by Rosa Brooks
When I was six or seven, I had a crush on a boy named Johnny, the sixth grader who served as de facto leader of our little wolf pack. I didn’t like his three rambunctious younger brothers, Tony, Nicky, and Victor, who often complained about letting a “stupid girl” into their games. But when Johnny gave them a stern look, they fell into line.
My own younger brother, Benjy, was, in my opinion, as unsatisfactory as Johnny’s brothers, though for different reasons. Benjy was small, blue-eyed, blond, and much admired by adults. In contrast to my drab brown locks—imprisoned each day in untidy braids after a tearful struggle with my mother and a hairbrush—his hair was soft, silky, and so flaxen that my mother declared it “too beautiful” to cut. As a result, he was occasionally mistaken for a girl in his early years. In fact, my brother seemed to me to possess many of the same girlish qualities so scorned by Tony, Nicky, and Victor: he cried easily, and could neither throw nor catch a baseball; when a ball headed in his direction, he covered his head and ducked.
True, Benjy was only three or four, but at the time I did not view this as a mitigating factor, and I couldn’t understand why our mother fussed over him so much. If she had made anything clear to me, it was that feminine qualities were to be despised. She spoke scathingly of her own mother’s rigid commitment to feminine propriety, and explained that girls and women had for millennia been forced into the most trivial pursuits, such as playing with dolls, cooking, cleaning, and prancing about in skirts and impractical heels. Meanwhile, boys and men got to do all the fun stuff: baseball, camping, boxing, winning wars, running the world. My generation, she told me, must resist such sexism.
I was fully on board with this program—no one was going to get me into a skirt and heels. (Benjy, in contrast, was fond of playing dress-up, and often appeared in my mother’s clothes and shoes.) When I was eight—it must have been shortly after that anti-nukes protest—I cut my braids off and jammed a Yankees cap over my newly shorn hair, hoping people might mistake me for a boy. One day, when several little girls from the next street over appeared and invited me to play, I cautiously agreed, but when it transpired that they wanted to play house with Barbie dolls, I refused to accept any role other than that of the family dog. I growled and nipped at the Barbies. After that, the girls stayed on their own street.
When I was nine, we moved to a different, larger house. It was only a block away from our old house, but it might have been on another planet. If my old street had been a world of boys, this new street was a world of girls. By now, Johnny was already lost to me: vanished into adolescence, no longer interested in tree climbing or games of cops and robbers. When we moved, I left Tony, Nicky, and Victor behind as well, along with Richie, Michael, Billy, and the rest of the gang.
Instead, our new street offered Laura, Caroline, Sandra, and Audrey, the very girls whose attentions I had previously spurned. At first, sullen and distraught, I refused to join their after-school games. But after a few lonely post-move weeks, I succumbed to the lure of a game of hide-and-seek, and a truce was drawn. I would play with the girls, as long as I was not required to act like a girl, and they would play with me, as long as I stopped growling at their Barbies.
Then I met Gabriel, the new boy in our fourth-grade class. He was Johnny all over again, only better, because he was my own age. We crawled through drainage tunnels in the park together, and found a way to shinny up onto our elementary school’s roof, where we built small, illicit fires and roasted marshmallows.
When Gabriel confessed that he had a crush on Laura, it didn’t take me long to figure things out. By then, Laura, whose house was directly across the street from mine, had become my other best friend. She was as pretty and blond as my little brother, and she had two older sisters. She could climb trees and tell heart-chilling ghost stories, but thanks to her sisters, she also knew all the arcane secrets of girlhood: how to shave your legs, how to wear a barrette, how to smile coquettishly. (Once, I overheard two female teachers note, with disapproval, that Laura was “a fast one, just like her sisters.”) Gabriel, entranced, still wanted to talk about baseball with me, but now he also wanted to talk about Laura. Did I think she liked him back? Did I think she might want to be his girlfriend?
