My Monticello(4)

Here are our lives laid out together: At ten, while I flailed beneath the blows of work boots, you flew down a zip line at a well-rated day camp. At twelve, while I reread tattered spy novels on the bumpy ride back home from that boarding school, your baseball team placed second in the region. You brought home a trophy. Your mother took a photo of you lifting it. Eventually she sent it to me.

As you grew older, I continued to make certain wishes clear to your mother—about your friends, your schooling, about the length and crop of your hair. Only once did she truly bristle at my intervention, when I insisted you leave swim team your senior year. The swimming had been good at first, but then you placed at state, a dive so graceful a big-league coach courted you. For a season, you took private lessons, shearing your hair, waking before dawn. You excelled in the water, your mother said—you might get a scholarship or more, so why not let you continue? I could feel her picturing you, her Black son, draped in red, white, and blue, holding gold. In truth, I entertained this vision too, but in the end, I couldn’t allow such a glaring deviation. When you were small, I’d worried that you would sink below my ACMs, that you would be dragged down. But here you were, soaring too high for a fair comparison. I did not say any of this to your mother. All I could do was remind her of my unwavering discretion: Hadn’t I held up my side of the bargain all those years? When I said this, she hung up on me, and for a long time we did not speak, though I soon found out that the swimming had stopped.

And so I was surprised when your mother called last August to inform me that you were transferring here to finish your degree. I was only startled to hear her voice. I already knew you were coming—I’d seen it on your social media site. Perhaps your return was an act of muscle memory: all the years spent here, at daycare, then later, in the back offices with your mother. It’s possible too that you were persuaded by the slick recruiting packets I mailed to your P.O. box each semester. Two years you’d attended that out-of-state school, and while you were away, I followed you as best as I could, though less closely than felt comfortable. Like any parent whose child leaves for college, I was forced to let go of some of my sway—though this gap depressed me. Were you drinking too much, I wondered. Had you gotten in a fistfight, or fallen in love with somebody? I drove up to your campus once but found the whole layout disconcerting—and never did set eyes on you. After that, I watched from a safer distance, monitoring arrest reports, subscribing to your local and school media sites. I hoped to catch a glimpse of your life. Did it resemble the lives of my ACMs, those boys I’d watched so ardently years earlier—their drunken escapades, their fearless hearts?

All I know is, when I spotted you here, you looked so tall, so lithe. I did the math—your age against mine—you’d just turned twenty-one. Whatever else had happened in those intervening years, you’d also become a man. Your visible ease in your own skin awakened something in me. Never mind those tragic stories from other towns and cities, young men lost and taken—they were not you, they were not mine. Your ascendance was a glimpse of what could be, and their deaths felt submerged. I realized you had never been average: You were more like a line of poetry too lofty for me to decipher. With you here, I convinced myself that you’d made it out past an invisible trip wire, out to some safe and boundless future. Even if I could not be part of that future, I might still be able to revel in its promise. I was nearly ready to give up on my questions or claim that they’d been answered favorably—those questions of mine, which had always been about hope.

But then—we both know what happened then.

As soon as I heard what they’d done to you, I wrote through that first long night and canceled my next day’s classes. Decades of research became a single anguished letter detailing the difference I could now measure on your face. I wrote about the burden of Race—how it warps the lives of Black and white people. I did not speak of my experiment directly. Instead, I used what happened to you as an anchor for my findings. I could never have predicted that my essay would spread so widely, that inside of a week I’d be invited to appear on several networks and a handful of national radio shows. In sound stage after sound stage, I laid out my meticulous argument, supported by data and by events I’d witnessed with my own eyes. I thought they’d be convinced; instead, they interrupted with other stories, opposing conclusions. I thought they might believe me; instead, they held up a few undisciplined lines from my essay as proof that I was angry and absurd. Death threats flooded my in-box, along with crooning love letters from mothers and sisters, from fathers and sons. Still, last night I was contacted with an offer for publication—not from a prestigious university press, as I’d always envisioned, but rather a two-book deal from a large traditional publisher best known for true-crime stories. Maybe there I can finally write what I want—if it’s all right by you—about what’s been done to me, about the things I’ve done.

As for what happened to you—I saw the pictures like everyone else, I read every account. I studied the cell phone video, frame by bloody frame. Here is your face, in which I have always recognized fragments of my own. Here is your blood, too bright and pouring. Even as you lie stock-still, pinned to the pavement, the police shout staccato commands, which they seem desperate for you to follow. The camera veers and I see them too, sauntering by in spotless sneakers, their ball caps askew. They look relieved that it’s you there on the ground, or else they flash faux gang signs at a camera only they seem to appreciate. The police made a statement before the video surfaced, in defiance of the fact that there is always a video nowadays. You seemed dangerous, they said, and I think of you as a swaddled newborn. They feared for their safety, they said, and perhaps this is true. Later, in a press conference, they admitted you had an ID, but there was some discrepancy. It was from a neighboring state and unfamiliar. You did not appear to be who you said you were.