Neighborly

I am sun-blind, sauntering down the street with a cigarette. The air is molten weariness. I am sadder than I should be; nicotine stands in as a poor translation for the healing balm of time.

A lady sprays two boys with a hose. They laugh and run from the spray, chubby bellies wobbling through transparent while t-shirts. A young man sidles beside me and says, “Can I get some of that?”

I assume he is asking for a drag of my cigarette. “Here, you can have the rest.” It’s too hot for this poison, truly.

He laughs. He is asking about the iced coffee, or the hose water, or maybe my hips. Not the cigarette, though. “That’s alright, ma, I have my own…” He gestures to a joint burning in his cupped palm.

I perk up immediately.  “Oh word? That’s how it is? Let me switch with you!”

“I don’t smoke cigarettes but you can puff this, here. How you doing this afternoon?”

“To tell you the truth, I was feeling pretty awful.”

“What’s up? What’s wrong?”

“Well, I was just having an argument with my boyfriend about Trayvon Martin.”

He laughs. “What about him? What about it?”

 “It’s just… I’m not talking about the legality of anything now. I’m just talking about right and wrong, you feel me?”

“Sure.”

“He’s trying to say that if Zimmerman had a right as a neighborhood watchman to patrol around looking for suspicious people, he had a right to talk to Trayvon in the spirit of protecting his neighborhood and who knows what happened between them then.”
           I try to pass the joint back. He shakes his head, no, keep smoking. Fine. I continue after another long drag. 

 “Never mind about the gun, it’s not the right thing to do to look at someone and make an assumption about that person and decide that you’re the arbiter of reality and just get up in their space. It’s never the right thing to do.”

“Right. Like just because he’s wearing a hoodie that means he’s suspicious, that means he needs to be neighborhood watched. I was just talking to my brother about this, we should all wear hoodies from now on.”

I shake my head, “It’s too hot for that shit right now.”

He laughs. “Na, but like thin ones. Anyway obviously that’s some racist shit. Ain’t nobody trying to follow some little Asian kid in a hoodie.”

“Exactly. Like,” My face gets hot. I pull hard on the borrowed joint. Words stick in fits and starts. “It seems to me, on a very superficial level… I just, I feel a degree of empathy with him. Look at me, right? Look.”

I wave a hand up and down my body, Vanna White-style. Big booty, no bra, all mismatched spandex because I work from home and was just stepping out for a cigarette. He looks me up and down, nodding like he already knows what I’m about to say.

“People get up in my space all the time because of the way that I look. And it’s because I’m perceived as a woman of color, you know. Or because I have the body of a woman of color and society thinks that means something. There’s no respect for my boundaries because of assumptions people make…or because they don’t care how I feel, whatever. I don’t know why they do it. All I know is that I don’t necessarily have bodily integrity in the eyes public sphere, because of the way I look.

And then I think about Trayvon, or about you, and I feel like it’s the same thing, or something analogous at least.”

His eyes crinkle in laughter, the irony not lost on him given how we came to start this conversation. “Yep. Basically. What are you?”

“I’m part Mexican. Might as well be white. My point is, what are they telling us with this verdict? Or what are other people telling us when they try to justify the verdict? They’re telling us our bodies aren’t really ours because if someone makes an assumption about us, it’s fair for them to act on that assumption. We’re objects, not subjects. ‘Look at what she was wearing, she wanted it.’ It’s the same idea.”

“Yeah, true. ‘Look at what he was wearing, look at how he looked suspicious, it’s ok.’ People don’t think about it that way though. They’re trying to say it’s not about race, it was just the wrong place at the wrong time. Just a misunderstanding.”

“Do you think it was a misunderstanding?”

“I don’t know. I do know that guy was suspicious because of race. That was was not a misunderstanding. And six white ladies, I’m sorry, five white ladies and a Spanish lady on the jury wasn’t a misunderstanding. They say his father was friends with a judge or something…”

We pace the block, passing the joint between us. We offer other words to each other, other shades of insight or thin props to rest our thoughts upon. We weave a shared narrative from nothing in minutes, marveling at how simple it seems. The joint dwindles to nothing. We shake hands, finally exchanging names. I say, “Our bodies matter.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“We have a right not to have people in our space, no matter what they assume about us.”

“Not if you don’t want to get shot I guess.” He laughs, and I do too, in spite of myself, in spite of how the bottom drops out of my stomach when he says it. This chain of thoughts ends so much more violently for him than it does for me, so much more harshly probable. All the other privileges I have settle back on my skin.  I am playing at empathy, but really we aren’t the same at all. I yawn.

“It was really nice to meet you. I needed this,” I say.

“Come on, I was about to go roll up another one, I got weed for days.”

“Not the weed,” I say, punching him lightly on the arm. We both squint. “Have a really good day, ok? A good life.”

“You too, see you around. Nice talking to you, ma. Keep looking up, ok?”

“Yeah. You too. Try to, anyway.”