We Rip the World Apart

Kareela

I step out of the office after a long day of too many clients with too many problems that are never easily fixed, and am hit by a heat that makes me want to skip the BLM headquarters and find my way to the beach. But the renovations on the new meeting space are almost complete, and I promised to help set up for next week’s meeting and scan and upload the latest batch of signed petitions.

It’s the third time I’ve shown up to help in as many weeks, this time and the last without Jasmine by my side. And as I think of Carson’s smiling face, his passion, the passion that must have pulsed from Antony as well, the beach seems less appealing. It’s not just Carson’s passion though…it’s everyone: mothers who stop by after work, despite having four or more kids in tow, because they want to do whatever they can to ensure those kids make it to adulthood with no time behind bars; grandfathers who remember what the world was like before, who acknowledge how far things have come while hardly changing at all; and young people like me, who just want something better, to be less afraid, to be seen for who we are, to feel we can breathe and move and exist without each step feeling so weighted there are days it’s hard to keep stepping.

I maneuver around a group of kids spread out on the floor, playing some card game I don’t recognize—joking and yelling and safe. Carson waves me over and directs me to the scanner. A satisfying pile awaits, at least fifteen to twenty pages containing approximately fifteen signatures and complete addresses each. The members have been busy.

Over an hour later, after I’ve finished scanning and categorizing more files Carson laid out for me, the place seems oddly quiet. I lock the filing cabinet, then, keys in hand, walk through the empty meeting space as disappointment creeps over me. I’ve been forgotten. Here, where I was finally starting to feel I belonged. I rub a hand over my upper arm, the keys dangling from my fingers.

“?”

I whip around, my bottom lip clenched between my teeth, my eyes wide at the shock Carson’s given me.

“Sorry.” He chuckles. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Was on a call. You all done?”

I nod.

“Thanks so much. So helpful.” He reaches out his hand and I drop the keys into them, my shock turning to something else as our fingers graze. My eyes trail over his face, the breadth of his shoulders. How many years separate us? Six, maybe? Nine? And here we are, alone. I take in the dimple in his cheek, the couch on the other side of the room.

I need to get out of here.

“Hey.”

“Yes?” my voice yelps.

“Have you eaten?”

I shake my head.

How different would life be with a man like Carson? So much easier in some ways. Harder, likely, in others.

“If you don’t have plans, why don’t you come to my place? There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about, and I’m starved.”

My mind races. Jasmine assured me Carson was a good guy. The best. So, in the rare chance he has something other than conversation in mind, all I’ll have to do is say no. Which I will.

“Sure.” A smile spreads across my face. “Sounds great.”

The drive, which takes us across the harbor, is less than ten minutes. My hands work in my lap, fingers squeezing, interlacing, then breaking apart as Carson chats about his meeting with someone from the mayor’s office.

He pulls into the driveway of a house that’s small and well-kept. The paint is fresh. The driveway free of cracks. The yard maintained, with an array of flowering bushes and a small garden in bloom front and center. “Lilacs,” I say, as we pass by the tree across from the front door, the scent both wonderful and full of pain. “We had one at our old house. In Toronto.”

He nods, his dimple prompting that all-too-recurrent flutter. “I’ve always liked them.”

My mouth goes dry, and I curse myself for not thinking to refill my water bottle. He opens the door and I almost blurt the word no! , ready to start rambling about how I’m not hungry or I forgot I have some work I need to do, or that I’m pregnant with a baby I can’t decide whether I want, with a man I feel the same way about.

But Carson calls out before I have the chance, and two kids come racing.

“Daddy!” One of them leaps into Carson’s embrace while the other wraps her thin arms around his side. Carson hugs the boy, squeezing him into his chest, kissing his temple, then sets him down to give the girl a proper hug.

As I follow Carson down the hall, I hope the laugh that bursts out of me doesn’t sound as embarrassed as I feel. “Rania,” he calls, “I brought company.”

The woman from the BLM meeting in Preston, with the dreads and regal yet inviting air about her, walks into view. “My queen,” says Carson. He kisses her firmly, gives her side an affectionate squeeze, then turns to me. “This is the girl I was telling you about. Jasmine’s friend. .”

