White Girl Mistakes: The Gun

The doorbell finally rang. I’d been waiting, hurt, while my entirely Midwestern baked chicken and Idaho potatoes dinner cooled in the kitchen. I was going to definitely tell Emmon how I felt. But when I swung the door open, he came in hurriedly with hunched shoulders and without meeting my eyes. Sitting on the edge of a chair with his hands clenched, he laughed the light laugh that’s not about something funny. Then he told me what happened.

He had been waiting on a dark street corner to change buses – it took two buses and an L to get from the Black near Westside to the White far Northside where I lived. A hunched-over old man was a few yards away under a streetlamp, and there was a cop walking his beat. The old man scowled and muttered to himself and occasionally burst out with curses aimed nowhere. Suddenly, he pulled a small handgun from his overcoat pocket. He took aim at Emmon, then lowered the gun and put it back. The patrolman watched from the shadows. Emmon turned toward the cop for help, afraid to speak or react. The gun came out again, the old man’s voice rising and falling as he passed it back and forth from hand to hand. A bus lurched to a stop, the wrong bus, and Emmon dove on.

“Maybe the cop knew the gun wasn’t loaded,” I ventured.

He looked at me. His hands were shaking. I tried to hide the fact that I was angry, not about his being late but for some reason I couldn’t quite identify.

“The cop would have been the only witness. One more street fight, one more dead colored,” Emmon whispered.

Before he’d finished explaining, the urgency went out of his eyes. I couldn’t listen and he could see it. Walking hurriedly into the kitchen, I knew I was leaving something behind, something I might not be able to get back.

We’d only known each other for a couple of months, but we’d fallen for each other immediately. When he introduced me to Coltrane, it was as if I’d found something I’d lost a long time ago. We liked to stretch out on the living room floor, letting my roommate’s cat decide which of us to sit on, sharing stories about our AWOL fathers, laughing about what had made us cry.

Now I wanted to run from the idea that the police would watch while one man took aim and fired at another he didn’t know. I’d indeed seen menace in cops’ eyes when they saw us on the street, but surely they wouldn’t stand around while someone got killed. Would the police, charged above all with protecting life, fail to recognize that a life was worth saving? I wanted to push this question back at Emmon, make it his mistake.

“Are you sure the cop wasn’t going to do anything?” I asked when he joined me at the kitchen counter. His story seemed preposterous.

 His forgetting that I knew nothing about being Black, that our love, which turned out to be genuine, didn’t give me x-ray vision into his world, was about as foolish as my thinking I could understand how Blacks had to live because I was a liberal. I hurried the potatoes out of the towels I’d wrapped them in and nervously slid the plain baked chicken, daringly seasoned with garlic salt, onto a plate.

I don’t remember what we talked about at the small secondhand table my roommate had found. There was a candle stuck in a Chianti bottle and oddball, unmatched dishes. Emmon concentrated on devouring my home cooking, as he always did, while the cat wove figure eights around our legs. Why didn’t the cop fear for his own life? There was no answer to that question, because it wasn’t asked. No one wanted to talk about it anymore. I’d lost something I didn’t need, which was the illusion that we were twins under the skin.