“Where you taking my boy?” Mama kept asking, her body stiff and straight, her hands reaching for him, but missing. They ignored her and walked him through the kitchen, going out the door. She kept asking it, over and over, running down the porch. It was the first time I ever saw Mama act like this. Lost. The porch was so dark, I could barely see any of them out there, but I leaned out the door anyway, and looked.

“You know where, Wentworth Precinct,” one of them yelled. Then I couldn’t hear them anymore as they took my brother farther and farther away. Just the slap of Mama’s feet, walking slowly back to our wrecked home.

Seven
Makeovers

The precinct at 51st and Wentworth sits kitty-corner to the highway, so Meechie and I had passed it every time Uncle Tim drove us to his house in Roseland. That corner was our portal to a fantasy land, where people lived in houses, and there were no gunshots. In the squad car, I bet Meechie thought about Uncle Tim and longed for an escape up that highway. We had driven past that drab stone building a million times and had never been inside. We knew that it was a police station, and sometimes saw cops walking boys through the entrance in handcuffs, but that wasn’t our life.

That night, he went to jail because he was Black and a boy, and to the police, that fit the description of a criminal. I’d learn that Black kids didn’t get the luxury of appearing childlike and innocent, that from the moment we are born, some people start a clock on how long it’ll take the boys to commit a crime, the girls to seduce.

I thought it would be obvious to the police that we were just a family, that we had nothing to do with the gang violence and drug culture swirling around us. Couldn’t they tell that there was peace in our apartment? The walls in our house were covered with pictures of our family and a Jesus clock. We weren’t pretending that people didn’t get beat up or shot in the playground. What went on in our apartment was our business, and what they did downstairs was theirs. I would learn though, real quick, that we were all the same in the eyes of the law.

The Black kids who hadn’t started committing crimes would eventually, the police believed, so taking them to jail, even if they hadn’t done anything, was justified. This is how Meechie entered the system and began to ingest the idea that he had no options, that decisions about his life were not his to make: the gang had his future picked out for him; the police had plans too.