Season 2, Episode 9: “Breaking Unbreakable Things” ft Cheakaity 

NARRATION: 

I found my way to Cheakaity Brown’s music via these very charming social media videos where he would cook dinner while cooking up a beat.

Toss some potatoes, fry some chicken, right next to a midi synthesizer and a laptop on the kitchen counter. At the end of the short window into his day, he’d have a delicious looking meal, and a funky sound to go along with it, bop ya head to. This was it! I thought. Food and music, yes, the match made in heaven: culture as it is lived. And in bite sized, still sizzling pieces. Cheakaity was letting us experience links I had always known were deeply important.  

Cheakaity Brown is a tall, young brother with swag. You’ll often find him decked out in sunglasses, and an early hip hop style kangol hat, often of course, with headphones. There are layers of gold necklaces which shine from his chest, and they're adorned with the occasional ruby or pearl. He looks confident and so, so natural on a mic, in a studio, on a keyboard. Like he was born for it. 

But the truth is you never know what calls someone to stand in front of a microphone. You never know what provokes them to the stark vulnerability of singing their heart out in front of a room full of people. For Cheakaity, it began with a fight for his life. 

My name is Meklit and this is Movement: music and migration, remixed.

Meklit: Can you tell us the story of your name?

Cheakaity: The story of my name. So, Chea in the Liberian Kru dialect, represents ownership.  Kaity means to split. So, together means the one that can break unbreakable things in two. Heavy name. I don't know why my dad, I don't know what that was all about, that's what it means.

Meklit: And do you think that he wanted you to break unbreakable things?

Cheakaity: Our immigrant parents, they always want to bestow some type of prophecy onto their children. You're gonna be like our Moses, cause they want, you know, the best for their children. And I've done things where it felt like odds were stacked completely against me and I've overcome it.

Meklit:  Like what?

Cheakaity: So for example I'm a person that cheated death. 

NARRATION:  Cheakaity grew up in Prince George's County, Maryland, right outside DC, the largest majority black county in America. And he represents the complex strains of Black culture in this country. His mom was from the American south. His dad was a Liberian immigrant. On Cheakaity’s records, you can hear him channeling the Baptist church, the R&B greats, and the local giants of Go-Go music. But you can also hear the West African church where his father preached every Sunday, where the pews were lined with shakers and tambourines. 

Cheakaity was drawn to music as far back as he can remember.  At seven years old, he was already playing drums for his dad's church. And learning to cook fried chicken skin and apple pie from his grandma, his southern grandma. He was full of energy and life. But one day when Cheakaity was nine, he didn't feel right. At first, his parents thought he was just trying to play hooky.

Cheakaity: Then the next day I'd get up, collapsed in the hallway I can't move. I can't move. I'm like freaking out parents come upstairs and there's like, okay, that's definitely strange. 

NARRATION: So they went to the doctor. The doctor ran some tests. The family left, but then the doctor called them. 

Cheakaity: I found something And you need to rush him to the ER, like, right now. You're racing against the clock at this point. 

NARRATION: The doctor had found a rare auto-immune disorder.

Cheakaity: Called Guillain Barre syndrome. So pretty much what was happening, I had like a common cold and your white blood cells supposed to fight off the common cold. But they continue to fight and they were actually eating my nerve endings causeing me to be a paraplegic. Like if you took a spoon and just like scraped it against my hand, I couldn't feel it. I was on track to die, I was on track to be a vegetable.

Meklit: Wow. And you were nine years old? 

Cheakaity: nine years old 1999.

NARRATION: The paralysis was inching up his body, from his feet and hands, to his chest, and neck, and head. But Cheakaity, remember, came from a church family, on both sides, they were not about to just sit back and see what the doctors would do. 

Cheakaity: You got the Southern side that's coming through and it's real tactile. So put the hands on your forehead. Oh Lord, bless them all. Same when they're shaking. You sitting there, I'm sitting there paralyzed. Just, just in bed. And then, you get the same thing on my dad's side, it's just louder and you just don't know what they're saying.

And it's just all kinds of screams and chants and stomping and just like clapping and just chaos.

Meklit: Love chaos. 

Cheakaity: But, true to the Cheakaity name, the person that like if anybody's gonna get through this It's gonna be the one that can get through something that's unbeatable.

Meklit: And What was the turning point?

Cheakaity: The turning point was it stopped in my eyes and it just went back down.

Meklit: So what was it like to learn to play music again after that? 

