Kofi Daniel Opam is a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Missouri. Their work has been published in The Atlas Review and Seventh Wave Magazine. They live in Chicago with their husband.

Won't You Talk to Me?

Kofi Opam

"Death is not static, and life is not quick.”

- A Haitian Proverb

...

I learned about Brandon ten years ago. I was a young queer person—although I didn’t use those words to describe myself, burrowed myself in labels like lesbian—and I sat in a circle of other 18-year-olds. It was September muggy that Friday, and I struggled to maintain focus as sweat pooled in the spaces between our thoughts. It was only the second meeting of the LGBT Book Club, and we were stumbling through a discussion of Aphrodite Jones’s book All S(he) Wanted: The Brandon Teena Story.

“I don’t understand, so is it a boy or a girl?”

“Why didn’t she just move to a city or something if she was so confused?” “I mean, what do you expect…it’s Nebraska.”

“Trying to pass for a dude…isn’t that, like, anti-feminist?”

I laughed with the others, the sound making rusty bandsaw blades of my throat. I wasn’t trans at the time, not yet, hadn’t quite realized it yet. I didn’t know how close my life’s trajectory would bring me to Brandon.

Ten years, and five surgeries, and two hundred thousand dollars in medical debt, and nine-hundred and ninety-five miles driven West, and unending statuses and letters and postcards and conversations explaining my name and voice and body and arm and life…all brought me to Iowa, brought me to Brandon, brought me to a winter afternoon scrolling through blog posts.

My friend Oliver had just published an essay commemorating the twenty-year anniversary of Boys Don’t Cry, the film that made Brandon’s story famous: “Watching [the movie] again, I wrestled with the fact that there are relatable elements of Boys Don’t Cry that speak to my experience living in a transmasculine body.”

In loving prose, my friend reminds me of the Real oy that is Brandon, that boy in the cowboy hat and Wranglers, blowing kisses to girls across rural roller rinks, running laughing from their brothers through the Nebraska starlight. Brandon was a young trans man from Lincoln—locals call it the Star City—was murdered by two men who he thought were his friends. He died twenty-five years ago, my friend wrote. New Year’s Day 1993, in a farmhouse in Southeastern Nebraska.

Nebraska. Reading my friend’s words, all lit up like cigarette embers on my computer screen, I remembered that I now live in the Midwest, in a town that is the closest to Nebraska I have ever and may ever live.

...

Brandon was born on December 12, 1972 to a single mother in Lincoln. He lived with his family in the Pine Acres Motor Home Park, now a few scattered homes on the northern edge of the city. He went to Catholic school his entire life: St Mary’s until eighth grade and Pius the Tenth for high school. Brandon was an outspoken boy, apparently always getting into fights with the priests. A few weeks before graduation, he was expelled for low attendance and low grades.

He ran away from Lincoln that summer, followed Highway Seventy-Three south before stopping in Falls City. Brandon enjoyed the small town, liked that nobody knew him there.

A few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Brandon sat in an old farmhouse, talking and smoking with two of his new friends. Late into the night, two self-proclaimed rednecks named John Lotter and Tom Nissen broke into the farmhouse, stinking of grain liquor and chew. They pressed a gun to Brandon’s chin and blew away the back of his skull. His friends, Lisa and Phillip, were also shot, point-blank. It was New Year’s Eve.

His murder caused a stir in Falls City community, who felt betrayed by what they felt was a buried lede: Brandon was trans, a liar of the highest degree. He had lied to those rednecks and they had shot him, and good for them. Brandon was a liar, anyway; arrested for several misdemeanors, ranging from stealing to robbery to forgery, he always told lies. He told people his name was Billy, or Lonny, or Charlie; he told them a movie star, that his parents lived in Hollywood; he told them he was a boy.

Dozens of articles profile Brandon: his hometown, his lovers, his anatomy, his killers, the weapons they used, where they sit imprisoned to this day. At least three books for you to read or reread on the bus: All She Wanted; In a a Queer Time and Place; Black on Both Sides. Two films to watch under the covers at night: A documentary, The Brandon Teena Story, and the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry. There’s a grainy video of Hilary Swank accepting her Oscar for Best Actress, her gown shimmering in bronze. There are two dissertations on a University of Nebraska-Lincoln database; a profile of the town in The New Yorker (written by Joan Didion’s late husband); an essay explaining the connection between the prairies where he was murdered and the rise of Bonnie and Clyde; a video that shows you how to find the place where he was shot, a still-abandoned farmhouse in the fields south of Falls City.

On the long drive to Lincoln, I listened to a few of the podcasts I had assembled, anything that mentioned Brandon’s name; I had enough content to listen to people talk about Brandon for hours. All of these items, aggregate, make their project the life and death of Brandon Teena. One theorist, a British queer scholar named Jack Halberstam, calls all of this, collectively, “The Brandon Archive.”

