The confident, teaching Mama that I had to put up with all day was back at the house. This was a woman I didn’t recognize, a subordinate, frightened being. That night, nothing she said to the police mattered. She had no authority there, or even in her own home. The police talked to her like she was a child. They yelled at her, barked orders in half sentences, something she’d never let us get away with. They’d taken her son right out from under her. I had never seen such a disruption of power. I didn’t know what they’d done to my mother and couldn’t imagine what was happening to my brother while he was out of our care.

We waited, and I watched the men sitting behind the counter. They joked around with each other, and I wondered how they would like it if someone busted up their sleep, waking up their cop babies. I wondered if these guys had gone out on sweeps in the past, breaking up warm, cozy homes and dragging innocent, sleeping boys out of their beds in the middle of the night. This behavior, bursting into someone’s home and dragging them away, is how lynchings were conducted. There had to be so much terror running through Mama’s mind that night, knowing that other family members, Grandma’s brothers and uncles, left the house in this same way, some never found, others found swinging from trees or in pieces in a river.

We sat in cold plastic chairs, shoulders trembling, teeth chattering. Since it was our first time in the station, it hadn’t occurred to Mama that we would need jackets in the middle of the summer blaze. I will remember this incident when I am old enough to vote and someone plays a cruel joke on me, making this very station my polling place. I will travel by train from a theological seminary in Michigan to this police station right off the highway. The projects will be long gone by then. I will vote for Barack Obama with hope in my chest, but terrible thoughts of this night in my head. I will remember how cold the police station was, and I will bring a jacket.

Eventually, two figures appeared at the end of a long hallway. I stared down what seemed like a city block away, and finally, Meechie’s lithe body, rocking from side to side, came into view. A police officer, in that same uniform, walked with him. I didn’t know the look on my brother’s face. The lines in his forehead were deep, like Buchanan wrinkles. The officer escorting him didn’t have any special emotion on his face, just acted like he could’ve been pushing a shopping cart around Jewel, instead of walking my brother from a jail cell.