We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,80

The kids? My sweet husband, who I often call Poopy? Something completely unrelated to me? Whatever the answer, I gave my workout to her. I thought about her saying “thug” the entire time I was on the treadmill, pounding out that run.

The next day, as I layered up to make my walk to the gym, I remembered that I had two new pairs of gloves and mittens, both in black and white stripes. I instinctively reached for the gloves, but I stopped.

“Well,” I said aloud, “thugs don’t wear mittens.”

I put the mittens on and went out into the street. Of course I was fumbling with my phone because, honestly, you can’t do shit with mittens on. But I was going to make my neighbors feel comfortable, dammit. Surely they would see my black face and say, “But wait, she’s got on mittens! She’s an acceptable Negro. She belongs. Just look at those darling mittens.”

That day, I decided to walk through the park instead of on the sidewalk. To save myself two minutes, I cut from the path to walk across a patch of grass. I was four steps in when I got trapped in a quicksand of icy mud. I looked down, my sneakers getting muddier and muddier, and I wasn’t sure where to step next.

Suddenly, a sea of children ran toward me. They were probably on a field trip, racing through the park, with their teachers trying to keep up. “What are the teachers going to think about this black lady,” I thought to myself, “in a puffy coat and black hoodie, standing frozen in this swamp of mud?”

I panicked, sticking my hands out at my sides. I’ve got my mittens on, I thought. Those teachers can tell their children not to be afraid. As the kids ran around me, I tried to skedaddle past them, because that is the only word for the ridiculous “walking” I was doing, slipping and sliding across the icy mud. And I became furious. Had I really reassured myself that I could erase four hundred years of history with these fucking mittens? Yes, the mittens were the thing that was going to separate me from the other black people who my neighbors deem threatening or, at very least, have decided don’t belong on the Gold Coast.

I had dared to go off the path set for me. But when I got to the gym, I didn’t think about my neighbors on the treadmill that day. I thought about my friend Ricky Williams. Ricky is a retired Miami Dolphin who I met while I was doing Bad Boys II. He would be the first to tell you that he has social anxiety, so we bonded over that right away. I called him Buddha because he was so cosmic and sweet. Like me, he likes to go for walks, and like me, he doesn’t always know where he’s headed. When I’m filming in new cities, I walk around and allow myself to get lost. And yes, I have been known to aimlessly follow squirrels.

Ricky was showing just that trait in January 2017, before an award ceremony in Tyler, Texas, when this ex–University of Texas prodigal son left his hotel to kill time with a walk. Ricky was strolling through nearby woods when someone called the police because he looked “suspicious.” On the body-cam footage, before the officers even got out of the car, one of them said, “That looks like Ricky Williams.” It was actually four cops who arrived on “the scene” to search and question him. He was told to put his hands behind his back, and right after they told him to spread his legs, a starstruck young officer asked if he was Ricky Williams.

“I am.”

What followed presents a surreal portrait of fame and the black body. On video, the cops seem to slip in and out of seeing him as Ricky Williams, someone whose fame sets him apart, and seeing a black man in a white space. Ricky stands there as the cop runs his hands all over his body. “I’ll explain everything to you in just a second,” says the cop, pulling Ricky’s hotel key card from his pocket. “People don’t know who you are, nothing may have happened that was wrong, but we gotta find out.”

When Ricky tells them he is staying at the Marriott next door, the policemen seem to leap on this fact as a reason to let him go. “If you tell me you’re staying at this hotel,”