The first time my white neighbor called the police it was during the renovation of our historic house in the deed-restricted neighborhood where we live. This is my not-so-subtle way of acknowledging my privilege. I proudly proclaim my lack of confidence in my indignation. It feels unearned. America likes its angry Black women best when we are poor and husband-less and mourning. I’m simply angry and Black. I apologize if that is not enough.
The call came while my family was vacationing, riding horses in the mountains of Colorado, so our contractor dealt with it. None of this is endearing, I know that.
The call came four days after Sonya Massey was murdered.
I don’t know how to tell this story without being both Black and not Black, a victim and an agent of the system. I’ve been called uppity, bougie, oreo, whatever. The circumstances of my life stir up something antebellum. There is little difference between those mulatto house slaves and me. We are beholden to the circumstances of our birth. We are still Black, but somehow must perform that Blackness perfectly to keep it. But who am I to complain? This story will not end with my blood.
The second time my white neighbor called the cops for no reason, I was in the shower. She complained that there was a construction vehicle blocking our shared alleyway–which isn’t exactly illegal, but since we pay extra for the off-duty police to patrol our neighborhood, such things are taken seriously. I know how all this sounds. I’m not asking for sympathy.
The officer had driven down the alley and seen for himself that it was free from obstruction, but still he was standing in my foyer instead of hers. In a neighborhood with such well-manicured lawns the police are a natural extension of a white woman’s rage. Call this hyperbole, call this unfounded. I know that it’s true even though I can’t prove it.
I’m diffusing my curls when the officer arrives. I throw on baggy jeans and an MTV T-shirt, because I still dress like the emo kid I used to be. My Blackness was shaped in a white suburb outside Flint. The water was fine back then, but the auto industry was not. This Blackness of mine is different, because we are not a monolith.
See, my neighbor doesn’t know that I still own my JNCOS with the white and blue swirls down the front. She doesn’t care that I prefer Taking Back Sunday over My Chemical Romance. She hasn’t learned that I’ve had a pixie cut, but never braids. All she knows is that I’m Black because she watches me through the windows of her painted brick house.
In the two years that I’ve lived next door, she’s never spoken to me. She speaks to my mother in-law when she visits from Pennsylvania, but never me. She speaks to my children, but never me. I’m so invisible that when my friend stopped by looking for me one day, my neighbor came out to help her.
“Did you lose your keys?” my neighbor asked.
My friend politely explained that she was not me but in fact a different Black woman entirely, because her face and gate and demeanor and not-me-ness didn’t give it away.
For all I know, my neighbor and I speak often. Except that I am a mosaic of Black faces that she has mistaken for my own distinct visage with the birthmark that runs from the center of my forehead over my right eye and stops at my temple.
This is why I’m afraid, even though I’m safe. That is the trouble with dwelling on this at all. There is an armed policeman in my foyer and I’m going to live through the encounter. That doesn’t erase the fear.
My neighbor doesn’t know me. So I question all the shields I have erected to protect myself from the hardness of this life. I educated myself at the finest college, attended grad school, pronounced the T’s in all my words, and kept my voice low in the movie theater. I have been twice as good, all my life. Still, there is the fear that all of it will not be enough to protect my soft body.
I walk downstairs, thinking that my husband is talking on the phone, only to discover that I’m wrong. I jump back in alarm on the landing, sweat dotting my brow as my hands begin to shake. There is a man in uniform standing at my front door surrounded by an army of small shoes that my daughters failed to place neatly on the rack some days before. I’m fearful in the comfort of my lavish home, sick with a laughable, but too real dread that all this money won’t save me.
My husband is speaking, introducing me, extending his gentle white hand. I keep my distance. I wonder what is going through this officer’s head as he sees me. I wish I could ask him. His dark eyes move from my husband to where I stand frozen, lingering on the last step. I clock his belt, the holstered gun, the holstered taser, the handcuffs. I feel the room shift as my eyes lock with his, before he looks away. I tell myself that what flashes across his face is recognition, but it was gone too quickly to be sure.
What must it feel like to be a Black man in law enforcement, to be the instrument of my white neighbor’s rage? We are nothing but a pair of house Negroes squaring up at our master’s behest. Except that people tell me we are colorblind, they say we are post-racial, and perhaps that is why this man cannot even look at me.
