The banging continued, and every time they hit the door, Mama jumped and Tonya seemed to sink deeper into her knees. Stacia watched us, her face crunched up from pain. She said to Mama, almost under her breath, “They won’t come in unless you open the door.” This didn’t calm Mama down; she just held her boy, who was a sophomore at DuSable, but who had by then already left boyhood behind.

Again, I tucked my face into Mama’s stomach. Eventually the banging stopped, and we knew that the police had passed over our door.

Nine
Project Kids

The next day, on July 4th, Mama summoned Auntie Nora’s husband, Uncle Tim, to come and take us to their house for a week until things cooled down on the block. Auntie Nora was Mama’s little sister by four years, and that summer, she was thirty.

Uncle Tim looks like a cop. It’s the stiffness where his neck and shoulder merge, and how he keeps this serious face, even if he’s just cracked a joke. He’ll give you eye contact, but don’t expect his brows to move too much. His lips stay smashed into one thick line. Hands always clenched, as if pondering injustice. He walks with both pounce and sway because he’s swole.

You see him, and think he’s been in jail or the army or in somebody’s gang, but he hasn’t. You would never guess that he actually does math all day; he’s an accountant at a firm in the Loop. Underneath those starched shirts he wears to work, there’s a horseshoe branded in his skin from his HBCU days. Every time he drove over to the buildings to get us, the dudes in the parking lot panicked, assuming he was a plainclothes, coming to lock them up.

They’d yell the signal for everyone to scatter, then one of the older leaders would say, “Dude straight,” and things would instantly calm down.

Uncle Tim always came up to our apartment, talked to Mama for a little while, then reached for my weekend bag, carrying it all the way to the car. That day, he held my hand as we walked through the breezeway and made Meechie walk in front of him, as if he got paid to protect us. We climbed into his mountain of a truck, and I crawled to the very last row of seats because I liked it back there, by myself. Meechie sat in the passenger seat, and once Uncle Tim got in, he said, “Seat belts,” then his truck crunched over glass and pop cans and rolled onto State Street.