▸ Column · Modern Wakanda — T'Challa, reigning king, reading a letter from a subject over a divided inheritance
BLACK PANTHER replies.
Replied to by Black Panther, with a rebuttal from Killmonger.
The letter
My father died at the start of the rains, and when his will was read aloud I learned he had left the whole of the family homestead — the land, the house, everything, worth more than a lifetime's earnings — to my brother Dominic, outright. My sister Renata and I were each given a small purse of cash, all that was left liquid, a fraction of the land's worth. Father never once spoke of money while he lived. Dominic says he earned it because he drove Father to his treatments for eight months, and that is true. But Renata and I traveled back every other week through the last year of his life, and the journeys cost the two of us a small fortune of our own. I do not want to drag my brother before a magistrate or poison every harvest gathering for the rest of our lives. Still — the purse I was handed feels less like an inheritance and more like something you press into a servant's palm at the door. Am I right to feel robbed, or is grief simply ruining my arithmetic?
Black Panther replies
Slow down. Read the document one more time, but this time read it for what it does not say. A will is a list of what a man owned. It is not a ledger of what he felt, and it is a poor translator of intention. Before you decide your father ranked his children, ask the harder question: did he mean to weigh your love against Dominic's — or did he simply reach for the crudest arithmetic a dying man can manage, that the house was indivisible and the coin was not? I inherited a throne over my whole family and watched what the bitterness of an uncounted purse can grow into. I will not tell you the wound is imaginary. It is not. Eighteen thousand for a year of crossings and grief is a real imbalance, and to feel it is not catastrophizing — it is arithmetic doing its honest work. But hear me: do not rule from that wound. The magistrate gives you a verdict and takes your brother. What you actually want is to be seen — your weekends, your cost, your grief counted aloud. Ask for that first, in the light, to his face. If recognition is possible, it is worth more than the land. Pursue the land only if he refuses to know you.
— Black Panther
Killmonger weighs in
Cousin, listen to you — "maybe he just reached for the crudest arithmetic." No. A man chose. Dominic looked at eight months of driving and your year of crossings and decided his was worth three hundred thousand more than yours, and the will is the receipt. Don't let anybody hand you "grief is ruining your math." That's the line they always use to make the robbed go quiet so the table stays pleasant. Your number's right. Feel it. Say it out loud to his face — not to be "seen," to be paid. And if he won't, the magistrate isn't poisoning the harvest. The harvest was already poisoned the day they read that purse. Just don't let it eat the rest of your years. Claim what's owed. Then walk.
— Killmonger
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