Cheakaity: So it was frustrating coming back because the doctor's orders were okay, you can go back and do these things, but slowly and don't over exert yourself. That was the one rule. So from there, I start to lean more into the singing

 Meklit: Mmm

Cheakaity: We had like, a choir leader that wanted to give me like, a solo. So, oh yeah, you had like a miracle, so you gotta, we're gonna give you the solo and that's going to be like your testimony songs. And he taught me this song. And from there I learned, oh I can, I can sing like a, like a soloist. I didn't know that. I don't know at what point I would have discovered it had it not been for the ordeal I've already been through. 

NARRATION: According to Cheakaity, there are gifts that you are born ready to reveal in the world. The ones that are obvious, that you get recognized for from the beginning. And then there are the gifts you have to search for, the ones that get uncovered by life’s bruises, that must be honed with time and perseverance. For Cheakaity, singing was exactly that. It was a buried treasure. And once he found it, he was never going to let it go.  

The late, great scholar, musician and revolutionary activist Bernice Johnson Reagon said “When we sing, we announce our existence”. For Cheakaity, singing was that megaphone. A way to reflect the wholeness of who he was. 

Meklit: So, Washington, D.C. is like, It's such an iconic black city, even the way the city was founded and formed and as you know, well first I guess, did you think of yourself as Liberian American and how did like global blackness feel to you growing up like how did you identify?

Cheakaity: I didn't think I started identifying until I was an adult because,

Meklit: As Liberian American? Or as?

Cheakaity: As Liberian and African American. It was just always something I had to explain and it just always felt like something I had to be on the defense about because it wasn't necessarily cool to be African around like black people. And, you know, all the other cultures that you might meet are the minority actually growing up. That's one thing that was a big culture shock when I started growing up and traveling outside of like DC and the rest of the country, especially the rest of the world. And I was like, oh, I didn't really realize how black this area was. And I just thought that everywhere just had a lot of black people.

Yeah, I didn't really see, I always knew I was different growing up. I just knew I wasn't like everybody else and, but I would try to be. But, of course, being the kid with the funny name, Oh, you're the African one! Oh, our African cousins are here, so they're making all the jokes, and they're doing all the, all the jokes you can think of.

It wasn't until like I'm an adult where I had like some sense of pride in it. Yes, I am a black man. Yes, I am an african american man, but I'm also a West african first generation. I also know exactly where I can trace my lineage back at least on this side I know what my name means. I know it has meaning. I know it has purpose. And that gives me some sense of direction. And I know I have like a lot of friends that don't, can't say the same.

Meklit: Yeah, I identify with a lot of that, you know, growing up. I grew up in Brooklyn, and I definitely got called African booty scratcher more times than I could count, you know? Like, I feel like there's a whole podcast to be done just on that term you know

Cheakaity: Oh that would make a, that would be a, listen, the name alone. The African booty scratcher podcast, it would, that would do Pulitzer prize, probably winning. 

Meklit: you might not be wrong

Cheakaity: Because everybody automatically knows where you're going with it. Everybody automatically knows the feeling attached to that term. It's like having to explain yourself, having to explain your school lunch, so the first reaction is to make fun of it, which we learned later. It's like a term of endearment. Like, you know, they, it's still all love, but they, that's what we do. They poke fun at each other. So yeah.

Meklit: Was there a moment where that kind of claiming of pride and identity kind of really took root?

Cheakaity: Being young, I think there was a turning point where like, I became like to my adulthood when I started saying my name and then like women's like, oh, that's so beautiful Oh my god. I love that name. I was like, oh, yeah, cool Well, you're like but growing up it's like, you know, you get oh, what's your name? What and you get laughed at but when I stopped getting laughed at they start looking at as beauty. I was like Yeah, by the way, you know, , this is my name. 

And then of course when Black Panther came out and there just a whole nother movement of wanting to be proud to be African again. I was like, oh, it's cool now. Great. So things go in cycles. Kind of like fashion. So it was like the Afro centric movement that it's, it's in vogue for a while. Then as we move on to something else and it comes back and we'll do something else. And a funny thing is like one of the characters in the movie, the antagonist, his name was Killmonger. 

ARCHIVAL: There’s about two billion people all over the world that looks like us, but their lives are a lot harder. Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all. 

And what tools?

Cheakaity: His dad was directly from the place Wakanda, the mythical African nation. And his mother was African American. I was like, would you look at that? Wow. So I understood, I automatically identified with what he was saying.

