I don’t usually do this with celebrities. But this is a special case. We’re connected.
I’ve written a lot about the Marvel Studios film “Black Panther,” before, during, and especially after its record-breaking run in theaters. But now my thoughts are on the man who played the title character: Chadwick Boseman, who died August 28 after a long and mostly hidden battle with colon cancer. He was 43.
I’m writing this about an hour or two after I heard the news. It’s one of those events that I’ll always remember where I was: reclining in bed, from a live text from my friend Johanthan, who’d just heard.
Joe probably thought of me because I’m one of the bigger Black Panther fans he knows. When we lived in the same city, Joe and I would encounter each other at DragonCon, a massive annual festival celebrating all things pop culture/sci-fi/comic books/gaming/etc. So he saw me the first year I cosplayed as the Marvel superhero, back in 2015, well before any of the BP film appearances starting in 2016 with “Captain America: Civil War” and culminating with last year’s “Avengers: Endgame.”
That’s the first commonality between Boseman and myself — dressing up like this great cat character, probably about the same time. (He looked better in his costume, though.)
The second: we share Howard University (the greatest of HBCUs) as our alma mater. I’m his upperclassman by several years and had graduated before he attended. But we’ll always be fellow Bison.
The third, and saddest: My maternal grandfather’s life was claimed by the same disease, almost exactly 19 years earlier. Granddaddy also had Alzheimers’ but the cancer was the killer.
Boseman was first diagnosed in 2016. That year, I’d had a scare myself and had my first colonoscopy. Black men especially are at risk from colon cancer and doctors recommend we get checked much sooner than white men, who typically don’t get the screening until age 50.
All was well for me. Not so with Boseman.
And so I find myself feeling so much like the supporting cast in the mid-movie Warrior Falls scene of “Black Panther.” At the time, I thought it served as a minor allegory for the seismic political shift of the 2016 election, though Hillary Clinton was certainly no T’Challa and Donald Trump was no Erik Killmonger.
But now, with our country reeling from unrest from unresolved systemic racial injustice and a pandemic exacerbated by our leader disrupting government beyond its ability to handle a crisis that only it is best equipped to do, that feeling and allegory both seem all too apt. And unlike a superhero genre film, there’s no near-guarantee of a final-act comeback.
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One more bit about Boseman.
He changed my life a little. Not simply because of the character he played in his biggest role, but HOW he played it. The long version is at the end of this November 2017 blog post, but the short version is this: It was his decision to play Black Panther with an African accent. That may seem like a small thing, but it was a bigger deal than I realized at first.
“The projects I end up doing [are always those] that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people — to Black people.”
@chadwickboseman
He did this with pretty much all his roles. Thurgood Marshall. James Brown. Jackie Robinson. And, of course, Black Panther. What he probably understood was that although he was focused on lifting his culture, the rest of the world benefited as well. And that simple decision with T’Challa’s accent, being king of a never-colonized African nation, went a long way toward doing that work.
So now, when I cosplay as Panther, I do my best to use a similar accent.
(His will always be better.)
Rest well, Mr. Boseman. You were my little college brother. You were a quietly heroic inspiration, more than we knew. You will likely — hopefully — inspire many of us to treat our health and others more kindly. And you were truly a king of an actor.
As that Wakandan king often said … “PHAMBILI!” (Onward!)
And onward go we shall. May we walk as well as you did.
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