“She’s becoming increasingly erratic,” my husband explains, gesturing at her house. He uses his church voice. It says, I’m harmless and matches the twinkle in his baby blue eyes. “We’re not sure what to do.”
The officer listens, nodding his head, eyes fixed on my husband, his hands high on his hips, well clear of his belt, but not far enough away to make me feel safe in my own home. I tell myself a story, that he’s trying to communicate across our silence. To stay calm, I imagine he is saying: I see you…and ain’t this some shit?
“We don’t understand it.” My husband gives the officer his awe-shucks smile, a look that earns tables without dinner reservations and upgrades at the airport. “We don’t know why she’s doing this. The only thing we can think of is…” He turns to me, hesitates. This is the moment where he wants to bring up race. My husband wants to speak for me. He wants to say the thing I’m screaming in my head loud enough that it is written all over my face.
The last time my neighbor called the cops I cried into my hands. “It’s because I’m Black!” I yelled through tears as my body curled inward on itself as though I might vanish into the pain. “I know that sounds crazy, and I know I can’t prove it. But I hate that I’m not allowed to say it.”
He wants to point out to the officer that this is not a law enforcement issue. My sixty-three-year-old neighbor called the cops anyway and can continue to do so without any consequences. And why might that be? And where have we seen this before? But it’s delicate even for my husband with all his privilege and church voices and awe-shucks smiles. Even he cannot voice this truth that burns me from the inside out. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m crazy. All I know is that the wall of silence between the three of us is why Black women learned to cut eyes in the first place.
My husband just shrugs. “We don’t know what to think.”
I stare at the officer while his gaze darts around the room, never drifting back to me. So I hate that I empathize with the man in my foyer with a gun on his hip just days after Sonya was murdered. What a thing it is to stand in my own home full of the fear his uniform evokes mixed with the relief at the sight of his brown skin, praying all the while that the relief is not a lie.
Later, I’ll be angry. Later, I’ll bemoan the valley between this man and me. That we could be in the same room–in my own goddamn house–in the same unbelievable situation and neither of us feels safe enough to laugh, shake our heads, and mumble, “white people” before moving it along.
Never before have I been with another Black person and felt so far from kin.
The only person unchanged by the situation in my foyer is my neighbor who is no doubt watching us through her window with a smug satisfaction that she doesn’t deserve. She is the rock and the hard place we are sandwiched between. She has plucked out our voices–on some Ursula shit.
I cannot decide if by speaking up, I’m joining in as we cry out or if I’m diverting the spotlight. No matter how I live my Black life, there will always be someone telling me I’m not really Black. An anticipation that I will be labeled a fraud or a sellout leads to this rhythmic swaying outside the ropes while the “real Black girls” double dutch, even though I know precisely how it’s done.
The silence gnaws at me. This well-behaved anger is like sugar-free cotton candy or fat-free butter. I swallow it down, left wanting and unfulfilled. What shackles are these that my rage is accompanied by the compulsion to acknowledge every moment when good fortune has shined upon me. I acknowledge that I’m alive after having the police at my house when so many other Black folks are not. I acknowledge that I have a wrathful husband who, if I’d agreed to it, would march next door and call that woman a racist to her face. All this is why I cannot help but compare myself to a house Negro complaining about the food at my master’s table while my brothers and sisters toil in the field.
I’m not a victim, not really. I know this, but I wonder who taught me to think this way and who exactly it benefits. My tears might be light-skinned tears or mixed-girl tears or even white tears, I cannot say for sure. But this impotent rage unraveling me feels like our shared inheritance, always bracing for pain with the knowledge that I will be expected to “go high” when all they ever do is “go low.” The more I think about it, I believe I’m like that Black police officer–eyes darting every which way. That realization is somehow disappointing.
He chose to be a cop. Just like I chose my spouse and I bought my house and made this life of mine. I don’t remember sacrificing my anger at the altar of this comfortable life. But when I go to reach for it, I come up empty handed.
So I am silent while my loud and unapologetic neighbor rages with an entitlement that never spends a moment with caveats and deference before lashing out at a perceived slight. It seems to me that if I must keep quiet in the face of injustice because of my proximity to whiteness, then she ought to be mute.
But this lady won’t shut the fuck up, so neither will I. At least that is the story I tell myself, while I wait silently for the next time.
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