I grew up in upstate New York. My family was poor. We were one of a handful of Black families in a predominantly white trailer park. As a single mother raising four children, my mom worked tirelessly for us to survive. She would come home after working a three-to-eleven shift and pray. She would often pray that my older brother — older by two years — and I would stay the same height. Because we owned two pairs of jeans.
My brother would wear one pair and I wore the other. And, at nighttime, we would hand-wash those jeans so that we could switch jeans for the following day. I still have calluses on my hands from washing those jeans. When I was twelve, on a chilly Saturday night in late summer , my mom was working her regular shift.
They invited me to play. Why not? Hide and seek in a trailer park is interesting. Kids would climb up and hide on the roofs of trailers, behind the skirts of trailers, and in the sprawling green space that consisted of two trees and a couple of bushes. The owner of one of the trailers called the police. They complained that someone was on top of their roof. The police showed up, which is to say the white police showed up.
Rounded all of us into the street. There were about twenty-five of us — I was the youngest of the group, but cops tend to age Black kids by several years. I was the only Black kid. The cops singled me out, accused me of attempting to rob a home, and roughed me up. They threw me against their patrol car. The other officer did a pat-down search. After they found nothing, they cuffed me and threw me in the back of a cop car.
They said the most horrific things to me. Every other word out of their mouths was the N-word, usually followed by some threat — to hurt me, to imprison me, to kill me.
