could do was watch. I watched and braved the inevitable reminders that this is it; after Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is released, you won’t make any more films. The narratives we created about your career are shattered. We will not watch you break more box office records. We will not watch you snag more Oscars with more flawless performances. We don’t get to watch you age and get distinguished speckles of grey in your hair and beard. We just have to mourn, morph, and move forward, because grief without transformation is vanity.

The following Monday at 1:52 am — after spending copious hours playing Breath of The Wild — I finally brought myself to watch Black Panther. I watched it the way I watched movies when I was a child. For the first time in four years, I didn’t watch a movie for motifs or symbolism. I didn’t watch it to compare it to the comics. I didn’t watch it in order to craft some sort of social-political argument around it — not to say the movie isn’t highly political, I just didn’t watch it with the intention of using it as an entry point for social-political discourse. For the first time since I started studying screenwriting, I watched a movie for the pleasure of watching a movie. However, while I watched, I had that thought again, “We never even knew.” This time I found myself asking, “How could you have belonged to us if we never even knew?” Somewhere around the time T’Challa gets healed in Jabariland, the answer came to me: We did not know, because you were not ours. We got to borrow you in intervals, but you were not ours. With that knowledge, the only option I had left was gratitude.

It’s hard for me to be reminded of people that I’ve lost because it reminds me of my own mortality and it brings me to a scary question: how will you be greeted in the afterlife? Which can also be read as: how will the people you leave behind remember you? I think we quite often make those two things synonymous. The idea that grandmom could be a saint and still go to hell is incongruous with human ideals of righteousness. But what if grandmom was a saint, she went to church every Sunday, and she overpaid her tithes? What if she never cursed, swore, raised her voice, or took the Lord's name in vain? What if she did everything right, but she never did the one thing she was called to do? What if she followed all the rules, but did as the servent with the single talent and buried her calling in fear? How do we remember grandmom then? How is she met in the afterlife? These, the unanswerable questions of our ever-expanding universe. While I’m multiple years outside of my brief, yet enlightening stint as an atheist, I can’t deny Neil Degrass Tyson’s point that religions are called “faiths” for a reason. There’s no way to know, we just trust that we are doing our best and that the God(s) we serve see(s) us.

The irony in T’Challa being practically invincible and you proving, so soon, to be a fragile mortal is not lost on me. I think about what it means to be a superhero on-screen while facing your own mortality behind the scenes. All over the internet, I see people praising your strength, but in the midst of these praises, I can’t help but think about the vulnerability that begat that strength. I can’t help but think about the tough conversations you had to have with your wife. I think about the challenges of showing up day in and day out while recovering from surgeries and chemotherapy. I think about what it felt like going to set with the weight of your diagnosis on your shoulders. And I imagine the terror of not knowing if you would win or lose. I imagine the struggle to surrender that outcome. When I imagine all of these things, I get torn between praising your fortitude with the rest of your adoring public and writing a think piece about what your death teaches us about Black people and the medical system. Though I know the piece is bound to come soon — if it doesn’t already exist — I don’t think I’m the one to write it. Partly, because it is insensitive clickbait — though I’m no stranger to pitching insensitive clickbait — but, mostly, because this time, I don’t think that piece needs to be written at all. We are in a political climate, where we are acutely aware of how invested our country is in the eradication of its Black citizens. In truth, it only came to mind because I have a tendency to look for the most sterile entry point to stories that hurt. I want the road with the least mess. But you, in the way those who’ve shared creative space with you eulogize you, reminded me that no revelations are found on the well-trodden road.

On the sixth day, I watched Da5Bloods. Seeing you in a Spike Lee Joint felt appropriate. One of my wildest dreams is to study with him at NYU. You have a line in the film where you say, “I died for you, blood,” and it shook me to shambles. It felt like you were speaking to us — to me. To those of us who now have a space in the film industry because of you and your comrades. The whole film felt prophetic. As if you were doing this film for your fans. As if you were hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers — just know that it was the movie we needed right now. It was the good-bye we didn’t think we would get. It is both haunting and healing. I’ve spent most of my life in south Louisiana so the idea of haunting as remedy is a fairly familiar concept for me — in fact, it is a salve I, and my peers, frequently use.

It took me another week after watching that film to finish this essay. As I type this final paragraph, it is 5:43 a.m. in New Orleans and you’ve been returned to the soil from whence you came. There is a phrase that was coined by your wife and shared by another illustrious member of your village, Lupita Nyong’o, that has been echoing for me recently: Take your time but don’t waste your time. You only needed 43 short years to change the world. I also know that you didn’t do it by yourself. You let us know in every interview on whose shoulders you stood. You chose, with every film that you decided to undertake, to honor those who poured into you by pouring into us. And living in that knowledge is where I’m able to cultivate an intense amount of gratitude. I’m appreciating the integrity of your community, your individual commitment and conviction, and I’m grateful for the chances you took and the intention that you put into your work. I’m grateful for the lineages — both blood and bond — that brought you to us. They bet on you and we all won. You bet on yourself and you became eternal. I hope that you rest well, knowing that you’ve inspired millions of us to fight for the tables we rightfully deserve in film, politics, sports, publishing, non-profits, corporations, and everywhere else. There are those who will never understand how valuable an ember can be to a man in a cave. They cannot understand because they’ve never been in such a cave. In fact, there are those who threw the man into the cave who would ask why he doesn’t simply walk out. They cannot understand the very specific darkness in which he is embedded because they have never had to blindly navigate their way out of a cavern. In the midst of that darkness, you were a torch to so many of us. We thought we would be able to bask in your light for many more years and now find ourselves writing epitaphs for our dashed hopes. But when the grief dulls, we have to accept the truth of the matter. The fact that we may not have gotten all that we wanted from you, but it was still far more than enough. I have no doubts that you completed the work that you were sent here to accomplish and that you were greeted in the hereafter by those you’ve lost, those you’ve admired, and those you’ve portrayed. I’m sure they were all just as proud of you as we are.

Rest in power.