How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(13)

Nicole drove a tiny green Geo Metro that I couldn’t drive because it was a stick, and also because my license was suspended. The four of us piled in that Geo and headed to a Lilith Fair concert in Hershey. The concert wasn’t Fresh Fest, and I didn’t love the wet fog of patchouli and weed, or the lack of my kind at the show, but it ended up making me smile and feel a lot.

After the concert, we stopped at a gas station before leaving Hershey and heading back to Emmaus. A few minutes after we got on the interstate, I reminded Nicole to turn on her headlights.

Seconds later, we heard the siren.

A young white cop came to Nicole’s side and pointed his flashlight at me in the passenger seat. I asked him if I could open the glove compartment to get her registration. He told me to keep my hands in plain sight.

I laughed at him. “See?” I said to Nicole.

An older white cop came up from behind us and approached my side. Both cops walked to the front of the Geo, talked for a second, then told me to get out of the car.

“For what?” I asked, now fake-laughing.

“Because we saw you throw crack out of the window.”

I sucked my teeth. “I’ont even drink,” I stupidly told the cop.

I pointed toward the field and told both cops again that I didn’t throw shit out of the car and that we could all go look if they wanted to.

When I raised my arms, the bigger cop put his hands on his gun and told me to put my hands on the car. He patted me down and handcuffed me while Nicole watched from the driver’s side and her ridiculous round friend sat quietly in the back of the car talking to the girl whose voice I can’t even remember.

Blackness is probable cause, I tell myself.

They got me.

I’m standing handcuffed in front of the flashing blue lights of a parked police car and a green Geo Metro. I’ve had guns pulled on me before and I was never afraid.

This is different.

The handcuffs hurt more than the thought of bullets. The two cops with deep frown lines place me in the back of the police car “for my own good” as a parade of mostly drunk white folks, on their way home from Lilith Fair, drive down the highway looking in our direction.

Shame.

I am guilty of being too much like my kind, which means I am one mistaken movement from being a justifiable homicide, or a few planted rocks from being incarcerated.

This is American law. In Hershey. In Jackson. In Compton. In Oakland. In Brooklyn.

This is American life.

I’m wondering what will happen if I ask the cops, “Do y’all still drink Kool-Aid? Does it make your tongue purple? Remember Tang? Would you ever want us to do this to you and your kids? I’m serious. Don’t you think police, teachers, doctors, and dentists should be more just and compassionate than the rest of us? Who protects us from you?”

I’m wondering if Nicole, who is now standing at the back of her green Geo Metro talking to one of the cops, will think I could have actually thrown drugs out of her passenger-side window. This, I tell myself, is why Mama and Grandma got so mad when Nicole’s white stepfather disowned her for talking to me. Grandma and Mama believed that if anyone should have used disowning as a tactic to protect their child, it should have been them. But they never did. They never would. They simply said, “Don’t get caught riding in the car with white girls” in the same speech during which they told me, “Don’t fuck anyone you can’t imagine raising a child with.”

I’m wondering if Nicole is wondering if she ever really knew me. I’m thinking I should have asked myself that question long before we decided to move in together. I feel so typical.

From the backseat of the police car, I’m watching this blinking blue field where my kind has thrown lots of invisible, and not so invisible, rocks of crack cocaine. I convince myself that Mississippi is on the other side of that field.

I want to run home.

For a second, though—truth be told—I’m wondering if I actually did throw rocks out of the window. Sitting in the back of that police car in handcuffs that had been wrapped around the wrists of many of my kind, I’m wondering if there’s any chance that I am what, not who, they think I am.

I’m watching the police search Nicole’s car. They pull out my backpack from the trunk. The older cop reaches in the bag and pulls out what looks like some condoms they gave out at Lilith Fair. He holds the backpack up in Nicole’s face and shakes his head. He comes to the back of the police car I’m sitting in and tells me to get out.

“Thought you said we wouldn’t find anything in your bag,” he says.

I get it. This isn’t just about race or love; it’s mostly about fucking.

As calm as I can, still water cradling my eyes, I say, “You should find that crack you saw me throw or you should let me go.” The cop makes some comment about my mouth and takes the handcuffs off.

I don’t feel free. I want to run home.

“All the people that you could’ve stopped, and you chose us?” I say with my hands pressed against my thighs. Cars filled with white folks keep passing us. They’re all watching, mostly knowing what my kind is capable of. I wonder if Kurt is in one of those cars. I wonder, too, how many of my kind saw me handcuffed on the side of the road that night.

They want to help, I tell myself. But they already know.

“You’uns safe tonight,” the older officer says. “We’re just doing our job.”