Puma Simone locked eyes with the camera Monday night, and by extension, the audience of two dozen looking back at them through Zoom. “I’ve always been on my own timeline,” said the New Haven-based artist. They were “trying to remember that there’s a greater plan to this journey,” and that things might “take longer than I want.”
But “I’m here,” they said.
Monday night marked the occasion for “Black and Blue 2,” Simone’s follow-up to a show they performed in early July. Where their first show mixed storytelling, music, and straight talk, “Black and Blue 2” found Simone sharing two stories they had written — accompanied with the realness that characterizes every Puma Simone performance.
Father’s Day
They began with a story about watching six police officers apprehend one Black man on Father’s Day, laughing as they did it. Simone thought of their brother, who had been beaten by cops.
“Keep your head up!” they recalled shouting to the man, but their voice cracked as they shouted it.
“This is what y’all doing on Father’s Day?” they then said to the officers. “I didn’t even do anything,” Simone recalled the man saying. That was when Simone said they recognized him; they had passed one another on the Green recently. “Why are there so many cops on Father’s Day?” they recalled thinking. After the officers took the man away, “the blue army retreated one by one,” except the sergeant and another officer. They were airing their opinions about the NHPD’s firing of a police officer for excessive force in June.
“What do you expect someone to do when you spit in their face?” the officer said, supporting the officer who’d been fired. “They’re going to react.”
“He should have been suspended, not fired,” the sergeant agreed. As if the force had not been excessive; “as if to say that kind of thing happens in Minneapolis, but not in New Haven,” Simone said.
One officer noticed Simone and became annoyed. “I said, ‘I don’t feel safe with you being here,’” they said. The officer “became visibly angry” and left.
“I can be on any street I want,” the sergeant said to them. Their discomfort was their problem. Simone asked if the sergeant was from New Haven. He wasn’t. “I am, and I live right here,” Simone said.
The sergeant sized them up, “maybe realizing I wasn’t a man,” Simone said. Then things got more complicated.
“Listen, do you know why we arrested him?” the sergeant said. “We arrested that man because he assaulted one woman and punched her, and threatened another woman with a knife. Are you OK with that?”
Simone felt the suspect was innocent until proven guilty. “I’m not OK with that,” they said. But it was about “how you handled him.” They mentioned the history of policing. “I said, ‘What you represent is slave patrols.’”
“I didn’t own any slaves,” the sergeant said.“The kids these days don’t respect authority,” he added. “And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why should they?’” Simone said.
They had worked in a residential program. “It was the worst job I ever had,” they said; having authority over other people was “soul-sucking.”
They squared with the sergeant. “Considering the history of this country, is it possible that collectively we have been traumatized?” they said.
“He took a step back and became quiet,” Simone related. “I saw his humanity.” Simone continued. The police department was like a building; it was an institution that was what it was no matter who was in it. “It wasn’t a question of good or bad cops.” But how do you reform it? “Exhausting,” Simone said.
“I watched him hang his head and drive away.”
Henry
“I’ve been going through different emotions,” Simone said — anger, “dealing with emotional wounds,” “healing your inner child,” “going with the flow.”
This was wrapped up with their conception of themselves as an artist. The artists they idolized made them think “you have a sacrifice so much just to pursue your passion.”
But those sacrifices, they said, “don’t fulfill me. What fulfills me is relationships, being with people I love and care about.” Good food, laughing. “I’m trying to make sure I’m saying everything I want to say.” Understanding what they wanted to do was about understanding themselves. The whole idea, they said, is “to return home to ourselves.”
That brought them to their second story, about a man named Henry, “white according to the census,” who slept on the street outside their place. Simone first met him while he was half-intoxicated, asleep in their rocking chair. “He peered up with one eye open.”
Simone said, “‘Excuse me, what are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, I just needed a nap.’”
