Would a conciliatory tone help? “Hey, ladies. How’s it going?”
“Mr. Murphy.” She was regal as she nodded to him. She was a queen, he was dirt.
“Can I help you? Is there any chance I could convince you not to show those signs during the game?” He could see the anger begin to pool in Rochelle’s eyes. Okay, okay, there’s no way I’m going to be able to win here. Manage, manage, that’s what I need to do. “Right, no. Okay. Can I get together with you after the game at least? So we can talk about it? I read the stories—I do want to do something.”
She nodded slowly, her eyes on him still feeling like a gimlet piercing his soul. Fear and relief tumbled around inside him. Maybe he could still salvage this.
“Okay, great—I’ll have an usher bring you more information about getting together. And please know I’m going to beat the hell out of New Orleans tonight.”
He held out a hand in dismissal and walking as fast as he could without breaking into a trot, hustled back to the locker room. He had to call his agent. Hey don’t be mad, I’m just about to be accused of racism on national TV. Hope you got all those contracts signed.
Yeah, as a low-drafted player, only in his second year, his contract wasn’t what would give him any significant money. His hope for getting lots of money was endorsements. Endorsements that he might lose because of Rochelle’s sign campaign, endorsements he might have never had a chance to get if he had kneeled at the national anthem like she’d wanted him to. Endorsements that were gonna be the seed money for the Dorothy Murphy foundation, something that would honor his mom and give his dad something to do, maybe get him out of his griefy pit.
The first person he ran into as he went back to the players area was Cedric Gorman, one of his defensive teammates.
“Jack, what’s wrong with you? You look terrible, man.” Guess he wasn’t as in control as he thought.
Jack barked out a short laugh. “I’ve got a situation. Can you come with me for a second?”
He led Cedric out of the tunnel and pointed at the women with their posters.
“So, I went to high school with that girl in the middle, and a few weeks ago she told me her little cousin had been shot by the police. She wants me to kneel during the national anthem for awareness or something.” God, that was awkward. Cedric was Black and he didn’t kneel, but Jack unexpectedly felt dirty.
Cedric looked at him. “You told her no?”
“Yeah, I’m not really here for distractions.”
Cedric rubbed his hands together rhythmically. “I can’t really see so good that far away. What do those signs say?”
Jack had to swallow before he could answer. “One calls me a racist, Kanye style. One says I’ve broken my mother’s heart—she’s dead, by the way. And one says Black Lives Matter with a memorial for her cousin.” He shifted from one foot to the other and then noticed the game clock. “Look, we don’t really have time for this conversation, but I hope you do know that I care about you and my Black teammates.”
Cedric nodded. “We trust you on the field, for sure.”
“Thanks, man, that means a lot.” Jack adjusted his pads. “Would you mind just sort of clearing this with everybody? I’ve got to make some calls, talk to coach about this.”
He hustled back to the locker. He’d missed five calls from his agent. Fuck. He called her back.
“Hey, Wendy. So it’s out there already?” He winced at her heavy sigh right in his ear.
“You’re officially trending on Twitter,” she said. “Hashtag racist Jack Murphy.”
The butterflies he’d been ignoring in his stomach coalesced into a solid pit. “Can we spin this in any way?”
“Oh, I’ve got plans,” she assured him. “It would’ve been nice if you’d told me about this girl before, but I’m a miracle worker. We are going to go ahead and launch your foundation with a focus on gun violence and trauma recovery. I’ve talked to your lawyers and financial planners, and it’ll be different from what you had planned, but I think it will make a difference.”
“Whatever you need to do, just do it. Just keep me updated. I’ll check my phone as soon as it’s over. Shit. The anthem’s about to start. I’ll have to update coach at halftime.” Team policy was that all players were on the field for the anthem so he rushed to stand beside his teammates, hand over his heart.
Rochelle was supposed to be mad at him. She was actively shaming him. So why did she flinch every time he made contact with another player? Even though he was the one initiating the contact—he was right, he did beat the hell out of New Orleans. The poor quarterback went down so many times at Jack’s hands. She hoped it wasn’t her signs that had made him this energized.
Rochelle sighed. Was she even going to get justice for her cousin? Or just making everything worse. Not everyone back home had thought approaching Jack was a good idea.
“He’s got his own demons,” they said. “He needs football. You know how he felt about his mama.”
But her aunt couldn’t even leave the house right now, only for church. Her sister-cousins would never be the same. So much joy and magic had just disappeared from her family’s world with her cousin’s death.
“It’s not supposed to be this way,” she’d cried and cried to her mom.
Her mom had laughed a short bitter laugh before she said, “Honey, it’s always been this way. You gonna love Black people, you got to develop a toughness.”
She was lost in her thoughts when the sound of bodies and helmets colliding right in front of her jerked her out of it. It was Jack, taking down a rusher for a loss. He looked straight up at her and did that chin-up gesture. She’d put her sign down for a minute, but she grabbed it and aimed it at him. He shook his head and walked back to his team’s huddle. The New Orleans player he’d slammed to the ground took a little bit longer to get up.