I know the name of Brandon’s childhood dog. I know Brandon would be my Aunt Rose’s age, if he were still alive (Brandon is a Sagittarius, like three of my cousins and half of the people in my graduating MFA class (the other half are Pisces)). I know the name of Brandon’s lawyer; he set himself on fire in 2018. I know the name of the neighborhood Brandon grew up in, the gay bar in Lincoln he might have frequented as a teenager, the river where the boys who killed him threw their bloody gun, the prisons where they rot. I know that he was killed with two other people on that early morning in December. I know that he is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, in Plot Fourteen of Section Z.

And yet I only recently learned about Phillip Devine.

...

One night while trolling the internet, sifting through the vast expanses of Brandon’s archive brought Phillip to me. Scanning piles of articles from The Daily Nebraskan and The Lincoln Journal Star, rereading reviews and plot summaries for the books and movies and, I came across a Donna Minkowitz piece in the The Village Voice. “How I broke—and botched—the Brandon Teena Story.” In the essay, Minkowitz reflects upon the decisions she made in publishing “Love Hurts,” her initial story on Brandon. She considers her choices to describe Brandon with words like “closeted lesbian” and “internalized homophobia,” and apologizes for making assumptions about Brandon’s psychology—why he was the way he was.

The second half of the piece begins with an assertion: “All stories are about more than

one thing, and Brandon’s was also the story of a young white woman and a young disabled black man.”

Here, Minkowitz is referencing Brandon’s friends, Lisa and Phillip, And here I made my first acquaintance with Phillip Elliott Devine. I had known that those boys killed more than one person that morning, but I knew almost nothing about them, let alone that one was a man with black skin like mine. Minkowitz considers the reasons that this might be:

“As far as I can tell, none of the journalistic reports for the first few months after the murder mentioned that Philip Devine was a black man visiting an all-white town. Mine mentioned that, as well as the fact that Phillip had come to Falls City to romance a white woman, Lana’s sister, Leslie, and that there was considerable public racism in the town, including the bald denial of service to African Americans at the town’s fast-food restaurant.”

Nothing I had amassed in Brandon’s archive had told me any of this. No Phillip in Boys Don’t Cry, no black boy in those history books—his name nowhere in the credits or dedication. In a confused sort of rage, I found an interview with the film’s director. When pressed on his total Phillip, she explained that her screenplay “didn’t have room” for Phillip, that her “greater obligation was to Brandon.” I read that and felt something cool and damp in my ribcage, walked into my bathroom without realizing it, stared into the flat glass mirror for a long time, wondering what I was looking at.

He is disabled, which is another part of his experience that I will never know. I am able-bodied, walking through a world that was built for me, in this one way.

...

Once upon a time, there was a boy with oversized glasses and songsparrow skin.

This boy was born in sunny Southern California in October 1972 to two loving parents. He was a happy baby, but his mother called his birth and the aftermath “touch and go, touch and go.” The boy was born prematurely, and twin surgeries in his first year gave him a prosthetic leg and an urge to climb. His mother named him Phillip. The boy loved to play, ran screaming after his brothers in the wide palm-lined streets, climbing Eaton Canyon, skipping steps at the Rose Bowl. When the boy was young, his parents split apart, and when his mother remarried, it was to a nice man from the Midwest. Leaving his father and brother in in the canyon falls and coliseums, this boy and his mother drove their trailer to the fields of corn and wheat and cattle and hogs. Signs welcoming this boy and his family to their new home sang: Fairfield, Iowa. A Taste of Utopia.

Less than one in a hundred people in his new town looked like this boy, with his skin black and California-shining. Farmers, aging hippies, and students of the small university mostly called the town home, were mostly white, were mostly avid adherents of a small religion called “Transcendental Meditation.” The boy’s mother was a Transcendental teacher in California, and the boy spent most of his days reading with the congregants, studying the Qu’ran and the Bible at the local library.

After graduation, the boy fled back west to nurse his dreams: Would he become a spiritual teacher as well? Move to Colorado, where he’d once hiked to the Mother Cabrini Shrine with his mother? Driving through a town near the state line, the boy met a woman with skin pale as parchment, and fell in love. He was “the right color” for her; she had a Thing for boys with skin dark like his, and he was so good looking, this boy with his oversized glasses, his big ears, his blue denim shirts and smile.

The boy spent the winter holidays with the girl’s family, west across the river into Nebraska. Signs welcoming him to this new place sang: Nebraska. The Good Life. His mother had warned him about some of those towns—towns where boys with sparrow skin might find themselves on the ends of sisal ropes if they stayed after dusk—but the boy knew better, and anyway, he was in love. A few days before the year’s end, the young couple fought and the boy fled to a small farmhouse south where some of their friends were staying—a redheaded girl with her infant, and a baby-faced boy with blue eyes and a messy ducktail.

