Let It Bang

by RJ Young

  I expected Hayes to push back on these points. Many middle-aged white men have done that when I presented these facts. But he didn’t. In fact, he showed a striking measure of compassion. He acknowledged that we live in a time where black men feel targeted by police because of the color of their skin. That this intense climate exists, and that it is hard for him to fully understand what that feels like. Turns out, Hayes already had a similar conversation with a close friend of his who is a black man.

  “We talked about this a lot. I had a belief that as long as you’re doing the right thing and being respectful and being compliant, things that I know he would do if pulled over by the police, you’d be OK. But he just beat it into my head: ‘Let me tell you something, it’s different.’ He said, ‘I might be dressed nice and my hands are at ten and two and I’m scared to death the entire time I’m talking to a police officer that I’m going to give him some reason to shoot me.’ I’ve never reacted that way to a police officer. I can’t understand that, but I do have to understand that that’s the way some people feel. I think it is reasonable to be concerned about that.”

  Still, Hayes believes that the only way forward in a situation like that, as a black man, is to do everything you’re asked to do. At the end of the day, the person that you’re dealing with has a gun. You don’t. “I don’t like governmental authority. I don’t like being told what to do. But I don’t like getting shot.”

  But what if the worst should happen? What if a black man was the person with the gun who shot the unarmed white man because he felt the white man had threatened his life? What happens then?

  “I think you just have to know that you have the right to defend yourself, regardless of what anyone would tell you. If it’s reasonable for you to assume that the person is going to hurt you—serious bodily injury is what the statue says—then you could and should use a gun to defend yourself. There’s not supposed to be any racial bias in the court. But we know that sometimes there is. It could go either way.”

  No, no, it couldn’t.

  12

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  The Razor’s Edge

  I STOPPED MY truck outside the Warren Theatre in Broken Arrow, so Lizzie could walk inside to print out our tickets from the kiosk while I roamed the crowded parking lot, looking for a good spot. It was just four days before Christmas. I was excited. We were going to see Assassin’s Creed, a movie damn near tailored for me, and the kind Lizzie would never see if not for me.

  I drove up and down, annoyed by all the people who seemed to have the same idea—to see a movie on a Wednesday night. I ended up parking near the deep end of the parking lot and hiking back to the entrance. By the time I’d stepped inside, Lizzie was ready and waiting for me. I felt good. I felt like me, in my black-and-red Sho’nuff hoodie, gray sweatpants, and brand-new Ohio State red LeBron Soldier Activations on my feet. Lizzie took my arm as we headed toward the ticket taker. Just as we got there, I was stopped. The sheriff’s deputy approached me.

  “Could I have a look inside your bag?”

  My bag was a dopp kit, a faux-leather toiletry bag. It held my wallet, keys, phone, headphones, notebook, and pens. It was so small, I carried it on top of my forearm. Yet in this sea of white faces, even while standing next to a woman with a purse large enough to carry an inflated beach ball, the deputy chose me. He took a step forward and asked again to look inside my dopp kit. Just as I was about to unzip my bag for him, he spoke again.

  “There are no weapons inside, right?”

  “Just keys, man.”

  I unzipped my bag and rooted through my belongings for him. This was a Terry stop—a stop and frisk. The term comes from the 1968 US Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio. John Terry had been searched by a police officer after the officer believed he saw Terry casing a store for a robbery. The court held that a police officer could search for weapons without a warrant, probable cause, when the officer reasonably believes that the person may be armed and dangerous.

  Satisfied, the sheriff’s deputy motioned for Lizzie and me to be on our way. Once we got past the ticket taker, I could feel my wife’s embarrassment, confusion, and pain.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “I did the right thing, though? I didn’t lose my shit.”

  I squeezed her hand, and we headed into the movie. Even before the previews aired, I saw Lizzie was still in pain for me, and I pleaded with her to go to the bathroom and cry it out. When she returned, she seemed better. I thought I was fine too. I thought I could let go of this little tragedy, this small horror, like I had so many times before. Then, without warning, I was awash in my own tornado of furies. I tried to reckon with myself, but soon I told Lizzie I was heading to the bathroom. She knew I never do that during a movie. Walking the corridors outside the screening rooms, I couldn’t bring myself to walk back in to watch the movie. Even knowing I was not the only black man to suffer these miniature atrocities, and that I would have to suffer many more to come, I couldn’t wipe this one away. I called Lizzie from outside the theater and got her voicemail. But she knew me. She knew enough to know I was outside waiting for her. And there she came.

  “Can we go?” I said.

  “Yes. We can.”

  When we arrived back at our apartment, I asked Lizzie to leave me alone in the truck for a while.

  “You want to take a walk?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She left me to go inside. When I saw her disappear through the front door, I let myself cry. This was not the first time I had cried because the world had treated Lizzie and me differently. Perhaps if it was just the outside world and not her family too, my marriage would not have ended.

