“？‘Did I ever tell you about how I would deliver the Philadelphia Tribune door-to-door at five years old?’？” I do my best Gigi impression, attempting to lighten things.
He picks up on the joke with his own Gigi impression. “？‘I was a newswoman before you were, Leroya.’？”
Gigi has only told us this story a thousand times. How she earned enough money as a child to contribute a full $100 to the house fund. She joked that the front door was all hers.
We laugh for a minute before we remember that Gigi is in the hospital, and our worries catch up to us.
“Anyway, it’s my fault if they lose the house. If they hadn’t had to help me…” He takes an aggressive bite of a drumstick, working his stress out on the chicken.
Hearing the pain and guilt in his voice makes my heart hurt. “It’s not your fault, Shaun. It was always only a matter of time before they’d have to sell.”
Never mind Shaun’s legal bills—property taxes were skyrocketing with all the white people who’d fled for the suburbs fifty years ago wanting back into the city. Even with me helping as much as I can, their modest salaries as a janitor and nursing home manager, with all they’d borrowed against the mortgage, mean it’s a lost cause, the coming heartbreak inevitable.
The weight of Shaun’s struggle is obvious, like he’s carrying a backpack of bricks. Every time I ask him how he’s really doing, he says the same thing. “It is what it is.” But it’s clearly taken its toll. I hurry to change the subject. “Did you and Staci meet up last night?”
Staci, with an i, and Shaun have been off and on since high school. I give her credit for sticking by him when he had to leave college, but that’s about it.
“Nah, we broke up… again.” He becomes all too focused on slathering butter on every square inch of a biscuit.
“Oh, man, that’s too bad.” This pitiful attempt at sympathy isn’t winning me any Oscars.
“Ah, come on, you’ve never liked her. You think she’s a ditzy white girl who’s not good enough for your little brother.”
Truer words had never been spoken. Staci’s always gotten on my last nerve with her skimpy crochet crop tops and her insistence on endlessly discussing her vegan diet. But it’s not really about Staci so much as it’s about the fact that Shaun almost exclusively dates white women, has preferred them since he was little. When he was five years old he told me about his first crush—a girl named Hannah, a wispy blond thing in his kindergarten class.
“Why don’t you like one of the Black girls in your class?” I asked him.
“White girls are prettier,” he said, like it was a fact of life, or common sense, an obvious conclusion everyone agreed with.
At twelve years old, this hit way too close to home. It was hard enough having braces and that stubborn patch of acne across my forehead, but on top of that, bushy hair and dark skin? How could I argue with him, when everything around me, including the mirror, whispered that he was right? It took many years and a lot of hard work before I could understand and argue confidently about the influence of patriarchy, false standards of beauty, and how centuries of toxic history have conditioned Black men to see white women as the ultimate prize—angles I’ve tried on Shaun over the years, but never the one that cut me the deepest: If Black women aren’t good enough for my brother, then what does that say about me?
“Y’all need to stay away from these white girls, ya hear?” Gigi told Shaun over and over when we were growing up.
Shaun being Shaun, he always tried to turn it into a joke, only Gigi never laughed.
“I mean it. You be careful,” she’d say.
“Well, maybe you can find a nice Black girl,” I say to him now, my glare countering the sarcastic tone. “How about that?”
“You sound like Grandma. And you kill me with all your little lectures about finding a nice Black girl. I mean, hypocrite much? Like you never dipped in the cream.” He snickers. “Whatever happened to that dude, anyway? We all thought you were gonna marry him.”
Two mentions of Corey in four days is two too many.
“Not going there.”
Shaun has no idea the role he played in the end of my relationship with Corey, and I’ll never tell him. Momma’s not the only one who doesn’t air her dirty laundry.
“Fine, fine. You talked to Jen yet?”
“No. I have to call her back. I don’t know what to say.”
“I mean, it’s crazy we actually know this dude. All those other cops who do that terrible shit all the time are strangers, but I know Kevin.”
Kevin. He’s Kevin, not Officer Murphy. And we do know him. In fact, I know intimate details about him, ones that would horrify him if he realized. Like how he makes a noise like a yeti when he comes, or that he can only poop if he removes his pants completely, or that his low sperm count was the reason they couldn’t get pregnant and that he punched a hole in their bedroom wall when he found out. Kevin and I may not be close, but there’s still an intimacy by proxy.
“I don’t know how you’re ever going to talk to him again, Rye. I mean, he killed a kid. A Black kid. How do you get past that?”
“Justin’s not dead. He’s in a coma.”
“That kid ain’t waking up. I’m sorry, but he ain’t. We can march and pray and march again, but it won’t make a difference. Also, he didn’t have a gun. Imagine fucking up in any other job like this. Imagine you work in McDonald’s and you serve someone fries you’ve accidentally covered with rat poison instead of salt and that person dies right in front of you. No one’s gonna say that ain’t murder. But this… these cops murder someone and their bosses just go, ‘Ooops, we did it again.’ Every single time.” He accentuates his point by waving a chicken bone in the air.
Shaun’s voice is loud, but so is Mark Morrison’s on the speakers and the baby crying at the next table over, and no one seems to be listening. All the same, my head swivels like an owl’s to see who can hear him. Momma always got on us for being too loud in public.
I start to shush him, and then remember all my promises to never turn into my mother and stop myself. I bite my tongue even as my brother gets louder, more riled up.
“If you shoot a Black kid and that Black kid doesn’t have a gun, then that police officer should go to jail. Screw you. You have failed in your job as a cop. You remember when I got fired from Kinko’s in high school for putting the wrong toner in the color printer. Sure, the printer broke, but no one died. I swear some of these dudes decide to be cops just so they can bust heads—Black and brown heads—and be on a power trip. I mean, maybe that’s not Kevin necessarily, but it’s a lot of them. You hear about their text messages with nigger this and that and leaving nooses in locker rooms and whatnot and people have to wonder why we’re suspicious of the police? They need a racism-screening test before people join any police force, man. Like, if we’re going to find on your Facebook that you’ve been posting jokes about Black people being monkeys, or describing us as ‘savages’ or ‘filthy animals,’ do not apply.”