The game dragged on interminably. Rochelle had always been raised a New Orleans fan, of course. Okay, half the town was Dallas fans, so it wasn’t “of course,” but whatever. She’d been around football her whole life, she watched the games, she was a fan, but this game was dragging on and on. She was even used to seeing this team suck. Now she just saw mostly Black bodies—and Jack—all hitting each other.
Finally the clock ticked down to the final two-minute warning. St. Louis had put their second string in, so Jack was on the sidelines. She could see his teammates come up to him and point at her and her friends and he’d roll his eyes and shake his head.
“Excuse me, miss,” an usher called over to her. “Jack Murphy asks you to come with me.”
She nervously gathered her purse and looked at her friends. “Do y’all want to come?”
They looked at her and shook their heads on the same beat. Holding posters was one thing, apparently, and dealing with who knows what consequences was another. It had been a big ask anyway.
She looked at the usher. “Okay, I guess it’s just me and you.”
He led her down into the bowels of the Superdome. She looked around her curiously. She’d probably never have another chance to get to see the bee hive of activity up close. Golf carts, folks in St. Louis and New Orleans branded clothes going every which way, people with lanyards hurrying to some destination. It was dizzying.
The usher brought her into a room set up for a press conference. There was a podium and some tables in the front and metal folding chairs were set up facing them.
She felt something poking her armpit and realized she still had her poster board, clutched tight into her side. She put it down and rested it against the back wall.
The usher with her looked at his phone and clicked a few things. “Okay, ma’am, things should get started here shortly. I have to go, but please stay here. Since you don’t have any official authorization, you will get in trouble if you just walk off. If you need me afterwards, I’ll walk you to the best exit for you to get to your transportation.”
“Thanks, I guess?”
He walked off and suddenly the room was
full of mostly men in khaki and collared or button downs, with lanyards around their neck that said “Press.” From the front of the room, the man she recognized as the St. Louis coach came to the podium. Jack came in after him and sat at the table.
The room became a lost place of deep voices. The coach quieted them all at once when he held up his hand. Almost miraculous. If only she could do that with her students.
The coach spoke. “Now, we are very excited about our decisive win over a good New Orleans team. I want to talk about that and about our plans for next week. But before we go forward with football talk, I know there was some significant distraction out there today, well, maybe more on Twitter than on the field, considering Jack’s play. He briefed me at halftime on the situation, and I want to get it all taken care of so we can move on. Before Jack here comes to the podium, I want to say that I have never seen him speak to his Black teammates with anything but respect and unity, so I don’t understand why these women chose to attack him in this way. But he tells me he can explain everything. We’re gonna talk about his record-breaking game in a little bit, but here’s Jack Murphy.” He held out his hand to Jack, and they hugged awkwardly as Jack came to the podium.
Rochelle tensed as Jack looked out at the media. The signs had been petty revenge for his apathy. She’d transmuted her grief into anger. She’d wave the signs, he’d mostly shrug it off, she would feel a little bit better. But her sign warranted a press conference? And what had the coach said about Twitter? Maybe she would get some vengeance. Not on the cop who killed her cousin, or the system that let him off, but on yet another white person who Did. Not. Care.
“Thanks, coach.” Jack ran his fingers through his hair and all the way down to his neck. He was still dressed in his uniform, his hair sweaty, his visible skin shiny with perspiration. He was probably nasty and smelly—and hovering in between the categories of racist and problematic—and still she wanted to keep looking at him. “Wow. I’m not exactly sure where to start here, y’all. I guess maybe the best place is the beginning? Rochelle, will you come up here? Yeah, bring your poster.”
Her heart pounded in her throat as she slowly made her way to the front of the room. All the eyes looking at her made her tremble. She held up her poster on the way to the front, turning it from left to right and back again like the women who signal rounds at a prize fight.
“Thank you, Ro.” He pulled out a chair so she came and sat down beside him, facing the media. “Now, Rochelle and I are both natives of Huss, Louisiana. We were even in some of the same classes in high school, including one taught by my late mother. Where our stories diverged is that I got into football completely after my mom died, and football took me and my dad out of that very small town. I don’t know if Rochelle stayed, but her family did, unlike mine. And—and I found this out just recently—last summer her young cousin was shot and killed by a member of the town’s police force. Rochelle feels like her family hasn’t achieved justice. And she’s chosen to exploit her connection with me to raise awareness. I am not happy to be singled out in this way, though I do think some of the achievements I had today were fueled by those accusation. I’ve spoken with my African-American teammates and made sure they know that I care about them. And I have an announcement. This has been in the works for a while but Rochelle’s activism has made me realize I should go ahead and create it. The Dorothy Murphy Foundation, y’all. Named for my mother, who never saw a cause for justice that she didn’t agitate for. And in that Foundation, there’s going to be a special section dedicated to the memory of Jonathan Fox, and it will focus on creating resources for dealing with trauma from gun violence and of course, our first beneficiaries will be Jonathan’s family. We should have a website set up by tomorrow.”
Rochelle had been listening doubtfully. By the time he had finished she was on her feet. The bulk of the room was clapping, and some people had started clamoring for questions. She turned towards him. So much of him was covered in armor.