He understands the black african american struggle because he experienced it firsthand but he also knows it has a rich history of his lineage and he understands kingship and kingdom and all this other stuff and he understands inheritance. He understands all these like royal concepts, but he exists in this reality as a black man, a black American man, which I thought was so profound. I said, wow, that's exactly what being Cheakaity every day is like. It’s like experiencing that. 

And then seeing people just like have their think pieces about the movie and seeing people show up to the theaters in like all the traditional garb they can and just going all out for some place that doesn't really exist And then now they got them thinking so. Okay, cool. Now, I want to see where I'm from and I want to know, Who am I? The sense of identity. And now it's widely accepted when a couple of years ago it’s still African booty scratchers. Still, they're making the jokes. It's like, we're accepted, but not quite accepted. But definitely the last 10 years, that was a moment I can definitely look up and say, okay, now it's acceptable.

NARRATION: Growing up, Cheakaity never visited Liberia with his father. About ten years ago, he started thinking about closing the circuit of his lineage, and going back to the coast where all of his ancestors departed the African continent, hundreds of years apart from each other. And he wasn't the only one. In recent years the whole coast of West Africa has been experiencing a surge of interest. An organization in Ghana was even sponsoring African Americans to travel to Africa. They were calling it “The year of Return.”  

Cheakaity: And it represented, how many years? 400 years since I think the slave ships left that coast and came to America. And this is supposed to represent like a great year of returning back home. And so they had like, all kinds of festivals, they had something called Afrocella there, it was like Coachella, but it was like a big Afrobeats festival.

And there were, Ghana was opening up like the ports and everything. And it was like, hey, come, we want all the African Americans to come and see your home and see what it's like to be over here in the motherland.

Meklit: Did you ever go back? 

Cheakaity: See, that's another, that's another long part of the story. The one thing that stopped me from going over there get this. So I have to take the malaria shot and the yellow fever shot.

Meklit: Oh, I know. 

Cheakaity: So I go to get my shots. I take the malaria shot. No problem. About to the yellow fever shot. They said, there's one question we have to ask you, probably doesn't apply to you, but it's a very rare case that if you so happen to have Guillain Barre syndrome, you're going to, there's a 50 50 chance you can get again, if you take this shot. And I was like, 

Meklit: If you take yellow fever? 

Cheakaity: If I take yellow fever, I said, as a matter of fact, I have had Guillain Barre syndrome. And I was like, what are the odds of the one rare, random thing that I just so happened to have when I was nine is the one thing stopped me from going over there. 

Meklit: It's really, it really requires you to like face something in yourself to like get the courage to like move forward. 

Cheakaity: Yes, it's one of those. My dad is, he's 100 percent against it. He's like, no, I'm not going to that again. I almost lost you once. I'm not going to like risk that again. Me it’s like, I'm faced with something. It's like, all right. Am I the one that can really break unbreakable things or is lightning going to strike twice? Am I going to, I said, gamble it's with, it's with my life. So scary stuff. But 

Meklit: That is scary. 

Cheakaity: I think more so of my fear of death is my fear of living unfulfilled. 

If you're going to do something, do it in a way that will echo throughout time. That after you're gone, it's like, okay, you made this impact here. You did what was inside of you to do. And when your grandson, five grandsons down, Oh yeah Cheakaity. You had a great grandfather Cheakaity, and he was a musician and he was a chef. And he comes from his father's side that came here from Liberia. And his great grandfather was a warrior and that guy did magic and His mom is from the South and everything. And they, he comes from people that can cook and everything. And so now you can go and do these things because you're empowered to do it through Cheakaity who was here in 2023, you know. So that echo and eternity thing is really big for me. So like, I think I'm more than afraid of dying, I'm afraid of dying not having done all that I was supposed to do, or all that I could do.

NARRATION: Cheakaity's latest album is called Grown Man, and you can find them wherever you listen to music. And for those of you in the DC area, you can find him in any number of clubs around town testifying from the stage. I can say from experience, he puts on a damn good show. 

Movement is produced by Ian Coss and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our editor is Megan Tan. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World. We are supported by the Mellon Foundation and distributed by PRX.

If you enjoyed this story, consider sending it to a friend, or leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. Believe me, this stuff really does help folks to find the show. If you happen to be curious about my albums, or performances, you can learn more at meklitmusic.com. Movement will be back with new episodes every other Tuesday through the fall.