Believe it or not, there are places in Ohio where boys load guns on the laps of their fathers and walk out into the slow-arriving winter air for the hunt. Believe it or not, there are places the hunt is about the feeling of pulling on a trigger and the rich vibration it sends through the shoulder. The joy in watching a body fall. I say believe it or not for myself, really. You likely already know this, or have a corner of a place you’re from that feels familiar to it. My parents wouldn’t let any of their children make their fingers into a gun, even while playing. My oldest brother, the first and most eager to push back against their rules, decided to buy a Super Soaker water gun. In the ’90s, they were all the rage. Bright, splashed in fluorescent colors, and large enough to hold nearly a gallon of water. My brother kept it under his bed in a case, taking it out only for the occasional neighborhood water fight. During one such bit of revelry, after he’d gone off to college in the late ’90s and left his water gun treasure behind, I remember a boy spraying an occupied police car with a brief and sharp blast of water. The police, outraged, burst from their car and began running, a small gathering of black children scattering like ants, laughing their way into never being caught.
I am in one of Ohio’s corners where animals die by the bullet and pile up in fields, or hide in tall stalks of unharvested land. It is southern Ohio, the part that rubs up close to Kentucky and considers itself a part of the Grand American South. This section of Ohio is interesting due to the aesthetics of the South it aspires to, and fails to reach. People hang confederate flags from trucks and anchor their words in a drawl. It is the South crafted by someone who only understands the South through movie stereotypes. A few days away from Thanksgiving, I am sitting at the table with a man who certainly has fired a gun, both for survival and for sport. On the news, there is another story about gun control and the man growls. We all have a right to protect our families, he says, looking out into the vast land through the window. And I think I agree with him, at least on the surface. So I nod slowly, lowly offer a small sound of affirmation. We all have a right to keep the people we love safe.
The reason my parents gave for their hard stance on toys explicitly molded after weapons was that they didn’t want their children to fall victim to the world’s obsession with violence at such a young age. What’s funny about my corner of Ohio and the corner of Ohio that I am spending Thanksgiving in is that both of the populations, though of vastly different demographics, can tell the difference between a gunshot and fireworks. This knowledge is essential if you are black and a child in a house with big windows, perhaps dreaming of the outside world and all of its possibilities. The key is in the echo. A gunshot, generally, is a brief burst and then a brief echo. A firework, on the other hand, explodes and echoes back, back, back. It swallows and keeps swallowing. Even if the light never touches a sky you can see, the echo is what to listen for. I don’t remember how young I was when I learned this, or if I will teach it to any children I may one day have to look after. We all have a right to keep the people we love safe.
My family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but my partner’s family does. So I make my way with her down to Buford, Ohio, each year, and this year is no different except for we don’t live in the state anymore, so the trip is longer. I’m generally the only black person here for miles, which is mostly fine because there aren’t enough people in the town to stare at me with confusion. Once, last year, I went out on my own to find a gas station, or perhaps a coffee shop. And when I got to the counter to pay, I reached rapidly for my wallet in my front pocket, and the white man behind the counter jumped ever so slightly. It’s one of those things you notice after you spend a lifetime as an object of various levels of fear. After that, I decided that if I go out here, someone else should pay for anything I need. But I mostly stay inside. I am sitting on the couch with my partner’s father, who I like because he is much like my father. An Army man, with uncompromising principles and varied politics, who speaks firmly and endlessly, but with good intentions. I like watching the news with him, even when our politics don’t align, because he is a curious observer of the world, something that can’t be said for every white man his age. In a way, we have a relationship that revolves around us using each other: with all of his children moved on and largely out of the house, I’m the son he can sit with and know that I’ll listen to him ramble when no one else will. And for me, he’s a small thing that reminds me enough of home to feel safe. I told him, when I was last here, about my encounter with the fearful cashier, and he turned red with anger and embarrassment. He wanted to know where it was, who the cashier was. It was a small town, and he wanted to know who to see about the issue at hand. It was slightly endearing, done with no performance in mind, just a genuine reaction to what he imagined as a simple injustice.
On the news, an anchor is discussing Ferguson. In a few days, a grand jury is going to decide whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown a few months earlier. I was on a plane when it happened, I remember, landing to a wave of news that got worse with each minute. When I tell my partner’s father that I think the police officer is going to get off without an indictment, he shrugs lightly. He was just doing his job, he says. And then, without looking away from the television, he says: I hope those people don’t riot in that city.
It occurs to me that for some, emotional distance is what it takes to equalize race. A white man fights in the army next to black men and so he learns what it is to die for those particular black men. A white man grows old and a young black man comes into his life that could be his son’s age, and he learns what it is to want to fight for him, as well. We all do this, I think. It’s how we learn to work through our various disconnects. Still, without anything chopping at the root of our souls, we’re still imagining the individual only, and not the system that surrounds them, that makes them feared. The cashier in Buford, Ohio, who jumped at my attempt for my wallet, didn’t know me as an individual. He simply knew fear learned from a system, played on loop to him for an entire life.
We are different and then also not, the people of my temporary Thanksgiving geography and I. We both want to survive through another year. Still, they were taught to run toward guns for survival, and I was taught to run from them, or even the illusion of them. Soon, I will retreat to the kitchen and chop something large into something smaller with the sharp blade of a knife that I would never carry outside of this home, for fear of what the land and the people in it would make of me.
The things we work to unlearn are funny, in that way. In my first year of high school, I snuck my brother’s Super Soaker onto school grounds. It was a foolish moment of youthful exuberance. A water balloon fight had broken out in the school’s parking lot earlier in the week. It was nearing the end of the school year, and everyone was restless and eager to be finished. During the lunch period, I pulled out the bright, fluorescent water gun and sprayed it at a crowd in the hallway for a few short seconds before the school’s security guard snatched the water gun from my hands, dragging me to the school’s office. I got reprimanded by both the principal and my father, who took me home, took the water gun, and hid it somewhere. I haven’t seen it since.
I didn’t, in that moment, understand that what makes a gun real or fake in the imagination ransacked by fear isn’t always the color of it, or the shape of it. Sometimes, it is the body of the person holding it, or the direction that they choose to point it in. What my parents were trying to teach wasn’t a lesson about weapons, but a lesson of the body and the threats it carries. We all have a right to keep the people we love safe.
In Buford, on a couch in the afternoon near Thanksgiving, I watch old footage of Ferguson, Missouri on fire a few months before, protesters clogging its streets and chanting for justice. I watch my partner’s father shake his head slowly as the bodies of protesters began to clash with heavily-armed police. There are sometimes wide and splitting paths that take us away from the people we aspire to love, even if we know they are loving us in the best way they can, with all of the worldview that their world has afforded them. As the sound on the television dies down before bleeding into a commercial, I hear a popping sound coming from somewhere north. I wait to count the echoes. I look, briefly, to see if there is any light in the sky.