She found a relatively open spot and started hitting it. “THAT IS NOT—” She punched his bicep. “—WHAT I WANT—” She aimed at his face. “—THAT ISN’T JUSTICE. THAT’S PLACATION.” Her throat hurt from yelling.
He grabbed her fist in his hand and gently put it down at her side. “Rochelle, you can’t do this right now,” he hissed at her.
She tried to hit him again but he was faster than her now that he was on the alert. He held her to his side and started walking her out of the room. “Sorry, guys. Talk to Wendy for more. Please don’t make Rochelle your story. You can see she’s been through enough.”
3
Rochelle let him lead her out of the room, but as soon as they were out of sight of the press, she turned on him again. “You don’t understand. It’s not the violence, it’s the police. The fucking police killed my cousin, and the dude got paid leave. ‘Cuz he was scared. Jonathan was scared too—he was running away.” She reached out with her other hand to hit him again.
“Wait. Wait.” He said. “Just give me a minute. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Too late for that, motherfucker. His grand gesture was a Band-Aid on a spurting artery, a false front on a crumbling building. And he was so confident it would be enough. Maybe it would be—for his PR problems.
He pulled her into a small room, really more like a closet and shut the door. He let go of her and started to pull his uniform shirt off.
“Jack! What the fuck are you doing?”
“Just, just, hold on,” he said through the fabric. Now she could see his stomach. He finally wrenched his shirt all the way off and then started on his shoulder pad thingies. “Help me with this.”
“Jack, why should I help you get your clothes off? How is you getting shirtless going to help things?” Why was she still here? What was it that made her want to trust him? She had all these questions, and she still helped him take his gear off.
“I promise.”
“But I’m so angry at you.”
“I know. I’m going to help.”
“With your dumb foundation? Have you heard of ‘police brutality’? That’s what we need addressed, not some gun violence trauma thing.” She wanted to hit him some more.
He finally got his armor all the way off. He picked up her hands and shaped them into fists. “Okay. Thumb out. Now you can hit me all you want.”
Jack wasn’t really ready for the way her eyes lit up at the invitation. He tried to keep his muscles relaxed as she approached him but he still involuntarily tensed at her first hit. It wasn’t an NFL hit, but he still felt it in his whole body. She hit him again and again, with two fists, for so long he started to worry about her hands.
“Hey, Ro, let’s take a break. Let me look at your hands. Let’s make sure you aren’t hurting them. Then you can hit me some more.” He could have stood there absorbing the blows, maybe some of her pain, for hours. He was a freaking NFL player. But she wasn’t. He grabbed her arm at the elbow and stopped the next blow headed for his abs. “Rochelle Morris! You have to stop.” She didn’t stop.
Before he realized what he was doing, he had her back to his stomach, her arms crossed, and he had his arms around her, his hands holding her wrists. “Shhh—shhh—shhh. Lemme look at your hands.” They were reddened, and a couple knuckles were close to bleeding.
“Okay, we’re going to have to ice them, okay?” He tried to gentle his voice, to make it calm and soothing, but he could feel the rasp in his throat.
How did he go from just living his life to holding a grief-crazed woman before she hurt herself hitting him? She had quieted when he’d first wrapped his arms around her. Maybe they could get out of here without further damage, and he could rejoin the team and do normal post game stuff. And then she stiffened her whole body and tried to kick him in the balls. “Whoa, whoa. Hey, I need those.”
“Not tonight, you don’t.” She said it like a threat and then suddenly she was facing him, in his arms, her head on his pectoral muscle, and she was shaking.
“Rochelle, you know I’d never! And it will take more than tonight to recover from this run-in with you. Come on. What sort of man do you think my mama raised?”
“Well, one who doesn’t understand systemic racism. But right. You’re okay. I’m just…not. Jack, I’m not okay. I attacked you in front of the press tonight. I’m probably going to lose my job. You can’t teach young minds if you’re attacking NFL players.”
Of course she was a teacher. “What grade do you teach?” Maybe he could distract her.
“Junior high.”
She was wearing a New Orleans jersey, and he traced the number on the back over and over. “Junior high, huh? Did you choose that age?”
“Yeah,” she started to shiver a little. “Because nobody loves them, but they need so much, and I can give some of it to them. But I’ve probably screwed it all up now.”
Her voice wavered as she finished speaking and suddenly she was flat-out bawling in his arms. Her tears and snot ran down his chest, and though he was a big strong NFL player, he shook with the impact of her grief. His belly skin itched as her tears ran down it.
“I just thought,” she pushed out between sobs, “I just thought life would get better. That Black people would be free.” A new, deeper set of sobs made him hold her tighter and closer. “And then they shot Jonathan. You think a foundation can fix this?”
She dissolved into high-pitched keening. He hadn’t seen grief like this since his mom died. But he had been seventeen then and had run away from his dad’s tears. Now the grief was on him, slimy and hot and palpitating.
He sighed and patted her on the back as her grief storm continued to rage. He was too tall to tuck her head under his chin, so he put his hand over the back of her head. He was going to remember the way her head fit into his palm for the rest of his life.
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