Carry

by Toni Jensen

  A recent study through the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago on “Trends in Gun Ownership in the United States, 1972–2018” found “Household gun ownership was greater among respondents in households with higher incomes….It rose from 18.4% for households with income below $25,000 to 45.8% for those with ($90,000+).” The same study found that “in 2010–18, household firearms ownership was higher among households with white respondents (39.3%) than among those with black respondents (18.8%). Similarly, it was greater among non-Hispanics (36.4%) than among Hispanics (16.2%).”

  Put more simply, our national gun problem includes the wealthy and white to a degree our narratives don’t accommodate. It’s then no surprise Carla Tyson owns a shotgun.

  After the threats, the posting bond, Carla pleads no contest to reduced charges at a hearing that June. She’s found guilty of misdemeanor first-degree assault and is sentenced to a one-year suspended sentence and to pay a $1,000 fine and $170 in court costs.

  In Arkansas, pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges for a first offense means you can petition to have the charges expunged from your record after some time has passed. In Arkansas, pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges means you can still legally own a gun.

  Back in the fall, after Carla pulls the shotgun on her neighbors, she begins the moving-out process. When I walk to and from the park, her yard remains poodle-less, and no one sees her or her driver coming and going.

  The incident occurs the week before Halloween, and on Halloween night, we trick-or-treat as usual in a gaggle—kids sugared and costumed up—racing house to house, receiving mini Snickers and Skittles, homemade popcorn balls and Rice Krispie treats at one house. At the corner of Cleburn and Vandeventer, Carla’s tall house stays dark.

  Parents talk low about how we wouldn’t have stopped there, anyway. There is a whisper-chorus of “so crazy.” No one calls her Miss Tyson.

  That night, as we circle around the park, I can’t help but think of my other encounter with Carla. In between the ice cream social and the shotgun incident, one weekend morning, I’m running at Wilson Park, and Carla and her driver approach me. Carla’s in tears, her gray hair wild and uncombed.

  The driver hands me a flyer, and I learn her poodles both are missing. They’d been in her yard one minute and then, the next, gone. It’s raining, and I’m about to head home, but I tell her I’ll keep an eye out.

  I know when I get home, my daughter will conscript me into walking the neighborhood with her, calling the names of the dogs, which are printed on the flyer. I know we’ll carry empty leashes, certain of her ability to call them to her. She has an ability for this, for dog finding. It’s a little spooky how often she encounters a dog who’s either run off or been taken from its owner and how often we’re able to return the dog to its home.

  My daughter’s eight, and by now, this find-and-return cycle has happened at least ten times, probably more. My favorite is the time in a northern Houston suburb, at her aunt and uncle’s house, when we encounter a purebred bull terrier, which then follows us back to the relatives’ home. I know the breed is expensive and this one is well-mannered and very friendly. She’s been well cared for, too, so we begin our search with hope that her owner is just around the corner.

  We convince the relatives to let us keep the dog in their backyard while we try to track down the owner. Our small dog likes this terrier, and the two of them chase each other around the fenced-in yard while we post things on Facebook neighborhood groups and google vet clinics.

  The next day, at a nearby vet clinic, we learn the terrier’s name is Skittles, and she’s been missing from a suburb on the other side of the Houston metroplex, about an hour’s drive from where we found her. The dog’s been missing for over a year. Her owner cries and cries, and she calls us later that day from the vet clinic to ask questions to which we have few answers and to thank us.

  So when Carla’s poodles go missing, my daughter and I do indeed walk the neighborhood in the rain, calling their names, holding onto extra, just-in-case leashes.

  We go to bed that night having had no luck, and at bedtime, my daughter is quiet and a little sad. “They’re out there,” she says, “in the rain and the dark.”

  I know she’s thinking she’s failed or that her ability has failed her, though neither of us would be comfortable naming it or saying so. I tell her we’ll look some in the morning and to try to get some sleep.

  We awake the next morning to barking in the back, in the yard next to our backyard. No one lives in that yard’s house at the time, yet there are Carla’s poodles, crying and barking in the middle of the yard. It’s rained and they’re muddy, and the chain-link fence is tight. We call Carla, and between her and my daughter, they get the chain-link bent back and my daughter squiggles through, and Carla’s face is wet, either from the rain or from crying or both.

  After, I joke with my then-husband that maybe Carla will donate money to the writing program now. The signs had mentioned a reward, but none is mentioned as we wave goodbye to the poodles.

  V.

  Three years after Carla Tyson pulls a gun on her neighbors, a man in Kentucky takes his gun to a Tyson Foods plant in Henderson, a town south and west of Louisville. In April 2018, Christopher Hancock learns of allegations that his wife is having an affair with another Tyson Foods employee. According to reporting by Beth Smith in the Henderson Gleaner, Hancock drives his wife and two small children to the Tyson Foods building, and he takes with him a 9-mm pistol, a .22, a .410, and a 20-gauge shotgun.

