by Ian Williams
He says, You never think this kind of stuff is going to happen to you. You know it could happen, just not to— He turns off the AC and opens the sunroof. So anyway, now I drive like this.
You didn’t do anything wrong, I say.
I was speeding.
All right, yeah, fine.
I was trying to give him What He Needed. But it’s hard to know with Pierre. His willingness to accept responsibility deflates me. It would be simpler to have this conversation if he were innocent and we could both make righteous fists against the police.
I go on, You realize that only 10 percent of that interaction had anything to do with speeding.
I know.
Even when you do something wrong, you’re entitled to humane treatment, I say. Even Cain.
We both know the denouement of the Cain and Abel story. After God punishes him, Cain worries that someone will nevertheless kill him in retaliation. God says, No, if anyone kills you, I will take revenge. I promise. Here, I’m going to put a mark on you to warn folks not to harm you. Over time, the story gets perverted, and people—white people, no doubt—claim that Cain became the first Black man, meaning that Black people are cursed by God from the beginning, that we deserve everything we get, that our suffering is a kind of preordained, original karma. But in the original text, God actually intends the mark as a blessing, as a mitigation of Cain’s suffering.
8.
Not to dwell too much on Cain, but when I teach Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” I spend a long time on the closing couplet:
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refined, and join the angelic train.
There’s a lot to say: Wheatley appeals to the Christianity of her white audience. She sets herself at its mercy. Yet she also positions Christians and Negroes side by side so for a moment they’re interchangeable; you’re not sure which one is the subject. And, to the point, she plays into the misreading of Cain and Blackness, opting to have a bad soul rather than no soul at all. Even Cain deserves Christian treatment, she’s arguing.
In America, I had a Hungarian church friend who loved the movie Coming to America. He learned English from it. My friend felt welcome in America. America laid out opportunities for him. He was able to start a business. He expanded. I always marvelled at how easily he was embraced as American, practically overnight, even with his accent, in a way that I or Pierre or any diasporic African would never be.
9.
I admit I was going fast, Pierre says again. But I was passing, so I thought I was going to get a warning. This guy gave me two tickets.
Two? I ask. For how much?
Pierre hesitates. He looks embarrassed. Finally, he says, For a thousand dollars.
A thousand!
To this day, I don’t know what the second ticket is for.
10.
I tell Pierre about the times I have been stopped.
The first time was in Alabama. We had dropped off my brother at college for the fall semester. It was still dark, maybe 4:30 a.m., and we were at the beginning of a sixteen-hour drive back to Canada. A family friend was driving. My mother was in the passenger seat. I was in the back. A white officer pulled us over because we were driving below the speed limit on a road with no traffic. He asked us what we were doing there and where we were going. But he wouldn’t let my mother speak. I’m not speaking to you, ma’am, he said, ostensibly because she wasn’t driving. He didn’t give us a ticket. We continued, feeling shaken and grateful. It’s weird how we’re so disoriented by these encounters that we leave them feeling grateful when, in fact, we should be furious, seeing as the officer had no basis on which he could give us a ticket.
During the last year of my doctorate, I was driving to a job at Humber College on the lakeshore of Toronto. A cop trailed me for a while. I was minutes from work. I thought, If I can just get to the parking lot of Humber, I’ll be okay. Before I could get there, the cop pulled up beside me, and said, It’s okay. You’re clean. In an alternate memory of this incident, he stopped me and asked for my driver’s licence and registration. He ran them through the system, before coming back and declaring, It’s okay. You’re clean. Maybe it happened twice? In any event, there was no reason for the random stop of me in my slightly rusted Civic. I taught my class, disoriented and stunned and inappropriately grateful, and hoped course evaluations would be kind.
Fifteen years later, in Vancouver, I got the only speeding ticket of my life, despite going the speed of traffic. The moment in Alabama is always with me, so I try not to be too fast or too slow. I wasn’t looking at the speedometer, but I accepted the officer’s assessment, which is not to say that I wasn’t pitying myself, asking, Why me? Why me? while the other cars whizzed past us. I did dispute the ticket—the only time I’ve ever been to court. I got a sweet, paternal lecture from an Indian judge before he dismissed it.
I even told Pierre about my mother, whose car got hit from the back while she was exiting a gas station. Not long afterward, she ran into the back of someone else. In both cases, the police declared that she was in the wrong. Cumulatively, I have spent hours of uh-huh uh-huh conversation with her as she tried to understand, Why am I always in the wrong?
11.
There’s more, Pierre says. The cop had my car towed.
Unnecessary, I say. Pierre doesn’t drink or use any substances. He was only going twenty kilometres per hour above the speed limit, not racing along like some of the city’s brightly coloured Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Or even Teslas.
