Enter Luke Cage. Impenetrable skin with a heart for social justice. An imperfect man with a love for humanity and community. A brother with swag. Goateed, coffee-bean-brown, bald and stout, he repels bad guys with flea-flicking ease, even if he doesn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound.
With a dark hoody and jeans – sans tights and a cape – he is the self-appointed protector of New York’s Harlem against gangbangers, drug dealers, rogue cops, corrupt politicians and two super bad dudes named Cottonmouth and Diamondback. He even shields a boy with his body during a guns-blazing attack on a barbershop.
A handsome fellow, his deep introspection and unflinching masculinity mixed with charm, wit and gentlemanly sensitivity make him the apple of the ladies’ eyes. He is John Shaft, Muhammad Ali, Jon “Bones” Jones and Marvin Gaye all rolled into one – a bad mother-shut-yo-mouth.
Luke Cage is a Marvel Comics hero born 44 years ago. Starring actor Mike Colter, the comic as television series debuted on Netflix last month.
Superman, I knew. Batman, I knew. Spiderman. Captain America, the Incredible Hulk… “But a bulletproof black man?” I thought to myself. “This I gotta see.”
The Luke Cage character first appeared in 1972 – born Carl Lucas and raised in Harlem. I was 12 back then and a Marvel Comics reader. But somehow I missed Cage. Still, I had no shortage of caped crusaders to emulate and imagine coming to the rescue of Gotham City.
As a child growing up on the West Side (Chicago), heroes sometimes seemed in short supply, distant, or mostly imaginary. But in hindsight, I know we always had our share – real-life super men and women who shielded us, who often did the impossible.
I thought about some of the “super” men I know: Paul J. Adams; Rev. Michael Pfleger; Phillip Jackson of The Black Star Project; Bill Curry at Breakthrough Urban Ministries; Rev. Wayne Gordon of Lawndale Community Church; and countless others, like the dozens of men who answered my call to help me read to children on Thursday’s at south suburban Matteson Elementary School – in our effort to “be” the change we want to see.
That’s the moral of the Luke Cage story. “I couldn’t just lay in the cut anymore. …Call it a vigilante or a superhero,” Cage explained to Detective Misty Knight. “Call it what you will. But, like it or not, I finally accepted that that someone had to be me.”
Whether bulletproof or not, me too. How about you?
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