We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,79
our two black kids. He didn’t say a word—just stared.
And what did Zaire do? That boy dropped the leash and ran. Dada followed. They just took off, with a pit-Dalmatian running after them like Boyz in the Waterfront Community Hood.
I had gone over this and over this with them, but when the shit hit the Shinola, they just didn’t know what to do.
Zaire and Dada told us all the whole story that night in the kitchen. The boys were laughing now, the edges of the experience dulling into an anecdote. I’d poured a glass of Chardonnay to calm myself down. I swirled the wine in my mouth for a second as they talked excitedly, tasting the notes of pear and white chocolate with hints of vanilla. I was drinking wine and listening to what amounted to a boys’ adventure story told in a million-dollar custom-made kitchen. None of it would protect us.
“They could have shot you in the back,” I said.
BACK TO THE GOLF CART, SEARCHING FOR ZAIRE AND DADA, WHO WERE probably fumbling with their keys and looking to everyone else in the world like two black boys staging a break-in.
I felt mad at them, I felt mad at D, and I felt mad at how black boys seem to be in constant danger. (And these are not just black boys. These are big black boys, especially endangered.) How are we supposed to give them all the knowledge, all the power, and all the pride that we can, and then ask them to be subservient when it comes to dealing with the police? “This is how you have to act in order to come home alive.”
They are the boys I adore. And people don’t value their very breath. It could be extinguished in one second, without thought, leaving a dog to run, dragging its leash the whole way home. A dog, safer from harm than black boy bodies.
seventeen
MITTENS
When Dwyane moved back to Chicago to play for the Bulls, we began renting a Victorian-style house on the Gold Coast. The boy who grew up hearing shootings on the South Side of Chicago now lives in the most expensive neighborhood in the city. The house was built in 1883, and one of the first owners was successful adman Charles Kingsbury Miller, a Son of the American Revolution who proudly traced his lineage to colonial families. For his postretirement second act, he led the charge for legislation to make it illegal to disrespect the American flag. He was especially upset, he said in an 1898 SAR banquet speech, to see the flag “converted into grotesque coats for Negro minstrels.” The home was recently restored to preserve its sense of history, so it is easy to imagine Charles returning to visit and the look on his face when he finds me at the door.
When I am in town, I leave the house every morning to walk to the gym. In the winter it is eight degrees in broad daylight, and everyone and their mother is wearing the uniform of a big black puffy coat with the hood up. You can see two inches of everyone’s face. As I walk, I see my Gold Coast neighbors scan the visible slash of my skin. They’re looking to see if I belong to one of the houses. Am I the cook? The nanny? Whose girl am I?
The sidewalks are narrow here because a lot of our neighbors have literally gated their shrubs. There’s the shrubbery in front of their home, then the sidewalk, and then more fenced-in shrubbery before the street. Why they need to wall off their shrubbery is another topic for conversation, but the result is that if you stop to talk with somebody, you literally block the whole sidewalk.
Yesterday on my walk, two women did just that. One had a dog on a short leash and the other was an older woman I recognized as a close neighbor. As I approached them with their backs turned to me, I rehearsed what to say to avoid scaring them.
“Excuse me, ladies,” I said in my sweetest, singsongiest voice. The older woman turned, reacting with a full face of pleasantness. But as she saw my two inches of skin, I watched a wave of terror come over her face as her entire body clenched.
I sidled past, and as I walked away, I heard my neighbor say something I couldn’t place, but then heard the last word as clear as could be: “thug.”