On the Saturday after the Charleston church massacre wherein nine worshippers at one of the nation’s oldest black churches were slaughtered during Bible study by a white gunman hoping to ignite a race war, we dragged our kids to the east side to walk them over New York City’s oldest standing bridge. It seemed as good a way as any to kill a weekend afternoon. The High Bridge, which was built with much fanfare in the mid nineteenth century as part of the Croton Aqueduct system and as a promenade connecting Upper Manhattan to the Bronx over the Harlem River, had recently—and somewhat miraculously—reopened after forty-odd years of disuse. I say “miraculously” because the bridge was an infrastructure most of us had come to accept as blighted, even as some civic groups had coalesced to resurrect it. In the back of our minds that summer of 2015, as an uprising and its violent suppression raged in Missouri, was the problem of when and how to talk to our children about protecting themselves from the police.
At what age is such a conversation appropriate? By what age is it critical? How could it not be despairing? And what, precisely, should be said? The boy was four then. The girl, just two.
The day was hot. En route to the bridge we felt no reprieve from the sun, just as we’d felt no relief from the pileup of bad news about blacks being murdered with impunity. When we learned of the terror at AME Emanuel in Charleston, we had not yet recovered from the unlawful death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, nor the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, nor the chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, nor the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, nor the shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, to name but a few triggers of civil unrest. We weren’t surprised there were no indictments in these cases, sadly enough, but we were righteously indignant. The deaths seemed to be cascading in rapid succession, each one tripping a live wire, like the feet of Muybridge’s galloping horse.
The picture we were getting, and not because it was growing worse, but because our technology now exposed it, was clear and mounting evidence of discriminatory systems that don’t treat or protect our citizens equally, and escalating dissent was giving rise to a movement that insists what should be evident to everyone: Black Lives Matter. There were hashtag alerts for pop-up protests in malls, die-ins on roads, and other staged acts of civil disobedience such as disruptions of white people eating their brunch. Protesters against police brutality dusted off some slogans from the civil rights era, such as “No justice—no peace!” but others were au courant: “I can’t breathe,” “Hands up, don’t shoot!” “White silence is violence,” and most poignant to me as a mother, “Is my son next?”
“It’s too hot and my legs are too small,” our son protested on the way to the bridge.
The boy was right—it was hot and getting hotter. He was tall for four but still so little. When standing at our front door, his nose just cleared the height of the doorknob. He was the same size as the pair of boys depicted in a two-panel cartoon by Ben Sargent circulating widely on my Facebook feed that summer. Both panels depict a little boy at the threshold, on the verge of stepping outdoors. The drawings are nearly identical except that the first boy is white and the second, black. “I’m goin’ out, Mom!” each boy calls to a mother outside of the frame. The white boy’s mother simply replies, “Put on your jacket.” But the other mother’s instructions comprise so intricate, leery, and vexed a warning that her words obstruct the exit: “Put on your jacket, keep your hands in sight at all times, don’t make any sudden moves, keep your mouth shut around police, don’t run, don’t wear a hoodie, don’t give them an excuse to hurt you . . .” and so on until the text in her speech bubble blurs, as in a painting by Glenn Ligon. The cartoon is titled, “Still Two Americas.”
I didn’t wish to be her, the mother who needed to say, “Some people will read you as black and therefore X.” Why should I be the fearful mother? Nor did I covet the white mother’s casual regard. I wanted to be the mother who got to say to her children, “Keep your eyes open for interesting details and take notes,” as well as, “Enjoy yourselves!” on their way out the door.
But for now, I carried our sweaty girl down 173rd Street on my back while my husband led our stubborn son by the hand. You know the thermometer’s popping in Washington Heights when there aren’t any Dominicans out on the sidewalks playing dominoes. Nobody had yet cranked open the fire hydrants. The heat knocked out the girl as if it were a club. The boy was in a rotten mood. He demanded a drink then rejected the water we’d packed. He whined that the walk was too long, then challenged our authority in a dozen other hectoring ways until we at last arrived at Highbridge Park. There he refused to descend the hundred stairs to the bridge by flinging himself onto the asphalt with his arms and legs bent in the style of a swastika, not five feet from a dead rat. The kid’s defiance bothered us for all the usual reasons a parent should find it irksome, but also because if allowed to incubate in the ghetto where we live, that defiance could get him killed.
Our son was soon coaxed down the vertiginous stairs by the magical horn of an Amtrak train on the railway beneath the bridge. He has explained to me his fierce attraction to trains and boats and vehicles in general with irritation that I didn’t already know the answer: “They take you somewhere else.” That’s just it. From the time your children begin walking, they are moving away from you. This is as it should be, even when you can’t protect them from harm with anything but the inadequate outerwear of your love.
A sweet old man in seersucker shorts stopped us at the entrance to the bridge to make sure we appreciated the marvel of its rehabilitation. He was something of a history buff and spoke in a European accent—Greek, I think. He could recall when the bridge was shut down after falling into long decline, and the time before that when miscreants and vandals tossed projectiles over the guardrail into the polluted water below or at the traffic on the Harlem River Drive. Thanks to him, I know that the bridge was a feat of engineering originally modeled after a Roman aqueduct, siphoning water from Westchester County through pipes beneath its walkway into the city, enabling New Yorkers to enjoy their first indoor plumbing (including the flush toilet). The old man never thought he’d live to see the day when the High Bridge was back in business, and was proud that the citizen-led campaign to reopen it had succeeded. “This bridge changed everything,” the old man said in wonderment, as if the relic was a truer paean to empire than the skyscrapers twinkling in the skyline far to the south of us—the Chrysler Building, the former Citicorp Center, and the spire of the Empire State. Dutifully, we paraded across to the Bronx. Maybe it was because I so admired the old man’s perspective, attuned as it was to a less conspicuous wonder of the world, that on our return trip home I noticed a mural I could have sworn had not been there before.