  His wife manages to contact her sister, who contacts the police, who meet the car at the Tyson Foods building. When Hancock tries to swerve around the police vehicle, he is headed off by a sheriff’s deputy. Hancock has told his wife, whose alleged lover is Black, that since he doesn’t know what the man looks like, he’ll wait and kill all Black men leaving the building—except instead of saying “Black men,” he uses a racist epithet.

  Hancock leaves his car when he’s met by the deputy and tells the deputy he has a gun and where it is on his body. He has a legal permit for the gun as well, a concealed carry permit, which gives him the right to carry the gun. What he doesn’t have, of course, is a good story or excuse for any of his behavior, which is indefensible. What he doesn’t have is a father whose last name is Tyson.

  Though Hancock is armed, he doesn’t ever point a weapon at anyone. Though he’s made threats on Facebook, he doesn’t threaten anyone in person or at gunpoint.

  It’s not difficult to understand, of course, that he’s convicted. According to the Henderson Gleaner, “The one-day trial of Christopher Hancock, 42,…came down to just 15 minutes of jury deliberation before the panel came back with a guilty verdict,” and the jury took less than half that time to decide a sentence, recommending Hancock spend ten years in prison.

  He’s serving his time at Blackburn Correctional Complex in Lexington, not far from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where another historic Osage orange tree stands on the old Fort Harrod site.

  Fort Harrod was the first permanent settlement by colonists in the state of Kentucky. Osage orange trees are not native to Kentucky, but there were prominent tribes whose citizens travelled back and forth to Kentucky through the territory that encompasses what is now Arkansas and Tennessee—including the Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Cherokee.

  The Osage orange at Fort Harrod is circa the late eighteenth century and, according to the Historical Marker Database, is technically the largest in the nation—76 feet tall at its crown, 88 feet tall at its full height, with a circumference of 12 feet 4 inches. Because it has a split trunk, though, apparently it can’t be crowned the tallest.

  Registered consulting arborist Jud Scott writes, “Was this tree brought to Fort Harrod in the late 1700–1800’s by a pioneer, did Lewis and Clark bring it back during their travels or was it planted by India
ns because of its good bow making properties? No one seems to know who planted this tree but it is a sight to be seen if you are in the Harrodsburg area.”

  Carla Tyson left the Wilson Park neighborhood and its Osage orange tree shortly after her arrest. Christopher Hancock can see the one at Fort Harrod in ten years—or less, of course, if he earns a good behavior early release.

  By telling these stories, I’m not arguing against Hancock’s verdict or his sentence—both are well earned and just. I am wanting only to put his story in proximity to Carla Tyson’s. In this, our America, the collective narrative readily embraces a story like Hancock’s as one typical of gun ownership, of gun violence. But what of Carla Tyson’s story? If more wealthy Americans own guns than do those living in poverty, why do we have such difficulty fitting this fact into our collective gun narrative?

  Because when wealth and whiteness are combined, the narrative shifts most times toward plenty, toward goodness instead of lack or deformity. We’re unwilling to acknowledge abhorrent behavior from an heiress but expect it from a working-class man. We’re willing to sentence him and to give her a pass.

  VI.

  After we leave the Wilson Park neighborhood for South Fayetteville, one day my daughter is playing with her friend who lives around the corner, whose grandparents have a farm in the country. They call to say they’re going out to butcher chickens and my daughter wants to go along, and is this okay with me? Also, when they’re out there, they shoot guns—shotguns or BB guns—at cans. If this makes me uncomfortable, they understand. They want to know what to tell her if my daughter wants to shoot a gun.

  I’ve known them now for years; they’re good friends who’ve seen us both through many things, including my recent divorce from my daughter’s father.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I trust you.”

  And I do, implicitly. My daughter at this point is eleven years old. I have talked to her about guns and gun safety many times. I ask the parents of her friend to put her on the phone, and I tell her to listen to them. I tell her if she wants to shoot the gun, that’s fine with me, but she has to watch first and to listen and to follow every instruction. She agrees.

  After I hang up, I think I’ll stop thinking about it, but I don’t stop thinking about it. In particular, I think of a high school friend whose father is killed in a hunting accident, in a trip and fall with him out in front of the other hunters, the trip and fall and then the shot coming from behind him.

  I text my daughter to tell her to stay behind other people if they’re out walking with guns. She texts back, “Mom I know o my god.” Apparently, as she’ll tell me later, this is something I’ve told her at least a dozen times.

  She’s eleven years old, and that day, she learns both how to shoot a gun and how to skin a chicken. The report later is that she’s good at both—a good shot and less squeamish than her friend about skinning the chicken.

  I’m proud of her and then sheepish about this pride. In other words, I don’t know what to feel or how to feel. I’m an American, perhaps, after all, complicit and conflicted and worried.

  Chicken, by its primary definition, originates as a word pre–twelfth century, according to Webster’s, and sheepish dates to the thirteenth century. Chickenshit by its secondary definition—as in weak, as in afraid—must be a newer concept, since the word is not first used even in its primary sense, referring to petty details, until 1943.

