On the first day of winter’s thaw, I saw two teenage boys on the roof next door holding guns. I don’t know much about guns, except that they kill and that young black men holding them are likely to be killed. I called my husband, trying to keep panic out of my voice so as not alarm my own children. He looked out the window. “Jesus. Call the police”.
After Michael Brown, John Crawford, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice - especially after Tamir - calling the police didn’t seem like the solution here.
“Don’t you see who it is”? I told him. “Eddie and Aaron”.
The boys’ lower-income apartments squat dwarfed by the shadow of our larger middle-income building. An invisible red line and a bright blue spiked fence separate us. Any of our fourth floor neighbors could see them as well we could. I’ve known both since they were small children, but I could see them through the eyes of a stranger, or through my husband’s first glance: two young African-American men, in hoodies, armed.
We watched them galloping with the guns, skipping over the low walls separating the units, and hiding behind TV satellite dishes. Every so often one boy stopped and picked something off the ground.
“Ah, they’re BB guns,” my husband said. “See? They’re reloading the pellets.”
My husband grew up in a neighborhood of long driveways, of single houses screened by large trees on private land. He still has that suburban instinct of detachment, a wait and see attitude. I couldn’t stand the tension of watching. Too much has happened recently. Too much continues to happen. We know how this one unfolds. I kept expecting the wail of police sirens, seeing the scene play out. No call to drop their weapons. Shots. Eddie and Aaron. More dead boys. “Where are my shoes? I’m going down.”
“What are you going to do”? my husband asked. I wasn’t sure. Go to the courtyard and yell. Ring their doorbells. Head off the police if they show? My husband stayed at the window. “I had a rifle when I was a boy, you know. I shot guns with my cousins in Texas and Arkansas every summer”.
But we are not in Texas and neither boy looks anything like my Caucasian husband or his ruddy, blonde cousins. Eddie is short and compact, full of muscles. Aaron is lanky, already taller than most grown men. No one is going to think they’re playing cowboys and Indians. They don’t get to be cops, only robbers. In their hands the black, snub nosed guns look real. I think of the news and of another unarmed teenager shot dead by police in Wisconsin. Tony Robinson.
I grew up in Morne Diable, a small Trinidadian village, where the wooden houses were scattered along the one main road. Everyone looked out for each other’s children. This is not a utopian memory. A neighbor’s son once interrupted my conversation with an unfamiliar boy to find out who he was. I was fourteen and to my everlasting mortification he told me to watch myself. In Brooklyn, in America, there’s so much hesitation to communally parent. I do it - I’ve told teenagers to stop smoking (actually what I said was I’d prefer they smoked pot than cigarettes), glared at them for roughhousing on the subway and given them the eye for swearing in front of my children. In each instance though, I take quick measure before the reprimand. Is this kid going to cuss me out? Or worse? It hasn’t happened yet, but Brooklyn is not that village.
I stopped searching for shoes and found my phone. I called Monique, Eddie’s mother. When he was a toddler she braided his hair in bouncy little plaits, just like I’d plaited our biracial son’s hair the weekend before. I left her a message. “Call me, please. As soon as you can”.
When Aaron was about nine, he asked me to make chocolate chip cookies. I have no idea how he’d found out I baked, but I started then, making cookies for the inner courtyard kids. I baked cookies for a year. The kids helped with my groceries and my stroller. Sometimes I gave them a dollar and sometimes I only thanked them. I thought it funny they called me Miss Gracy, but didn’t tell them to use my first name.
My husband stayed watching Eddie and Aaron. Just in case. In case what? Someone else called the police? The guns turned out to be real? Wasn’t this waiting for something to go down? How would I live with myself if I did nothing now, when action mattered? Just when I decided to go out, they disappeared down the roof hatch.
Eddie’s mother called on Monday afternoon. I told her the boys had been on the roof playing with BB guns and before he recognized them my husband had almost called the police. I wanted them to get in trouble, but with their mothers, not the law. I also wanted them to know I was the one who told on them. And when I run into them they’re going to get in trouble with me.