I was left standing on the side of the road, Pierre says. The cop asked me if I had anyone to come get me. I said no.
You should’ve called me, I said.
You were busy. I didn’t want to bother you.
I feel a rush of guilt. I am, sadly, one of those people who always claim to be busy or tired. About a month before the incident with the cop, Pierre had a flat tire and I missed his call because I was in the middle of a winding conversation with my mother. When I called him back, close to an hour later, I found out he was stranded on his way back from Whistler but had already arranged a tow truck. He was okay. Just a flat. He was probably remembering the last time he had a flat tire and we had figured out how to change it by watching YouTube videos in the parking garage of his college.
Still, I suspect it wasn’t just busyness that deterred him from calling me. It was shame, already coursing its way through his self-perception.
Anyway, Pierre says. The cop called the tow truck and they towed my car and I had no choice—I had to get into the back of his car.
I imagine all six feet three inches of Pierre squished into the back seat, looking out the window, looking at his phone, looking anywhere but into the officer’s reflected eyes.
I can’t explain that feeling, he says. I felt like I was being arrested. My whole life, I never thought—
Encounters with the police feel like near-death experiences. You see the light. Your life flickers before your eyes like scenes of a montage. If something happened to you, who would know?
Pierre says, I saw my parents’ faces.
12.
The cop dropped Pierre off at a gas station.
Pierre tells me that a man hit on him outside the gas station and he’d never been so happy to exchange one unwelcome advance for another.
He says, The gay guy asked me if I wanted a ride somewhere.
You’re sure he was gay? He wasn’t just—
I knew. It was more than a ride. I knew what he was getting at, and I still almost got in his car.
This is the effect of his disorientation. He was about to risk entering another dangerous situation with a stranger just so he could get home to safety. Here was another role to play, this time in a gay, white, sexual fantasy: the exotic, hung Black man who could blow your back out.
13.
His vehicle was impounded for seven days. When he went to get it, Pierre expected the same hassle as with the police officer.
But it was easy, he says. I showed them proof, some ID, and two minutes later they let me have it.
He can’t predict how the world works anymore. When will white bureaucracy step in to inconvenience him? When do minor infractions beget exaggerated consequences? When might he get lucky?
14.
I got home and for two weeks I couldn’t do anything, Pierre explains.
That was the period he had described as his staycation.
I just watched Netflix, all the comedy specials I could find, trying to make myself happy again. I ate ice cream and sat in bed. I didn’t work. Didn’t call my family. Out of the blue, Pastor Ron called me. He was all friendly, didn’t want anything. He said, Call me Ron.
On the morning of the day that Pierre tells me this story, the Zoom sermon was based on Micah 6:8: What does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? Pastor Ron said that justice meant holding yourself to the highest standard while extending mercy to those who fault you. In other words, police yourself, not other people.
It’s very Martin Luther King.
15.
You know what I was listening to when the cop pulled me over?
Kendrick, I say. Pierre has been having a Kendrick Lamar renaissance.
Right, he says. So as this cop’s coming toward the car, Kendrick’s going—and at this point Pierre sings with his shoulders—We gonna be all right !
16.
Next time, I say, call me. It doesn’t matter if I’m busy or with someone or in an airport somewhere. Just call me if anything happens.
He is quiet.
I feel the futility of trying to protect a Black person from danger. If anything happens. If Pierre had been shot or Tasered in his car, what could I do? It is already too late. Maybe I’m insistent because I don’t want to learn of his death on the news. I want this young Black man to be distinguishable from other endangered young Black men. He is so soft-spoken that you constantly have to ask him to repeat himself. He quit his job after three months and started his own business when he realized he could do everything the firm was doing on his own. He likes his pants cut just above the ankle. Never wears socks. Can identify the model and sometimes the year of every car on the road at a glance. Became boyish when I bought him a toy car for his last birthday. The cop’s version of resisting arrest would be the only one in circulation.
I say, Next time—
It’s so sad to have to say next time.
I try again: Next time, the minute you’re pulled over, start recording on your phone. When the cop gets to the window, let him know that you are recording this interaction. He knows the time we’re living in. He knows if he doesn’t act correct—if he doesn’t treat you like everyone else—he’s gonna be all over the Internet, that the repercussions are finally real.
I’ve taken on the tone of the righteously indignant.
But, again, I’ve missed the target.
Pierre says, I looked him up when I got home. He’s been fired twice. He was involved in some kind of corruption thing.
And he’s back on the streets. Tell me, how does that happen?
Yeah, I don’t know.
17.
I’m the third person whom Pierre has told about the incident.
