We’re standing in the living room, rubbing on hand sanitizer and scrubbing the floors with bleach, when Pops says, “You know no one wakes up wanting blood on their hands.”
He leans heavily on the mop handle as he talks about how hard it is being a cop, and how many riots he’s lived through. When they riddled Amadou Diallo’s body with bullets, he snuck into the protest that marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and yelled at other cops on horses incognito. When race riots between Jewish and Black streets broke out in Crown Heights, he drove through the chaos just trying to get home. Each time the city blacked out, he said, “N***** lost they minds.”
George Floyd’s video was on the news that he looks upon his cellphone.
I think about the last 50 plus years.
I think about my Pops, born and raised in Brooklyn throughout those years with damn near a football in his hand at any given moment.
How in 1973, a cop walks up to a 10-year-old black boy named Clifford Glover in Jamaica, Queens and shoots him in the back without warning or reason. The officer claims he was armed with a gun, he wasn’t. The cop was charged and acquitted. Just three years later, in 1976, 15-year-old Randolph Evans was shot point-blank in the head in Brooklyn by an officer. The officer was let off because of a temporary plea of insanity.
I see Pops funneling that anger into getting himself through the police academy with his older brother in 1991 and becoming a Corrections Officer on Rikers Island for about a decade. I remember him hopeless, homeless, stressed, faithless, wanting to die and pissed about it, but never so much as to be sad or compassionate. Organized sports gave him the freedom to be acceptably angry that I believe he desperately misses.
One time during his rounds on Rikers a riot broke out, and inmates rushed him before another guard could come with help. He said he fought viciously with no regard for any life but his own, and one guy, as he motions with his hand, was cut from face to chest. He said he gets the cops, but he gets mad at all of it too.
I think about the last summer block party we had, years ago, where he was jumped in front of the house by a dozen police, thrown to the ground, and assaulted all while shouting that he was not resisting.
There is so much inconceivable violence given and received in his life and other Black lives that reflect his that it’s basically a second language, evidenced in everything he does, no matter what side of the law he stands on.
In thinking about Minneapolis’ George Floyd and his horrific and agonizing death, it’s all the other Black men and boys that have died senselessly at the hands of police with or without cause that truly stand out. Not every George Floyd or Eric Garner is recorded and broadcast to the nation. Some didn’t incite riots or demonstrations even though they had just as much witness and outrage in New York City, but they did gnaw away at black people forced to live through it.
Coronavirus outfitted people with masks and eliminated a few distractions, but this is an ingrained pattern of violence that is only occasionally disrupted by a civil rights or a black power or a black lives matter or a ‘Tired of This’ 2020 race riot.
It’s the same story though, with the same exact soundtrack that is the neverending wail of a black mother crying over her son, that will eventually be the soulful croon of yet another black woman, that will then be copied and sped up just enough to be popped onto the back of a hip hop track as a rapper spits over it with something angry and semi-conscious, which is then re-copied into a white person’s album for the sake of authenticity and crossover appeal.
The people protest and rip through downtown Brooklyn that night for George Floyd and countless others, but for us, it’s just our cleaning day. We stay inside with the kids and watch Coraline for the umpteenth time.
Across the street, a small party erupts, or at least the incessant laughter makes it sound like one. Pops socializes a bit with people he’s grown up with and strangers he just met, bonding over tilapia fried whole and baby shrimps. He absolutely delights in free food. I’m more than happy to sleep in and not have every adult I run into call me by my neighborhood nickname and remind me of just how small I was back in the day-day.
By morning Pops, the party animal, has fallen asleep face down on the floor, shoes still on.