“Welcome!” Rania crosses the space between us and wraps me in a hug so warm, so inviting and motherly, that a spritz of moisture builds behind my eyes. I smile brightly, damning these hormones.

Dinner is grilled chicken and spiced potato salad, with corn on the cob so sweet it doesn’t even need butter—though we slather it on, anyway. The kids are talkative and precocious—aged twelve, seven, and five. When we’re about halfway through the meal, after the children have told Carson all about their day, Rania looks to me. “Carson said you have questions about how disarming works. Defunding.”

I look between them. Nod. “Well, yeah, I mean…I just, like in theory, it sounds so great, but in practice I wonder how it would work.”

“And it makes sense to wonder, to ask questions rather than shrug it off as a pipe dream.” She tells me that disarming police doesn’t mean disarming all police or disarming them entirely—most would still have pepper spray, night sticks, possibly tasers—it means keeping firearms reserved to specialized units who are only called to the scene when necessary, who are rigorously trained on when and how to use the weapons and when not to, who have regular mental and emotional assessments to ensure they’re still fit to carry those weapons.

As she continues to explain, calmly listing numbers and examples, explaining the ins and outs of what sounded like an unrealistic dream, it all makes sense, so much sense I’m equally in awe and enraged that this type of system doesn’t already exist.

I shake my head, stare at the table.

“?”

If it did exist, if it had existed eighteen years ago, my brother would still be alive—my father, too. I swallow, the anger exploding in a frenzy of emotion I struggle to keep down.

“Are you—”

“It makes sense!” I yell, and snap my gaze up, disgust and frustration blazing. “It makes so much sense.” I pause, look between them again, see the faces of the children, wide-eyed at my outburst. And like wet fingers to a wick, the fire that blazed is extinguished, leaving wispy fumes of rage tampered by embarrassment. “Do you think it’s possible?”

Rania shrugs, her hand extending until it rests on my still-clenched fist. “I don’t know. Probably not in my lifetime.” She glances to the children. “Maybe theirs. Hopefully. But change is possible. Better is possible. It’s already started in some places.”

I nod again, pull my hand away, not looking at any of them but lost in that hazy sight my mind so often goes to. Antony in his last moments: Sometimes he’s alone. Sometimes he’s in a crowd. Sometimes he’s standing tall. Others, I watch him fall.

There are things I know: A collection of sheets found among my father’s effects. The things he knew—words written in a script so different from what I remember. Hen scratches. Scribbled over and over again. As if by writing them repeatedly, maybe they’d make sense.

Seven bullets. Three cops.

Four of those bullets found their target.

I don’t know whether Antony’s body convulsed with those impacts like a puppet on a string or stayed still with the shock of it, then slumped to the ground.

Three of the bullets found no exit.

I don’t know whether he died instantly or bled out.

When he reached the hospital, he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Dead. Before he even reached the age I am now.

The cops’ names. First, middle, and last. Their badge numbers. That none of them received disciplinary action.

I don’t know whether, in the privacy of their own homes, they feel guilt. Or pride. Or that it was just a day on the job, nothing to think about beyond that.

“?”

My jaw quivers, and I realize Rania or Carson must have shooed the children away, because they’re getting up from the table, feet shuffling quietly to the living room.

“That’s why we do this,” says Carson. “Antony is why we do this. You are. Your mother, your father, all the people who’ve lived what you’ve lived through, who’ve died, who will keep dying if nothing changes.”

I squeeze my moist eyes shut. Damn hormones. Damn hormones. Damn hormones.

Rania’s hand is on my shoulder. “It’s happening every day,” she says. “And it’s horrible. Not just the deaths, but all of it.” She squeezes. “It’s okay to be angry. You should be angry. It’s okay to cry. The whole world should.”

But I don’t cry. I was taught not to, for the sake of my father, my mother, the classmates it would have made uncomfortable. I wipe a rogue tear away and sit straighter.

“We’re angry, too,” says Carson. “And we’re so glad you’re with us. Antony, this anger and pain, it’s why we hope you’ll become even more deeply involved.”

I look up. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been through a lot,” he says, “more than anyone should have to go through. Which means your words, your voice, hold more power than most.”

A weight seems to settle in my stomach.

Rania, with her hand still on my shoulder, looks to Carson. “I don’t know if this is the time.”

