We Rip the World Apart

Kareela

In the BLM headquarters, Rania sits on one side of me, Jasmine on the other. I imagine Antony leaning over my shoulder, urging me on, but can’t feel his presence.

“Have you read any of it?” asks Rania.

“Only a glance.” I look at her. “Have you?”

She nods.

I stare at the folder, now sitting on the coffee table in front of us. The room smells of meat and spice, with the faintest hint of something sweet. I want to be alone, but not alone. I want to take in every detail, but also to throw this folder and everything it contains into a fire and never look back.

“You could start with one page,” says Rania. “And if that’s all you want to look at tonight, that’s all you look at.”

“Maybe an account of what happened?” I say. “As in, technically…who shot, why, etc.?”

Rania nods and reaches for the folder. She rifles through the pages, then pulls a couple out. Rather than handing them to me, she sets the closed folder back on the table, the pages on top of it. “Jasmine and I could head to the back,” she says, “start compiling some of the new petition forms from tonight. If you like.”

“Okay.” My gaze stays on the pages. When they’re halfway to the office, I pick them up, thinking again of what I know and don’t know, and what I want to know. As he lay on the ground, did he realize he was dying? Or was he gone instantaneously? All that he was. Gone.

The music comes back to me. The laughter and life that used to fill our home—my parents’ eyes. The joy I’m not sure I actually remember or simply made up. A hope. A dream.

With tense focus, I lift the first page, read that the shooting happened not at the rally, as I’d believed, but later. After clearing away dropped signs and other debris, Antony and a few of his “compatriots,” as the report calls them, were on a nearby side street where a protester’s van was parked. They were storing the signs for future use and loading the garbage to cart away. The witnesses said the police came after them, harassed them about the protest, about the law, said that if they tried something like this again, made even one slip, they’d be sorry. There are four accounts of what happened in the report from Carson’s contact. All slightly different, but all affirming Antony was not armed and held nothing in his hands.

The police report from the three cops is less clear on this point.

He had a gun, one officer had said. Then, when pressed, Well, we thought he had a gun. A little later in the report, the same officer clarified, He could have had a gun.

Another said Antony was clearly dangerous. Aggressive. His mission was to incite unrest. Violence. And the meaning behind the man’s words are clear without Carson’s contact having written them out. Of course he could have had a gun. Of course he was dangerous. He was a Black man in a place they thought he shouldn’t be, doing things they thought he shouldn’t.

It was his own fault is what they’ve said, without actually saying it.

I pick up the folder and flip through more pages, faster, eager. Desperate. The reports from the police. From the investigator placed on the case. The disciplinary committee, which doled out no discipline. The Special Investigations Unit, who decided that the officers had a reasonable assumption of fear for their lives, so laid no charges. My eyes burn. The sound of the scanner and the faint murmur from Rania and Jasmine mix with the rushing throb in my ears.

I think again of those words behind the words. In some ways, the officers were right. Antony was where he shouldn’t have been. Doing what he shouldn’t have been doing. He forgot who he was—in their eyes. He’d done the thing none of us should do, if we want to preserve our lives—see ourselves through our own gaze, not theirs.

One witness, Deja, speaks with such conviction, such passion, about how she should have been braver. Stronger. Saying they all should have stood up with Antony instead of dropping to the concrete under threat of those guns, that the police wouldn’t have shot them all. That, in the days following, they shouldn’t have cowered in fear, bending to the officers’ pressure and threats to hide the truth. Antony was brilliant, she says. And brave. Headstrong, maybe. But that’s not a crime. He was murdered, she continues. Plain and simple. He was murdered. And none of us did a thing about it.

I reach the medical examiner’s report. Four bullets, as I already know. But the locations are new to me. His chest, his shoulder, his hip, his head. Two aimed to kill, two maybe not. And three more, missing their target entirely. I scan the pages, itching to see if there are any more statements from the cops, something to explain more clearly, have it make sense. But it’s only the witnesses’ words. Antony, they said, stood tall in front of the officers. Told them everything the group had done was peaceful, and within their rights. When the officers told them to scram, empty out the square, not try it again, he stood firm, asking why? On what grounds?

