How We Keep Each Other Alive
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by Amber Butts
I take my shoes off and step into the dirt. The ground is cold, damp enough to come up through my feet and ease something that had been tight all morning. Leaves press, then give, then press again. The soil shifts under me, not giving way, just answering back. I stand there long enough to feel my weight land fully. Closer to the ground the air changes—wet wood, earth opened up, living and dying at the same time. I breathe it in and feel it drop low, where breath is supposed to sit.
The trees hold. Underneath them, everything is moving—roots crossing, fungi stretching out, passing water, sending signals. A tree falters and the others adjust. Nothing here stands alone. I stay until my breathing matches that pace. Not slow. Just steady. People who live close to catastrophe learn how to read the air. They have had to. The sky shifts. The wind turns and we pause. Smoke moves in a pattern, something is already wrong. We learn to pay attention long before anything official tells us what is happening.
I remember the year everyone was afraid of Y2K. The news talked about systems failing, planes falling out of the sky, the country going dark all at once. People laughed. My grandmother did not. She filled the garage with what we would need—canned food stacked against the wall, water, candles, matches, extra clothes folded into plastic bins, bags of rice, things that could last. She checked the stacks more than once, tightening lids, moving things closer to the door. I learned the shape of preparation by watching her hands. She was not waiting for the government. She did not expect anything from it.
Five years ago, a building down the street from me caught fire. They said it was arson. It had burned before. Security didn’t stop it. Police didn’t stop it. The fire spread. Within a couple of miles, homes were catching—our stairs, the roof. The air turned grey. Ash fell for weeks. It clung to everything. Our hair. Our clothes. The back of our throats. This country lets things burn and calls it an incident.
Some people stayed. My neighbors stood outside with hoses and buckets, passing water between them, refusing to let the fire take more than it already had. They won that day.
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I left. I packed what I could carry and got out. In one house, someone stood in the yard with a hose, feet planted. In another, a car filled quickly—papers, a bag of clothes, a photo slipped into a side pocket. Doors shut. Engines turned over. Two ways of holding on.
A pair of shoes hangs from a telephone line, tied there so their memory wouldn’t disappear.
I press my toes deeper into the soil and feel how much of that is still here. Jars line shelves, lids sealed tight. Water is caught and stored. Seeds are dried and labeled. Someone teaches another person how to keep a fire through the night. Names move hand to hand.
Who has space? Who has food? Who can come get you? Who can take your kids if you need to run?
A plane moves overhead, loud enough to cut through everything.
It’s been storming for four days. Last night I thought they were bombing the city. Helicopters circled. Rain came down hard, water running over streets and freeways, pooling at the curbs, pushing up onto the sidewalks. The water didn’t drain. It gathered, moved, found its way into everything it could reach. A family rushed off the freeway. It looked like it was on fire. My neighbors gathered at the end of the block, swaying in place, the shock easing as someone stepped out with a phone and yelled “it’s fireworks”. Fireworks from a tech company across the bridge. No one told us. People were still outside, trying to make sense of it.
I don’t look up. I know that sound—cargo, military flights, crates strapped down.
Lebanon. Palestine. Iran. Sudan.
Philadelphia. A rowhouse. Eleven Black people murdered. Five children. A fire left to burn across sixty-one houses over two blocks, two hundred fifty without homes. Tulsa. Greenwood. Burned.
The sound passes. The roots keep moving. Water moves through the trees. The ground keeps its pace.
I sit down and put my hands into the dirt. It holds. Not symbolic. Just real. Wood smoke drifts through. Someone nearby tending a fire, keeping heat going, making sure something lasts through the night. Somewhere else, land holds. Water tanks sit beneath gutters. Food is put up for later. Women move between tasks—checking levels, tightening lids, passing instructions. A list is on the wall. Another hand learns the steps. A kitchen feeds a block. A table holds names written down and passed along. A door stays open longer than usual. The same hands that seal jars have touched ash.
I close my eyes and take one deeper breath. The soil under me. The smoke in the air. The sound that just passed overhead. All of it here. I open my eyes. A leaf falls near my foot and rests against the dirt. I stay a second longer, then stand. The ground leaves a trace on my skin. I don’t brush it off.
The sky keeps moving. The ground holds. We keep each other alive.
Amber Butts is a Black mama, abolitionist, and advocate for collective freedom and self-determination. Rooted in Oakland, she moves through worlds of play and repair, treating tenderness, nuance, and joy as abolitionist strategies of survival and transformation. Her role as an organizer is guided by expansive, nuanced visions of Blackness that refuse constriction and one-dimensionality. Her work—through cultural strategy, storytelling, and grief practice—carries forward traditions of mutual aid, imagination, and struggle across generations. Amber’s favorite freedom practice is observing how non-human beings organize to confront power and protect one another, lessons that shape her abolitionist commitments and her vision for interdependent futures.