by RJ Young
My mom was enthusiastic just to have me call. When I asked her if she would like to meet me right then for pizza, her only thought was whether she was dressed appropriately. When I picked her up from the pharmacy where she’d gone to retrieve her purse—she’d left it there while filling a prescription—I saw immediately how much this woman, turning sixty that year, had changed physically. And how she was still the exuberant and defiant woman who had raised me. In my truck, driving to Andolini’s, we tried to make small talk.
“Your truck runs smooth,” she said.
“Thanks, Ma.”
“How many miles on it?”
“Just over a hundred thousand.”
“Runs smooth.”
I told her I had to take care of it. It’s the only truck I got. Not long after this, she volunteered that her truck payment was $400 a month, and she was thinking about downsizing to a car. “I don’t need something so big anymore,” she said. I tried to make the small talk last a little longer, but it didn’t take. I came out with the news about my divorce, and my mother was hurt. This Christian woman had been married to my father for over thirty years. She couldn’t fathom how Lizzie and I had let it come to this; how we were so ready to let each other go, without putting up what she thought was a necessary fight to save our marriage.
She was still going on about it when I came around the truck to help her out, and she wrapped her hand around my bicep. This was a gesture she’d performed in the past, but this time I felt the full weight of her. When she asked me to slow down as we were going through the crosswalk, I realized my mother was so frail now, she needed me to hold her up to walk across the street.
When we sat down to order, we began to talk about what I was up to. But I was stuck on the fact that this woman in front of me was speaking slower, moving slower, even though I knew she’d been on disability after suffering a back injury while working at a call center years back, a job she took on because she could not make the money she once had as an alcohol and drug counselor. I took stock of the bulge at her hip and the bulge in the small of her back, under her blue cardigan and hidden from view for anyone untrained to look for such things. When I pointed out she was carrying, my mother shushed me. I was not surprised I was shushed. I was surprised she carried a gun. She had white Converse sneakers on her feet. Her naked shins led to blue capris. The salt-and-pepper hair spurting from beneath her TU ball cap made her the picture of a gentle brown grandmother. Ruin and woe to the person who didn’t realize my mama was strapped and looking for an excuse.
MY MOTHER HAS a master’s in marriage and family therapy from the University of Southern Mississippi. Her office was at Pine Grove Behavioral Health and Addiction Services in Hattiesburg. At Pine Grove, my mother thrived. I knew this because at that time my sister and I were in her back pocket.
She took us everywhere with her. She introduced us to everyone. I remember running the halls of the rehab facility. Building forts out of plush cushions in waiting areas. Playing Ping-Pong with recovering addicts who insisted on playing for something. I’d put up my Capri Sun against their cigarettes. Whether they let me win or I was just that good is open to debate. What’s true is that the packs of cigarettes ended up in the trash, much to the chagrin of the folks who thought I’d be a good sport and give back the cigarettes they knew Mom wouldn’t let us smoke. This was the only environment I’ve known in which race simply wasn’t spoken about or thrown back in my face in a way that hurt. I never knew how much that meant until I was a teenager in very white, very conservative Oklahoma.
Our moving from Mississippi to Florida when I was ten and then to Oklahoma when I was thirteen meant that my mother’s professional license to practice was no longer valid. For a time, she worked for the Department of Children and Families in Panama City, Florida, as a social worker. She was trying so hard to be the kind of woman who could continue to work full-time and raise two young children. But the work was uninteresting and everlasting. My mother was tired, and couldn’t help me as much with schoolwork, so I began to suffer in my overwhelmed school. I didn’t care so much to study anymore. So my mother made a decision.
She resolved to home-school Denise and me. That’s how I went through seventh and eighth grade. By the time we moved again, to Tulsa, following my father’s job, I was beginning to see that my parents had made some wrong choices, pursued the wrong opportunities. My father didn’t have a college degree then, and when, because of this, he was continually passed over for a better position, he took offense and ultimately quit. This led to bitterness, and to my decision to leave for college and never return. In keeping that promise to myself, though, I lost my parents. My parents lost me.
OUR SERVER TOOK our order. Ma ordered sweet iced tea. I ordered unsweetened iced tea, and the server left us to look over the menu.
“Still watching your figure?” Ma said.
“Clearly not. I’m about to order a pepperoni pizza.”
She smiled. “You do that every time you come here?”
“I know what I like.”
“Well, I’m going to be a little more adventurous.”
Ma ended up ordering all the fixings. Something she wasn’t going to finish and wouldn’t take home. I pointed that out to her.
“You’ll finish it,” she said.
“No, Ma. I won’t.”
“See? Watching your figure.”
A lull set in, and Ma looked at me expectantly. Like I should ask her something. So I asked her when she’d bought her gun and why.
