In December of my second year of law school, Dan and I want to celebrate his birthday by going out to dinner in Boston’s North End. It is 1992. We wedge our car into a parking spot on a narrow street a few blocks away from the restaurant and walk down the sidewalk hand in hand feeling the brisk chill as dusk falls on the night. I’m a little nervous walking these streets. While my law school is located in Cambridge, a cosmopolitan city with people from all over the world, Boston is known as a balkanized city with pockets of deeply embedded racism. We are an interracial couple in the wrong part of town lured by the promise of great Italian food.
On the opposite side of the narrow street, maybe thirty feet or so in front of us, a man walks toward us. As we near him I see him do a double take, which I take as a kind gesture so I return his gaze, begin to smile, and prepare to nod. But he stares back at me with no smile as if he is studying us. I look straight ahead and keep walking and then I look back over at the man, hoping to see we are of no interest to him. But the man is now almost even with us and he is staring straight at me. He passes under a streetlight. I see pale skin, squinted eyes, and an upper lip starting to tremble like the mouth of a growling dog.
I could be wrong. This could be all kinds of things. He could be deranged. Could be mad at something else. Could want to harm us for reasons having nothing to do with race. I just know I need to get out of there.
I squeeze Dan’s hand tight and mutter walk faster baby we need to walk faster as I quicken my pace and Dan has no choice but to follow. After twenty brisk paces we round the corner and I turn around and peek in the direction from which we’d just come. The man is walking off into the night.
“What?” Dan asks. “Why did you speed up like that? What were you saying?” He hadn’t noticed. Never had to notice. Had not learned to notice.