Unlawful assembly, said one, and disrupting the peace. Another referenced Antony’s status as an immigrant, adding on an incorrect and defamatory word. Which was typical, said one witness: We’re all the same to them. All four witnesses report what came next differently. One says Antony took a step toward the police. Another said he started to lower his hands. Another, that it all happened too fast. The fourth, that Antony said something back to the most aggressive cop—the one doing most of the talking, who had an Irish, or maybe Scottish, accent—something about him being an immigrant, too. And that’s when the shots fired.

None of these things seem enough.

Yet the shots fired, one officer, a fraction before the others, pulling the trigger. Why?

Fear for his life? Fear that the split second it would take to see if my brother was reaching for a gun, or something else, or nothing at all, would be the second that cost him his life?

Or was it hate? Plain and simple.

The report doesn’t say which bullet came from which officer.

His chest, his shoulder, his hip, his head.

One in the van. Two in the wall of the building behind him.

It doesn’t say which bullet entered first. I close my eyes, hoping for the head—for instant death, no pain. But then, maybe, Antony would have wanted that second or two for a final thought. To think of Mom or Dad or me. To remember his first kiss. To have time to hope.

I scan the pages again, thinking maybe I missed it and it’ll be there—who shot first. I need to know who shot first. To find him, ask him why. I clench my teeth, resist the urge to scream as the not knowing haunts me, has haunted me for nearly two decades. Who shot first? Why? Because one had to pull the trigger before the others. One had to decide. And if he hadn’t, maybe the others wouldn’t have, either. One finger, triggering all the others.

His chest, his shoulder, his hip, his head.

I focus on those stray bullets—in the van, the wall, imagine at least one of those shooters missed on purpose, hoping the others would, too. Imagine he lies awake in bed, even now, wishing he’d been braver, stronger. Wishing he’d tackled the other officers, stepped in front to defuse the situation. Wishing, if that’s what it would have taken, he’d turned his gun on his colleagues.

A cry erupts from somewhere deep within me, a guttural yawp as I throw the folder to the table, double over on myself, my head in my lap.

Did his body jerk and spasm? Did he fall to the ground instantly? Was there pain?

Or was he just gone? All that he was, in an instant, gone.

“.”

I raise my head, blink, and see Rania on the couch beside me, sense Jasmine.

“Are you—”

“It’s not enough.” The words spew out of me. “This, all of it. It’s nothing.”

A long breath. Rania’s hand on my knee. “I can see that.”

“What was Carson thinking?”

“What did you know before?” Rania asks in a whisper.

“I don’t know.” I clench my fists, my chest tight, my frustration too large for this small ineffective body. “Nothing.” The heat behind my eyes is unbearable, my body a steam engine. “I knew he was shot. I knew—” And there’s nowhere to release this anger, this grief, this helplessness. “They made him sound like a villain. Like he was dangerous and aggressive. Like the police were doing a community service.”

“Yeah.” A long sigh. “That’s typically how it goes. You’ll notice none of the news reports that imply that are in here.”

“Were you sent them?”

“We were. Carson figured you’d know all about that, and if you didn’t, there was no need to see it.”

The steam trickles out, a slow warbled breath between my trembling lips. A few casseroles came. But not enough. At six, I had to figure out how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sometimes, for snacks, I chomped on whole carrots, too scared to use the knife that slipped and rolled when I tried to cut that unwieldy vegetable. And my father, who had been so robust, withered, his clothes hanging loosely, all of him so much smaller than before.

Silence is what I remember after Antony, only broken by the sound of the television, which never seemed to shut off.

“It wasn’t like it is here,” I say, looking to Jasmine, who clasps my hand in hers, squeezes. “There was no community. There was no one.”

Rania makes a soft noise that indicates she’s listening. That she’s here now.

“People turned away from us. Their smiles, if they smiled, weren’t the same. It was like…like…”

“You were infected?”

My shoulders slump as my eyes drift closed. “Yeah. And my parents…it was like they didn’t see it. Or didn’t care.”

