Things I Have Withheld

by Kei Miller

  Isaac is behind the wheel and we are driving back. I am riding shotgun and K is sprawled out on the back seat. It is evening but I only know this because we have been out all day, and also the time on the jeep’s dashboard tells me so. If it was only for the harmattan, every part of the day would look the same, like dusk—like we are driving through a never-ending fog. We almost fail to see the police flagging down our vehicle. At the last minute we pull over.

  The police—and it is a large group of them, many more than the usual pair I am used to seeing on Jamaican highways—seem weary and agitated. I know the look; I have seen it in Jamaican police officers on highway duty. They have been at this spot for too long and have not issued as many tickets as they had hoped to, and more importantly, have not collected as much bribe money as they had hoped for. One officer,who seems to be in charge, gestures for Isaac to roll his window down. What is your name? Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Where do you live now? Where were you born? Are you sure—I know this village. Are you from there? I can call people to check. Make sure you are telling me the truth! The questions seem unnecessarily aggressive to me, and fast—one on top the other, as if he wants Isaac to trip up on something—make a mistake. Isaac’s politeness is practised and efficient. The officer tells him to get out of the car and bring his documents over. Isaac disappears into the group of officers while another officer tells me to wind down my own window. “Who are you?” the officer barks.

  “I am Kei,” I answer. I know this game well enough. I have played it in Jamaica. My answers will be efficient, precise. They will be polite but with an edge of curtness.

  “What do you do, Mr Kei?”

  Brother Desai’s words come back to me in this moment: Writers are a dangerous set of people! And indeed, in this moment, it would be a dangerous thing to be a writer. I know that this is a negotiation of power but it is important in such moments to always remember your own power is never greater than the officer’s. You must be humble. If possible, you should give an answer that makes you seem adjacent to power. You must give the officer the impression that, if it comes to it, you are the kind of person who will be able to call upon people. In these moments, I am never a writer. That is not an answer that works in these situations. Instead, I give another truthful answer that is more helpful. “I am a university professor,” I say.

  “Oh?” says the officer, “Do you have ID?”

  I do not, but I have my bank card, and I show him, my title written on it.

  “We are sorry to inconvenience you, Prof.! It is just a standard check.”

  I nod.

  The officer has paid no attention to the back seat, but on his own K is winding down the window. “Hello, my bruddas! My bruddas!? How are you doing?” he calls out brightly from the back seat and I think to myself, Oh shit!

  Outside, the officers have become even more agitated—almost desperate. All of Isaac’s documents check out. Everything is in order. His registration is up to date. There is no easy misdemeanour to pin on him, no easy bribe to extract. They have now ordered him to open the back of the jeep so that they can do a search.

  Unsurprisingly, the officer who was at my window is now ignoring me in preference for the man he has found in the back seat, so much more enthusiastic—so much more willing to talk. “And what are they searching for, my brudda?” K asks.

  “Drugs and weapons,” the officer replies, “but only illegal weapons. We have no problem if your weapon is registered . . .” he lets his sentences trail off, dangling, as if hoping K will pick up the threads.

  “Oh,” remarks K, “So it is OK if the weapon is registered?”

  In the front, I shake my head. I wonder why is he engaged in this conversation. Why would he ask for clarification about weapons when we have no weapons?

  The officer continues, “No you can have a registered gun. But no drugs. Drugs are illegal . . . no marijuana, no cocaine.”

  “No drugs?” K asks.

  “No.” The officer is smiling.

  I know that K is not so naïve as to think these officers mean us any good, but he is naïve about other things. He is naïve enough to believe in the good logic of law, and in the basic rights of citizens, and that there are simple things we can do to protect ourselves and to hold the police to account. These are the kinds of naïve beliefs you might have if you grew up in a place like the UK or even the US. You understand that the police might often do unjust things, but you believe that you will be able to shine a light on that injustice­—­to amplify it and bring them to account. You would not believe such things if you grew up in a place like Jamaica or Ghana, and I realise then that there are so many kinds of kinship in this world.

  It is because K grew up in Britain he believes in the good logic of law and in the basic rights of citizens and does not think anything of taking out his phone and filming the officers as they search the back of the car. He does not know that less than a year ago, Ghanaian police assaulted the journalist, Malik Sullemana, for daring to film them. Everything had happened the wrong way around: it was a police officer who had crashed into the vehicle in which Sullemana had been riding; it was the police officer who tried to flee the incident like a criminal. Sullemana caught up with him and confronted him, but then when other officers arrived on the scene it was not to offer justice to Sullemana. When they realised he was filming the whole thing, they beat him up badly. They left him with blood clotting in his left eye, bruises on his left arm, and swelling in his left leg. If all that wasn’t bad enough, they then threw him in jail. And K does not know that less than a year before that incident with Malik Sullemana, the same thing had happened to Latif Iddrisu. It is illegal (and the logic of this would not make sense to K) to film the police in Ghana, and whether this law is written in the actual books or not is immaterial. It is a law the police will defend with all the brutality of their muscle.