  THERE WERE FOURTEEN vehicles this Thanksgiving at Charles’s house. Of those fourteen, five were trucks. One was an ATV. One was a Polaris RZR, a kind of hybrid of a go-kart and a four-wheeler in need of an attitude adjustment. All of them were parked tightly together, leaving only a way open to the storm shelter we’ve sometimes had cause to herd into after seeing a tornado’s funnel descending upon us. A string of cow skulls hung from the only tree near the house, a tree Nancy won’t let Charles cut down. A life-size bronze statue of a buck watches over it. Half a football field to the north lies a trough that Charles fills with corn to feed the bucks and does that pass through because he knows Nancy likes to see the deer. The rule is, you can’t shoot any of the deer approaching the trough. This means Charles has to stand down with his rifle while continuing to fill the trough. This is a measure of love.

  After five families tied together by marriage and blood exchanged introductions, Nancy asked aloud if we should say a prayer before eating. Three women yelled out Yes! in unison, like a forbidding Greek chorus. Then two more women called for Charles.

  “What?” he said.

  “We need to say grace.”

  “I need to get my computer.” Which is an iPad, but no matter how many times you tell him that, it’s still a computer.

  “Why?”

  “Because I looked up prayers on it.”

  With his iPad in hand, Charles marched to the center of the gathering and began to read aloud. Like soldiers who know the drill, everyone bowed their heads, grabbed one another’s hands, and filled the room with a silence that didn’t enfold me so much as squeeze me. God has no place in my worldview because, if there was one, She wouldn’t stand for the world I live in.

  “That was a good prayer.”

  “Yeah, you need to print that out and give it to everybody.”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.” Charles’s unapologetic honesty was met with laughs while we began our ritual consumption of food on a secular holiday created
to mythologize Pilgrims.

  I’d promised Lizzie I’d avoid picking fights or taking undue offense at the things often said at these holiday dinners. Trying to keep this promise, I secluded myself in front of the living room TV, where football was on, and I was alone. I ate my meal in silence while trying to concentrate on the game. I knew if I dwelled on some of the views I’d heard expressed here, I would not be able to prevent myself from confronting someone about something—about any of the things wrong with this situation.

  Two of the youngest of the clan came sprinting to a stop in front of me during the third quarter of the Detroit Lions–Minnesota Vikings game. The Vikings were driving, as Minnesota’s running back Jerrick McKinnon, a muscular black man, caught a short swing pass and turned it into a big gain, planting the Vikings firmly inside the Lions’ twenty-yard line. The boys were just old enough to be Webelo Scouts. Each held identical Nerf guns, like a sci-fi writer’s idea of what revolvers will look like in two hundred years.

  Then they pointed them at me.

  “We’re going to use you as target practice,” one said.

  “Yeah!” the other said.

  In that moment, I decided they couldn’t yet comprehend the meaning of pointing a gun of any kind at an unarmed black person and uttering those words, in that order, with that authoritative tone. They couldn’t yet know how badly they’d hurt me.

  “No, you won’t,” I said.

  The words came out angrier, louder than I’d heard them in my head. The boys scurried away just as I realized I had turned into another angry black man. Then I tried to remember a time when I was not angry. The Vikings settled for a field goal, and the game continued.

  NANCY HAS A need to send everyone she loves a Christmas card, and those cards thrust my very being into high relief. Such was the case when I tried to sneak away one Thanksgiving before Nancy caught me.

  “We have to take the Christmas-card picture before you go.”

  I tried to hide my disgust, but I doubt I succeeded. Nancy retrieved for me one of the five matching shirts she plans for every year for her Christmas cards. This year Charles, Nancy, Jimmy, Lizzie, and I were all to wear a black sweatshirt with an illustration of Darth Vader wearing a Santa beanie, with the caption I FIND YOUR LACK OF CHEER DISTURBING. I handed my phone to a relative to take this picture, at Nancy’s request. He took it. And now there’s another picture in which I stand in the middle of four white people, who are smiling into a sun unobscured by clouds during the last vestiges of fall. I showed this photograph to my dear friend Kate. She broke into a giggle fit when she realized what was in front of her. “One of these is not like the other,” she said.

  IN OUR TIME together, I believe Charles gained a greater understanding of what guns and gun ownership mean to me. He came to understand why it was more dangerous for me to carry a gun than it was for him—no matter how skilled and careful I am with one. I’ve watched him engage his friends in conversations about the shooting of unarmed black men in a way that is knowledgeable and forthright and built on the foundation of discussions he’s had with me.

  He no longer wonders aloud if an unarmed black man deserved to be shot by police, or if the unarmed black man was guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s more critical of local law enforcement and its use of deadly force. He’s empathetic and thoughtful about the black community’s relationship with our fetid criminal justice system, and he has softened his stance on gun control. Over dinner one day, having seen his thinking slowly evolve, I told him I was proud of him. “Well, I care about my son-in-law,” he said.