By the end of fifth grade, Laura and Gabriel were holding hands during the slow song at the roller rink on Saturdays, and I had admitted defeat. I grew my hair back out, and asked Laura to teach me how to put on eye makeup.
Learning how to be a girl took time. Laura lent me some of her skirts, and Caroline and Sandra explained barrettes to me. Laura’s oldest sister taught me how to shave my legs, while her middle sister offered tips on flirtation methods.
“Fast” or not, the proximity of Laura’s older sisters was a stroke of good luck, as my mother resolutely ignored the fact that I was approaching puberty. She never mentioned it, and, taking her cue, I kept silent as well. When I noticed that my once-flat chest was becoming less flat, I wore heavy sweatshirts and walked hunched over. When that became insufficient, I surreptitiously spirited away a few of my mother’s bras from her dresser drawer. When I got my period, I kept silent about it for six months, sneaking feminine hygiene pads from under her bathroom sink. Finally, struck almost dumb with mortification, I blurted out my secret, staring at the ground.
“I’m so proud!” my mother declared, giving me a hug. But she didn’t mention it again after that, and she never asked if I needed pads or tampons, leaving me to buy them myself or tuck them discreetly under the groceries in our supermarket shopping cart. She never bought me a bra, or suggested we shop for one—I was in college the first time I wore a bra that hadn’t been purloined from her dresser drawer.
* * *
• • •
In the spring of 2016, shortly before I started classes at the police academy, I was arguing constantly with my mother about joining the reserve corps. One night, I had a dream in which I was furiously angry at her. In the dream, I knew that my anger had something to do with my brother (who, despite his early aversion to wrestling and baseball, grew up to be thoroughly heterosexual and devote himself to such aggressively manly activities as war journalism). In the dream, I was weeping and almost shouting at my mother, something I have almost never done in real life. “I even cut my hair off so I would look more like him!” I shouted in the dream.
I woke up at this point, thinking: Oh. Well. Of course.
Most of the time, I chalk this up to normal sibling paranoia. If I grew up with the distinct sense that our mother admired the masculine and viewed the feminine as contemptible, my brother tells me he grew up with an equally strong conviction that she viewed masculinity as toxic and dangerous. Both of us are probably right.
Our mother’s own romantic choices certainly suggest some ambivalence. She married and then divorced our father, an academic from a middle-class family of urban intellectuals. Her second husband, my stepfather, Gary, could hardly have been more of a contrast: he was a working-class bruiser, an autodidact with a wicked sense of humor. A union organizer, Gary could quote Marx and Adorno, but his day-to-day conversation leaned heavily on the phrase “motherfucking fucker,” and his organizing tactics were often of the creative, not exactly legal variety: when a company initiated employee lockouts, for instance, he enlisted my brother and me to help him apply Krazy Glue to the locks on the plant doors in the middle of the night. (“They want a fucking lockout? We’ll give them a fucking lockout.”)
If I loved my father for his thoughtfulness, empathy, and calm, I loved my stepfather for his determination not to “take any fucking shit” from those “motherfucking rat bastards.” My father was not the kind of man who got into physical fights; my stepfather’s response to threat and insult was to get right in the other guy’s face.
As for my mother: well, she divorced my father and married my stepfather.
All this is to say that as a child, I internalized some notions about gender that were, as my brother Ben
put it in a recent conversation, “pretty messed up.” My mother’s silence about such matters as puberty and menstruation suggested that the details of being female were either so trivial as to be beneath notice, or so shameful they could never be acknowledged. Sexism was bad and patriarchy was bad, I deduced, but so were femininity and passivity. Wars were unquestionably bad, at least when they took place in Southeast Asia, but toughness and aggression were clearly admired.
During my tomboy stage, I was a fighter. My stepfather taught me to yank an opponent’s thumb or arm backward until he cried for mercy (police, I later learned, call these “control holds”). I gained other skills from the series of short-term boarders who took up residence in our basement guest room. There was a Dutch guy who taught me yo-yo tricks, wrestling holds, and a few karate moves, and a Greek Cypriot, fresh out of the Army, who used my brother’s toy rifle to demonstrate how to bayonet an enemy to death. I practiced over and over, stabbing sofa cushions with an angry roar.