“The conversation was different back then,” says Rania. “Your parents likely wouldn’t have had this information. If they went into the station, they were probably brushed aside. In every word, every action, the goal would have been to make them think Antony was the villain, a criminal, a lowlife who got what he deserved.”

“But—” Jasmine blurts, then shakes her head. “Sorry…I mean…nothing.”

“What?” I ask.

“It’s just, this wasn’t the thirties. This was after the civil rights movement. No offense, , but it seems like what you’re saying, Rania, is that her parents just, like, had no agency? No ability to even have it?”

“No. What I’m saying is you don’t know their pasts, their situations, their fears. We’re taught, or at least the powers that be try to teach us, that they are infallible. That the police are knights in shining armor, there to protect us, to make everything all right. And so if they do something…like what they did, what they do, we’re told it’s part of their mission to serve and protect, which implies the people they’re protecting us from are the ones in the wrong.”

“Antony wasn’t,” I say. “He wasn’t…I mean…violent or anything. I know that.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t.”

“And my parents knew that—” I turn to Rania, a current of furious resistance tingling my limbs. “They’re not stupid people. I don’t buy that they would have just accepted this was Antony’s fault. I don’t understand why they didn’t push, fight! The cops all stayed on the job. No punishment, no nothing.”

“Again, your parents didn’t have the information we have, the networks, the easy ability to see and know this kind of thing was going on so often, everywhere.”

“But it’s not like this was before the internet,” says Jasmine.

“No, but it was before the rise of social media,” says Rania. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is your parents were already brave, stepping outside of the norm, whether or not they saw it that way. A Black man and a white woman married in what, the late seventies based on Antony’s age? And here they are in a country that declares vehemently there is no race problem. Which means the problems are with individuals. Individuals like Antony.

“Listen, I don’t know the situation. I don’t know your parents. All I’m saying is you don’t know what they were facing. You don’t know how hard it would have been to stand up to societal views, all those negative stories being spread about their son. Maybe even violence toward them, or the threat of it, for raising this ‘terror,’ as one article referred to the protesters, a Black group spreading terror, creating a nightmare in the city’s streets.” Rania pauses, then continues, the tension in her voice rising. “Despite the fact that there was no vandalism, no violence. It’s a system of cover-ups, lies, false reporting to justify and make acceptable the killing of Black and Brown people. So no, you don’t know what it would have been like for your parents to fight that, especially with a young daughter at home to protect. Especially with a grief that’s more intense than you can imagine.”

She stops and rests a shaking hand on my shoulder. “Sorry. It works me up. Anyway, I know you’ve had your share of grief, but so have your parents, and probably they were trying to survive as best they could while most everyone around them would have been saying—or thinking, at least on some level—that this was Antony’s fault. Their fault.”

I turn my head from her, look to the table, trying to imagine what it would have been like, if what she’s saying could be true, while also trying to work through the realization that I’d never considered any of this before, never taken the time.

“So don’t judge them for not fighting when you don’t even know whether they did. You were, what, six? Maybe they did fight. Maybe they fought and lost. Either way, trying to blame them won’t help anything. Especially not you.”

My shoulders tense, the steam inside rising again. A current of shame hits me—shame for thinking so much about myself and so little about them. For the way my father had stood, wanting to fight, and how I had been the one to tell him no.

Had he tried before? Failed? According to these papers, Antony’s “compatriots” were harassed when they tried to make their story heard to the police, the media. They were threatened, some even temporarily put behind bars. And if my parents had done any of that, suffered any of it, I wouldn’t know. I’d never asked.

I should have asked.

“Why did you give me all this?” I gesture to the papers before us. “Why did Carson? He said it wasn’t about me speaking, but…”

Rania smiles, pity in her eyes. “Because you have a right to know.”

I look away, the steaming fury and confusion and shame causing my head to ache.

A right to know.

I thought knowing would give me the answers I’d been looking for, a way to make sense of Antony’s death. But it was senseless, could never have been justified. So instead of having answers, there are only more questions, more mess.