Late that night, two self-proclaimed rednecks from the girl’s hometown broke into that farmhouse, stinking of liquor and waving a gun. The boy recognized these men, real white power types, carving swastikas into fence posts and bragging about their days behind bars with the Aryan Brotherhood.

At one in the morning on New Years Eve, those two rednecks put a gun to the boy’s right temple and blew away the back of his skull. They dragged his body out of the room, leaving him to bleed out on the couch. When the boy died, he had only been alive for twenty-two years, two months, and twenty-three days.

A few weeks later, the boy’s mother and step-father published his name in the local paper.

His body was returned to Fairfield, where they had him cremated at a funeral home nearby. Phillip Devine’s ashes were buried unmarked in a cemetery a few miles away.

...

I’ve had so long with Brandon—ten years—but none of that seemed to matter now. I visited Brandon and Phillip’s graves within a week of each other.

...

Once upon a time there was a baby-faced boy with blue eyes and a ducktail.

Brandon is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, which is massive as a city as I roll through its wide avenues, peering out at the immaculate graves. The morning air is thick with fog, so impenetrable that the lights of downtown drift in and out of my sight like blinking

fireflies in the mist. I imagine Brandon sitting shotgun next to me with my car windows down. The Nebraska wind howls across the skylight and he cocks me a lopsided grin, handsome in a checkered shirt and cowboy boots, smoke billowing up from his lit cigarette into the fog above.

I show him my arm scar, the graft shiny and black where the surgeons tore away flesh and nerve, and he whistles. He pulls out the brochure he used to keep in his chest pocket. It’s creased and dog-eared, so ragged you can barely make out the title: Cross-Dressers and Transsexuals—the Uninvited Dilemma. On the inside page is a grayscale diagram of a phalloplasty. It looks a lot like mine.

Brandon is a liar. Every article I read is sure of it: “A woman who posed as a man is shot dead”… “The consequences of gender deception”…“Who’s that lady?”… Brandon gives himself new names: Billy Brinson, Billy Brandon, Charlie Braymin. Brandon tells his friends that his mom is out acting in Hollywood. His dad is in a cowboy in Memphis. His sister’s a model. He’s the star quarterback at his high school. He gets a fake ID to get a job. He forges checks to buy his girlfriends flowers and pizza and candy. He steals debit cards . Brandon is a liar.

I’m a liar. I tell people all sorts of lies about myself. I tell them what position I played when I was on the football team in high school. I tell them the name of the fraternity I rushed in college. I tell them who I would have been if I weren’t assigned incorrectly at birth, if I were given hormone blockers at eleven, if I were given testosterone at sixteen. I tell them that maybe I would’ve grown tall and wide, caught a perfect spiral on a slant route like real boys do in the movies. Sometimes it feels like the lies are the only past I have I tell Brandon about my boys: the rugby teams, the support groups. He tells me about his: Lotter and Nissen, his best friends. He roars to life to tell me about bumper skiing. How Lotter used to call him buddy. “Come on, little buddy,” Lotter would say. “We’re going driving.” We are platonic ideals of ourselves, constellations of all the possibilities we were never able to have.

He talks to me about his wide Nebraska streets, the factory walls and trailer parks and steel. I tell him that there’s a new top surgeon in Omaha, that the University health insurance covers some surgeries now, and his eyes are curled bluebirds of longing. I want so badly to ask him about Phillip but no words come.

I put my hand on Brandon’s tombstone and the wind whispers. He dissolves, a cloud wisping itself apart at my side. All that’s left is my own backlit voice, pebbles crunching under tire, an engine smoking. On his grave, etched in bronze below his birth name, is his epitaph:

Daughter, Sister, Friend. Sometimes it feels like the lies are the only past we have.

...

The sun burned so bright as I drove quick quick down Highway 1 to Fairfield. We were listening to another podcast about the murders, and I thumbed the leather on the steering wheel to the crackle over the stereo. Driving down Glasgow Road in my silver sedan, the road empty but for barren cornfields for miles in either direction, we initially missed the sign for the cemetery, a blue blur streaking by off the left shoulder. There was no driveway or clear path in, just some gravel scattered across the mud, and dying grass wilting in the wet divots dug by old car tire. The sign answered the question before I even thought to ask: Wright Cemetery is not a perpetual-care cemetery. Situated on less than an acre, its marble headstones grow out of the dust like weeds. The earth was spongy from the Spring

thaw, and my boots sank into the mud piled high around the mausoleums. After I told her the name of who we were looking for, my friend wandered off north in search of something that might lead us to him.