  I am interested both in the naming of things and in the quantifying of them. I am interested in how contrary are our natures, mine included.

  When she arrives home both safe and happy, I ask my daughter if she wrung a neck or plucked a chicken, in addition to the other tasks. She cheerfully reports she did not.

  “Your grandma hated the plucking,” I say, “and your grandpa hated the neck wringing.”

  “The chicken stuff was fine,” she says, “and the shooting was fun.” She smiles her wide smile at me, her enormous hazel eyes, so much like my grandmother’s, held wide and bright. “I liked it,” she says. “I’m good at it.”

  Pass

  I.

  After the last of her classmates say their goodbyes, she tells me. The room for my graduate seminar is nearly windowless, cinder-block, small. This is our final class of the spring semester, 2019, and we sit near the corner, in our ridiculous desk-chair combos. She’s leaving the university, she says. One of her undergraduate students has accused her of showing up to teach her class drunk. She can’t take any more. She can’t. It’s a last-straw sort of situation.

  This woman, I’ll call her Marie, is one of the few students of color in the MFA program where I teach at the University of Arkansas. She’s a talented writer, a steady, intelligent presence in her classes.

  As a graduate teaching assistant, she’s been bullied by some undergraduates in one previous class. They accused her of being incompetent. Though none were particularly specific, though none came forward to speak to her directly or to levy any direct, specific charge, the department began a file. There were meetings. There was no conversation about race, about the confluence of race and gender, unless the student was the one talking.

  In the class, this semester, though, the one containing the drunk-talk student, all has been well. We’re in the last week of the semester when the complaint arrives alongside the spring rain. The department will add this to her file. She may have to go on probation.

  “Is everyone passing the class?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “Did they ask you that?”

  Another headshake.

  No one outside this small, nearly windowless, cinder-block room is talking about the accuser’s potential motivations. No one is talking about how Marie doesn’t drink. No one is talking about where we live—Arkansas, which some say is where the Midwest meets the South. I would say we’re Midwestern in how we don’t, as a culture, as a practice, talk straight, if we talk at all. I would say we’re Southern in how the last thing we’re good at is holding meaningful conversations about race.

  When I say, repeatedly, “You don’t even drink,” Marie laughs the kind of laugh that is a last laugh, an all-finished laugh.

  “It’s so insulting,” she says.

  I say to my student that I both know what she’s going through and that I don’t. “You can pass,” she says, nodding.

  From my slumped position in my desk-chair combo, my head swivels, and then I nod. It’s true. I’m Métis, I’m Native, but I absolutely can pass.

  The kind of passing to which we’re referring just barely makes Webster’s top ten definitions for verb variations:

  a: to serve as a medium of exchange

  b: to be accepted or regarded // drivel that passes for literature

  c: to identify oneself or be identified as something one is not // tried to pass as an adult // Mom could pass as my sister

  Webster’s doesn’t account for what some now call white-coded, which is meant to define those of us who pass but perhaps aren’t actively trying. What does it mean to try to pass? What does it mean to pass without trying? With this act, how do we measure intent? With this act, this action, how much does intent matter?

  There isn’t much to say, after. Outside, in the dark and damp, we hug and shake off some of the seriousness, and we laugh a little because, what else? I watch her turn right, and I turn left, toward my car, and the rain shifts from hard, straight, and steady to intermittent, to the kind that comes toward you at all angles. A cloud of blackbirds alights in the tree next to the parking garage, and as I approach, they begin the dive and swoop they do after spring storms, which is called a murmuration.

  I drive down MLK Jr. Boulevard toward home. The historic marker two blocks from my house will let you know where you are if, before, you didn’t. It’s good sometimes to be reminded you are driving down the
Trail of Tears, even if the reminder leaves you holding in your breath a beat too long. It’s good sometimes to have the impulse toward forgetting and then to be reminded of the literal—where you are—with the past made present, with it carried and lived as you drive on home.

  II.

  When I was a graduate student in Texas, the first time I brought a story into workshop, a fellow student told me if I was going to “write about Indians,” I would need to separate my writing more from that of Louise Erdrich. Then this man misquoted from the beginning of Erdrich’s novel Tracks, ostensibly to show how similar it was to my story. At the end of workshop when it was my turn to speak, I corrected his misquotation and suggested in my most polite voice that perhaps to him “Indians” writing about snow all seemed the same. I assured him we were not. I assured him though we might both have written about snow, neither of us was “writing about Indians.”

  There were so many things that afternoon I did not say. I did not tell this man how it felt, in my first weeks on campus, to have my favorite book mistreated this way. I didn’t trust my voice for that. I did not explain how “Erdrich” rhymes with brick, not witch. I did not trust my voice for that either.

  Her books were sent to me by a friend when I was young and lived in Wales for nearly a year, so far from home I thought I might float from my skin, I might shift shape, I might no longer be who or what I was. Her stories were the first fiction I read to contain the word Métis. I kept that part very quiet. There was no part of me that wanted to hear this word mangled and spit from this man’s mouth.