To that end, I get stuck, in the retelling, on my own casualness. I’ve never forgotten the mortification of the moment, the shock, the sensation of all the blood running out of my face. Yet, here I’m sanguine. “It’s just a thing that happens,” I’ll say with the sort of horrific matter-of-factness that my parents have adopted when talking about their lives in segregated Baltimore. Is the point that some part of the past will always sound horrific as a price for living in a presumably better future?
* * *
—
Because of the incident at school, the principal decided she wanted to put me and Prentice in racial sensitivity training. Both of us? Honey! The two of us, together, learning about difference. My mother, perspiring in Betty Grey’s suit in the humid late spring, was having absolutely none of it. She walked into the principal’s office in that black suit with white stripes, spoke to her at length, and then walked out and took me home. I don’t know what Betty Grey’s suit told them, but you should already know I didn’t take anybody’s racial sensitivity training. Obviously. I mean, hello, I am problématique! And besides, my parents didn’t sacrifice themselves, their time, their prospects, the clothes on their backs, for me to go to school, get called a nigger, and then take a class about it.
My mother showed up to fight for the world my parents so desperately wanted for us, a world that must have seemed ephemeral and fleeting in that moment. I’m sure they never thought that the world they were trying to craft would be perfect for me; why would they? But this particular controversy—a mix of nineties bureaucracy and age-old prejudice—must have seemed a strange kind of trouble.
* * *
—
In the bubble, however, the trouble didn’t last. Things went back to normal relatively quickly. And, to be frank, I was glad. I was a fifth grader and I thought the moment was an anomaly, completely divorced from me or who I might be able to be. It was all just so weird and random and nobody really disliked blacks, so what was one really to do? Besides, we were studying the Middle Ages that year, so there were, truly, larger concerns like flying buttresses and the plague. I never forgot the incident, though, never figured out where to put it.
Prentice and I didn’t stop being friends. In retrospect, maybe this reflects badly on me. I can feel your judgment. And I would like to remind you that you are judging a ten-year-old. And I am judging you for that. So. We’re all just trying here, okay? Maybe it doesn’t reflect badly. Maybe it’s like one of those “heartwarming” race movies where a white person with suspect ideas and a black person become friends and they both learn a lesson about difference except nothing that’s learned is new to the black person, who was just going about their black business when this whole thing started. If you see it that way, please feel free to option this story for an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie. (I am not above this, honey.) But that’s not why I’m telling this to you. Oh God! Can you imagine? All those trees chopped down and made into books so I could tell you about how we all bleed red, white, and blue? How embarrassing for everyone involved. How embarrassing for those trees! No. I’m telling you this because it was a moment that felt both strange and familiar, and I tucked it away inside myself, to fidget with and worry at until its rough parts disappeared and it shone. I’m telling you this because the more I think about that incident, that moment in a bubble, the more it tells me about the delicate, permeable utopia my parents were striving to create. And it suggests to me that they succeeded.
I know that my parents wanted me to live in a better world than they had, but they must have also desperately hoped I’d be prepared to live in the real world. Why else would they teach me to raise my voice against injustice, to write letters, to make hard choices? And so that painful moment in the classroom was as much an answer to their prayers as the moments of triumph and discovery and freedom, of which there were far more. As they prepared me for the world, they prepared the world for me, one difficult decision at a time. And it’s a world that’s complex and misshapen and poised for discovery and ripe with promise. I look back and I can see the dreams they had, glimmering and evanescent and steely and diffuse, forming a trail from the place where we started to the place where we are, and the place we hope to be. And I know what it means when they sigh, “There’s never any trouble here.”
* We were unaware that we were watching a television show that had gone off the air thirty years before our births. But even if we had known that, it wouldn’t have mattered. Are we serious about getting Timmy out of that well or not, dammit?
Molly, Urine Danger Girl
Technically, I grew up in a dangerous area. Sometimes people got killed nearby. I never saw any dead bodies, although once the movie Homicide needed a kid to play a corpse at a crime scene set a couple of doors up. They approached my mother and asked her if one of her sons wanted to earn money lying in the street. I was very excited about this; I thought that this would be my big break. She was like, “Rosa Parks didn’t sit in the front of that bus so that you could lie in a gutter and collect Equity points.” (I’m paraphrasing.) (Probably.) Anyway, despite the fact that I grew up in a dangerous area, that’s my only experience with murdered bodies. It’s possible my neighborhood was just dangerous on film.
Nonetheless, I avoided telling my classmates about where I lived, and I only invited one person over one time. I guess I was embarrassed. The things we saw out of our windows were so dramatically different from the things they saw. My classmates, by and large, lived in suburban neighborhoods—some with mega-mansions, some with the regular homes of your standard middle-class white family—none the setting for a television show about murders and the detectives who investigate said murders. My parents wanted more for us than what our surroundings could provide, so it’s probably no surprise that my mother was less than keen about me lying in a gutter outside our front door drenched in fake blood. I see that now; I didn’t then. Truth be told, I always thought the pastoral neighborhoods where my classmates lived were scarier. Yeah, it was a common occurrence to hear gunshots ringing out somewhere in our neighborhood, but in the suburbs, my friends had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on acres of woodland. And you know what lives in the woods? Horrors limited only by your own imagination (and, I guess, your knowledge of woods and the creatures therein).
Are there bears in the city? No, there are not. Are there hockey-mask-wearing killers in the city? Who in the city has a hockey mask? Are there Babadooks and Mothmen in the city? Honey, the rent is too high for all that. True, there is the threat of mugging and an air-conditioning unit falling out of a window and crushing you and buses driving by and splashing your tutu. But that’s about it, at least as far as physical threats go. The danger in a city is systemic and endemic; it’s built into the walls and the street corners and written in invisible ink on the mortgages and in the local newspaper headlines; it powers the public transportation and funds the political campaigns. The danger in the city is all around you, but has clearly delineated borders. The suburbs, on the other hand, are places of literally endless physical peril for everyone everywhere. The worst of the worst are those super suburbs for people so rich they can’t stand the sight of other people, where you have so much land that you basically live in a house hidden in a national park. You might as well be Sigourney Weaver in Alien going into some of the places with a mile-long private drive. Like, you are forsaken out there. If you call the police, they let you know their anticipated arrival time in days. And who wants to live that far from a Costco? You’re so rich you’ve started to inconvenience yourself. Look at your life.