I’ve been working on this, on and off, for some time. My dream is to one day make a comfortable living as a writer. I want this blog to eventually become a hub for measured and researched black thought. While I do want to focus more on 800 word short posts, I want to publish long form (5,000+ words) at least once a season.
This is one of two pieces I’m working on. Watching “If Beale Street Could Talk” inspired this first piece, a mediation on black marriage and black personhood. I want my approach to longform to combine narrative, argumentative, and expository writing. This is the narrative portion I have drafted. The rest will come when complete. Please read this initial draft of what is hopefully my first longform!
It was toward the end of a fine summer evening. My wife and I had just finished dinner with her medical school buddies at Saddle Creek Woodfired Grill in North Little Rock. We were now on Vimy Ridge Road, on the border between Little Rock and our town of Alexander. My wife grew up in Helena, and I spent my twenties in the town of 14,000; I grew to eventually crave living in a rural area. We secured a rural development loan through a state initiative and lived on top of a large hill, surrounded by farmland and Arkansas’ bayous.
Emerald Mountain, the subdivision on top of said hill, was built about a decade ago, craved from the rural Arkansan wilderness. It’s become an affordable midway point for people who want to live outside the city but do not feel like dealing with the traffic that comes from living in the bedroom community of Bryant. Buoyed by available funding from rural development loans, it expanded and contains large homes on the main drag of Skyline Drive, and more modest homes in its rapidly expanding offshoots. Emerald Mountain is for strivers, for married folk such as my wife and I who are done with rent and still believe in the American Dream of home ownership.
This evening was like so many others we spent together betrothed over the last six years. We were blasting Rihanna, my right hand intertwined over her left—me occasionally stroking her wedding band—and my left hand holding the steering wheel of my GMC Terrain steady. The window was open a crack, letting a little humidity seep in. I felt boss. In control of the small world we had built together.
The black boy was rounding the corner of Pleasant Hill Road when a Little Rock Police Department SUV rolled up on him. Its klaxons offensively muted out “You Needed Me.” Their blue lights rudely pierced the summer dusk we were enjoying. Out of caution, I pulled over and gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
My wife and I immediately noticed the child was trained well in the mores of black personhood. Before the police even got out the car, he raised his hands and stood ramrod. The police emerged, two white men. He remained still. One of the officers barked at the child. The boy slowly moved his left hand to his shirt and raised to his chest. Nothing was within the waistband of his basketball shorts. The officer gave more orders. He opened the door to his police truck and ushered the boy in.
My wife’s training also kicked in. Before I knew it, all of my insurance and registration papers were on my dashboard. This was because I made the decision to pull over and record the encounter.
It’s been ten minutes. I hook my iPhone 8 Plus to my car’s charger so that the battery won’t stop mid-recording. Another LRPD truck pulls up. Four cops are conversing while the child sits in the back of the first truck; he’s being detained and I can tell that they have not given any probable cause for doing so. My wife and I have been talking while I record. I’ve mainly been cursing. She’s primarily been talking about how unfair the child is being treated and asking, due to my civics teacher background, what amendments the officers are violating in detaining the boy without explanation. It’s the Fourth, I tell her.
We used our words to deny our fears the space between us. We should have felt in complete control of this situation. I was nine months removed from grad school—the first in my line to complete a Master’s degree. Before that, I was the first man in my lineage to complete my undergrad degree. My wife was less than a year away from completing her medical education and becoming the first doctor in our family. In this moment, we should have felt so much more powerful than we actually did.
Black people have never believed that education would buy us power. It could only give us agency, the ability to determine our futures with more independence. But never power. The power of the state and white supremacy could smash us at any moment’s notice. Our nervousness was belied by a belief that our degrees, our striving, our accomplishments, should amount to more than the dread we felt watching the police detain this child. All they needed to do was divert their attention to us and all that we have built could be obliterated.
Nothing— our graduate educations, our nice clothes, the new GMC Terrain that I financed in part through the best car insurance plan I could afford, our year-old mortgage, our 700+ credit scores—could save us.
My wife’s anger is always silent. Quietude enveloped her as the police began to drive off with the child still in their possession. They made a right on Skyline Drive and drove up to Emerald Mountain, inside our subdivision and outside their legal jurisdiction. We drove in silence behind them.
The LRPD cruisers dropped the child off in front of one of the tony houses on Skyline Drive. The brick was an off white, and the house had a three-car garage. It was the type of house my wife and I wanted one day so that I could build a home gym and still have space to pull in our vehicles. The cruisers stopped and let the child out and then pulled away, not bothering to explain to the parents why their child needed a home escort into a neighborhood where the people living there are more focused about their equity than the non-existent crime rate.
I pulled off, heading toward a side street that contained our house. My wife remained quiet. I placed my hand back into hers. She squeezed. Her wedding band was warm.