I leave Corinne and make my way downstairs, my Know Your Rights training kicking in.

Mama waves me back, but I don’t stop. I’m concerned it’s gotta be about Daddy.

He’s hurt.

Worse.

“What’s happening?” Corinne calls from the stairs. Her eyes scrunch up like if she thinks real hard, she’ll figure out what’s going on all by herself without having to ask.

I look up one more time at Jamal’s door, but it stays shut. Doubt hits me. He must’ve been on his way out when I saw him. He’s going to trip when he gets home.

“Things are fine,” I say. “I’m sure of it.”

I take deep breaths, swallowing up the panic that’s racing to my brain. I try and push down the memories of the time they came for Daddy. Thank God Corinne wasn’t born yet. She didn’t have to see him dragged by his neck through the house by police. I screamed nonstop when Jamal opened the door and the cops pushed him aside. They rushed Daddy, threw him on the ground, and shoved a knee in his back.

Daddy told me he wanted to lie still, but your body does the opposite. Survival. Someone’s holding you down, you want to ask why, yell out in pain. They beat his head down, expecting with each punch he was supposed to take it in silence. Each cry he made, they hit him harder until he shut his mouth and they cuffed him.

Mama was stuck between fighting for Daddy, holding on to her pregnant belly, and keeping me calm. My scream ricocheted in the background as they read his rights, accusing him of murdering Mr. and Mrs. Davidson.

Corinne never held that memory, but I know she feels it in everything we breathe. It’s in the polite nods across the street we have to make, the way our family turns down our music when there are others around. Say yes ma’am and no sir. Leave our jackets and backpacks in the car when we go shopping.

It’s in the way I carry myself that tells our story now. I can’t risk being accused of anything. Because if something goes wrong or missing, I know it’s in the back of someone’s mind that maybe I had something to do with it. And it’s in the way that the voice of the strongest woman I know stumbles when saying, “Hello, Officer” as she walks through the visitation gates to see Daddy.

Only recently has it been cemented in my mind and made clear that acting civil, being deferential, doesn’t matter. It’s like Mama has always said: Black lives don’t matter enough to them. That evidence is live and in color, on every news channel in America.

I’m snapped back to the present as they yell, “Police! Open up!”