“I got my first gun August 26 of 2012,” my mom said, “and joined the NRA. Joined the USCCA.” While I was coming to the end of my gun odyssey, deciding I wouldn’t shoot anymore because I didn’t believe the world would be a better place with me preparing to shoot back, my mother, I was just now discovering, had begun her own.
She was scared. That’s what she said. She said she was scared, and she wasn’t going to allow herself to be a victim in a world she saw growing madder by the day. Mom got a gun a month after James Holmes killed twelve people at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
“I like to go to the movies,” Ma said. “Least I used to. Then the Colorado shoot-up thing happened. And all those people sitting in the movie theater—he was just killing them all. And loading some more. And killing more. I said, ‘I ain’t going out like that.’ Since then I’ve had a number of things reinforce that viewpoint.”
One gun wasn’t enough, though. The news she consumed had informed her of that. This is a woman who cleaned her house to the sound of Rush Limbaugh blaring from her phone, who believed Glenn Beck was a saint until “he started to move to the left,” who denounced Megyn Kelly as traitorous because she called Donald Trump on his bullshit, and who doesn’t understand why many of us don’t like Trump.
“Why do you like Donald Trump though, Ma?”
“RJ, he’s saying all the things I feel.”
“So we need a wall?”
“To keep the drugs and Mexican criminals out, yeah.”
“A wall, Mom?”
“The Chinese have had one to keep the rest of the world out for centuries. Why is it a big deal that we want to build one too?”
I changed the subject. “You still shoot regularly?” Making conversation now, believing this to be an easy segue.
“I would shoot practically every day of the week,” she said. “Now it’s a little harder for me to get around. I need to get back to it. You still shoot like you did?”
“No, Ma.”
“Shame. You’re a good shot.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You told me the last time we talked that you don’t carry a gun. I hope you never get into a situation where you have to change your mind.”
Our server came back with pizzas. Ma was taken aback at the size of her fourteen-inch pie.
“Goodness gracious. I’m never gonna finish this.” Then she looked up at me again.
“I’ve got all I can handle in front of me.�
�
Ma frowned and began to dig into her pizza. She looked up at me, briefly. Then looked back down at her pizza. I waited for whatever it was she looked like she was bursting to say. Her face showed a vulnerability I hadn’t seen in years. Her lip quivered just a bit. I could feel her waiting for me to say something—anything. But not a whole lot came.
A FEW WEEKS later my mother called me.
“I haven’t been able to figure out why I’m falling off to the right of my shot,” she said, “and it was making me mad. Then I remembered my son is a certified pistol instructor. You think you could help me?”
“I don’t shoot anymore, Mom.” I knew she remembered that too. At that point, I hadn’t gone to a gun range in months.
“Who said anything about you shooting? This is about me.”
I sighed. But then it occurred to me that this was my mother at her most humble. Over lunch I had learned that her favorite hobby now was shooting her pistols, and that she took great pride in being a good marksman. It was a source of immense satisfaction that I, her son, am a better shot than she is and of great consternation that I didn’t care to shoot anymore. “Can you go Sunday afternoon?”
I met my mother at her apartment complex with my range bag in hand, as she was using a dolly to ferry her gear to her truck. Her bag was twice the size of mine, and she was bringing two different kinds of targets. The white-and-gold MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat atop her head completed the look. She waved at me.
“Hey, Bud!”
I jogged up to her and pulled her range bag off the cart, threw it across my free shoulder, and carried both items to her truck. She took much longer than she would’ve liked to climb into her truck, muttering about how she needed something smaller. Then she turned over the engine. Before pulling out of the parking lot, she shot me a look.
“You bring your NRA instructor hat?” she said.
“It’s in the bag.”
“Good. I want these folks to see that.”
We were a sight when we pulled into the United States Shooting Academy parking lot—which is right next door to the Tulsa Police Department. I was in sweatpants, a hoodie, and Jordans, and had my NRA instructor hat on backward. My mother looked very much at home in this lobby filled with handguns, shotguns, and rifles of all stripes. I filled out the Academy paperwork and left my driver’s license as collateral. Mom then drove us to an open shooting bay. While she was taking her favored full-size FNS-9 pistol out of the bag, she made the mistake of lifting it so the gun barrel was pointed at me. I swerved out of range.
“If you point that at me again, we’re getting in the truck and going home,” I said. “You know better.”
My mother looked like she’d been scolded for neglecting to clean her room. “Sorry.”
After that, we quickly fell into a teacher-student relationship as I put my mother through my usual warm-up of shooting twenty-one shots from close range to ten yards away. I was struck by how willing she was to do exactly what I asked without the slightest hesitation.
Occasionally, she would question why we were doing an exercise. Once she discovered the reasoning, though, she went back to listening. This willingness to be patient, to be teachable, had also emerged in me over the several years I’d spent learning to get good with a gun. Now I realized where that came from. After all, my mother was my first teacher.
