I Would Have Died
Today.
Today.
The wind has been heavy the past few days. The sound of cracking branches is so common that, like today, when things have become slightly more still, I wonder when the next torrent of currents will come. But this is easy to forget. For now it doesn’t affect me.
2017.
The spring term was over and people were leaving. We decided to walk to the small village outside campus. Passing a construction site for a new home, we stood there as we finished our cigarettes and looked at it. We stubbed the butts out on the pavement. Noticing that no one was around we walked into the site. The frame of the building was completely set and there were floors that you could climb. We went from frame to frame, examining the symmetry of all the two by fours, the way things were lit by the open window like a church hall that would one day be a forgotten attic. We walked into each unwalled area, taking guesses about which room would go where. After about fifteen minutes, we left, walking down the street, not bothered by the neighbors or the police.
2020.
Ahmaud Arbery, a man my age, black, went for a run through a white neighborhood. He ran through there often. He stopped for a second to look at a construction site, wondering perhaps, what it was all for. A curious neighbor. Two white men saw him. He was black and so obviously terrifying, dangerous, always a threat. To be squashed, subhuman. Never attempting to see his humanity, they followed him. Thinking themselves vigilantes, they are really an old, you could say traditional, form of terrorist that has lived here since before any of this was called an independent and free country. They followed him. They trapped him. They were armed. He was in running clothes. He was going for a run. They killed him without ever attempting to take the time to ask if he was innocent. He’s black. He’s always guilty. I have a hard time believing that they thought any other way about this. Those men, for once, are in jail.
2005.
At the age of twelve I got picked up by a sibling’s friend from a play I was in. She was taking me to my Dad. He was helping my siblings film a movie for a high school project at the local diner. It was night. He and another man were playing robbers. They wore fedoras and trench coats, had prop guns made of PVC with bright orange ends. There were two cameras and two boom mics inside. One camera set was a prop, the other actually recording everything. My sibling’s friend and I sat in the back of all this, next to the window, smiling as we ate ice cream cones. The sound-man sat beside us. He told us later that he had a funny thought, that the vents were filling up with smoke and that SWAT would come in to arrest all of us. At that moment he looked out the window and to his right. There were two police officers outside, both armed with assault rifles maybe thirty yards from us as they watched us shoot a movie for a high school class. We stopped filming, the sound man saying the cops were here. We went outside. They did not threaten us. They listened as we spoke. They took their fingers off of their triggers and came inside of the diner. They told us that we were fine. They had a complaint of an armed robbery at the Koffee Klatch. They told us, kindly, to just keep people outside of the door to tell passers by that we were just filming a movie.
2020.
Breonna Taylor asks the cops for help, scared of someone breaking into her apartment. It turns out they were cops. What they were doing was legal. They came in. According to reports, they had a brief confrontation, and then the cops shot her eight times. They thought her apartment might be some kind of drug mule. It was past midnight. She was an EMT. She is a year older than me. We are both Geminis. In the dark we sleep, supposedly safe in our homes. She never is able to go to nursing school.
2020.
There is nothing I have in my life that contrasts with George Floyd’s murder. When I was a kid I did wonder if any money I had was counterfeit. If so, I doubt the police would expect that I made it. After all, I’m from one of the wealthiest counties in the nation. they would’ve thought it was unintentional and I perhaps would have gone to the station. I would have been let go, losing the fake bill, but not my life. Just a stupid little kid. Free to be innocent. They would not stop me. They would not, in the middle of a bright day, kneel on my neck as I beg for air. They would not.
Today.
If you are white, there are times in your life that you deal with the police, but rarely does it end badly. Rarely does it end in death for a minor crime. We all have stories like this. Lucky breaks with the cops that many of us don’t think of as lucky since we are so used to being white, being seen as non-threatening to our white protectors. And have no doubt that’s what the police are. The foot soldiers of white supremacy and the subjugators of people of color. Perhaps not individually, but no doubt systemically. They walk together like brothers in arms, like soldiers in some gang. There are countless other moments when I have dealt with the police — illegally camping, skateboarding on public property, running red lights, speeding. And they treated me as a person. They had no doubts as to my humanity because I was white. If I was innocent or guilty, they still treated me kindly. They never would put their hand on the butt of their pistol. But at that diner, or in that construction yard, I doubt it would mean the same thing if I were black. I wonder if I would still be alive. And I sit here, still living in Marin, listening to the wind at a distance begin to break the branches around our trees.