  The officers do not find drugs in the jeep because there are no drugs in the jeep. They do not find weapons in the jeep because there are no weapons in the jeep. But the officer now sees that K is filming on his phone and he smiles as if all his patience has paid off and all his Christmases have come at once.

  K is ordered out of the car and frogmarched towards the group of police. I know he did not handle this well, but I feel sorry for him. It is such an intimidatingly big group of officers and they are wearing a range of uniforms—from solid blue, to khaki, to various shades of camouflage. Some of them are holding guns and others batons. They are all shouting and gesticulating and K is in the middle pleading. I feel sorry for K, but there is nothing I can do. I turn on my phone to finish a crossword puzzle. Words from the argument drift over to me. “Illegal!” shout the officers, and something about “social media”. K is protesting, “But I’m a foreigner! I’m just a Sco’ish lad! I don’t know your rules!” And despite myself I have to stifle a laugh—how suddenly all attempts at brotherhood have been abandoned. We are always choosing between our various identities, occupying the one that suits a situation best.

  Isaac is visibly worried. He is constantly moving between the jeep and the officers. Whenever he returns to the jeep, he has his hands on his head and says “Oy-yoi-yoi! This is bad. This is so bad.” I must seem so heartless to him; I only raise a brow and go back to my crossword.

  An officer comes to my window. “We are sorry, Prof.,” he says to me, “we know you are a good man. We respect you. But your friend. Oi! You know what it is like, Prof. These people, they come into our country and they take these videos,” he is talking to me as if I am suddenly his brother—as if I understand this world, which I do, and as if I am sympathetic to his position, which I am not. “Oh yes, Prof.,” he continues, “they take these videos and then they write all manner of things—blogs and essays. Yes. That is what these people do. They write these things, you would not believe. And they make us look so bad!”

  “Is that so?” I ask, and c
an’t help but marvel at his logic. Why wouldn’t it occur to him that if they did not do bad things, maybe bad things would not be written about them? But such logic belongs to another landscape.

  “Oh yes!” he assures me. “The things they write about us—especially on social media. On that Facebook! It is terrible. We cannot allow it.” I nod. I go back to my crossword.

  The confrontation seems to stretch on forever. The officers are shouting, “Illegal!” and, “Social media”! Isaac is pacing back and forth and saying “Oy-yoi-yoi!” K is pleading—“just give me back the damn phone and I’Ll delete it!” But the officers refuse. “It is evidence!” they say. “We cannot delete evidence!” These are the words they use, but it is not what they mean. What they really mean is, how much money will you pay us to let this go?

  Another officer comes to my window. “But Prof.,” he says, “Why do you not intervene?”

  “And what could I possibly have to contribute?” I ask.

  He looks at me for a few seconds and then shrugs. But I know what he wants. He wants the whole situation to get even more chaotic. He wants to have us all emotionally involved and desperate. He wants us to be panicked about the possibility of K going to jail so that we will reach deeper, much deeper, into our collective pockets. He does not understand­—­or maybe he does—that my refusal to get involved is its own act of resistance.

  “I’Ll just wait here till you’re all done,” I say, and he walks away a little defeated.

  No headway has been made in the brouhaha and there is now only one option for the officers. They must make good on their threat. They have to up the ante and show their muscle. K is ordered into the back of the police jeep. Isaac is told to follow as they take him off to jail.

  We are back on the road. Isaac keeps saying “This is bad, this is sooo bad,” but this whole farce of an arrest seems ridiculous to me. It is not an arrest. We all know. This is a shakedown. A mile into the drive and the police have pulled over to the side. They’ve all climbed out to repeat the same performance as they had done before, but perhaps now having proven a willingness to go through with their threat. They are still shouting, “Illegal!” and, “Social media!” but now they have added something else to make their intentions more clear. “It is such a pity we have to arrest you,” they say to K. “If only there was something else we could do. If only there was another way to get out of this mess . . .”

  They will go no further in spelling out the bribe. It has been put on the table for us to take or not. Isaac talks to the officers and talks to K. An amount is agreed. We scrounge up all the money we have between the three of us. The transaction is made. K is released.

  The drive back is even more silent than it had been before. K is brooding in the back seat. His disappointment is thick in the car, but a disappointment that cannot be easily named—like a sort of betrayal, like the darker truth of brotherhood. “You OK?” I ask, and K nods, but he does not meet my eyes.

  14

  AND THIS IS HOW WE DIE

  I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.

  —James Baldwin

  Dear James,

  I saw your death. Not the one that found you in Paris, the cancer eating away at your stomach, but rather the one you fled—the one you said would have come to you if you had not left America.

  James, this is how you die: you are twenty-five years old. You are a young man with a fine and muscled body. Perhaps it is partly the blessing of good genes but also the result of discipline. You have trained your body. You often jog through the coolness of a Georgia morning. It is February and though winters in this part of Georgia are already mild, you are glad that the worst of it is over, but the humidity has not yet crept back. What a fine thing it is to run. How uncomplicated. No machines, no crowd of men in Y-back T-shirts grunting as they lift bars of iron over their heads. It is just the road and your own feet pounding its surface, your heart racing to a speed it is used to. You do not think about your breath the way beginning runners do, the ones who worry they will run out of it, who stop and bend over with their hands on their knees to catch the thing they fear they will lose. But you, James—you take your breath in your stride, literally, filling your lungs with the cool air, the cool air oxygenating your whole body, your beautiful body running against your own time.