For several weeks when I was in fourth or fifth grade, Gabriel and I lay in wait after school every day for a boy called Jason. Each afternoon, Jason would walk down the school driveway, backpack over his shoulder, and each afternoon, Gabriel and I would jump on him as soon as he left the school grounds, knock him down, and toss him around a bit. Looking back, the best I can say about this is that we did not really hurt Jason, and I don’t think he was particularly traumatized by being knocked down every afternoon; he seemed to regard the whole thing with good-humored tolerance, as if it was just our way of being friendly. Maybe it was.
I got into only one real fight during my childhood, and it started because of my brother. I was nine, and though at age seven Benjy no longer had shoulder-length hair (and was only a year or two away from insisting that he be called “Ben” instead of Benjy), he was still much too pretty, and a magnet for bullies. Waiting for the school bus one morning, a boy called Mark began to taunt him.
Mark was a nasty kid, the kind who poked injured kittens with a sharp stick. I had seen it. It wasn’t long before the word faggot was used to describe Benjy’s demeanor.
I told Mark to lay off. He ignored me.
I told him to lay off, or else.
At this, he sneered, “What are you going to do to stop me?” and gave Benjy’s shoulder a little shove.
I threw myself at him, and soon we were in an all-out fight. At first, I had the better of it. Although Mark was taller and heavier, surprise was on my side, and I managed to knock him flat. I sat on him triumphantly, not sure what to do next.
To my amazement, he started to cry, first a little bit, then loudly.
“I have dirt in my eye!” he wailed.
Good, I thought savagely. I hope it hurts.
My triumph didn’t last. Mark recovered, shoving me off and landing a hard punch to my jaw, and it was my turn to cry. Turning, I hightailed it down the street toward home.
I pushed through our front door and into the kitchen, where I found my mother sitting on her favorite kitchen stool, smoking a cigarette. My face hurt, and I launched into a series of tearful explanations (Mark hit me! He started it, he was being a bully, he hurt me, it wasn’t fair!), but she wasn’t listening. She rose, pointed at the door, and said, in her most dangerous voice, “Get back out there, and get on that school bus.”
I was stunned. I’m not sure what I was expecting—that she would stride vengefully down the street, seize Mark by the scruff of his neck, and haul him back to his parents for a good thrashing? I assumed, at least, that she would offer sympathy: hugs, an ice pack, maybe an assurance that after my ordeal, it would be better to just stay home from school and rest up.
But I went back out, and got on the school bus. I sat alone in the front row, head down, trying to hide my tears.
Writing this book, it occurred to me, for the first time, to wonder what had become of Mark, so I started googling. He hadn’t left much of an internet footprint; the first and only reference Google could find was a 2013 obituary. Mark had grown up to become an officer in the New York City Police Department, then died at age forty-two. The obituary didn’t give the cause of death, and I could find no other trace of him in any news databases, so it’s safe to assume his death wasn’t in the line of duty. (An illness, maybe? An overdose? Suicide? An accident?) Other than that, the internet offered no further clues. Mark the bully became a cop, had two children, and died, leaving behind only a four-sentence obituary in a local newspaper.
No one comes to adulthood as a blank slate, and for me, it’s probably fair to say that issues relating to authority, violence, and gender are all tangled up together. It added up to a heavy dose of ambivalence. So much, in fact, that I spent the months following my acceptance into the reserve corps training program telling myself I didn’t plan to go through with it.
If I decided to show up at the police academy, I told myself, I’d be showing up just to see what it was like. I could go for a few weeks to satisfy my curiosity, then leave. And even if I decided to complete the academy training, I didn’t have to go out and be a cop when I finished. This was a volunteer position. I could always go through the academy, then say, “Thank you, that was interesting, good-bye.”