He told two specific African friends: one studying in the Philippines and another who studied in Maine before going back to Africa. Why them? Why me? I think it’s for the same reason Black people acknowledge each other in the street or create a Black club in high school. We need each other to anchor ourselves against waves of racial disorientation. It sometimes baffles white people, this intimacy between Black people, even strangers. We seem to be affirming each other only because we are Black when, in fact, we are affirming to the other that I see you as more than Black.
Have you told your parents? I ask.
No way, he says. Not even my brother.
I can understand why. His parents would tell him to forget about North America, just come back to Africa, for his safety and his dignity.
My mother tries to get my brother back to Canada at every opportunity, not really for her sake—he doesn’t have to live near her—but just to increase his chances of staying alive. So far, he’s outlived her fears in Alabama and North Carolina. He works out and eats well and hopefully will die of natural causes. That’s as optimistic as I can be about his future in America.
18.
We make it back to Vancouver.
In the elevator of my building, he sniffs upward. I smell it too.
Someone’s been to Church’s Chicken, he says. Not KFC. Church’s.
I laugh. So specific. We’re aware of what Americans think about Black people and fried chicken, a stereotype that neither of us knew until moving to the continent. But we also think the Church’s Chicken on Fraser Street is brilliantly designed: glass everywhere so you can practically read the menu from the street, private drive-through, bright-yellow sign floating like Christ the Redeemer over Rio.
In my condo, neither of us eats. We watch a comedy special where a white woman is funny until she says, I’m from the South, but I’m not a Southern belle, not until I need to be. Then we watch a Black man who says, I’m split: I can’t be a Democrat because I’m a Christian and I can’t be a Republican because I’m Black.
And so we shut off YouTube and Pierre tells me another driving story.
When I went back to my country for my sister’s wedding, he says, I was driving somewhere to pick up some gifts. It was midnight, no one was on the road, and I was speeding. There was a cop parked off the road in a spot where he could see me but I couldn’t see him. And he caught me. He came up to me and said, Good night. I said, Good night. He told me that I was speeding. I didn’t deny it. It was true. But I did tell him about the wedding and the gifts and that I could see ahead of me for hundreds of metres. The cop looked at me and he could tell that I wasn’t drunk. And you know what? He didn’t give me a ticket. He said, I’m gonna let you go. But don’t speed again, all right? Like a dad. And you know what? I didn’t speed. I saw him parked in the same spot on my way back and I waved at him and he waved back.
It’s almost midnight when Pierre decides to leave my place and drive home.
He does not message to let me know whether he arrives safely.
TWO EYES, A NOSE, AND A MOUTH
AND A MOUTH
The French horn
At the end of grade six, the kids who signed up for band gathered in the school gym to select our instruments. The girls asked for flute or clarinet. The boys asked for saxophone or drums. The instrument I really wanted was violin, but this was band, not orchestra.
One by one, the music teacher called us to the front and ran us through a little audition that involved matching the pitch that she sang. The pitch test was to determine which students had the best ears to play brass instruments. After the test, she announced which instrument each student was assigned.
When the music teacher got to W, I went up and tried to match the note she sang.
Mmm, she hummed.
Muhh, I hummed back.
Mee, she hummed.
Meh, I tried to match.
Weird, she said. You’re singing everything a third below me. What do you want to play?
Saxophone, I said.
Everybody can’t play the saxophone and flute, she said. We need people to play trombone and baritone.
I thought a while, then I said, Can I play French horn?
It was one of the least popular instruments. I only asked because I had a crush on a girl who was assigned to French horn.
The music teacher shook her head. I supposed I had failed the pitch test. I was prepared to try again.
I didn’t know what that was. It sounded too close to baboon. The teacher wrote something on her clipboard.
Tenor sax, she said for me.
I walked back to my spot in the crowd of students, disoriented. Were my lips really too big to play the French horn?
* * *
—
The tenor saxes sat in the back row of band with the trombones, the baritones, and the bass clarinets. The French horns sat in the row ahead, in the corner of my left eye. I could comfortably see the girl I liked, one hand tucked into the bell of the horn, happily puffing her French horn or emptying the slides of spit. It was a fine piece of machinery, the horn. Yet it sounded like a lonely animal in a foggy forest.
I went to the public library and read up on the instrument. I borrowed cassettes of classical music. I made myself a tiny mouthpiece out of a Christmas ornament, a bell, to practise my embouchure. I was prepared to work twice as hard to get half as far, to quote Blackparentese.
The following year, I asked for the French horn again.
This time, the music teacher said fine.
And I was terrible. In my mouth, the instrument gurgled and bubbled with spit. It demanded a lot of pressure from my diaphragm. It made my teeth vibrate, my whole face buzz. There was no medieval forest in the instrument, only a series of wet diarrhea farts. I got a C in music that semester. And that wasn’t happening, girl or no girl, so I switched back to tenor sax and all was right with the world.