  There is a jeep. It is behind you. At first you think nothing of it. You do not think it contains danger. You only pull to the side of the road and wait for it to pass, but it doesn’t, and it is only then—this refusal to pass, its insistence on staying behind you that you begin to worry and that your heart begins to race even faster than the speed it has grown used to. The driver is calling for you to stop. Stop, he says. Stop! I need to talk to you! And you wish that you had worn earphones whether music was playing from them or not, but at least you could have pretended that you did not hear him.

  There are trees on the side of the road. You think about running into the greenery but just as quickly dismiss the thought. You would be stuck there. You would be hiding like a frightened criminal. You have done nothing wrong. You are only jogging—running now—and you do not know why the man in the jeep behind you is shouting for you to stop. It makes sense to stay on the road, to simply do what you have been doing. There is the possibility someone else will appear on the road, and just like that, someone does. Another jeep is stopped ahead of you—a white pickup truck with a man standing in the bed of it. The driver’s door is open and the driver is standing outside. They do not seem like men who you would run to for safety. They are big and burly and bearded and white. And they are loading guns. Why are they loading guns? Not the neat kind of handgun you might tuck into the elastic of your shorts, the metal pressed cold against your back—but those big-ass rifles that you have to pump. A white man’s gun, you think. A gun for a modern confederate soldier. What seemed like it could have been safety has now revealed itself as an even greater danger.

  It is no longer such a fine thing to run—not when you are running for your life, not when you really might lose your breath and never regain it. Your heart is pounding so much faster and harder than your feet on the asphalt. You cannot turn around. The other jeep is still behind you as if to block you in. You pull closer to the white jeep and then pull sharply to the side deciding to run around it. The men are shouting. Stop! I told you to stop, boy! In front of the jeep the man points his gun towards you. Fast as you run you cannot outrun a bullet. You imagine the bullet in your back and decide the only thing to do is to pull the gun away from this man so intent on killing you. You run towards him and try to wrestle the gun away. There is an explosion. Your ears ring. Your wrist feels as if it is on fire but there is no time to think about the pain. You reach for the gun even more desperately. You both stumble even as the man tries to reload the gun. Another explosion. Now it is your side that is on fire. And why? What is the cause of this? You struggle some more. The man reloads. A third explosion. You feel like your whole self is on fire now, like the brightest light is spreading out from your own stomach. You fall. The man says, Fucking nigger. And James, this is how you die.

  This is also how you die—

  You are twenty-six years old and it is a Friday night. There is nothing particular about this night, nothing special except maybe it is a little more quiet than usual. It is as if the whole world is holding its breath, which it is. It is strange to exist in this time, in the held breath of the world, but if you had to give your own feelings a name just now, you might say you felt content, even safe. It is the end of the week and you are in your own home, in your own bed, and your head is rested against the broad chest of your own boyfriend. Somewhere in the distance you hear a siren and for a moment your body tenses, not out of fear, but as if to ready yourself for work.

  You
used to work on ambulances—the screeching siren following you to the old woman who has collapsed in her living room—a heart attack, or to the couple trapped in the metallic crush of a car that has skidded off the highway. Now you work in the emergency room and the sound of sirens is the sound of work coming in. But you are not in the hospital; you are at home, in your own bed, with your own boyfriend, and the movie playing on the TV is more watching you than you watching it. You have both decided to stay in tonight because of that tension that is out there in the world. Though the State of Kentucky has not yet declared a lockdown (that will happen in three days) the strange virus that is already bringing the world to its knees is close. It has already entered this bluegrass state, this Commonwealth of Kentucky. You have been thinking about your own safety, of course. How could you not? You have wondered if your job will provide you with the right gear, face shields and gloves. You are an essential worker, after all. That comes with risks. You are the kind of woman who considers the risks. Your mother has said as much, her hand soft against your cheek and her eyes wet with a thing like love. You’ve always had your head on straight, girl. Always. But risks are for tomorrow. Now—just now—you are home. The terrible virus is out there doing its thing in the world. For just this moment, you are allowed the feeling of safety.

  The banging at the door causes you and your boyfriend to jump, to scream a little. It is so sudden. It is so loud. It is so insistent. You both jump out of bed, fully awake and terrified. Your boyfriend marches into the living room. He has taken out his registered gun like a man protecting his castle. This isn’t his home, but you are suddenly glad he is here tonight. Who is it? He is shouting. Who the fuck is it? You are shouting, even as you cower in the hallway. Your boyfriend points his gun towards the door—the door that is banging so loudly as if all the tension that was out there in the world is now gathered right outside your own apartment trying to burst in. And then something you have never seen before—the door flies off its hinges and into the room like the big bad wolf just huffed and puffed and blew it out of the way. Your boyfriend fires the gun but you hear so many more shots. So many gunshots. And your body as if it is on fire, as if the brightest light is spreading through your entire being. And James, this is how you die.