But things take on their own momentum. I had put so much energy into the reserve corps application process that it seemed silly not to go through the police academy training course. After that, I decided to start patrol duty—because of the sunk costs, because I was curious, and because everyone around me either condemned or laughed at the idea, which cemented a perverse determination to go through with it.
My mother still made frequent cracks about “fascists” and “racist pigs.” It was hurtful and exasperating, but I didn’t want to keep arguing with her, so I tried to push my uncertainties and ambivalence to the back of my mind. I was going to become a reserve police officer, and that was that. “I understand you don’t like this,” I finally told my mother, “but it’s what I’m doing, and I don’t have to justify it to you.”
But yes, I had a lot to prove. I wanted to prove that I wasn’t weak, or scared, or just a “stupid girl,” as Tony, Nicky, and Victor had charged all those years ago. I still burned with shame when I remembered running away from that fight at the school bus stop. I wanted to prove that I could learn to do push-ups, fight, handcuff people, and shoot a gun—that I could survive insults, challenges, threats, a face full of pepper spray, and whatever else anyone wanted to throw at me.
PART TWO
The Academy
Model Recruit
The Metropolitan Police Department is an organization which functions optimally in accordance with certain rules and regulations that govern the demeanor and performance of its recruit and lateral officers.
—Reserve Recruit Officer Training Handbook, DC Metropolitan Police Department
On April 12, 2016, I reported to the DC Metropolitan Police Academy as instructed, along with fifteen other would-be police officers in Reserve Recruit Class 2016-01. There was Wentz, a former NYPD cop, now in “consulting.” He was in his late twenties or early thirties, smart and cocky; even on day one, he exuded a slight aura of “Do I seriously have to go through this shit?” There was Woodson, a former enlisted marine from Texas, now also in “consulting.” (In the DC area, that’s usually a euphemism for contractors doing classified work for the Defense Department or an intelligence agency.) There was Ramos, a young Cuban American army sergeant still on active duty, and Rodriguez, a Mexican American lawyer from California who had worked for a civil rights group; he looked like he thought he might have walked into the wrong room. I suspect I looked like that too.
There was Turner, a black guy about my age, also in consulting, and Smith, a quiet, self-contained coast guard lieutenant. She was the only other woman in the class. There was Gregson, a florid fiftysomething white guy in an expensive suit who introduced himself as “the CEO of a major international health care company.
” There was Brandt, an air force colonel. There was Lowrey, a middle-aged NASA engineer. He was friendly, lumbering, and slow-spoken, and it became immediately clear that he was destined to become the butt of a thousand rocket scientist jokes. (“What the fuck, Lowrey, it doesn’t take a fucking rocket scientist to know that when I say I want you to do those push-ups now, I mean, I want them now. Oh wait, I forgot, you are a fucking rocket scientist! So you should have no fucking problem with this!”)
All these people had first names too, but it was apparent that no one was planning to use them. I became Brooks, or Recruit Officer Brooks, though later, as a small form of rebellion, I occasionally introduced myself as Rosa and referred to my classmates by their first names.
The youngest reserve recruits were in their early twenties; the oldest, in their early fifties. We were not otherwise a terribly diverse group: two African Americans, three Latinos, and the rest of us all white. Just two women. Twelve of my classmates were current or former military, and three or four had prior law enforcement experience in other jurisdictions.
Our first day at the academy was fairly painless. We arrived in civilian clothes and spent a few minutes introducing ourselves before the instructors launched into a discussion of what we could expect during our time there. We were told to purchase gray T-shirts and gray shorts for our physical training classes. Given our abbreviated evening sessions at the academy, we would do group PT only on Saturdays, but would be expected to train on our own during the rest of the week. We would be issued recruit officer uniforms, which would be mandatory attire in all subsequent classes, but should purchase our own boots (black, at least six inches high), a “garrison belt,” and four black leather belt keepers, whatever those were, each to be adorned with two brass snaps.