  This was before he became so angry with me that he stole my jar of change when he helped Lizzie move out. This was just a month before his daughter and I got divorced.

  LIZZIE AND I used to play a game when we went out in our hometown. We played the game whether we were seeing a movie at the Warren in Broken Arrow or eating pizza at Andolini’s on Cherry Street or watching Jason Isbell sing at a concert at Cain’s or sitting in the audience at the University of Tulsa to hear any one of the amazing artists the college brings in to speak. To play the game, we looked around the room, and we counted. We counted how many black people were in the room. To get a valid number, we excluded wait staff and event staff from the count. If the number reached double digits, we celebrated. But frequently in my hometown, and most other towns in Oklahoma we’ve lived in and visited, we didn’t get to celebrate very often. Many times, I’m the only person who looks like me in the room. In those moments I don’t want to go out again at all.

  Lizzie and I used to play another game when we were out. This one, like the first, relied heavily on skin color but not so much on numbers. Whenever we saw an interracial couple, we’d approach them. We’d approach them, and then high-five them. We never once had to explain to the couple why we were high-fiving. We never once were met with anything other than excitement. I’ve never had to explain to an interracial couple the sinking feeling I had when Lizzie introduced me to one of her friends at law school. I’ll call her Marie Antoinette because she was white, glowed with privilege and jewelry, and was eating cake at the time. I watched her contort her face and say, “Oh, I didn’t know you were black.” As if my ethnicity should have any bearing on whether or not I was her friend’s husband. As if it mattered.

  And then I realized, to her, it did. I didn’t realize whiteness or blackness mattered to Lizzie either, until the days just prior to the 2016 presidential election, when my country chose to show its true face, as bigotry stood at the doorstep and opened the door wide. I didn’t realize until too late that this is how a previously happy marriage comes to an end. I was pissed, and I was upset and venting more than a brick chimney at the height of the industrial revolution. I was so angry, yet I felt so safe with her, that I yelled out, “I hate white people!”

  “But I’m white!”

  A thing that had never dawned on me until she said it. I guess it had. But not in this way. Not connected to the visceral physicality those words evoked. In fact, the knowledge of her not being white but associating herself with being white felt like a rebuke. Because I thought of her as Lizzie, my wife. Not a white person, not a white woman, not my white wife—just Lizzie my wife. It felt as if, in that moment, I had no idea who I had married. I was no longer part of a single entity with this person I was supposed to share the rest of my life with. I felt hurt and dismayed and confused—so utterly confused.

  All at once I felt horrifically scared too, utterly alone in this space, this apartment, where I had believed beyond doubt that the plights, tragedies, and insanities of the world could not get in.

  The work I had done to get to know Lizzie’s family had seemingly been for nothing. The postracial society I was striving to be a part of in coming to understanding Charles, and his effort to understand me, looked like an elaborate hoax because of the force Lizzie put on that word—white. The tears that streamed down her cheeks looked warm enough to burn, to scorch me with their honesty. In the games we had played, I wondered now whether the two of us ever had the same reasons for high-fiving other interracial couples. Were we counting the black people in the room for the same reasons? And there was the way Lizzie saw me, the way she’d seen me for years—the way I have been since I was a small child. I have been angry at the world. I have been devastated by it in such a manner, in such a violent rage with it, that I was blinded. I could not see how my seething had affected her. I realized that this razor’s edge we’d been living on had not only begun to cut us, but had cut through us. Over the course of our marriage, that razor had been separating us into two individual parts that could no longer exist together. Admitting this was painful. It still is.

  13

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  Shooting with Mom

  I DID NOT speak to my mother for a year after Lizzie and I decided to divorce. The rhetoric and emotion of the 2016 presidential election not only tore a schism in my marriage but also created a deeper divide within my family—the only one I had left. But now my pending divorce pushed me to seek out my mama. I wanted to be friends with her again. I needed family. But this wasn’t going to be easy.

  I am a very blue Democrat. My mother is a very red Republican. This makes her somewhat of a unicorn. How many black women decorate their black Ford F-150 with an American-flag magnet the size of a dinner platter and paste an NRA Lifetime Member sticker on the passenger side corner of the rearview mirror, just opposite a gold sticker with a capital T underlined and the slogan TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT? Out of that subset, how many black women conceal-carry not just one but two pistols every time they go out? Like I said, my mother is something of a unicorn. Grandmomme, whom I called most Tuesdays, confessed she could talk to her youngest child only if the conversation didn’t involve politics. “I told her I’m not fooling with that mess,” Grandmomme said.

  I hadn’t yet told my mother about my pending divorce, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to. But I figured it was time to see if she even cared to know me anymore. If anything had changed with her. If there was some way we could be family again without ending our meetings with shouting matches and hurt feelings. I wanted to see if I could hear her. I wanted to believe she could hear me.