Hush (4 page)

Cops murdering. Cops murdering a black kid. White cops murdering a black kid. My father turning at the first shot to see the kid standing there, his arms raised above his head. The second and third shots. The kid falling. My father’s face, first surprise, then anger, then fear maybe—that his friends could do this, could be so afraid of a black boy that they could shoot without thinking, without remembering that he, Officer Green, was black, that black wasn’t a dangerous thing. “No . . . ,” my father said softly, the way he says it now when he sits alone at the window. “God, please, no. . . .”

Outside my window, the night got darker, then slowly faded to gray.

 

 

 

OFFICER RANDALL
, MY FATHER SAID SLOWLY when I asked him for the fifth time who the cops were.
Randall and Dennis, Toswiah. That’s who killed the boy.

As he said their names, the floor began to slide out from beneath me. Mr. Randall and Mr. Dennis. Men I had known my whole life. Officer Dennis, who always had a silly joke to tell
(Hey Toswiah, what do you get when you cross a skunk and peanut butter? Something very smelly sticking to the roof of your mouth!)
and Officer Randall, who was tall and gray-eyed and had a son named Joseph, who Cameron was in love with.

“He came out of nowhere,” Officer Randall had said, his hands shaking, his face crumbling with the horror of what he’d just done. After a moment, he added, “He startled us, Green.”

Officer Dennis was there, turning toward my father, easing his gun back into the holster, his voice unsure. “We thought he had a gun. He was going for something.” Then cursing, his bottom lip starting to quiver with the weight of it all.

“He was facing you,” my father said. “He was just standing there with his hands up.”

Then Officer Dennis’s voice drops just the tiniest bit. His eyes narrow. I swallow. I’ve known Officer Dennis all my life, but in this moment, I don’t know him at all.

“We thought he had a gun!”

5

THE PHONE CALLS STARTED COMING A DAY after the shooting.

If Green says a word,
a raspy voice said,
we’ll kill him.
I held the phone away from my ear, then closer again, pressing it hard against my head. The voice went away then. A minute later, there was a dial tone. Then the loud beep and another voice telling me that the phone was off the hook. I couldn’t hang up though. Even though the beep pounded into my ear and my hand hurt from holding the phone too tight, I couldn’t hang up.

When Mama came into the living room a little while later, she found me standing there, my face twisted up in horror, tears streaming down my nose and into my mouth.

The second time the raspy voice called, my mother snatched the phone out of the wall and screamed. I was sitting at the kitchen table eating a jelly sandwich.

Cameron was at cheerleading practice. When she came home that night, she threw her blue and gold pom-poms on the floor and said
Everyone at school is acting so weird. I hate my stupid life!

Joseph had started it. After the shooting, he began spreading the word around school that our father was a liar. That he was trying to ruin Joseph’s life. Joseph was tall like his father, gray-eyed, too. He played guard on the basketball team and was a running back on the football team. Girls followed him and giggled. Boys held up their hands, feeling important when he slapped them five. Cameron had gone to the movies with him, had let him walk her home, had kissed him beneath the bleachers at the football field. She said the first time he took her hand, his was so sweaty, she wanted to laugh out loud. Said
Maybe that’s when I started falling in love.

And when Joseph chose Cameron, the other cheer-leaders, who she knew had always called her
The Only
behind her back, frowned. One even asked, “But why
you?
”

I wanted to slap her,
Cameron told me.
I wanted to die.
Then softer, she said
Sometimes I hate being black. Don’t you?

And I didn’t answer. Because, back then, I couldn’t imagine being anything else. I loved Mama’s skin, loved the way it smelled and felt. I loved looking in the mirror and seeing my own brown face staring back at me. Even if there weren’t a whole lot of black people in Denver, the mayor was black and I was black and Lulu was, too. And my family and Grandma. The thought of waking up anything or anybody else scared me.

I thought white people weren’t mean to black people about race stuff. I thought Denver wasn’t that kind of place. But the morning Joseph walked into the school and said my father was a liar, only a few kids doubted him. Only a few kids, who had heard their own parents saying
White cops, black kid dead,
turned away. When the paper ran a story about Raymond Taylor, only a few kids thought to themselves
It could’ve been me.

