Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,13
a black person become friends and they both learn a lesson about difference except nothing that’s learned is new to the black person, who was just going about their black business when this whole thing started. If you see it that way, please feel free to option this story for an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie. (I am not above this, honey.) But that’s not why I’m telling this to you. Oh God! Can you imagine? All those trees chopped down and made into books so I could tell you about how we all bleed red, white, and blue? How embarrassing for everyone involved. How embarrassing for those trees! No. I’m telling you this because it was a moment that felt both strange and familiar, and I tucked it away inside myself, to fidget with and worry at until its rough parts disappeared and it shone. I’m telling you this because the more I think about that incident, that moment in a bubble, the more it tells me about the delicate, permeable utopia my parents were striving to create. And it suggests to me that they succeeded.
I know that my parents wanted me to live in a better world than they had, but they must have also desperately hoped I’d be prepared to live in the real world. Why else would they teach me to raise my voice against injustice, to write letters, to make hard choices? And so that painful moment in the classroom was as much an answer to their prayers as the moments of triumph and discovery and freedom, of which there were far more. As they prepared me for the world, they prepared the world for me, one difficult decision at a time. And it’s a world that’s complex and misshapen and poised for discovery and ripe with promise. I look back and I can see the dreams they had, glimmering and evanescent and steely and diffuse, forming a trail from the place where we started to the place where we are, and the place we hope to be. And I know what it means when they sigh, “There’s never any trouble here.”
* We were unaware that we were watching a television show that had gone off the air thirty years before our births. But even if we had known that, it wouldn’t have mattered. Are we serious about getting Timmy out of that well or not, dammit?
Molly, Urine Danger Girl
Technically, I grew up in a dangerous area. Sometimes people got killed nearby. I never saw any dead bodies, although once the movie Homicide needed a kid to play a corpse at a crime scene set a couple of doors up. They approached my mother and asked her if one of her sons wanted to earn money lying in the street. I was very excited about this; I thought that this would be my big break. She was like, “Rosa Parks didn’t sit in the front of that bus so that you could lie in a gutter and collect Equity points.” (I’m paraphrasing.) (Probably.) Anyway, despite the fact that I grew up in a dangerous area, that’s my only experience with murdered bodies. It’s possible my neighborhood was just dangerous on film.
Nonetheless, I avoided telling my classmates about where I lived, and I only invited one person over one time. I guess I was embarrassed. The things we saw out of our windows were so dramatically different from the things they saw. My classmates, by and large, lived in suburban neighborhoods—some with mega-mansions, some with the regular homes of your standard middle-class white family—none the setting for a television show about murders and the detectives who investigate said murders. My parents wanted more for us than what our surroundings could provide, so it’s probably no surprise that my mother was less than keen about me lying in a gutter outside our front door drenched in fake blood. I see that now; I didn’t then. Truth be told, I always thought the pastoral neighborhoods where my classmates lived were scarier. Yeah, it was a common occurrence to hear gunshots ringing out somewhere in our neighborhood, but in the suburbs, my friends had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on acres of woodland. And you know what lives in the woods? Horrors limited only by your own imagination (and, I guess, your knowledge of woods and the creatures therein).
Are there bears in the city? No, there are not. Are there hockey-mask-wearing killers in the city? Who in the