When I showed her how she was rushing, how she wouldn’t allow herself to relax before firing, and the steps to correct the problem, she started hitting the bull’s-eye. In fact, she started hitting it at such a consistent clip, she wanted to have a brief match with me.
“This is your lesson, Mom. Not mine.”
“So?”
“I haven’t shot in months.”
“You scared you’re gonna lose?”
“Fine.”
I set the rules. From twenty yards out, we would each get to take three shots at tiny targets. Closest grouping wins. My mother shot first. Whether she was flustered or instantly forgot what I had taught her, she went high and right with her first shot. Then she barely clipped the target with the second. She was an inch away from the bull’s-eye with the third.
“OK,” I said. “My turn. If my first two hit inside the target, I win. No need for a third, right?”
“Cocky, aren’t you?”
I put three rounds in my magazine, loaded into my Glock, and took two deep breaths. I let off two shots in rapid succession.
“You missed with the second,” Mom said.
“No, I didn’t. Check.”
We locked the slide back on each of our pistols, and laid them on the table. Then we walked to the target. My mother let her fingers search the target.
“Damn.” I’d put two holes right next to each other in the center of the target. “My son can shoot.” She pulled me close, hugged me, and kissed my cheek. She let go then and pulled back, with a sheepish look. She almost whispered the words: “You want to try to be friends again?”
14
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Hands Up
I WAS ALWAYS aware of the irony of relying on guns to try to get close to my white father-in-law. Just as I am aware of the irony of spending a day at the gun range to begin to repair my relationship with Mom.
But I make no apology for using anything at hand to get closer to another human being. I never will.
If I’ve learned anything during my odyssey into guns and their role in our country, it’s that we are in a literal arms race, ramped up by the racialized fear peddled to us by damn near every institutionalized force in the land. Gun culture in America is inherently racist because white people historically fear black men with guns. I have cited facts, history, story, and policy to prove this point. And yet I live as a black man in a country where too many people are so afraid of being called racist that they will not confront their own racism—around guns, around their social, economic, or constitutional privilege.
I wrote this book because I wanted to understand not only Charles, but the people—mostly white people—who feel they must carry a gun for self-protection. I wanted to know who they felt they needed protection from. I wanted to demonstrate my willingness to reach out to them.
My odyssey taught me a great deal about the escalating cycles of white fear that fuel black fear and the insanity of American gun culture. My odyssey did not teach me how to be a man without being a black man first. And has made me more afraid for my life than ever before.
My letter to white people would begin by asking you to speak up for me. When you are in a room full of other white folks who are making insensitive or coded or hateful remarks about those of us who are not white, you are the only voice we have. If you are not heard, then we are silenced. That frightens me. But it does not frighten me as much as the task of convincing you that the way forward is for you to feel uncomfortable. You have to step into the fire with me, to feel that distress and pain and anguish. Because I will never live safely in the world without the sacrifices of those whose birth certificates and driver’s licenses say this: white.
I am expert with a handgun. Yet both of my guns remain unloaded and stored in a cool, dry place where a padlock has final say over who can get to them. This is because I understand the historical significance of a black man owning a gun in his home. I understand why it’s important to guard my Second Amendment rights. I also understand that the Second Amendment—or my exercise of it—isn’t going to stop misinformed and racist people from shooting and killing me because of how I fit into their biases. Only empathy will overcome that. Only an understanding that my life is valuable will shoot that down.
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Lizzie Stafford, for loving me. Your intelligence and kindness sustained me.
Thank you, Mama and Papa. What we’ve gone through just proves our love.
Thank you, Ron Taylor. You are the brother I always wanted. Thank you too, Yolanda Taylor, for a safe place. And thank you, Ron Taylor Sr., for lifting me up and dusting me off.
Thank you dearly, Charles Stafford and Nancy Stafford. You never blinked at welcoming me and loving me.
Thank you, Mary Wafer-Johnston, for loving me when I did not love myself.
Thank you, Laurel Williamson, for the bread and water.
Thank you, Weapon X and Brave. I’ve only ever been RJ to you.
Thank you, Tyler Burroughs, for not allowing me to spend New Year’s Day alone.
Thank you, Kate Galatian, for being my Lasso of Truth.
Thank you, Celia Ampel, for your patience as a reader and a listener.
Chris Lusk, you have my gratitude for being the first editor who gave a damn.
Thank you, Sarah Szabo, my favorite superhero.
Thank you, Katy Mullins, for calling until I picked up.
Thank you, Dr. Amber Coyle McConnell, for teaching me to swim through pain.
I want to express heartfelt appreciation to my agent, Michelle Tessler. Also to Deanne Urmy, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for believing in me.
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·