There’s this thing called the Blue Wall of Silence in the police world. It means all cops are brothers and sisters and should never betray one another. You swear to it in your heart when you become a cop. It’s not written anywhere, you just know it. You know that cops are there for you no matter what. My father told me you believe hard in it because you have to. You have to be able to trust your fellow cop. No matter what. There had always been cops in my life—hanging at our barbecues and parties, coming to my class to speak about crime, taking me and Cameron along with their kids to trick-or-treat, bringing over armfuls of Christmas presents. There were undercover cops, too—who, if we begged enough, lifted their pants’ legs to show us the guns concealed there, or made us squeal by telling us cops-and-robbers stories where the bad guy almost got away but was caught at the last minute because of one daredevil feat or another. There were beat cops walking our neighborhood, calling us by name, and traffic cops coming up to our car to say hello.

 

 

 

SIX DAYS AFTER THE SHOOTING, INSPECTOR Albert Oliver showed up at our house just before we sat down to dinner. When Mama asked him to join us, he shook his head and said he needed to talk to Daddy outside. Inspector Oliver was tall and white-haired, even though he wasn’t old. I didn’t know him as well as I knew other cops, but I liked what I knew of him. He was always shy and polite around Mama, Cameron and me, speaking softly and taking each of our hands in both of his to say hello.

It was a Monday night in April. Denver was just starting to get warm. Mama had opened the French doors leading from the kitchen to the back deck, but the air coming in was still more cold than warm. When Cameron got up to close the door, Mama gave her a fierce look and shook her head. Cameron frowned and sat down again. My father stood on our deck in his police uniform. He had taken his holster off and laid it on a chair. Without it, he looked smaller. He put his hands on the porch railing and sighed.

We sat around the kitchen table, each of us leaning toward the door to listen. I could just barely hear Inspector Oliver’s voice.

“Think hard, Green. Randall and Dennis might be the wrong people to go after. I’m not saying they didn’t do it—I’m not saying they did, either,” he said slowly. “It’s just that cophood’s all those men have. Who knows what they’ll do?”

I stared at my plate, feeling sick. Mama had made lasagna with spinach and roasted red peppers. Beside my piece of lasagna, there was salad. Any other time, it would have been one of my favorite meals. But that night, my stomach was turning over and over again. When had Randall, with his silly laugh, and Dennis, whose face broke into the biggest grin when he saw me and Cameron, become the wrong people? They were our friends.

“I know what I’m doing,” my father said, his voice shaking. “That boy getting killed was wrong. You
know
it, Al. I can’t let them go back to work knowing what I know.”

He got quiet for a minute.

“What about next time?” my father said. “What about Raymond Taylor’s family?”

“They thought it was gang related—”

“Because he was black. That boy was standing, facing them, with his hands raised. And they shot him. Both of them. Bullets came from
both
guns. We both know that. We
all
know that.”

Inspector Oliver didn’t say anything. Maybe he was staring at my father like he was seeing him for the first time, like he was just realizing my father was the same color as Raymond Taylor. And the same color as the mayor of Denver.

After a moment he said, “Officer Dennis said he was reaching for—”

“He wasn’t reaching for
anything,
Albert.
Anything.
He was shot standing! I saw it.”

“You guys’ve been friends for a long time. You three—”

“Officer Randall had called for backup because he thought it was gang related, thought it was a lot more than one. When I pulled up, that
boy—
he was a
boy—
came out from behind those cars with his hands raised and stopped. He was
stopped
.” My father’s voice broke.

I got up suddenly and walked quickly to the door. Behind me, Mama called my name, but I ignored her. I hated the sound in my father’s voice.
Hated
it.

I moved across the deck to the patio swing. Both Daddy and Inspector Oliver were staring out into the darkness. My father turned then, looked at me like he was starting to tell me to go inside. But he didn’t.

“He was standing, Albert. He was standing and now he’s dead.”

Wind blew, rustling the plastic covering the barbecue grill. Otherwise, it was stone-cold quiet.