He leans back in his chair with a slight nod.

“Time for what?”

“We’ve got another rally coming up. Televised this time, and I thought you might want to speak…but Rania’s right. And there is something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

A sense of dread settles over me as Rania’s hand falls from my shoulder.

“I made some inquiries a couple of weeks ago,” says Carson. “Jasmine mentioned you didn’t know many details about what had happened with your brother. Which didn’t surprise me. They hide as much as they can—from the families, the media—especially back then, but I know of a journalist in the Toronto chapter who’s been documenting, researching, trying to put together a fuller picture of exactly how much we’ve suffered, who we’ve lost, and how, over the years, the details of those losses have been kept out of the papers, how the files in the public reports are hugely redacted.”

My hands clench in my lap, the possibility of new knowledge tantalizing and terrifying. Growing up, I’d heard tidbits from schoolmates, neighbors, but I was too afraid to learn more, to ask questions. Then, after my father’s death, I read everything I could find in archived newspapers about Antony. Most of it obvious trash. Lies. The person they wrote about could not have been the brother I knew.

“He’s sent me a bit of info already,” says Carson. “Not much. But he’s working on getting more.”

Something cold and tight pulses within me. “About Antony?”

He nods.

“About what really happened?”

Another nod.

“But how? I thought—”

“There were some people there who were afraid to speak up or were pressured into silence, but they aren’t so afraid anymore. There are official records that were unavailable to the public at the time.”

That strange pulsing spreads through me. Fear, but more than that. Yearning. Uncertainty.

“A lot has changed,” says Rania. “Regarding information. And now that things are coming to light about how real and insidious the systemic racism was… is… people who were afraid, and so kept silent, are willing to speak.”

“About Antony?”

“About so much. We now know in Montreal, police used photos of Black men as target practice,” says Carson. “I know one of those cops. A good guy who gets sick just thinking about it, remembering how he pulled his trigger beside everyone else, too afraid to speak out. But the more people who speak, who tell their stories—stories from both sides—the sooner change will come.”

I stare.

“So, I’m getting that info on your brother. What I need to know is, do you want it?”

My mouth opens and closes. Opens again. Rania’s eyes are kind and supportive. Carson, this man who Antony could have been…would have been, maybe, who I thought brought me to his home with questionable intentions, yet had this intent instead—to offer me information, ask me to use it, which is questionable in another way.

I shake my head, want to rise from the table and run. But I stay seated. Laughter lifts from the children in the next room. The eldest has her head in a book. The two younger ones pull and smack and twist a toy I’m pretty sure might be older than I am—Hit It! or Bump It! or something like that.

The slights over the years crash upon me. The “Brown People Posse” at school in Toronto, how I wanted to be a part of it so badly, but they wouldn’t let me, at first saying Jamaica wasn’t really a part of the West Indies, but then, when I countered that, saying I had to be Black, really Black, to be a part of the posse, not just half. How in Juniper Cove I faced the opposite problem. That even to those who welcomed me, I was the Black friend. How any time I had an issue with anyone about anything, everyone always assumed it was because of that Blackness.

And now here these people sit, wanting me to represent them, regardless of my mix—all that white blood coursing through me. Regardless of the fact that if I did that, if I spoke of my mother’s gunned-down child, she would know of my betrayal…which I’m starting to care less about. She’s betrayed me in so many ways.

But, more important, what they’re asking me to do is what Antony would have done. And he died because of it.

Their eyes are on me as I take a deep breath then exhale.

Not only do they want me to represent, they want to give me the details to do it more accurately. Details I’ve wanted my whole life. Details that, if his incoherent mumblings were true, my father craved almost as much as he craved the drink.

To know. To actually know and, maybe, to understand.

“?”

A thrumming sounds between my ears, the roar sickening.

To know. To finally know. And once I do, to be expected to do something with that knowledge.

“Don’t even think about what Carson was saying,” says Rania. “Don’t worry about that. Not yet. Just…” She looks at me with such compassion I want to fold myself in her arms once more, let the forbidden tears come. “This isn’t about that. What matters is whether you want to know.”

She waits.

Carson’s voice is soft, hesitant. “?”

I turn my gaze—the roar like a windstorm—wanting and not wanting to know. Fear sweeping through me. “I’m not sure.”