I stopped crying when I was 17 years old. 

I got tired of being teased about being sensitive. I would later learn that I am an empath and therefore feel things deeply — an explanation that wouldn’t have helped me much in grade school, where I was called all kinds of names for crying. In junior high, I began wandering down the wrong side of the tracks, hanging out with the crowd that wasn’t welcomed in stores — much less homes. I was still crying then, but it was done secretly in the shower, or my room under the blankets. 

By 17 the crying was gone. The kid that once lived in me moved out. I was kicked out of school in 11th grade. I was fully in the street by the time I started 12th grade at my new school, which was notorious for jumping kids, so I carried a knife inside my jacket pocket—every day. And because God looks after babies and fools, I never had to use it. 

I was so far gone, that when I see pictures of myself from back then, I have a tough time recognizing that kid. I see the hurt he’s hiding. I see the rage building up. I see the tears trapped in his body, dragging his shoulders down. 

And because life doesn’t stop, so many sad things kept happening. One of my closest friends was gunned down and left on the street to die in broad daylight. My grandmother died. Another close friend went to jail for life. And my mother had begun kicking me back out into the streets that I kept running from. During all of this — the bouts of homelessness, the death of childhood friends, the loss of the only woman who loved me unconditionally from a baby to a boy — I couldn’t cry.

It’s like tears got trapped in the place between my age and my size. I was shadowboxing my way into manhood, but nothing looked the part. I was struggling with what I thought things should be and what I got, and I suffered because I couldn’t make it right.   

My therapist would later tell me that somewhere along the trauma of my life, I lost my separation cry — the cry children make in the crib when they want attention. It’s the cry that sends their caretakers scrambling to make sure they haven’t wet themselves. The cry that babies use to make sure you are coming if they need you. 

“When you did cry and no one came for you,” my therapist tells me years later. The words hit like stone. I finish the rest for her: “So if no one’s coming, what’s the point of crying?”

I leave the words between us like an awkward couple at dinner waiting for the check. 

But it all made sense. The problem was that just because I’d lost something, it didn’t mean I would ever find it again. A fundamental understanding of boxing does not make someone a fighter —meaning that to get back to the boy who lost his way, I was going to have to stop thinking and feel my way through. I was going to have to cry. 

But I hadn’t cried in years. And to understand this is not just to understand my personal story, but to understand the years of abuse that Black America has heaped onto Black boys. You’d have to look at all the ways that America hates Black boys. It would be to truly examine the hatred that killed Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Kalief Browder, and XXXTentacion. 

It would be to undo the years of emasculating young Black men for feeling deeply. You’d have to examine the trauma created by family members who tease and yell at Black boys mercilessly for crying because they are upset. One would have to go all the way back to slavery, up through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement and still, they’d probably be unable to pinpoint the ways in which we hurt young Black men by teaching them how to shut down parts of themselves.

“You better stop crying before I give you something to cry about.”

So somewhere between the chaos and the violence, I lost my tears and ultimately became an extremely angry adult. I’ve spent money and time undoing what I didn’t create, and even today, I have trouble crying over extremely sad events that are worthy of my emotions.

This brings me to Wallo267, one-half of the extremely popular Million Dollaz Worth of Game podcast he hosts with his cousin, former rapper, Gillie Da Kid. 

On a recent episode of Shannon Sharpe’s podcast, Club Shay Shay, Wallo, who once served some 20 years in prison for armed robbery as a teen, has spent his freedom trying to ensure that no other Black boy has to experience what he went through. But, what’s different in Wallo’s retelling of his past life is that he not only ignores the glorification of prison —a staple in hip-hop culture —- it is his vulnerability.

“What you doing, man? You scared?” an inmate asked young Wallo when he saw him wearing his boxers in the communal shower, Wallo told Sharpe. “I realized a shower wasn’t that important. I can just wash up in my sink for a while until I get used to going down there. I was scared to death.”

That fear drove Wallo for the majority of his prison sentence. He told Sharpe that he had to let go of his outside thinking and developed a crazy mind to survive. He knew that once he got out he’d spend the rest of his life trying to make sure that no other Black boy ever experienced the nightmare that he had.

And then, on a March 2022 episode of Million Dollaz Worth of Game, in a Chicago basement while speaking to rapper Lil Durk and about 100 of his boys, Wallo told the story of how he lost his brother and the anger and pain he had to let go of in wanting to avenge his death.

Wallo cried. Ugly cried tears that wouldn’t stop coming. He cried the kind of cry that makes it hard for him to speak. It happens every time he talks about his older brother’s death and forgiving his brother’s killer. 

“I said, ‘No. I’m going to live for my brother, my grandma, my brother’s kids, my mama,’” he said. “I’m going just tell you something, Shannon. I’m not built like that—to go kill no Black man. I’m not built like that. I’m not designed like that. I’m not tough like that. I’m not ruthless like that. I’m not heartless like that. That’s just not me … I don’t give a f— how I die, I don’t care what happen, but if a Black man kill me, you’re going to hear my scream until life end … You’re going to hear my pain. My tears is going to flood the ghettos of America.”

Because Wallo now knows what Wallo then didn’t: That killing a Black man doesn’t even the score; it just perpetuates the pain. So he cries. Openly. For all the times he held his tears in and for all the times he hid under his prison blanket and wept (he’s talked about this too.) He’s open and vulnerable about what he’s learned and what he’s lost and he knows that to change this —  to change the echoes of “Man up” that permeate the culture — it’s going to take a complete reboot of the emotional makeup that Black parents pass on to their sons. 

“It started from when a little boy is young and he’s playing on the swing and he falls, he starts crying,” Wallo explained. “‘Boy be tough! Don’t cry!’ We’re taught to ignore and bury our emotions and our feelings and our vulnerability. That’s not cool. … It’s a real big programming that took place by us alone. So, how do we come up out of that? It’s going to be deep. It’s going to take a lot.”

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