Grief Pedigree: Ka in the Good Hands of the Creator

Imaga via Ka/Website

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No Christmas wishlists, all Douglas Martin got was Santa’s claws.

Kaseem Ryan was of a long tradition of bright Black boys being raised in the mouth of hell who were convinced that maybe, just maybe, words can save us.

I’m sure you’ve heard that old saying about making it out the hood. But most of the brothers I grew up with who wound up selling crack only burrowed deeper into the streets, or they made it out in the back of an unmarked Crown Victoria—or a glossy wooden box buried deep in the ground. I knew a lotta niggas with a good jumpshot, but aspirationally, they couldn’t measure up to the boys who had been playing in AAU since they were seven.

Some of us had bars but not the will to succeed. Some of us had bars but we succumbed to not having elders who believed in us. For all of us, the glass ceiling was reinforced with a second layer and we broke through anyway. For a select few, we chipped away at that ceiling until we were men and the glass finally broke. How can you be a “late bloomer” when your seed was planted in Dante’s Inferno?

I was listening to Ka’s verse on Navy Blue’s “In Good Hands”—the highlight of Navy’s debut LP—at the gym the morning he passed away. There were yet to be any online tributes or emotional offerings to the memory of the spartan auteur of hip-hop’s underground. In these moments, in a sterile L.A. Fitness on Highway 99 in North Seattle—just a few short blocks from where ladies of the street wave at handsome (and otherwise unhandsome) passersby, usually men, in the pursuit of rent money—it was just me, a few strangers on ellipticals and treadmills in various degrees of sweating through their t-shirts and tank tops, a few TVs silently broadcasting the NFL Network, and what might be my favorite rap song of the decade blasting at near-obscene volumes through a fairly pricey set of Bose earbuds. (One sign of many that I have officially “made it.”)

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Navy opens the song sipping a piping hot Mediterranean delicacy and obliquely references L.A.’s Zoot Suit Riots (no Cherry Poppin’ Daddies)—while ending it by discovering the root of why he feels anxious around white people; a par-for-the-course observation of living in an America no less hungry for Black and Brown flesh than it was before the cultural rise of BLM and DEI.

Over the chirping, whistling, street corner blues of the sample Navy loops, you can almost hear the young rapper stepping into his purpose in real time. Although his early EPs and features—like his sleepily evocative verse on Earl Sweatshirt’s “The Mint”—showed promise in the then-burgeoning generation of MCs with high emotional intelligence, Sage Elsesser truly became a sage after formally collaborating with Ka. Navy’s reverence and willingness to learn from the perch of what could be deemed as his spiritual predecessor makes itself evident when he wraps up a neat sixteen and cedes the remainder of verse space to his elder’s sprawling musings, adding up to double the length of the song’s first stanza.

“Tried the stovetop to hop off the ol’ block,” begins Ka’s verse, recalling the scores of budding chefs cooking their way out of the hood, watching the corner and offering hands when the order is up. The bard of Brownsville alludes to the service of a soldier in the streets “years before I enlisted with Navy;” traces the line from brandishing his service weapon to his FDNY captain’s rank. Essentially, “In Good Hands” is primarily a showcase for Ka; a spotlight in which his symbolic passing of the torch to Navy was rendered more meaningful.

“The stress of empty pantries kept us antsy.” There is a world that exists in this bar. A hard-earned stroke of grace; a multitude of life paths springing from it. The line is Gwendolyn Brooks-esque in a way I’ve rarely associated with rap writing before or since. People ask why I find drug dealers driving British imports to be so glamorous. It’s because the first sign of wealth I saw in an existence where the only items in my kitchen cupboard were a box of expired, stale cereal and the crack pipe my biological mother hid behind it.

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“The stress of empty pantries kept us antsy.” Eight words that hold so much weight speak mightily to the gift of economy in Ka’s words. Words that take me back to the crunch of gravel driveways and food scarcity. Words that push me toward the bougie grocery store in my neighborhood—with its $13 bottles of fresh tangerine juice and organic bell peppers—instead of the Safeway across the street. Words that make me think about how my love of words helped me climb out of the hole Tom Waits sang about; one they didn’t bother to push Wallace into when they killed him.

On one hand, it has been pretty incredible to see mainstream outlets give space to celebrating the body of work of a true-to-life Black genius. On the other hand, the outpouring of gratitude in the wake of this man’s death has inspired me to pull the mirror around on myself yet again. To wonder if I have the talent that will only be celebrated after my demise. To take stock of the reluctance I’ve had over the past several years to do more than merely “stick to the subject,” as is the parlance of my field and not make it too much about the crumbled walls of my youth that partly made me want to be a music journalist—or just… a somebody—to begin with. I wanted to hide behind being good at my job, to see if that was good enough. It was sometimes.

But as I’m sweating through an R.M.F.C. tee on the open upper floor of the gym chain I’m a member of, I’m thinking about how Ka used writing as spiritual release as much as art form. The attention a Black writer can get for writing well about the heavy aspects of their individual Black experience can be too much to bear sometimes. But there was once a brother from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville who never flinched at that responsibility. Not even in the face of New York Post hit pieces written on the doorstep of Trump’s America.

Sometimes being good on your own merits—completely divorced from the context of what got you there—can look like avoiding your purpose. I’m too in touch with the things I can’t see to believe in coincidences. A message given to me from the universe through Ka on the morning of his heartbreaking passing is too clear a sign to resume that search for spiritual relief through writing.

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