“OK, but you can’t be here,” Simone said, and he left. They saw him again a few days later on the street. He said, “Do you remember? I was sleeping in your rocking chair the other day.” Simone laughed, and they started talking. He said he’d been drinking that night and only got two hours of sleep. He tried to enter a recovery program but “they didn’t want to help me.”
Henry was a veteran, like other homeless people Simone knew. The people they met, they said, were “troops.” They then noted that people “love their heroes, but not when they need change or need to sleep on the stoop.”
Simone saw Henry every few days, sometimes in confrontation with himself or neighbors, sometimes headed to the package store. “Are you OK?” they asked. “I’m angry,” he said. He’d gone to the hospital telling people there he was in pain, physically, emotionally, psychologically. His social security had been cut off.
“They wouldn’t take him because he wasn’t sober enough,” Simone said. “All he would say is ‘they don’t want to help me.’”
Simone heard him later shouting in the street at 3 a.m. They wondered: If he stayed on the street, would someone call the police? They recalled what a friend had said once: “The moment they stop you, you are arrested, because they have stopped you from going or doing what you are going to do next.”
The police arrived. Simone heard Henry swearing at the officers. Henry had told Simone about previous altercations with the cops. They went outside and called Henry’s name. “Henry, are you OK?” they said.
“They don’t want to help me,” Henry said. “You woke my friend up,” he said to the police.
“No, you woke me up,” they said to Henry. They defused the situation. The cops thanked them.
Henry then apologized. “I’m going to sleep on the church steps, but they don’t want to help me,” he said. Simone turned to go inside. “One more thing.” Henry said. He then told her a story, about how he’d grown up all over New England before landing in New Haven. “My father used to take me blue fishing in the harbor,” Henry said. “And with that, he departed,” Simone said.
Simone said they saw Henry just before the show “I said, ‘you know, Henry, you helped me write a piece.’”
It led Simone to a pointed tangent, about the number of artists and thespians who had been to Yale. “How many characters have been built off of people in New Haven with no reciprocity?” they said.
Single But Taken
Simone finished up with a short speech and shoutout to everyone who had tuned in to support them. “On the clock I am Britney, the name my mother gave me, the name on my state ID,” they said. Their name was “meant to be an ode to my father,” whose name is Brian.
But when people ask who they are, they said, they say they’re “single but somehow taken, heartbroken, but really I’m an artist. Somewhere in my mind I am powerful, somewhere in my heart I am lovable, but I was never taught to trust myself…. I am queer, I am Black, I’m a lover, I’m courageous. Still I struggle with fear but I’m still here.”
They started singing. “I’m still here. I’m still hurting but I’m here.”
“What’s in a name?” they continued. “Why is it important to know somebody’s name? Why do they say ‘say her name?’”
“If you’re still here,” they resumed singing, “you’re still hurting but you’re here.”
The chat window filled with support. “Love you, Puma!” wrote Bobby Craves.
“Say her name,” wrote Caitlin.
“Love you Puma! You rocking this,” wrote Julia Zhao.
“I’m still hurting but I’m still here,” wrote Sun Queen, echoing Simone. “That’s it, stay here, feel, live & learn & sit still & listen. Love.”
Charisse Alouidor wrote: “Keep them glasses on lol,” which made Simone laugh, too.
“One of the reasons I didn’t go off the deep end in college was because I had beautiful, smart, genuine, loving Black women around me,” Simone said.
“You loved us right back,” Alouidor wrote.
“This is more than a performance,” Simone said. “I just want to be up here and show you where I’m at.”
The shy and high academic achieving Hillhouse student-athlete - that I once knew as Britney - has found her social justice and artistic voice as "Puma Simone". I love it! I am proud of you for having the courage to stand up and be who you are in the world. #Sayhername
💯💪ðŸ¾
Sent in the spirit of:
Breonna Taylor
Sandra Bland
Tanisha Anderson
Mariam Carey
Darnisha Harris
Michelle Cusseaux
Shelley Frey
Kayla Moore
and many more.