You needed an identity in middle school. I chose skater, like the rest of the wannabe badasses. It was an easy choice. Bart Simpson skateboarded every week on TV. So did the role-playing-game guys who managed to get girlfriends.
Before skateboarding introduced me to my blackness, it was just an excuse to make the suburbs mine. Every yellow curb was begging for a noseslide. Every parking lot for the zigzagging. Every hill for the bombing, knees bent, fingers resting where grip tape met wood.
Since we were a loud, dirty nuisance, the police took notice. They’d start their sirens and we’d scatter like dropped marbles. Sometimes they’d trap us, creeping up while our wheels roared.
I was caught once, in eighth grade. Since I was too young for an ID, I said I was Kevin Canseco from McGuire Road. Cops like baseball, so they called my bluff: “OK, Bash Brother. Wait in the car.”
Outside squeezed down to ear-pressing silence as the door closed, then I watched the two cops search my friends on mute, hoping they’d thrown my board in the front seat.
The ride home was faster than skating but felt twice as long. The cops ignored me after they got the right address, so I glared at the backs of their army guy haircuts while the radio burbled a static version of their smug drawls. After half a second of feeling gangster, I got mad because I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and I didn’t think my folks would understand that if the cops didn’t.
Waiting to be let into my own house brought me back to when I was too young to have a key. When Mom opened up, her eyes got wide and she said, “Hello?” to the cops.
When the cops said, “Your son . . .” Dad appeared at the door. I’ll never forget how he was mad at them, and asked what they were charging me with, what they were claiming I’d been doing.
When the cops said I’d been trespassing, my dad said, “In a parking lot? That’s a public place.”
And they said, “Not if he wasn’t parking.”
And Dad said, “Are you charging him with anything? Is there a ticket?”
And they said, “No, but—” and he said, “Thank you,” then told me to go to my room because he had to think about this.
That year, it started seeming like my world was too big to fit in the house with my parents. I fumed on my bottom bunk, and tried to flip through a skateboard magazine, but the page ripped.
I got in trouble for getting in trouble with the cops: a week off the skateboard. When my folks told me to hand it over, I admitted that I didn’t have it. Mom deflated and Dad looked furious again.
A few days later, when it seemed like I’d never have another skateboard, Mom stood in my bedroom door and said, “We’re worried about you. What’s going on? Something has to change.”
“Here’s a change: stop worrying.”
When the yelling moved into a silence that somehow felt worse, Dad drove me to the grocery store and said, “There are people out there who expect the worst from you because you’re black. Like when your mother had to go fight to get you put in a better reading program in first grade. And they’ll single you out, like those police officers.” He gripped the wheel at ten and two. “And we’re lucky because we live in a nice neighborhood, but that means that you’ve got to be extra careful. You stand out.”
I looked at the wood fence we were winding past and wondered if standing out in a nice neighborhood meant you weren’t nice.
“But Dad,” I said, and twisted my wrist to show its inside, whale-belly pale. “I look like Mom. I skate with white guys who are darker than me.”
He was quiet for a while, then ran a yellow light for the first time in his life. Sometimes Mom said things like, “You might look a little different, but that makes you beautiful.” Meanwhile, Dad never even tiptoed near race. But as we cut onto the parking lot’s rough, unskateable pavement, he said, “You’re still black, and you need to act accordingly.”
Before, I’d only believed I was black when girls asked if they could touch my hair. At any other moment, I was just sure I wasn’t white. Everyone was white in the ’burbs, and I definitely wasn’t them. Who else dug through their dad’s old 45s to find the funk songs that rappers sampled? Who else watched black movies, wanting to live on a block with shared histories? Who else was alone enough to do that?
Dad and I pushed down the lock buttons as we got out of the car, then he chose groceries in silence—a blue box of spaghetti, a foam tray of ground beef, a jug of Chablis. The cashier was a college-age white guy with a zitty chin. He put his hand over Dad’s wine and looked from him to me and back, half smiling, then said, “You’re buying this for him.”
I looked around like, Who?
Dad said, “That’s my son.”
The cashier smiled more and said, “No.”
I turned to my father in confusion.
Even though I was insulted that the cashier couldn’t tell that my dad was my dad, I wondered if he was proving my dad wrong. If we don’t look like family, and I don’t look black, then I don’t have to be careful.
This was typical of the mess that white people put black people through. Being black wasn’t just having cool old records and curly hair, it was to constantly be in trouble. Not trouble like grounded for a week, but trouble like the water is hotter, and your eyes are stuck open. I’d known that heat ever since—in the nauseous fear I feel whenever I see a cop, in the way I never shout the loudest around a bunch of white people—but never felt it cranked up, never was sure that it was a black heat, until I was walking back from the police station with Lucius and that trip to the grocery store popped into my head for the first time in years.
Dad got his wine, and we drove home in silence because he was never an “I told you so” type of person, and I knew that if I said anything, I’d be acknowledging something I wasn’t ready to deal with. Accepting the truth would have taken away the small freedoms and bits of confidence that I’d been elbowing my way into. The same thing had just happened during my DNA test at the police station. This time, I had to listen.