The inspector fussed with a cuticle while he spoke. “Officer Dennis and Officer Randall’ve been cops for a long time. Their daddies were cops, and their daddies’ daddies. Something must have scared them bad to just shoot—”

“And what about the things that scare
me
? I’m sick of this. Gang talk and everybody looks my way.” Daddy looked hard at Inspector Oliver. “Anyone stop to think that there aren’t even enough black boys in Denver to make up an all-black gang?”

When Inspector Oliver didn’t say anything, Daddy went on.

“He was
standing,
Al. He was standing and he was black. And you know and I know and everyone on the force knows those gangs everyone is so afraid of are not made up of black boys.”

“You’d be taking their dreams away, Green. The only thing these men have.”

I folded my arms across my chest and shivered. The raspy voice came into my head again. Felt like it had grown hands and wrapped them around my throat. I looked at Daddy and swallowed hard.

“What about the only thing
I
have? You think I know how to be anything else but a cop? A cop who’s a father, that’s all that I am.” He pressed his fingers to his eyes and sighed. “I know how to protect, Al. You know why?”

Inspector Oliver raised his eyebrows slightly, like he knew Daddy would go on whether he said anything or not.

“Because I’ve got two daughters. Two. You think I brought them into this world to turn around and watch them get killed for no reason at all? That could have been Toswiah with a hat on standing there. They could have seen her and saw something threatening.” Daddy raised his voice then quickly lowered it again. “That could have been
my
girl. It could have been my wife at the other end of that phone line being told her daughter had been shot!”

I stared down at my hands, trying to imagine Mama getting a call that I’d been killed. I saw my own house collapsing in on itself, the roof and walls crumbling.

“What makes you think the D.A.’s going to believe you?” Inspector Oliver said.

My father looked at him but didn’t say anything. Matt Cat pushed the screen door open and jumped into my lap. He circled once then lay across it.

“I’m playing devil’s advocate here. You’re making it about race, so I’m—”

“I’m not making it.” My father shook his head. I could feel his exasperation across the deck. “It
is
about race. If Raymond Taylor was white, I don’t think he’d be dead now.”

Inspector Oliver shrugged. “We don’t know that, and we’ll probably never know that. What I’m saying is, two white cops against a black cop,” he said slowly, counting off on his fingers. He raised his other hand. “A black kid dead.”

After a moment, Daddy turned and looked over at me again. Something caught in his eyes. We stared at each other without saying anything for a long time, then Daddy shook his head and turned back to the inspector.

“I believe in the law, Albert,” Daddy said quietly. “I wouldn’t be a cop if I didn’t. My father was a lawyer and his father was a judge. And here I am—a cop. You say it’s in Randall’s and Dennis’s blood—well, it’s in mine, too. They shouldn’t have killed Taylor. I’m going to stand by that.” He looked out into the darkness. When he started talking again, his voice was low and scratchy. “I’m going to stand by that no matter what, because the way I see it, the way I’ve taught my girls to see it—blood’s the same color no matter who it’s flowing through.”

 

 

 

YOU CAN PAUSE A VIDEO, REWIND IT, PRESS stop and power and make it disappear. Right there, that evening with Inspector Albert Oliver standing on our porch biting on his cuticle, is the point where I’d pause. Then I’d press stop and my father would still be a cop in Denver, his uniform pressed, his shoes shined, his face calm and smiling.

6

THERE WEREN’T MANY BLACK PEOPLE IN DENVER, but the ones who lived there were angry. There was a protest. And a rally. There was a small riot in downtown Denver. Two black ministers gave sermons about injustice that made the local paper. We weren’t church-going and we didn’t march. But the rage was in the air all around us. And in the center of it, there was Daddy, the only black cop in his precinct, coming home from work after a day with not a single white cop speaking to him. The white cops who had been our friends became strangers. Me and Cameron walked from the bus stop and no cop car slowed down to ask if we were Green’s copper pennies. The white cops made believe they didn’t know us; the black ones from other precincts acknowledged my father but stayed clear of him. At night, my father would sit at the dining room table and tell us of the phone calls he’d gotten—anonymous calls from men who identified themselves as cops. “You’re doing the right thing, Green,” they’d whisper