Suspect.. “Are You Prepared To Have A Black Son?
We were young and in love and sat under a magnificent Caribbean sky
It was starting to get real
Infatuation had firmly moved into the long view
He had just met my mom
Slept under the same roof for the first time
She a preeminent Wasp. Well-intentioned, progressive, but a wasp. Me, her daughter
“Are you prepared to have a black son? Do you know what that means?”
I did not. I was clueless.
We moved into together in 1999 and this accelerated my understanding. Living up close and personal with Derik, a black man from South Carolina, my then boyfriend and now husband of 15 years gave me a view into his daily, exhausting, relentless reality of which I only ever knew about hypothetically. I had been raised in a semi-integrated church, went to integrated schools but largely operated in a white world of friends and activities.
Cut to now, I think a lot about our current state of hate and misunderstanding and think so much stems from our segregated neighborhoods, schools and communities. This segregation a direct result of systematic rules, regulations and practices. My husband now have two black sons. We intentionally live in a multi-racial community but am cognizant that neighborhoods to our north, south, east and west are deeply segregated. My 14-year-old, particularly, is awakening to how he is perceived and profiled in the world. He keeps his hands visible while in stores, not in his pockets. His innocence no longer free. His movement in the world: monitored. After George Floyd’s death, we had the most breathtaking, heartbreaking versions of “the talk” …. not the first, but an iteration upon.
I felt compelled to do more than comfort him in the moment. Try to assure him he’d be safe when I could not guarantee this fact. I found myself thinking about a poem, Suspect, I had written and recorded for my husband almost 20 years ago, chronicling his relentless confrontations with the police and lifting up my love for him as well as my own reality as a white woman. I knew I needed to dust it off. I turned a creative colleague and friend and asked if she could animate it, bring life to it, to reach a larger audience.
Here it is. May it incite conversation, healing and change.