I knew Phillip Devine would be hard to find, had been so hard to find. On a digital database of over two hundred million, I find two locations where he might have been buried. One of them lists the wrong birthday and has him buried somewhere in southeastern Nebraska. The other, which I was able to corroborate with yellowed back-copies of the local newspaper, and which therefore seems more promising, has him buried in this small roadside graveyard in southern Iowa.

The cemetery feels translucent. In my memory it’s as foggy as the day in Lincoln even though the sun shone so bright. I try to imagine Phillip, wish so badly for him, and he does not come, a beautiful black boy with oversized glasses. This graveyard is barely an acre. I do a lot of increasingly frustrating math at my dining room table, which eventually tells me that it’s barely half an acre. Brandon’s cemetery is twenty-four times larger; a team of landscapers, florists, and receptionists care for the graves year-round; someone knows he is buried in Plot Fourteen in Section Z.

A week later I returned to Wright Cemetery, this time with the groundskeeper, Tim. He led me to an unremarkable tree at the eastern edge of the graveyard, to an unremarkable patch of grass and stones. A long moment passed. “Well,” he said. “Here he is.” Tim looked back at me and there might have been something like expectation in his gaze. I tried to guess what he might be expecting from me.

...

I’m all scrambled up. My photos, I mean. They’re all scrambled up. When I uploaded all of the pictures I took from the trip, they were all out of order.

A sign for Wright Cemetery, blue and bright; a billboard for the Lincoln Children’s Zoo (“Feed Baby Giraffes!”);

trees like spiders against the sky, blue and then gray and then black;

roads and roads and roads—Humboldt 551, Highway 46, Interstate 80, US-218; pamphlets from the funeral home (how to talk to your children about cremation, how to grieve for a special friend);

notebook paper scribbled thick with addresses—Cornhusker Highway, Main Street, Nebraska State Penitentiary;

headstones in granite and marble and limestone and bronze; pine needles; plastic flowers;

a grave you can see from the road—Brandon in bronze, birth name in bronze; daughter sister friend in bronze;

rosary beads in pink and white and blue; Mardi Gras beads in pink and white and blue; shipping containers and gas stations;

homemade lawn signs with Bible verses and slogans telling me to “lock her up!”; clippings from

the Fairfield Ledger from January third fourth and fifth of 1994; a scanned copy of an obituary from the Behner Funeral Home; farmland and melting snow;

Phillip Elliott Devine; brother;

pickup trucks; son;

the view from the hotel in Haymarket Square; a double whiskey ginger at Brandon’s bar is five dollars; friend;

an unmarked grave; a silver maple tree; a memorial for Phillip.

...

I’m all scrambled up.

Phillip, how do I get you to talk to me?

...

Once upon a time, there was a boy with black skin and a silver car, and in that car he drove to two towns to find two boys buried in two cemeteries.

On their last night of living, I imagine that Brandon and Phillip played a board game. Scrabble, maybe. I think Phillip probably kicked Brandon’s ass. They joke about their girlfriends. Of course they’re sisters.

...

Brandon and Phillip are both dead. I am just trying to make some meaning out of their deaths. I survive, and I’m alive, and I can’t help but wonder why, can’t help but try and spin their lost bodies and stolen ashes into shrines.

Is it possible to amass enough information about someone to feel like you really know them? Is it possible to learn enough facts about a person you’ve never met, that you might finally justify calling them kin, ancestor, brother?

This is a fact: Brandon Teena is incredibly easy to find online, in real life, in cemeteries, memorials, movies, books. I am combing an archive, mostly created by people whose genders were assigned correctly at bird, trying to piece together a story.

This is a fact: Phillip Elliott Devine is incredibly difficult to find. He has two graves listed online; one of them has the wrong birth date. I fabricated many of the details of his life and death. What I do know: He lived, he was shot, and he died. He is buried in an unmarked grave in a small cemetery in southern iowa. He has no archive. I want so badly to identify, which is another way of saying that I want so badly to know. I am combing through back-issues of small town newspapers, reading obituaries written mostly by people with skin pale as parchment, trying to piece together a story.

This is a fact: I am trying to claw my way into something that might make these two boys mine. I read a book about evidence; it asks me to suture my idea of evidence to ephemera, to traces: evidence as smoke. The author tells me to think of this smoke as standing against “the potential tyranny” of facts. I read a book and its author talks to me about these impulses, to accumulate facts like money and rocks and cars. He says that “trans” is movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival, that “blackness” is a condition of possibility. He asks me to think about the Queer Elsewhere of Blackness. “To feel black in the diaspora, then, might be a trans experience.” To be Phillip is to be Brandon is to be me, or someone and everyone elsewhere. I read another book whose author calls writing theory “fixing a new constellation of ideas for a time at least.” She asks me to read her book like a song. Phillip, your unmarked grave a song. Brandon, your dead name a song. We cross and leak, slip and shatter.

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